Sounds Like A Cult - The Cult of Tony Robbins

Episode Date: August 17, 2021

Super-wealthy motivational speaker Tony Robbins physically towers over his thousands of adoring acolytes, boasting a booming voice and omniscient life advice about everything from love to business to trauma, which he espouses at his world-famous conferences… but in light of recent abuse allegations, his cult status is starting to look a lot more predatory than inspiring. Special guest Kate Kennedy of the Be There In Five podcast joins us this week to unpack the cult of motivational speaking and Tony Robbins, discussing peer pressure and forced vulnerability, the connection between Robbins and disgraced self-improvement star Rachel Hollis, and so much more.

Some people's expectations, their belief systems are, life should be taken care of me. I gotta show people that you need to deliver something to life because as long as you're waiting for somebody to take care of you, then you're always the victim, you're always waiting. It's not about getting the goal. It's about who you become in pursuit of it. Wait, that's his voice?

It's like so creepy. That's his real voice. Don't believe, I feel like he's putting on an act. I swear, that's like his signature. That's like what someone with vocal fry surgery sounds like. It does, but he does vocal exercises to maintain that sound. He's a monster. This is Sounds Like a Cult, a show about the modern day cults we all follow.

I'm Issa Medina, a comedian and documentarian. And I'm Amanda Montell, an author and linguist. Every week here on the pod, we choose a different group from the cultural zeitgeist. Try and answer the big question. This group sounds like a cult, but is it really? Hey everyone, really quickly before we get into the episode, you might have seen this is our last episode of season one.

We are so appreciative of all the support every listener, all the DMs and suggestions. And we're going to be launching a season two very soon, but in order to do that, we launched a Patreon because we really need some outside production support. So you can go to soundslikeacult.com to check out the different tiers, the different perks, depending on how loyal a culty you really are. Thank you so much for everything so far and on to the episode.

This week, we're going to be talking about the cult of Tony Robbins. Tony Robbins, the self-help blowhard. Sorry, I'm getting out of myself, but yeah, so we're talking about this self-help guru who is worth $600 million. Issa, do you want to give a little background on this guy? Yeah, for those of you who don't know who Anthony J. Robbins is. Oh my god, Anthony.

Thinking about him being named Anthony shifts my perspective of him. I know. It makes me wonder if he's like Latino in any capacity. I don't think so. I think he's white, white white. He's definitely spray tanned. Yeah, that's why I was like, is he a Latino?

Because he's like very tan. Yeah, he looks a little bit like a cross between James Marsden and Frankenstein's monster. Yeah. He's like 100 feet tall. And his teeth are definitely bleached white. Oh, 100%. Maybe even veneers.

Bo talks up the was. Yeah, but this isn't a judgmental podcast. No, no, no. Like his appearance are the least of his problems. Yeah, for sure. But yeah, anyway, for those of you who don't know who Tony Robbins is, he's a motivational speaker and he kind of started his career really early on.

I don't think he's actually ever had a real job. He has published two books, Unlimited Power and Awaken the Giant Within. Oh, what does that mean? No doubt Ghost Written. Sorry, that's me being a salty author. I hate when people make bajillions of dollars on books. They didn't write that speculation.

But basically he is just one of the most famous and successful richest motivational speakers in the US of all time. I think it's a little important to know a little bit about his early life because it says a lot about him. Like he's a motivational speaker to help people get their life on track. But he ran away from home when he was 17

and immediately met his mentor who was a motivational speaker or hypnosis guy who kind of took him under his wing when he was 17. And I think that's really important to know when you're looking at someone who's built an empire telling people how to live their life. Yeah, and it really is an empire. Like this guy is known primarily for the conferences

that he hosts, which are these massive events with thousands upon thousands of attendees. Tickets will run you between a few hundred dollars and a hundred thousand dollars. And throughout the day, you'll be exposed to meditation, personal development, breakout seminars. He'll like pluck people out of the audience and basically do the old school healer thing

where it's like, you're blind. I'm gonna help you see. Yeah, you've probably heard of the guy who had people walk across hot coals. That was Tony Robbins. That was Tony Robbins. So he for sure has a cult following. Tony Robbins first occurred to me

as a cult followed figure about five years ago when my mom's best friend went to one of his conferences and went viral because this video spread around of her standing up to him. He started talking trash about the Me Too movement. Women were painting themselves as victims and that was ultimately disempowering them. Our man who thinks women are victimizing themselves.

