Substack Exclusive: Why Spiritual Questions Open You To Risk

This week we’re sharing something special that was previously only available on our Substack page: a chat between Jonathan and filmmaker, Mark Vicente, co-director of the 2004 film “What the Bleep Do We Know!?“, and the NXIVM whistleblower whose testimony helped put Keith Raniere in federal prison. Many teachers have real wisdom and profound opportunities to change. Many are resurfacing hidden ancient knowledge that the world truly needs. And some of the teachers are wolves in sheep’s clothing who prey on those who believe there must be more to our often limited experience. If you saw The Vow on HBO, you know one half of Mark’s story. Mark was born in South Africa. At nine years old, out in the bush, he heard Zulu drumming and was overcome with emotions in a way he couldn’t explain. He wept — hit by a certainty that if everyone else could feel what he was feeling, the country he was born into would change. And the senseless injustice could be stopped. Years later, Mark’s film, What the Bleep Do We Know, used the language of quantum physics to argue that the materialist worldview is incomplete. That consciousness participates in reality. That suffering is not only something to endure — it’s something we have some say in. Then the wolves came. When What the Bleep was released, the NXIVM cult began profiling Mark. They read his interviews. They studied what he wanted more than anything — to communicate a spiritual truth that could change how people see the world. Then they built a recruitment around that specific longing. He was inside NXIVM for over a decade. His wife realized what was happening before Mark did. She handed him an article listing twenty things a narcissist does in a conversation. He read it, took a scheduled call with Keith Raniere, and ticked them off in his head as they happened live. When he hung up, he knew he would never speak to Raniere again. Mark’s new film, The Narcissist’s Playbook, is the map he wishes he’d had while under the control of a cult leader. It features self-identified narcissists explaining, on camera, what they do and why they enjoy doing it. Dr. Ramani Durvasula — who appears in the film — estimates roughly one in six adults meets criteria for narcissistic personality traits. Not all of them are dangerous. Some are, and the current consensus among clinicians who study the darkest end of the spectrum is the part spiritually oriented people find hardest to accept: Those brains do not change. Not with love. Not with patience. Not even with the right teacher. If you love someone who is inside a dangerous community and they can’t see it, or if you’re beginning to wonder whether you are, Mark shares this: The deepest trick of narcissistic abuse isn’t the abuse itself. It’s that you come to believe you are the cause of every problem. Upgrade your kitchen with Our Place today. Visit fromourplace.com/BREAK http://fromourplace.com/BREAK and use code BREAK for 10% off sitewide. Make your summer wardrobe feel easier. Go to https://www.quince.com/breakdown for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Go to https://helixsleep.com/breakdown to receive up to 30% off your Helix mattress. Visithttps://drinkag1.com/BREAKDOWN http://drinkag1.com/BREAKDOWN and get a FREE AG1 Flavor Sampler and a FREE bottle of Vitamin D3 + K2 in your Welcome Kit with your first AG1 subscription order. Get your annual IANDS Conference tickets athttps://conference.iands.org/https://conference.iands.org. Go to https://tidd.ly/4uVltMe and use the code MAYIM50 to get $50 off your Elastique order. Find Mark at @markvicente on Instagram and narcissistsplaybook.com https://www.narcissistsplaybook.com/. Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/mayimbialik%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.

• 0:05Jonathan Cohen?

  And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 0:06Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to our breakdown. Today, we're sharing a conversation with Mark Vicente. He's the filmmaker behind What the Bleep Do We Know? He's also the NXIVM whistleblower. His testimony helped put Keith Raineering in federal prison. So if you saw The Vow on HBO, you know who Mark Vicente is. He's actually here to talk about his new film, The Narcissist's Playbook. It's the map he wishes he had had while under the control of a cult leader.

• 0:36Jonathan Cohen?

  One of the most powerful parts of Mark's story is that he was in not just one, but two cults. And he talks about the things that make us vulnerable, how narcissists work, and how they use a specific set of techniques to manipulate people. And he outlines them.

• 0:56Mayim Bialik?

  He also spent a decade inside NXIVM. And so I actually first learned about Mark from that and was so excited that he also happened to be the What the Bleep Do We Know guy. So this is a really, really cool conversation. He has a new film that he's going to talk about. It's called The Narcissist's Playbook. And it's the map that he wishes he had had while under the influence and the control of a cult leader. So The Narcissist's Playbook features self-identified narcissists explaining why they do what they do, why they enjoy doing it. And actually, a friend of the podcast, Dr. Romani Dervasila, appears in the film, talking about how one in six adults meets the criteria for narcissistic personality traits.

• 1:40Mayim Bialik?

  Mark tells you what to watch for, the deepest trick of narcissistic abuse. It's really, really a great conversation. We're so excited to bring it here.

• 1:48Jonathan Cohen?

  If you want to sneak peek on conversations like this, right when they happen, head over to Mayim Bialik's Breakdown on Substack. Join the growing Breaker community. You can get ad-free episodes and content not released anywhere else.

• 2:00Mayim Bialik?

  Also, Jonathan has a ton of cool conversations like this one over on his Substack, which is Practical Spirituality. So check that out as well. We hope you enjoy the conversation and we'll see you over on Substack.

• 2:13Jonathan Cohen?

  Mark, where do you want to start? Where are you right now in your life, emotionally, intellectually, joining me today? Like, let's do a little check-in. How are you feeling?

• 2:23Speaker 02

  Things are a bit chaotic right now because we're getting ready for the launch of our film, which you saw, that's where you and I met.

• 2:29Jonathan Cohen?

  I did. Take us back to What the Bleep Do We Know? And this film was widely credited as the cultural on-ramp for a wave of consciousness and quantum spirituality that followed, including the very, very famous The Secret. Do you have that association? Do you know that this was the on-ramp?

• 2:49Speaker 02

  Yep, yep. I met the director of The Secret afterwards because he was a friend of my wife's. And yeah, he said that as well. He said, like, we started something, you know? And it was, you know, that film, that idea had been in my mind for years. You know, I should probably go back to my past a little bit just to-

• 3:05Jonathan Cohen?

  Please.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  -explain what happened. So I was this kid born in South Africa. At a very early age, realized something was wrong with the country. Like apartheid was just, I thought it was a horrible idea. I asked questions of the adults around me. Nobody could give me good answers. I knew something was wrong and I saw like a lot of bad stuff as a kid, you know, that I thought was problematic. And everybody I asked just couldn't give me a good answer. My mom luckily was a complete weirdo, complete weirdo. She was like into Hinduism and Buddhism and this and that and the other. So she was kind of the black sheep of the family. But I do remember having a bunch of very deep spiritual experiences as a child, especially like out in the bush, you know, when I was living with my grandparents as a kid, that I couldn't explain.

• 3:49Speaker 02

  And I kept on saying to my mom, there's something I want to study, something I want to learn, you know? And so she kept on saying, what about this and what about this? And then at one point, I thought it was Kung Fu. So I started, you know, studying Kung Fu and different martial arts. And I think much later, I sort of stumbled on the new age stuff. And I had this yearning to talk about these ideas. And there was one specific thing, I think, that got me going. I think I was about nine years old. I was in the middle of the bush, you know? It was west of Johannesburg, in the middle of nowhere, close to a place they actually called the Cradle of Civilization. I was listening to some music from this musical. It was like, you know, Zulu drumming, drumming music. And I remember having this profound experience, like this rush up my body,

• 4:33Speaker 02

  into my chest, like out my eyes, and I just began weeping. And I just felt the beauty of like this feeling that I was having. And I just kept on thinking, if people could feel what I'm feeling right now, like the whole country would be different. And I was a kid, you know, so I started thinking, well, if I build speakers big enough, everybody could hear this music, you know? So like, and I lived in this, in this valley between two mountains. So I started imagining like, you know, Jack and the Beanstalk type speakers, like massive speakers, because the ocean was like eight hours away. And I had to reach the ocean. And I couldn't figure out what the speaker system was. Fast forward, I was like, I think 12, 13. I was in Lisbon with my parents and we went to see this movie. I think it was called, in that day, Get It or Steal It, Star Wars.

• 5:16Speaker 02

  I saw Star Wars, like, holy shit, I was blown away. And when I walked out, I was like, those are my speakers, movies. That's how you do it. That's how you touch people. So my obsession from that age was movies. Did a lot of stuff in South Africa, worked my way up the film system there. And I finally got my break to come to Hollywood to shoot a film there. And I was super young, I was like 25 or 26 or something. And I shot this like massive studio film as a cinematographer. It was a big deal to me. And I ended up staying and I worked in a lot of stuff, you know, while I was in Hollywood. But it was a lot of crap. And I had this thought of like, I have to figure out, how do I use what I love to talk about the things I love?

