Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of Maximum Fun.org and is distributed by NPR.

It's Bolzai. I'm Jesse Thorne. My guest Jane Borden was kind of obsessed with cults, reading books about them, watching documentaries, old news pieces from 2020, whatever. What kind of cults? Well, there's your classic cults, the ones everyone knows about, the Manson family, Jones Town, that kind of thing.

There's obscure ones, like a group called Mankind United from the 40s, that promised to bring justice to the secret cabal that caused the Great Depression.

And old cults, too, like that time three guys loaded up a bunch of

families on a boat, pointed it west, and sailed thousands of miles until they finally hit a rock.

Plymouth Rock. Anyway, Jane Borden is a writer with Bylines and Vanity Fair in the Washington Post

in the New York Times magazine.

So she didn't just read about cults. She wrote a whole book about them. Cults like us is not just a study of cults, but also a study of why they seem to be such a uniquely American phenomenon.

I'm so thrilled to welcome Jane on the show, so let's get right into it.

Music I'm so thrilled to welcome Jane on the show, so let's get right into it. Jane Borden, welcome to Bullseye.

I'm so happy to have you on the show.

It's so nice to see you.

Thank you for having me.

I'm excited.

So do you think that, well, let's start with this.

Okay.

What is a cult? What is a cult?

What is a cult?

So the modern definition, which we have thanks to a psychologist named Robert J. Lifton, and this has definitely become a pejorative word.

It wasn't always in history.

But today, the definition of a cult has three characteristics.

There's a charismatic leader who's worshipped

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