Shocker. Yeah, and so she very bravely stood up to him and was like, I think you're really misrepresenting the Me Too movement. I'm a survivor of sexual assault and a video of her standing up to him went viral. And this was my mom's best friend from childhood. So I was like, damn, who is this man?

Yeah, well, I had heard of him before and I thought, oh, he's just like a harmless blowhard. People are feeling down. You love that word. Oh, I do. Called him a blowhard like five times today. He is the perfect representation of a blowhard. What does that even mean, a blowhard?

It means like somebody who talks a lot of bullshit very loudly. Oh, okay. I just thought him in like asshole. Yeah, similar to asshole. Someone who's screaming out of their asshole. Oh, they're blowing hard out of their mouth. Yeah.

But not sexually, just obnoxiously. Exactly, exactly. So I thought before he's just kind of taken advantage of people and if they want to pay $10,000 to hear him spew a bunch of bullshit, that's on them. But then this experience that my mom's friend had alerted me to this idea that he's really spreading these super problematic ideas and these enormous promises

to vulnerable people in a way that's really predatory. Yeah. It's like when you take into account that it's not just people who are like seeking business help or like how to make more money when he does things like speak to victims of sexual assault or victims of abuse is when it starts to become questionable because those people are extremely vulnerable and potentially susceptible to influence.

This is such a red flag for me whether you're talking about a motivational speaker or an Instagram influencer. The people who are the most willing to speak with authority about literally every topic under the sun are most often the people who don't have any authority to speak about anything. Yeah. So we know that he runs these conferences

and people pay a lot of money to attend. Off the bat, it gives me Keith Reneary vibes. For sure. But what? Or mega church vibes. Or mega church vibes. Yeah, exactly. But when you showed me the amount that it would cost

to go to these seminars, when I saw $500 to $4,000, I was like, that's how much bad bunny tickets cost. I was like, is this any different than paying a lot of money to see your favorite artist? But then it's like, you're not just paying for better seats at a concert. You're paying for intimacy. You're paying for proximity to this godlike figure.

Yeah. And also the thing is when you go to a concert, you willingly know you're going to receive a live performance of a studio album. And you're like, wow, this is great. I'm paying a lot of money because there's only one person who sings this song. You know what you're getting.

You know exactly what you're getting. But when you sign up for these conferences, you're promised like, I don't know, fulfillment, transcendence, career success, these things that like, you can't track. Does anybody following up with his attendees and being like, so did you become that billionaire? All this goes without mentioning that Tony Robbins,

this person with more money than God, a literal Netflix documentary, and so many thousands of worshipers was the subject of a really intense Buzzfeed expose a couple years ago, which alleged that he abused his fans and staff, sexually and otherwise. And yet, even after that article came out, Tony Robbins has kind of remained untouchable.

He's really powerful. So we're going to be continuing to chat about Tony Robbins with a very special guest, someone who I've been wanting to talk to you for the longest time. She is also extremely interested in the wide spectrum of cult-like groups that exist in our culture. Yeah, so we're going to be talking with Kate Kennedy from Be There in Five podcast.

She is a pop culture commentator, author and host. She's just so incisive and eloquent. And she and I have an uncanny amount of things in common, just the way that we perceive and write about the world. Kate and I were DMing about her coming on the podcast and I was running by all these themes with her. You know, what do you want to talk about? The cult of this, the cult of that.