• 5:59Speaker 02

  And so, you know, fast forward to 2001, you know, when we began doing the project, which I can get into more. But What the Bleep was basically my attempt to get everything that I felt inside of me out into the world. Because as a kid, in South Africa, there was like one new age bookstore in Johannesburg. And I would go in that bookstore every week. And I thought to myself, these weird bookstores have amazing things in them, like the knowledge, if I could just get it out. And so it was sort of my attempt, along with my team, to get all these weird, kooky ideas out into the world, which it did. And I mean, it was pretty big. I mean, 2004 was the first one, you know? And then 2006, we released the second one.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  But that was sort of the genesis, you know, of why I wanted to like make that film and what's been, you know, what I've been passionate about my whole life, which is basically getting that kind of message out in the world.

• 6:53Jonathan Cohen?

  I love that it starts from a very internal place, this sense of disconnection and disbelief in what's happening around you, the fact that you have this internal intense emotion that you're like, if only people could feel this. And then how do you take an internal emotion and then make it into concepts that can help guide people's lives, right? Like, what the film actually gets at is the conflicts in the material world are not all that there is, right? That our perceptions and our, the way that we're seeing, you know, interpreting our circumstances influence matter as much as matter itself. That there is, you know, there's more, there's a lot more.

• 7:32Speaker 02

  100%, yeah.

• 7:33Jonathan Cohen?

  You know, that impacts the nature of suffering. It raises questions about consciousness. It raises questions about how we cooperate. And while it's extremely powerful, these are very destabilizing questions because you're challenging the nature of reality.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think that was what excited me. You know, it's funny, I think a lot of people that jump into like some kind of weird spirituality, it's because the status quo isn't working for them.

• 7:58Jonathan Cohen?

  Exactly.

• 7:59Speaker 02

  You know, like, and so I was a religious kid, you know? I was in like the Anglican Church. And then my grandfather was in the Dutch Reformed Church, which is a lot of the fire and brimstone kind of stuff. And there was something just didn't match for me, that the behavior and like what was taught, it just wasn't working. And everything was so, despite the fact that there were angels and God and what Satan and whatever, I was like, it just, I didn't have the words, but it just seemed so materialistic. Like, and there was no sense of like, you have power, you have agency. Everything was like, somebody else has agency. It's Jesus, or it's God, or it's Mother Mary, or it's, you know, Gabriel. Somebody else has got, has got the ability and the wisdom and you don't. Which is interesting because, you know, kind of to fast forward a bit,

• 8:42Speaker 02

  that was the sense that propelled me to, I have to find the knowledge outside of me. Somebody else has the wisdom, somebody else has the goodness. I just have to find who that is because it's not in the church. And it doesn't appear to be in the Christianity I was involved in at the time. So it has to be somewhere else. So I went looking for people that I thought were wise, you know? And that's how I ended up in multiple cults, you know? Until I finally realized, well, that's not working. But that was the sort of, that was the feeling as a kid. I was like, there has to be some answer to this thing. This is not all there is. And the reason I felt this is not all there is as well, I remember when I was in the Anglican Church, when you confirmed, you're like confirmed.

• 9:24Speaker 02

  And this, the bishop came from Pretoria to this tiny little town where we were at White River, where my, where my boarding school was. And I remember him going around with the water and the wine and everything. And he touched each of us on our heads as sort of a blessing. And I remember like, when he touched my head, something happened. It was just like electric. It was profound. It was like the, you know, the whole peace, the pass, the all understanding kind of thing, just filled me with like, light and beauty and softness and gentleness. And I remember going to the other kids afterwards, and did you, did you feel that as well? And they're like, feel what? I'm like, did you, I mean, when he touched your head, like, what? And the whole day I was talking to the adults, I was talking to the kids about what just happened. Nobody understood what the hell I was talking about. They thought, oh, it's so cute. Like, he's such a grown up little

• 10:07Speaker 02

  boy. But I had this feeling like, there's more. There's more to like, this experience. And my mom was that, my mom was that way. My mom was, oh, there's reincarnation, there's this, there's that, the other. So my mom was the one person in my life that was like, yeah, no, it's way more than, than you're being told and we're being told. So there was this constant aching in me, this constant searching in me, you know, which funnily enough, we can get to later. I don't feel the searching anymore, you know?

• 10:32Jonathan Cohen?

  Interesting.

• 10:33Mayim Bialik?

  My MB Alex Breakdown is supported by Rabbit Air. I have to say, we absolutely love our Rabbit Air purifiers. I'm one of those people who didn't know that this could change my life until I got my Rabbit Air. We actually have three of them, so we can have allergen free air wherever we're spending our time and recording. And with fall allergy season on the way, having a high quality, effective air purifier on hand is absolutely key to tackling those fall allergens and keeping your space clean. Rabbit Air's advanced Bio GS Happa filtration goes beyond standard filters by trapping over 99.99% of ultrafine particles down to 0.01 microns. It efficiently captures microscopic allergens like pollen,

• 11:15Mayim Bialik?

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• 14:40Speaker 02

  I don't feel like I'm seeking anymore. I, but I was, I sought for decades. It was interesting, because only later did I come to the, the recognition that that feeling that I had, maybe he had some kind of love and ability and whatever, or maybe not, I don't know. Maybe it was the meaning I placed on the moment that caused this ignition inside of me, of some connection to my own divinity or whatever, I don't know. But I did understand later, like, these things are not coming from a religion. They're not coming from a specific system or framework. It seems like it's innate in, in human beings that, that we, we have access to these things. It's just that I think that people hijack

• 15:24Speaker 02

  what my wife calls the doorway. They hijack the doorway and they say, this is the door. And then everybody gets stuck in the doorway to their own divinity, thinking like, I don't have access to it on my own. And, and it doesn't make sense.

• 15:38Jonathan Cohen?

  So well said. And as a kid, at that age, from my experience, and maybe it's similar, if you have something that's so outside of the norm in terms of, of this profound experience, you want to look around to the adults and say, who can relate to this? How am I not alone in this? If this is real, well, guys, come on, you're living in a way that's so muted and painful. If only you could understand what I've experienced, but as a, as a child, you, you don't have the authority to share that. And so everyone's backwards and you're like, just looking for the people who are of like mind, which puts you in a very external seeking role. There's no way to embody it internally and to know how to navigate it

• 16:20Jonathan Cohen?

  and utilize it. You know, it takes years of integration to say, oh, I can trust in my own experience. I don't need that, you know, whatever, um, guide through the door in order to, to help me.

• 16:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's true. And I was seeking that. I was seeking some kind of like, is it just me? You know? Because there was my mom, which was great.

• 16:43Jonathan Cohen?

  But you can't, you know, but she's your mom.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  My mom, my mom.

• 16:46Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 16:47Speaker 02

  You know, my mom was like, the black sheep, and she was a complete weirdo. And I, and I hated that she was so weird, you know? Because I just, I kind of wanted a more normal mom. I always said, I just wish my mom was normal. She was very sweet. She said, I know, I know, but I'm not. Um, but I was thinking about, you know, I was in Cape Town last year, because my mom lives in Cape Town now. I was in Cape Town remembering like the, like, the 90s. Like, the year 1990 was my quest to like, find people. And I got involved in all these different kind of weird communities, you know, in Cape Town, because Cape Town was and still is, in some ways, a very woo woo kind of place. And I ran into all these like weird characters, you know, and, you know, and I was this young guy, and like, a lot of the older women were like, really like gravitating towards me, realized, oh, they just want to stop me. Like, it's just, it just, it was just, it was just weird.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  And then I remember before I went to America, I got a call from a buddy of mine. He says, ah, there's this amazing, like astrologer woman, you got to talk to her. And I'll get to the What the Bleep creation. And I said, okay, I'll talk to her. And I talked to this woman. She says, you have to meet Ramtha the Enlightened One. I'm like, Ramtha the Enlightened One? Yeah, you have to meet Ramtha the Enlightened One. I said, okay, yeah, sounds great. Anyway, I fly to, fly to LA, you know, I'm prepping for this film. And the film gets pushed two weeks. And I think, ah, I can go meet Ramtha dude. So Ramtha was like this entity supposedly channeled through this woman called Jay-Z Knight up in Washington State. And I say all that because there's two things that are interesting. When I got there, I was like, these are my people. Like, the people I've been looking

• 18:15Speaker 02

  for my whole life. There's this feeling of like, amazing community. And, you know, there's a lot I could get into, but that organization is very, very litigious. So I think I'll just, I'll be kind of careful. But it was a very, very inspiring experience. And it was actually there that, you know, a bunch of us created What the Bleep. So What the Bleep emerged from that, from that organization. But at first, I had the feeling of like, I finally found people where I'm not crazy anymore, and they understand what I'm thinking, what I'm saying, and nothing I'm saying is weird anymore. So I'm no longer the outcast like I was in boarding school. You know, I went to boarding school in Canada for a while, and I was, I was the weird kid. I was a weird kid wearing like yoga clothes. And all my friends were wearing like jeans and plaid shirts, and they were like-

• 18:57Jonathan Cohen?

