I'm Jane Marie, and this is the dream.

I'm Diane Ben Skowder, and I'm the founder of a nonprofit called Antidote.

And what is Antidote?

Antidote takes a public health approach to psychological manipulation.

We're working to build a public health framework for this ever-increasing problem of psychological

manipulation.

Before we go further, what do you mean by psychological manipulation?

What I mean by that is that a lot of people don't realize how prone they are to being taken advantage of

on a psychological level.

And oftentimes people think that people join cults or get scammed in different ways,

and that that takes place on a critical thinking rational level

but mostly it takes place on a psychological level where people are seeking happiness or to feel

better about themselves or they get something out of the scam if you will that makes them feel better about themselves. And so the controls

that are taking place, the manipulation is actually taking place on a psychological level.

And I think that's really critical to understand.

We spoke a little bit about it in the first season of the dream, which was focused on

multi-level marketing and just all the tricks that are played on us and the tricks we

play on ourselves and our minds and, you know, just how people we talk to for our program

are highly intelligent, well-educated, you know, suckers eventually.

And people feel like that's incongruous.

Right.

That people who get taken in by these, you know, scammers must be, like, lacking some sort of intelligence.

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