This is exactly right.

Trust me. Do you trust me?

Would I ever lead you astray?

Trust me.

This is the truth. The only truth.

If anybody ever tells you to just trust them, don't.

Welcome, welcome to Trust Me, the podcast about cult's

extreme belief and manipulation from two hippies who've actually experienced it. I'm Lola Blanc.

And I'm Megan Elizabeth. And today is part one of our interview with Jonathan Hirsch, podcaster, producer,

an author, and friend of the show who grew up in a cult led by new age guru Franklin Jones, also known

as Adi Da. In this week's episode, he's going to tell us how his parents met while in their

spirituality and psychedelics era, ultimately happening into Franklin Jones's group, and how many

of Jones's followers were indoctrinated just through listening to his tapes at first.

We always come back to the tapes on this podcast. We'll discuss the group's constantly changing belief system. One follower is fascinating experience, seeing the doctrine differently,

once she had to translate it into another language, and what it was like growing up on the

cult's compound as a child.

And next week we will get deeper into Jonathan's personal experiences being in and then of course

leaving the cult. A lot of what we talk about today, he gets into even more on the podcast

he made about this experience called Dear Franklin Jones. And he also wrote a book

that also includes these topics called The Mind is Burning. But before we get into it with him,

so much to talk about, Megan, please tell me your cultiest thing of this week. No. Okay, fine.

Please. Okay. So this podcast we record and then it gets released later. So I know some people might be like, wow, hot take. This happened forever ago. But still, it's culty and we're going to talk about

...