  What years was this?

• 18:58Speaker 02

  That would have been 1980. And I was just this weird kid. I wanted to fit in so badly. So I kind of abandoned for a while, the whole spiritual thing. Because, you know, who wants to, a kid wearing a yoga pants? I mean, that's just stupid. And I don't mean the tight yoga pants. I mean, like those-

• 19:11Jonathan Cohen?

  The flowing, yeah.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  Flowy, you know?

• 19:14Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 19:15Speaker 02

  So I was, I was an outcast a lot. And so I buried that stuff for a while, until it got so intense, I said, this is the, the real me needs to come out. And so when I went to that particular, you know, organization up in Washington State, I was like, these are the people. This is what I've been waiting for. You know, lots and twists and turns, you know, and finally realizing there's, there's problems in every single organization.

• 19:36Jonathan Cohen?

  There's something interesting about the seekers and this notion of, we co-create our reality to a certain degree, but that can be weaponized. And I'm not saying about this organization, so maybe even make it more general.

• 19:51Speaker 02

  Here's an issue with some teachings, and it's, I had this experience, you know, at Ramtha, but, but many other places. There's this whole thing of, you know, wanting to be divine, or contact the divine, or even, even as bold as to, you are God.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  I don't have a problem with any of that. You know, not that you are God, supplant the true nature of the universe and you are egotistically and narcissistically better than everybody, not that you are God. Like you are part of the fabric of the all. Totally with that. I think the problem comes with the denigration of being human. Like somehow, like your ego is shit and your body is shit and being human is shit. And like, all those things are shit about you. And you have to get beyond that, as though it's some impediment that if you could just get beyond that, you would finally touch the face of God. That to me is one of the most damaging ideologies that exists. Because then what you're doing is saying, okay, everything that I am in this dimension, let's call it like this density for some people.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  Everything I am in this density is shit.

• 20:56Speaker 02

  If I just wasn't in this density, then I would be something better. In essence, I start to maybe even hate myself or I'm disappointed in myself. And now I'm having a challenge with my own psychology, my own psyche. As opposed to maybe the place that I'm more in now, which is, let's assume for instance, the all is the all and it's all. It's not just pieces of the all, it's everything.

• 21:18Jonathan Cohen?

  Yep.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  Isn't the ego, isn't the body, isn't the human experience, isn't the human density, then all part of that as well? And what if we were to accept and incorporate that in the experience of this moment and the is-ness? As opposed to, well, the human body is shit, but the astral body is good. Or the blue body, or the fucking whatever body it is. That division, that polarization, to me is a huge issue. And I found in many, many different groups, there is this self hatred. There's the hatred of just this experience. And you don't get anywhere then. You don't, you're so busy reaching for some peak experience. And then when you're not having the peak experience and you're just being, oh, that's

• 22:03Speaker 02

  disappointing, well, now I'm just being, yeah, what's wrong with that? Why not incorporate that? What if that, to use very spiritual terms, what if that is God also experiencing itself? So you think God doesn't experience itself when it's having a crap? What if it's everything?

• 22:19Jonathan Cohen?

  It is everything and you know, there's, there's a movement towards a much more integrated experience of spirituality. It's not only the blissful feeling you described as a child who, and that propelled you to need to communicate. That is divine, but so is having emotion and so is having anger. And how do we navigate all of it and be present in it? The nature of how this philosophy can be used to manipulate.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 22:46Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah. And to make people not trust themselves and what you spoke to about that, a lot of people sit in the door. You know, a lot of teachers will sit in the doorway and say, I know what's beyond the door, but you can only get a little peek. And actually, if you peek too far, you're wrong and you've misinterpreted this. And there's a right way to do things.

• 23:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I love what you're saying. So the whole door metaphor, that's actually my wife's metaphor, so I want to give her credit for that.

• 23:12Speaker 02

  But it is a big issue because like, I would see teachers say things like, you know, you are this, you are God, you are divine, you're whatever. I'm going to show you techniques. And then if you do anything else, well, that's, no, that technique will not, that's wrong.

• 23:25Jonathan Cohen?

  And you're wrong for thinking about it.

• 23:26Speaker 02

  And you're wrong for thinking of that. And even though you have free will and free choice and you're God, I really am the only one that knows the right door. So like, this is the door. And if you don't, you know, then the entire organization turns against you. Like then you're like, oh, that's a fucking cult. There's a few things. The one is the hijacking of people's natural, deep, profound experiences. Like, you know, you go to some event or something, or I don't know, Burning Man, whatever. You have a profound experience and some asshole stands up there and said, because of me is why you had that experience. Or the other people say, because of him or because of her is that, that's why you had that experience, which doesn't make sense because logically, the person sitting next to you didn't have the experience.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  And it was the same transmission that was coming at you, which means it's not the transmission, it's you activating whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever. So that's the one thing. The other thing is, people that are seeking are generally speaking, really beautiful, profound souls, who haven't been trained to understand that just because somebody uses the right words, doesn't mean that they are embodying the words. My first cult counselor, I was very fucked up when I came out. My first cult counselor, this was in 2017, said to me, the first thing I need to tell you is, look at what they do, not what they say.

• 24:40Jonathan Cohen?

  Yep.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  Cause I kept on saying, but he said, but he said, but he said. And she said, look at what they do. Throw out what they say. And I couldn't quite grasp the idea that it wasn't the same. No, if they say it, it must be who they are. And then I finally was like, oh no, wait, I think my mentor is a psychopath. And then like, it clicked, I was like, oh shit. So he's just been mimicking everything that matches my, our values. And it didn't occur to me that he's full of shit because if I say those things, I mean them.

• 25:14Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 25:15Speaker 02

  You know, and it's funny, my wife, my wife was the one that first woke up from Nixium. And we watched a lot of movies, she made me watch movies because the cult, the cult exit counselor spoke to her first. And she was like, how do I get him out? How do I wake him up? And she's, and the exit counselor said, well, show him, show him this TV show and show him that. And there was one, one film I saw that I loved by this guy called Vikram Gandhi. Have you seen Kumari?

• 25:37Jonathan Cohen?

  I haven't.

• 25:38Speaker 02

  So Vikram Gandhi just co-directed the Burning Man series that's coming out with my friend, Jahan Nujaim. Vikram made a documentary about, cause he's this Indian dude with like long hair and he looks like, you know, Indian Jesus.

• 25:52Jonathan Cohen?

  Oh, I have seen, I have seen a trailer for this. It's amazing. And he goes.

• 25:56Speaker 02

  He makes, he makes a cult.

• 25:58Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 25:58Speaker 02

  And.

• 25:59Jonathan Cohen?

  Because he has the accent and he can speak the language and it's, it's all perform, performance.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  And I don't want to give it away, but like, it's very, it's, it's pretty amazing and people really buy it.

• 26:08Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 26:09Speaker 02

  We look for these symbols of goodness and we project our own stuff out there onto these people. And if you have somebody that just knows how to mimic, it's very easy. And especially with people that aren't well trained. And I think one of the things I'm seeing with, with spiritual people, this is not a bad thing, are not well trained in understanding pathologies, you know? Spiritual people are like looking for that connection, looking for that deep whatever. And it doesn't occur to them like, that a complete psychopath can, can model and mimic the behavior of some avatar and be lying. Like it's really hard for, for good people to understand that. And so that's a huge issue, which is one of the reasons that, you know, I wanted to make this film as well.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  I wanted people to understand like, what's the map behind all the terrible things that can happen in spirituality? And, and people go to events, by the way, and retreats and things, they have wonderful experiences, but God forbid you get close to the inner circle because then you're going to get burnt. Cause that's where the weirdness is.

• 27:09Jonathan Cohen?

  A lot of people will think, I can feel the difference, right? I can feel the difference between someone who is just staying and cosplaying and just saying the words versus someone who truly embodies it. And I don't think a lot of people can because we project, right? We want an answer, we want someone to have knowledge, we want them to have more information that, than we do. And I think we're desperate also for some solution that we can quickly incorporate into our lives. And so if they are embodied and if they do speak all the words and have the messages, we're like, oh, I'm going to get something from this. And we don't necessarily consciously think that, but I, but I think we've been trained

• 27:49Jonathan Cohen?

  to believe that ecstasy or some removal of struggle, bypassing the human experience in some way, is just around the corner.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, that's so profound. So I have a friend, you actually saw him in the film, Richard Crannan.

• 28:04Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 28:05Speaker 02

  And, and Richard Crannan teaches people, and, and he's not the only one, there's many therapists that teach this. Like if you, if you fall in love with somebody and you have that insane excitement and it happens fast.

