This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is Solvable.

I'm Jacob Weisberg.

For a moment, I thought I heard glass breaking around me physically.

It was my entire identity crumbled.

It was just devastating.

Diane Ben Skoders' life changed when she left the Mooneys.

It wasn't easy.

The cult provided connection and meaning, and while she was a

member, it was hard to imagine a life outside of it. Diane was a victim of psychological manipulation,

a technique practiced by cults of very different kinds, ranging from the People's Temple,

which ended in the Jonestown tragedy, to nexium to QAnon.

Radicalization can happen because not enough people understand how psychological manipulation works.

And I don't think there's any other way to solve it than to take a public health approach to it.

It's like mole-wacking. Until we get to that tipping point of enough people understanding it,

it's just going to show up in different ways and in different packaging. And we'll just be

programming someone from this cult and that cult and one person at a time. And that is just

not going to solve the problem. It'll just keep getting worse. Diane Ben Skoda is the founder

of antidote.NGO. Her organization provides resources to families looking for support and individuals looking to make a change.

I just, you know, I could imagine myself just feeling immense frustration and a failure of empathy because it's their own stupidity.

It does seem like that, I know.

And I struggle with those feelings myself myself even after a lifetime of trying

...