Amanda Montel, welcome to Heart Starts founding. Oh my God. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited. I'm

to try to keep my enthusiasm to myself. No, I'm so excited to have you truly because I wanted to do

an episode like this for so long, just reading through real cult stories of like experiences that people

have had firsthand with cults. I felt like there was no one better. Thank you. I'm honored. What a

privilege.

Can I ask before we jump in, when for you did the like fascination, dark deep dives into cults begin?

Ooh.

My earliest memories.

I'm dead serious, though, because my dad grew up in a cult.

My dad spent his teenage years against his will in a cult called Synanon, which was this,

you know, now what we imagined to be a classic cult, this 70s California compound in the Tani Brown Hills of the Bay Area that started out as an alternative drug rehabilitation center

that later grew to accommodate so-called

lifestylers or people who didn't struggle with addiction, but who just wanted in on this blossoming

countercultural movement of the 1960s and 70s. Oh, interesting. And that was my grandfather.

And so, yeah, when my dad was 14, my grandfather forced him and his two toddler

age half-sisters to move onto this compound where kids lived separately from their parents. And

there were head shaving rituals and reassigned marriages and this traumatizing truth-telling ritual

called The Game. And in fact,

this cult was the entire basis for the troubled teen industry. I was going to say it's interesting

that your dad was a teenager when you joined because I've read about that kind of laying the

foundation for what has become the troubled teen industry today. That's right. That's right. Yeah,

it planted the seed.

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