• 28:16Jonathan Cohen?

  Red flag, red flag.

• 28:17Speaker 02

  Red flag.

• 28:18Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 28:18Speaker 02

  Run.

• 28:19Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 28:19Speaker 02

  Cause it's like lust and limerence and awe and it's all this weird shit. The same thing goes for groups as well. If you go to the group and like, within the first hour, you're like, I've found my people, I'm here, I have arrived, my lifelong quest is now over, whatever, whatever, whatever. Cause what you're experiencing is a profound experience of like love bombing. Because you go into a group, an organization, everybody loves you. They call you family. I mean, in, in Nixium, when I first got there, Renee, second in command, right-hand woman, Nancy Salzman, she just used that all the time. Your family, your family, you know, your family. And I was like, that's just weird. That's too soon. That's, but I still missed everything, of course. I didn't see the red flags, turned everything pink.

• 29:02Speaker 02

  That kind of awe and that limerence, that is so dangerous. I'm not saying don't have it, but you are so stupid when you're in that biochemical state. It's like teenage love. Teenage love is necessary for the survival of the species, but it's stupid. Teenagers start wars, like, you know, over that shit.

• 29:22Jonathan Cohen?

  And, and you miss all the red flags and you can take your life down a totally different path and you lose a lot of critical thinking, right?

• 29:30Speaker 02

  Hundred percent, hundred percent. And it's beautiful. I mean, it's beautiful, you know, some, there was a evolutionary biologist that said to me, that's important, you know, because you want, well, the tribe needed to mix, you need to go fall in love with the girl in the other tribe, you know? And defy everything.

• 29:42Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah, it doesn't matter what the obstacles are, it doesn't matter if you're going to get killed, it doesn't matter anything. It's just perpetuate the species at all costs.

• 29:48Speaker 02

  And it's beautiful, it's beautiful. But like, for sensitive souls, you know, and I find a lot of spiritual people are, they're, they're sensitive souls, they're good people. I get so hurt because what happens is you find out that what you thought was goodness isn't, and it actually hurts goodness. Spotlight. There was one character that said something, I can't remember who it was, who was Catholic, I think, and was finding out what was going on. And he said something about that it broke goodness, it broke God inside of me. And I thought a lot about that because later on, when I woke up from Nixium, that's what it did. It like, it broke goodness. Like I think, well, if that wasn't goodness and that was evil, then what is goodness? Does it, maybe it doesn't exist, you know?

• 30:31Speaker 02

  So really, really difficult time for me, until I was able to start reconstruct, oh, I do know what goodness is. Cause in 2017, when, when I woke up, I didn't know anymore. I only knew one thing, I only knew, he's done terrible things to my friends and I'm going to destroy the motherfucker. That is the only thing that I knew. What he did was bad, we're going to put him away. That's all. I didn't know anything else. And it took, you know, two years of like, working with the FBI and the trial and everything. And only after the trial was I able to go, you know, sit at the ocean with my wife in Portugal and just sit there and go like, I don't know anything. Cause I'd thrown everything out, like I. Maybe Jesus was a psychopath, maybe Buddha was a sociopath, maybe all these people are fuckers.

• 31:16Speaker 02

  So I threw everything out. My wife didn't. I threw everything out. And I sat by the ocean for months and months and months and months and months. We lived in an apartment. I went to sleep at night, but I sat at the ocean until one day I felt the connection again. And I felt something and I was like, ah, there it is. That's me and the universe, the whatever, the whatever, whatever, without the doorways. You know, without the stories, without the templates, without the structures, just a pure, pure experience. And that's when I could begin rebuilding my deeper sense of spirituality and morality with it, you know? Cause that took a while.

• 31:53Jonathan Cohen?

  Everything in this is just, I feel so emotionally moved. I want to go backwards a little bit, but right before we go backwards, I'll just comment and reflect that like, going through the evil that you uncovered, it's very hard to reconcile that. Was there any good at all in that organization that first drew you to it, right? Like there had to have been some benefit and some either community or insight or spiritual experience. Otherwise it wouldn't have provided any value to start with. And so, you know, I think it's a very evolved state of mind to be like, there can be evil, but also there can be aspects.

• 32:37Jonathan Cohen?

  Or I experienced something that I can still hold on to without the organization.

• 32:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, but for me, I guess I had to throw it away because there's, you know, I make a distinction between while I was in compared to after. So while I was in, was there good stuff in the, in the tech? That's what they called it? Yeah, it was good stuff, but built into it was the dismantling of your psyche. You know, I still have arguments with people that are still doing the tech, you know, to this day that evaded prosecution. It dismantles you and, and, and it says it's pulling you more into you, but it actually, it actually doesn't. And listen, the tech was amazing, like in the sense, everybody struggles with like disconnection. And like, instead of connecting to themselves, they, they take themselves, their locus of control, they put it on a person, on an object, on a this, on a that. I need the sports car. I need the whatever, whatever, whatever.

• 33:28Speaker 02

  And so they're perpetually unhappy. People in the spiritual tradition say like, if you could pull yourself away from your attachments back to you, you would feel peace. What the tech did is it looked at what was the thing you think you need to be okay? And let's work on breaking that connection so that you no longer feel like you need that thing. And you're left with, I'm just me, I'm okay. And the way it did it was actually quite smart. You know, it's a bit like NLP and there's some Scientology stuff and there's some pretty advanced stuff in there that seemed to work very well. Like I went in my first retreat there or event, I should say, I think on, I don't know, day seven or eight or whatever.

• 34:08Speaker 02

  They helped me overcome a massive, massive phobia I had that never came back until I left the organization. What I thought had happened is that I'd actually taken care of that, that issue is I was having panic attacks. Now, what's funny is that in 2017, when I woke up, I spoke to a cult expert and he said to me, all the psychological stuff that you thought you resolved, it's about to come out again. Like that's not possible. It all came out. But everything, single thing I, I thought I resolved came back out because they, what they did is they compartmentalized you from, dissociated you from the, the reactions, from the trauma, from those things and buried it somewhere. And it came back out, but at the time, I remember thinking, when they helped me get over the phobia, I was like, this is fucking amazing. Like I want this for everybody. Yeah.

• 34:53Speaker 02

  Cause it was very mathematical and I, and I wanted to make movies that could do this. And so like, and they kept on saying at first, like, well, you should meet Keith Raniere. He's the one that invented this, you know? So like, it took me like 10 days and finally I meet him and you know, I, it was, it seemed very profound. We sat down for five hours and I asked him questions because I believed he was one of the smartest people that ever existed, blah, blah, blah. He was, he was actually in the Guinness Book of Records, but it was fake and bullshit. And I was kind of blown away. So I thought this tech, and this is what everybody thinks, like everybody in NLP or Scientology, they all think they have the tech. I thought this tech would change the world. I thought this tech would make things better.

• 35:32Speaker 02

  Like all the misunderstandings people have with each other, all the ways that we react to somebody and we're really reacting to ourself, but we don't realize it. And that we act out on another person because we don't understand what's happening internally and we build meanings about this, that and the other. All of that could, with mathematical precision could be handled so that we could be our full selves and just interact with people as their full selves. And most people who are like spiritually inclined or humanitarian would listen to me and go, that sounds pretty good. And they pointed out all my faults, too angry, too this, too that. And they said to me, so you want to change the world and you're humanitarian, you want to use movies? Like, how does that relate to you being so angry about other people's behavior? And I was like, damn it.

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• 37:51Speaker 02

  That's a good point. And they said, don't you think you should work on that before you make your next film? Yeah.

• 37:57Jonathan Cohen?

  And now they have you.

• 37:59Speaker 02

  Got me. They got me a few ways. I mean, like when they, when I first met them, like they picked me up in a Learjet, flew me all over the country. You know, we have the money and the resources and we can help fund your movies. So to, to a filmmaker, it's pretty good. That's like, I'm in.

• 38:12Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 38:13Speaker 02

  And then they, so the Learjet's the money, the whatever. Then they were like, and now we have the tech. I felt like I was going to the X-Men headquarters, you know?

• 38:22Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah. You're like, this is the solution to, to the world's problems and to personal problems as well. Why wouldn't you want to?

• 38:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. So they, they had me and they had me. And again, I was flying high. I just made What the Bleep. It was becoming very successful.

• 38:35Jonathan Cohen?

  How long after What the Bleep did you encounter this group?

• 38:40Speaker 02

  Interesting. It came out and they, I found out later, when the film came out, they began profiling me and built a file on me. And these are people that had the kind of methodologies like people in intelligence might have, you know? Like they could, they listened to radio interviews and this and that and things I wrote and watched me. And they figured out what made me tick and what I wanted. And they met me there. This guy wants to change the world using film. We're going to offer that to him, you know? And, and when you're wanting something that badly, it's very difficult to, you know, like, listen, I had three attempts in my life where intelligence tried to recruit me.