Tony Robbins was on the table and she was like, I want to talk about that fucking guy. Do you want to introduce yourself and what you do for our listeners who might not know? Yeah, absolutely. My name is Kate Kennedy. I live in Chicago. I am a kind of entrepreneur,

podcaster, author, hybrid that more recently has done my podcast as a full-time job, which covers what I like to call pop culture, but it kind of is more like millennial lifestyle topics I'm interested in that I talk about in the long form and deep dive. That's how we view ourselves too. Like we're not really a pop culture podcast.

We're a zeitgeist podcast. Yeah. People say drink every time I say zeitgeist because that's the perfect word. It's like sign of the times, things that we care about. And that encompasses so much more than kind of what you normally would consider a traditional pop culture.

I guess if we want to jump right into it, we were just wondering what first inspired your interest in cults as well as group that seemed like cults. And what is your personal interpretation of the word? So I grew up going to religious camps and youth groups not because of my family, but because of my friends. I was going to these Southern Baptist camps and these mega churches.

A lot of my formative years were spent absorbing the truth of other people and kind of narrow groups as the truth that I didn't really reconsider till my twenties. Like, is that right? Was that normal? Is that the right way to think about myself, my body, my agency, all these things?

You're so deferential to authority when you're younger because you just assume they know better. I think I had the lack of a better word luxury of getting to step back from that religious sector without losing my family because they weren't my connection. I was very enmeshed in a community. The vernacular, the belief system that I then got to kind of deconstruct in a very low risk way.

And then when I got older and started talking for a living, I just realized how much of that sort of model plays into everything we're doing. Following influencers, following self-help gurus, following even people like me, the communities are developed around shared things and it can be good or it can be really bad. There's like a spectrum, right?

I kind of am obsessed with the Byte model and I just think about really the biggest thing for me is the desire to control your access to outside information and or the perspective on dissenting opinions, I think is huge. Does it make you worship harder or do you have any ability to think for yourself? Yeah.

Yeah. For those who haven't heard of the Byte model, this was a list of criteria that the cult expert, Steven Hassan came up with. He was an ex-moony member of the unification church who got out. He's a psychologist. He deprograms a lot of former cult members. His school of thought is a little bit controversial. I mean, there are so many ways

that different scholars think about cults again because there is no hard and fast definition. There are just these different ways of interpreting it, but it's spooky how you developed an interest in cults and cultish groups because it's so similar to me. I grew up like atheist, reformed Jewish, but I would go to my friend's evangelical megachurch and was just enraptured by their fanaticism

and their language and then saw hints of that all over the culture, so freaky. Do you have kind of a predisposition to, I'm not like a cynic necessarily, but like I have trouble vangirling and obsessing over things and when people were raising their hands and praising the Lord and near speaking in tongues, I was like, what's wrong with me?

Like, why don't I feel this? Yeah, there's two different kinds of people. There's people who are ultra aware of what they're in and there's people who just don't want to think. It takes effort to, you know. To scrutinize. And I think it comes very naturally to us. I too, by nature and nurture, push back.

And I always joke that like, I'm looking for a cult to surrender to. It looks fun, but I just can't. No, you're not, Amanda. No, I'm good. You want to be the cult leader. I'm being facetious. Let's be real.

I think about this all the time to your point about being a cult leader. Whenever I do live shows, I'm like, I just want to clarify guys, like I'll skewer Rachel Hollis for getting up on a stage, charging people money for tickets and dancing and singing in unison.

But like pot kettle, they're just small fine lines of wielded power and worship and the reason you're there. And yeah, it does become weird when you're a person that talks about things like cults, knowing that your goal is to build a following, right? Like you need an audience for content. And it's kind of a mind fucker.

Yeah, no. And the second you start to defend why you're not a cult leader, you automatically seem like one. Yeah. I think also I don't have a following like you guys, but you know, if you anyone wants to follow me, like how happily lead.

But I think the key is when people are unwilling to even joke about it, that's like a red flag. In your opinion, what are some of the things that cult leaders and motivational speakers generally have in common? I think that holding abstract concepts that there are no concrete solutions to over people's head and pretending

like there are concrete solutions. Happiness, success, money, salvation are not provable or disprovable. Very much, you know, the messy human experience that they pretend to have gamified. And we'll tell you the most basic ways to improve your life, get more sleep, drink more water, exercise, stand up for yourself.