• 39:21Speaker 02

  None of them worked. And the second attempt was using sex. Didn't work. You can't get me on that shit, but damn it, you can get me on my art. Or you could at least, you know, I'm not sure about now because I turn shit down now. But my art.

• 39:37Jonathan Cohen?

  When I hear this, it's, I feel like they're speaking to the nine year old still.

• 39:41Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 39:42Jonathan Cohen?

  You're speaking to the nine year old who's having this profound experience and this insatiable desire to communicate to the world that there is something more and that we have this backwards and we're mired and just weighed down in a level of conflict that we don't have to be in. And I can relate to that. I can relate to it, seeing my family struggle and, and seeing things that I couldn't communicate to them. Hey, you're making yourself sick through this perception. I can't explain it to you. I wish I could. Or some other dynamic. And so like, it makes total sense to me that someone who approaches you and says, we're going to help you.

• 40:19Jonathan Cohen?

  We have the resources and we have this, you know, fancy in the, I almost see it as a black box technology. That is going to help you communicate. That nine year old is going to be like, sign me up. I don't care what it is.

• 40:34Speaker 02

  You've actually nailed something that nobody's ever nailed, which is really interesting. And not in a single therapy session has anybody said that. And I realize you're right. They spoke to the nine year old. That's what I never understood. I was like, what, what, why? But you just nailed it. That's what they were doing. I don't think they knew that's what they were doing. But the nine year old was like on fire. And I'd seen bad stuff already, you know, I'd seen, you know, manipulative people. My dad was an intelligence. He told me the world doesn't work the way you think it works. There's a lot of bad people pretending to be good. I, so I knew all of that. But it was an infantile kind of response in the sense, and I don't mean that in a bad way, like this very innocent, beautiful, like yes.

• 41:13Speaker 02

  And you've nailed actually what I've never understood, which is it was the nine year old responding. That's, thank you. That's cool.

• 41:20Jonathan Cohen?

  I feel bad for the nine year old because the intention was so pure.

• 41:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:26Jonathan Cohen?

  If people could really have that experience that you described in nature. My belief is that most people are, are either muted emotionally to the point where they feel almost nothing. Or the things that they feel are mostly on the negative side.

• 41:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:46Jonathan Cohen?

  Meaning that they feel angst and anxiety and pain and just every problem and anger. And very rarely are we able to pause in the just profoundness of being and be overwhelmed by the sensation of existing.

• 42:06Speaker 02

  Yes, a hundred percent. During the battle against NXIVM, I was scared that I'd lost all of that. You know, I was like really worried. I thought, I think it's gone. Like I don't have it anymore. Because I was so cautious. I was also highly paranoid with good reason. There was hacking attempts and PIs were looking for us and you know, we were, you couldn't find us. We were in the government program that nobody could ever find us, that kind of shit. But I thought I lost it. I was so numb and so angry.

• 42:37Speaker 02

  And I threw out all personal growth, all religion, all everything. And I was very worried. It's funny because you're kind of worried, but also like you don't have access. Well, I didn't have access to that beauty in that moment. So when later it came, started to come back, it was amazing to me. Cause I, I'm still connected now, maybe even more deeply to what that nine year old wants. But like, maybe I've not taught the nine year old a bit more about how the world works. So I've seen enormous evil now. And people say to me sometimes, like, you spend so much time dealing with dark stuff. And I'm just really dark stuff I'm dealing with. Not just what you saw, like there's a bunch of other projects. I've seen some just, just evil shit, you know?

• 43:22Speaker 02

  But it's funny is I have this appreciation now for the goodness and the beauty that you speak of. And the awe, you know, maybe even more deeply than I did before. You know, cause now I understand maybe with more wisdom, the, the experience of is-ness is everything. It's the worst and the best of being humanity, of being human. And, and the best is also really, really, really amazing. Like I've been watching the, um, some of the memes about the, the World Cup. And how people are saying, America's actually much more amazing than we thought. We thought it was a horrible place. I'm seeing all these people having a good time. Like, wow, that's really nice.

• 43:59Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 43:59Speaker 02

  That's, that's a relief for a change, you know? And it really moves me. I cry sometimes when I see these people like, you know, dancing together. I saw the Norwegians in Times Square. I start crying. I'm like, oh my God, that's so beautiful. So that has come back more strongly, but I was very afraid I wouldn't, I wouldn't have that again. You know, it's really concerned.

• 44:19Jonathan Cohen?

  I would understand the concern and it's very hard to access that when you're in an active battle. Right? Like you have to put on a wall of defense when under attack. Like you've been on the front lines of fighting evil. It makes sense that you would have to sacrifice. The large spiritual questions, why am I here? What happens when I die, which may be the biggest one? What is reality? And can I shape my own experience? Are the biggest questions that can be manipulated to make you follow someone. Right?

• 44:52Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 44:53Jonathan Cohen?

  Someone says, I can tell you how to shape your experience. Fantastic. And there are many, many tools that help us get out of our ego, out of our perception. Move away from thinking about things only in a, in a very limited way. We know the science of regulating the nervous system and that, that changes the options that we see around us. Like there's both very out there spiritual stuff and very concrete psychological stuff. However, if the answer is always you need more of my classes, be very careful. Do you have any like quick advice on, on that?

• 45:29Speaker 02

  I mean, I just keep on coming back to like, go inside. It's, it's, it's all in there, you know? And also what's sad is every single one of those things that you talked about there, which are beautiful, beautiful questions, they're also tied to some existential terror. Like what happens after you die? I mean, our body is terrified of dying. And if we're only our body, this is not making it bad. If we're only that, it's terrifying. You know, what, what are we here? Is there free will? Isn't there free will? These are all deep existential questions, but they also lead to deep terror. In the end, inside my meat suit, am I actually all alone? Is there anything out? I mean, there's all this, is there anybody out there? Am I alone? You know?

• 46:12Speaker 02

  And now you have the existential crisis of isolation, all that stuff. So it gets down to our most basic fears. And so my sense is, I don't feel like you can really, your radar works well enough until you actually begin to address those things inside of yourself. Like, I feel like you have to go inside and you have to feel your own terror of isolation and existential, you know, like whatever it is and like never existing again. And, you know, all those things. Unless you can go there on your own, I think we become very susceptible to other people using our fears. If we're, if we refuse to actually engage with them.

• 46:52Speaker 02

  So my sense is the radar would work better if we've already not confronted and beaten those things, looked at them and accepted that they're part of the experience of being here. Am I afraid of dying? A part of me is, do I think reincarnation exists? Probably. Do I think there's something else? Absolutely. I have, I've had out of body experiences and like steep paralysis shit and like all kinds of, I know there's more. Like I've been there. I've, I've had the experience of being way out, astrally, I don't know, whatever it is. And slowly coming into my body and this very real experience slowly fading away until I just am in my body with my heart beating and it all starts to slowly fade.

• 47:37Speaker 02

  And I realize, ah, I think this is more real, but that's more real. I've had all those experiences, but there's still terror and there's still fear. If anybody says, I am the way and the light and the door and that shit, fuck them.

• 47:50Jonathan Cohen?

  The no pressure, the making us, the love bobbing to look out for, to make sure that you're not like, this is family. Look, I'm, I'm about chosen family, you know? People, many people feel isolated. Many people have, are disconnected from their actual blood family. I'm not opposed to people recreating and having chosen family. But if there's an organization that quickly is like, you're family now? That's a red flag to me. You have to, that has to be a slow evolving process. Um, even in dating, I've always, I've always said, you don't know someone for at least a year.

• 48:26Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 48:26Jonathan Cohen?

  Because you see someone in a moment of their life. You don't know what happens when the circumstances around them change. You don't know if they're the type of person that has their circumstance around them change frequently. You haven't seen them get sick. You haven't seen them deal with adversity. You really absolutely don't know someone until you've seen enough cycles of their life.

• 48:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 48:48Jonathan Cohen?

  And especially now when we think we know people, right? Like, we're like, oh, I just met this person. I got the greatest feeling. I, I followed their content online, like I know them. You don't know them.

• 48:57Speaker 02

  No, no, it's so true. It's true, right? I think that's the cool, the cool thing. I've been married now for, is it 15 years? I'm terrible at this. I can't remember 16 years, whatever it is. My wife and I have seen each other at our best and our worst.

• 49:10Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  Like, and I think that's good. I feel like, I feel like we know each other. I think we're going to make it, you know?

• 49:15Jonathan Cohen?

  And it took, it took time though, right?

• 49:17Speaker 02

  Oh my goodness. It took, because there was the, the, you know, my wife and I never had the like, oh my God, giddy feeling. Like we had this sense of like, oh, I recognize you. And then, you know, we were in a culture while, and then like, you know, the coming out of it and all the drama. But there is something about that connection which feels, I'm not going to say it is spiritual, but it feels almost spiritual. It's more than just what we look like and power and this and that, the other. Like I sometimes look at my wife and I go like, who's that little soul in there? Cause I'm, that soul is just so amazing. And sometimes I'll say to her like, who's in there? You know, who's that, who's that person in there? That, that whatever in there, you know? So yeah, I'm a big, a big believer in like taking your time with, you know, with dating and finding that person.

• 50:01Jonathan Cohen?

  Beautiful.

• 50:01Speaker 02

  Now we're in the dating world.

• 50:03Jonathan Cohen?

  We're, we are. I mean, I think the, the other thing that, that strikes me is that anyone who says, I will give you a way out of suffering. I don't disbelieve them, but there isn't a utopia. Everything is generally a trade-off.

• 50:16Speaker 02

  No, exactly. There was something else that, that, that I was thinking about. Oh yes, the other thing I was thinking about was no matter how good the organization says it is or what it purports to do, if there's coercion there, if there's threats, if you're going to be in the out group, if you don't go along, that's a huge problem. And I think that people in political parties should think about this. And I'm not pointing in any particular direction. If you're in a political party and if you think for yourself and it doesn't go along with the status quo and you're a pariah because of it, I think there's a problem. You know, it doesn't mean you burn the whole political party down, but just understand it's been infected now with some culty stuff.

• 50:56Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah. I mean, I think we see that everywhere.

• 51:00Speaker 02

  In extremes for sure.

• 51:01Jonathan Cohen?

  In the extremes for sure. Well, one thing I will say about just, just wrapping and not to be overly negative about the end of suffering. I do believe there are ways to suffer a lot less.

• 51:11Speaker 02

  Yes, I agree with you. I agree with you. I'd like what you said though. Like if somebody says, I'll, I'll take it away. I'll show you the way to take it away. Like, do you feel like with suffering? Cause I'm sure there's things you and I both did suffer about, but don't suffer about anymore. Did you have the experience like I did of just getting exhausted with the suffering?

• 51:28Jonathan Cohen?

  Yes.

• 51:28Speaker 02

  I'm so tired of it. There has to be another way.

• 51:31Jonathan Cohen?

  Absolutely. And a lot of it was, am I going to take action on something that's bothering me and then make it worse? I had this experience literally right before we jumped on this. And this is such, this is so benign and mundane, but it was an amazing example for me. Someone was coming to the house to, to, to help us with, with a project. And I only, I knew I only had a certain amount of time. And I started to get annoyed that what actually was happening was I was anxious that I wasn't going to have enough time before I got on this. So I called up my, and I'm like, we, the scheduling and she's like, what do you want me to do? I just made everything worse by acting on it and not just like taking a fricking beat and dealing with myself.

• 52:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:16Jonathan Cohen?

  Now, that's just a small example, but not everything that happens in my head, I need to act on. Or I need to rope other people into, like sometimes I just need to process and be like, there is unknown in the universe.

• 52:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:29Jonathan Cohen?

  And there's unknown in my day right now. And do I have the trust that it's going to be good? Manageable or catastrophic? Where, where am I putting my intention here?

• 52:39Speaker 02

  Yes, I like that. You've actually got me thinking about something else with that, which is like abusive people, cult leaders, whatever, they, they leverage these anxieties.

• 52:49Jonathan Cohen?

  And I can give you an answer to this. Just ask me, get me on speed dial and I'll tell you what you need to do.

• 52:55Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah. But there's something about just being like present in the moment, like in this moment, right now, is everything actually okay? In this moment, is everything okay? And I feel like as long as we have those anxieties, we are open to things. Because here's an example. Let's say in certain kinds of Christianity, like you could go to hell if you, if you do this, that or the other. You know, there's some other terrible thing that's going to happen to you. If you're in a new age, whatever, it's like, you know, if, if you don't make it, you're going to get left behind. In whatever church it's, if you're not going to be part of the 144,000, they're going to be saved. There's always some group that's going to get saved. And if you do these things, you're not going to get saved. It's everywhere. That anxiety, that suffering is resolvable if you just stick with now. I don't know if hell exists.

• 53:40Speaker 02

  I don't care. I don't know if I'm chosen. I don't give a fuck. But they leverage that feeling of like, whatever the FOMO is that I'm gonna get left behind, that you know, God's not gonna love, whatever, whatever, whatever it is. And that, that constant anxiety and that suffering is the way in for them. I'm starting to feel more and more like that's the shit worth actually spending time on. But this is the stuff that matters. Talking about the nature of being, like, I don't know how anything works. The one thing I can tell you that happened is I went from knowing everything to knowing nothing.

• 54:13Speaker 02

  When I was in the cult, I knew everything. I was smarter than all you motherfuckers.

• 54:17Jonathan Cohen?

  That's a dangerous place. That's extremely dangerous.

• 54:20Speaker 02

  So bad. Now I know shit. Like, I'm like, I don't know. Like, I don't know. I have feelings. I have ideas. I have theories. Like, am I gonna stake my life on reincarnation exists? No, cuz I don't know.

• 54:34Jonathan Cohen?

  Don't you think that's a more spiritual way of existing? Because it leaves room for the largest nature of reality, connection with a divine. Like, if you know everything, where's the ultimate, you know, curiosity in that?

• 54:50Speaker 02

  That's so interesting. So, you know, with What the Bleep? We interviewed this guy called David Albert, physics professor at, I think, Columbia. And when we had our big event in Santa Monica, David, we invited David Albert to come and do a talk. And, and this is What the Bleep won. And before he got up on stage, he came to me and said, I'm very angry at you. And I said, why?

• 55:11Speaker 02

  He said, because I think what you've done is you've sort of spiritualized quantum mechanics. You've, you've made it like into this magical, whatever, whatever. And, and I said, yep, probably have to some degrees. And there's something worse than that. You've tried to define it, and you've tried to narrow down what it is. You don't seem to understand, we don't know what the hell is going on. It is so mysterious that we in the sciences are baffled. And you're suggesting you know how it works. You have limited the true nature of reality. And I was like, what? It struck me so hard. And he said to me, so that's my position on your film.

• 55:51Jonathan Cohen?

  You've limited the true nature of reality.

• 55:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I said to him, okay, I'm gonna really sit with that. And he says, well, you still okay with me going up to talk? I said, yes, please. And if that's what you wanna say on the podium, do it. Did you believe him? It struck me so hard, I didn't even know what to think. And then in, in, in the years that passed since then, I've thought more and more about it. Because we took a very simplified view of, you know, consciousness and the nature of reality and quantum mechanics. And you're about, it was a very simplistic look at things. And maybe some of it's true. But I think I was going so much on some experience, but a lot of theory. And now I'm more just about my experience, you know, is something true to me experientially?

• 56:37Speaker 02

  But it struck me because the math, the physics, I'm using these terms badly, and that's not correct, suggests that there is a mystery beyond understanding. Like, mathematicians are just crunching numbers, finding new kinds of mathematics to try and explain shit.

• 56:57Jonathan Cohen?

  You know, we spoke to an astrophysicist recently, 95% of the universe is unknown. They just have no effing clue what's happening.

• 57:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:06Jonathan Cohen?

  And my response is like, that's, is that not terrifying? And she's like, it's marvelous and exciting. And we're on the frontier of like, not knowing is such an amazing.

• 57:18Speaker 02

  It's beautiful.

• 57:19Jonathan Cohen?

  Place. And I think about that on a large cosmic sense. And then I think about it on a very personal sense. If we can embrace that, which I am not great at. This is, I think, the work of, of me being a more okay person to be around, to be in, around myself and other people.

• 57:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:38Jonathan Cohen?

  Is the level of not knowing about small things, about timing, about just a lot.

• 57:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:44Jonathan Cohen?

  Requires me to embrace that and to trust that things are generally gonna work out and be okay.

• 57:50Speaker 02

  I'm so, that's so interesting you say that, you know, I had an experience, I think it was 2021. I'd spent like weeks and weeks and weeks doing certain kind of meditations and things. And I was on a bus on my way from the coast into Lisbon. And I remember just having this amazing like pop out experience. And a question that had always been in my mind is, you know, is there free will or not? And I had this experience where I guess I accessed some other level of myself, the universe, I don't know, whatever. And I remember thinking, in this place, I was like, there is no free will. It doesn't, it's not even matter. It's not even a question. There is. And I saw that I had this weird experience of like, I am part of a pattern. I can reference the pattern, but I am also the pattern.

• 58:36Speaker 02

  Unable to reference myself without the I, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I experienced the paradox of like, this blackness and emptiness full of, full of nothing and full of everything. But what I experienced in that moment, and it actually lasted for weeks, was like, I'm not so sure of this free will. And I don't know if it matters. That thing helped to reduce my anxiety tremendously. Because I constantly thought like, I have to make things happen. I have to bend the world. I have to bend people's perception. I have to make them understand this, that, or the other, as though like, I have the right to do that, or even know how to do that. Maybe I don't, you know? And I was just left with a big like, I don't know. And weirdly, the I don't know felt freeing

• 59:22Speaker 02

  because I'd spent so much time in the anxiety of thinking I had to know. Which is so, it's so anxious. Like, I have to know. I have to find the right tech so that I know how shit works.

• 59:33Jonathan Cohen?

  So you know how it works? And also, does it change the decision you're gonna make next if you believe that it's preordained or not?

• 59:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. And it's, it was so interesting, cuz I mean, I don't think, and as far as I know, I don't think that anybody with mathematics has, has been able to figure out, is there free will or not? It's discussed endlessly. But in that place, it didn't matter. And I was like, really fascinated at that experience, like, it doesn't matter whether it exists or not. Here I am, making the decisions. Is the decision I'm making preordained? I've had psychic readings with people 40 years ago that talked about what I'm experiencing in this decade of my life and what would happen accurately.

• 1:00:13Jonathan Cohen?

  I had a psychic reading when I was about 24, 25 years old. And at that time, I'd gone to undergrad late, cuz I dropped out the first time I went back. I was an older student for an undergrad student. And I had, I was in a serious relationship. I was thinking about starting a family. I really wanted to like, work and, and earn money as a writer. That's what I was in school for. I caught the film bug in undergrad. And I went to the psychic who said, you're gonna start earning money as a full-time writer when you're 34. And to me, that was devastating news because there was so much time left.

• 1:00:48Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:00:49Jonathan Cohen?

  Between then and now, I'm like, what am I gonna do for all that time? How am I gonna like, figure my, my life out? Was very destabilized for months afterwards. It felt like I was given information that I just shouldn't have known, and, and it was very unsettling.

• 1:01:04Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:01:05Jonathan Cohen?

  And forgot about it, went about my life, didn't, you know, think about that reading or, or the parameters set. Went to, went to grad school, went, studied film more, started working and was making some, you know, money and working freelance. And then second, but it was, I was doing other things as well, juggling, trying to stay afloat. At 34 years old, I moved back to Toronto, Canada, and started as a full-time writer at an innovation and design company, which then took my, and, and only after I had been there a few months did I think back to that psychic reading and be like, what the fuck happened there?

• 1:01:40Speaker 02

  Yes. That's so cool. You know, I have a theory, and I, and I know this is, we're going off into weird areas, but like,

• 1:01:50Speaker 02

  I don't think time exists in the way we think it does.

• 1:01:52Jonathan Cohen?

  I agree with you. I don't know how to explain it, but I agree.

• 1:01:55Speaker 02

  Like, our equipment takes what we think of time and lays it out in the line, our equipment.

• 1:02:03Speaker 02

  So we are astonished when something that we think is remote is connected to this moment here. But the thing is, they're not remote. They're all part of the same, uh, hmm, hmm, that we're stretching out in the line. And so we're astonished. Because I have had the same thing of like, how did they know 40 years ago that this would? Because it wasn't 40 years ago, in the past or the future. Our equipment that we're using is, is, is decoding it in this way so that we get astonished. That's my theory currently.

• 1:02:35Jonathan Cohen?

  Yes, but baked into that is the notion that these events are designed, right? The fact that time can be collapsed on itself like that so that someone can see would mean that I was gonna make the decision, like, the decision to go back to Canada or that my life wasn't gonna unfold. Maybe it would have unfolded in a way that I didn't go back to Canada. But at, at that time, like, how did they know that those years would be this juggling act versus 34 or something opens?

• 1:03:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know. It's, and you know what I'm left with is like, I don't know. I don't know.

• 1:03:17Jonathan Cohen?

  Because if you take it to the place of, it is all designed, then you're also at risk of people then looking externally for someone who can read the timeline and tell you what's gonna happen. And then that brings up a whole other range of issues. Because I do believe we can curve and, and dodge and, you know, pursue things that may not necessarily be apparent. If I had to offer a, a perspective, it would be that I think there are major moments that are likely sketched out as highly probable. In between those major moments, there's a high level of variability.

• 1:03:56Speaker 02

  What I've gotten to is the, my framing of everything, it's the way I'm seeing things that's, that's, makes it hard. And I may never be able to see things in this dimension, in this body, in this framework. I mean, I know that when I have, let's say, I don't know, let's call them out of body experiences. I have a much broader, in those moments, if they're moments, I don't know what they are, a much broader understanding of how everything works. Like, I see my life from a distance. You know, I, it's like I pull way, way back and I see it related to like, what seems like other lives. Like, in my dreams, I'm living other lives, like intimately. Like, I know these, I am this person. Like, it's not just a story. I am her. I am him. I'm like.

• 1:04:39Speaker 02

  So I feel like when I, when I'm just here, the framing doesn't allow me to, to perceive, you know, all those things. So that's why I'm still like, I don't know. It's really cool. It's a great conversation.

• 1:04:54Jonathan Cohen?

  What was it like when your wife left NXIVM and you were still in it? That was one of the most painful moments for me as the viewer.

• 1:05:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:02Jonathan Cohen?

  In the film, because she's desperately trying to get through to you. She's the closest person in the world to you and you to her. And yet you're divided in this way that is just almost unspeakably painful.

• 1:05:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. One thing I want to say before I answer that, there's a scene in, I think it's episode two, where you see her crying and I'm consoling her. She wasn't crying about us separating. We never separated. That was an editorial choice. Uh, I argued with the editors about it. I said, like, it's not, it's not exactly true. And they, and they were like, is there any way you could see this as an emotional beat? That feels true. And I'm like, yes, yes, I can, I can do that.

• 1:05:42Jonathan Cohen?

  Fair enough. I mean, I think that's a nice and honest disclosure, but also I think it still remains true.

• 1:05:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:48Jonathan Cohen?

  That you two are, are now in the opposite spectrum of what's happening.

• 1:05:52Speaker 02

  For her, it was actually in many ways much worse. I was just very confused because I was stuck with like, yeah, but I want to be honorable and I want to do the right thing. And I'm like this soldier, you know, in this, in this militaristic system. And like, what's the right thing to do? Cause I'm so brainwashed. And she's like, he can't see the evil, you know? And, and she didn't know what the evil was at first. It took her a while and then she started realizing what it was. And then, you know, I don't remember if this is in the vow or not, but I, she said to me, what will it take? And I said, evidence. I said, data, because that was the word we used, data. I need data. Very like sciencey language. And so she sent me, she connected me to two women that I knew and they told me stories of what had happened to them. And then I was like, oh shit.

• 1:06:37Jonathan Cohen?

  Cause you couldn't not believe them.

• 1:06:39Speaker 02

  I believed them. I believed them. Like I, I had no reason to think that they would lie. And then it started to like, things started to make sense. And then I went back to Renee on a phone call, which I think is in the vow. And I started asking him a bunch of questions and then he lied. And I was like, ah, what is going on? So for us, it was very hard. For, for my wife, you know, the way she described it, it was, it was one of the hardest things for her because she realized she might have to leave me if I never got it.

• 1:07:08Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:10Speaker 02

  And because of that, she was going to fight in every way possible to get me to get it. And at first, the way she did it was just very directly, this is bad, he's bad, da, da, da, da, which didn't work. You can't tell somebody who's in a cult that their leader's bad because you think you are the same as the leader. Like your values are the same, everything, everything. So then she spoke to, you know, this exit counselor who told her, told her what to do. But it was in a time of enormous confusion. So she basically left the organization in January 2017. I woke up in March. She already knew three months before that. So it's about six months, I think of her realizing shit is bad. And how am I going to get him to see it?

• 1:07:51Speaker 02

  You know, and I was so stuck still with the values and the honor and the this and the that and the other, that I couldn't see what was going on. I knew there was a problem in the organization, but I was going to Renee saying things like, there's a psychopath in the organization. He goes, oh, why do you say that? Because this is happening, this is happening, this is happening. And then he said, well, who do you think's the psychopath? And I was like, I think Alison Mack's the psychopath. And he goes, oh, that's interesting. I didn't realize he had Alison Mack under his control and he was making her do all the decisions she was doing. And then he distracted me with like, well, when you say there's a psychopath in the organization, do you, do you calculate it? Or do you feel it? And I was like, oh, that's an interesting question. And me and my brain, I'm like, ah gee, I wonder. He distracted me completely from the point of the discussion, which was there's a psychopath in the organization.

• 1:08:35Speaker 02

  Now, the trick was he was a psychopath. And he was in, I imagine he was enjoying that conversation thoroughly. Cause he was like, you're so close. You're so close. You know, and the deliciousness, because he loved practical jokes. He would play them for months and years sometimes. I think he enjoyed that moment thoroughly. So I was still so stuck in, there's a problem, but it can't be him. It's not him. So the break of finally realizing it's him is what she was pushing up against, not the break. She was pushing up against my walls of, I know there's problems, but it's not him, which was very hard for her. So yeah, I mean, she, she told me, she said, look, there, I recognize that they may come a point.

• 1:09:17Speaker 02

  You know, and it was interesting because the cult exit counselor she spoke to, I won't mention her name, but this woman was in a cult and dubbed in her husband who began asking questions. So she really understood how this worked.

• 1:09:31Jonathan Cohen?

  Wow.

• 1:09:32Speaker 02

  You know? Yeah.

• 1:09:34Jonathan Cohen?

  Connect us to the narcissist playbook after your experiences.

• 1:09:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:40Jonathan Cohen?

  Leads to this film and what you hope people get out of it.

• 1:09:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. So what happened is that as I'm beginning to slowly wake up, she is beginning to give me articles about narcissism. And there was one day in particular, I had to have a call with Keith Renee. And she handed me an article about like the, the 20 things a narcissist will do in a conversation. So I read the whole thing as well. That's pretty fascinating. Then I got on the phone call with Keith Renee. And in my mind, I began ticking off everything in the list. It wasn't everything. It was most things on the list. And when I hung the phone up, I realized I would never talk to him again.

• 1:10:15Jonathan Cohen?

  Wow.

• 1:10:16Speaker 02

  Ever. Cause I realized, oh my God, this is who he is. Like there's a map for what he is. So I began studying narcissism, sociopathy, psychopathy, a whole bunch of things. A lot, a lot of the reasons is because my wife kept on saying, you need to study this stuff. We had studied, by the way, psychopathy in the organization. He was having us study the way he worked, but we couldn't connect that it was him. So I began, began studying all these things and I, the question I, I had for so long is how did I miss it? And I finally realized the reason I missed it is because I had never been trained in, in how this works. Had I understood how this worked, I probably may have seen it earlier. I probably was still being fooled, but I may have seen it earlier. So I'm obsessed with trying to understand like, what happened to me? Who was he? I'm mapping it all out.

• 1:11:01Speaker 02

  I actually began watching and reading the work of HG Tudor, who's in the film as well. And this was helping me. And so I was so obsessed with this and I was feeling pretty lost, you know? Cause I had to, I had to stop a project, shut it down because it was, it was sort of supporting the organization. And it was a cool project. And then my wife said to me one day, so you know, you should make a film about narcissism. I think this was after the trial. I was obliterated. I was like, I don't know what I'm going to do. And she said, I said, I want to get back to the project that I wanted to do. And she says, I think you should make a film about narcissism. I was like, that's a good idea. So 2020, I start, you know, toying with the idea. I bring in, you know, my producer, one of the other producers, uh, who was an exec on the vow. And so we've been working this thing for five years.

• 1:11:44Speaker 02

  And the idea of talking to self-confessed narcissists, which you saw in the film, is because I feel like people need to understand how these people operate. You know, like you need to understand how they think they're not the same. And a lot of good people are like, they just have, they need enough love. They didn't get enough love as children. And now people think this about dark, tetrad individuals, you know, that somehow the sadism will go away. If you love them enough or give them enough, whatever. That shit's never going away. Their brains are broken. So I felt like I needed people to understand that. So I wanted to make a film that people could go through the experience of, of being vindicated of like, this is what happened to me. And then listen to the people that do it very honestly, as you, as you saw in the film, speak about what they do, why they do it, and how much they enjoy doing it.

• 1:12:30Speaker 02

  You know, which is, which can be pretty shocking, but a lot of people walk out of the film, they're like, that's how it works. And then as you saw, which I don't want to talk too much about, as you saw, taking the audience through the experience of what it's like to be fooled. Because many people that have been abused, whether it's cult or, you know, a relationship or whatever, they get asked the question like, how did you not see it? Like how, why did you not leave, you know? And so in the film, you go through the experience as a person, maybe that hasn't been through it of being like, oh shit, I fell for it as well. Like, oh, that's how it works. So that's a lot of what we want the film to do. Like we made it for survivors to be able to go like, yes, that's what happened to me. And I think what'll happen and is happening already is people saying to other people, you gotta see this film. Because like, this describes what I've been trying to explain I've been through.

• 1:13:13Jonathan Cohen?

  The word playbook in the title is apt because it helps people understand their experience. If you've gone through it and it very much helps people avoid the experience if they're in something that feels confusing.

• 1:13:25Speaker 02

  Hundred percent.

• 1:13:26Jonathan Cohen?

  I think then what you started with, the notion that these people are not going to change.

• 1:13:32Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:13:33Jonathan Cohen?

  I think the hardest part for, for a lot of empathetic people, a lot of people who are in a relationship with one of these people, or who may have one of these people as their parent. The most shocking statistic and, and the, our podcast has done an episode on narcissism, you know? And, and I was struck by the, it then, one in six people will fall into this category. So like, look around you. It's not like have you experienced this? It's who in your life are you experiencing this with?

• 1:14:02Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:14:03Jonathan Cohen?

  And of course there's levels to it, right? Like I want to also caveat it. Not everyone is the darkest of narcissists who are gonna, you know, ruin your life and suck you down a black hole. But even understanding the darkest part and then walking backwards to say, there are people on a spectrum here who may be exhibiting traits. And if you're in a relationship and seem to be having the same type of argument over and over and over again.

• 1:14:31Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, vulnerable narcissism. Yeah.

• 1:14:32Jonathan Cohen?

  That one is so fascinating to me because you're like, you always, like you, the non narcissist always becomes the problem. You've always perpetrated something against this person. And to me, as especially as a man who often, and this is stereotypical, we are in scenarios where like, we have to change our behavior because we're not sensitive enough or aware enough. Or we've, we've, our tone is wrong or whatever that is. Like all these natural things that men often experience in relationships can get weaponized to a point where like, oh, I don't even know what's up or not. I don't even know if my tone is reasonable. I have no idea.

• 1:15:07Speaker 02

  Yes, hundred percent. And, and as you saw in the film, we, we also have a, a man who's been, you know, in a situation with a female narcissist, you know? So we're like equal opportunity film in that way. It shows up differently. And the other thing, by the way, that also, we don't talk about as much as communal narcissism, you know? Is the people that sort of build communities around them. They run charities, they run NGOs, they run political parties, whatever it is, they have a cause, you know? And they want to bring everybody into their cause. And sometimes these people are not good people, but the language is right. Maybe it's the language of social justice or politics or whatever it is. There are some pretty nasty people at the top of different organizations and it's worth like paying attention to how that works, you know? So there's, there's a whole, yes, there's a whole spectrum, as you say, of people and the way it plays out.

• 1:15:50Jonathan Cohen?

  Mark, tell us where people can go to learn more about the film and also to follow your work.

• 1:15:57Speaker 02

  Me personally, I'm mostly on Instagram, just at Mark Vicente. The film, the website is narcissistsplaybook.com. Uh, we are on every single platform as well. It's either the narcissist playbook or narcissist playbook, Instagram, Tik Tok, whatever. We're, we're kind of everywhere. And we put a lot of content out. We're also putting out stuff that, you know, didn't make the cut. So there's a lot of stuff still coming and we're going to, we're going to continue this outreach program even once we start releasing the film. Because a lot of people are looking for answers, you know, and, and places to go. And we want to design something where people can go like, well, where do I go for legal help? You know, what kind of therapist do I need? Because you, you can't just go to any therapist necessarily, because therapists by their own admission

• 1:16:41Speaker 02

  are not as well trained in this as they could be. In fact, Dr. Ramani is training a lot of therapists in this because you go to a therapist, sometimes you've been in a bad situation. And they say, well, it takes two to tango. What's your responsibility? And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, that's not how it works.

• 1:16:53Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:54Speaker 02

  You know, yes, that's true. Sometimes when you have two empathic people with conscience, but when you're dealing with a narcissist, it's not, it takes two to tango. It's one person is fooling everybody. And the person who's being abused believes they are the cause of all the problems, as you say.

• 1:17:09Jonathan Cohen?

  That is probably the most important take home message. It can be so easy to overlook it and internalize this if you're an empathetic person.

• 1:17:18Speaker 02

  Yes. It's your superpower and, and your Achilles heel. It's beautiful. The projections of good people and other people, it's beautiful. And sometimes foolish in the wrong context.

• 1:17:30Jonathan Cohen?

  Mark, thank you so much for spending time with us. I just have absolutely appreciated your work over the years and getting to talk with you is just really a special gift. Great conversation. Thanks a lot, man.