People see small incremental levels of change and get hooked on a product that allegedly can get them to this end point. They really can't because these people benefit from you never actually getting there, but you become dependent on it. My biggest cue is if you say how many figures you've made in the first sentence

of your boilerplate intro about yourself, that's my like, you know, all these coaches and people are like, learn how I went to, you know, made seven figures. But I think the bigger concept is promising you something and looking like they have it and acting like there's a formula for it and they're the only ones that know the equation.

Totally. Yeah, seven figures. Like not everyone can make seven figures. That's just a fact of life, unfortunately. But like they dangle it in front of everyday people. Like it's something that they can achieve. Yeah, it's like, look around you. Do you think every single last person in this room

is going to make seven figures? Because the promise is that they will, but that just doesn't check out. That's impossible. Right, that's a huge issue of why people like Rachel Hollis will frustrate me because it's that sort of curated authenticity and relatability.

Like I'm just like you and then you pramp vulnerable people who are struggling and then they're like, well, oh, I'm just like you and you did this so I can do this. Just for a little background, Rachel Hollis is one of these like self-improvement lifestyle influencer types who wrote a book called Girl Wash Your Face and encountered

some controversy when she said some insensitive things on the internet about how she became so successful. I'm a person who can't cook. I don't like when people say, I just eyeball it. I don't know how to eyeball it. I don't have skills. And I think that in a lifestyle self-help sense,

people will follow her formula and she's excluding, you know, having a Disney executive husband, how much help she has in the home. A lot of her audience are mothers and people genuinely struggling with financial stuff. That's a piece that frustrates me because the bottom line of any entrepreneurial venture and that sort of cultish or self-help guru

is like you need time or you need money or you need both. Yeah, these leaders generally like ignore or downplay their own privilege. They'll love bomb you with like hope and all of these inspirational quotes being like, you can do this, you can do that. But they fail to mention all of the things

that they already had in their life and the privileges that they came from. But what else do you think is culty about these self-help seminars, like the events in particular? Well, I think the large group trainings are another dead giveaway of artificially breaking people down to build them back up

and then make them think you need them. They need you. A hundred percent. What do you think specific to American culture that like people fall for that? The self-help thing. The kind of capitalistic dream of being your own boss and having full autonomy,

especially in the past 10, 20 years, this idea of working a nine to five being selling out or selling your soul or normal jobs just not being fulfilling. I think it's kind of American and millennial in that we're, we are straddled between this world raised by boomers where, you know, you're a company person, you're there for years,

you respect and don't leave. And then millennials kind of share on social media that they have these passion-filled jobs and you feel confused between which world you belong in because we kind of value both. And these entrepreneurs kind of overstate the simplicity and what it takes to succeed and make people feel ashamed that they've got just,

what is a normal job? And that is totally fine. You're touching on so many juicy points here. I mean, in my book, Coletish, in the multi-level marketing section, I talk about just like the evolution of the Protestant ethic in this culture. And, you know, in the mid-20th century,

it evolved to, I'm going to be a good company man and I'm going to send the hierarchy of my company. But then that generation gave birth to millennials who were told, you can be whatever you want to be. Now we see on social media an infinite number of possibilities for what a life can look like, everything from your job to your hair color to your beliefs. And that's crushing.

It's like choosers paradox. I just want a guru to tell me what to pick, you know? And that's like the Tony Robbins is and the Rachel Hollis is. It like eases the pressure of having to decide all these choices about who I am and what I think. Yeah. I also think that these people like Tony Robbins promise you this idea that if you work for yourself,

you'll be able to time-manage more. But the reality of owning a small business or the reality of working for yourself is you're actually working 12 hour days. Yeah, that's true too. I just think that like if you're selling somebody this big broad thing that they expect to get, they're going to become addicted to your product

because they're just never going to get it. With Tony Robbins, I think the problem is that he doesn't care about creating healthy or realistic goals for other people. He just cares about putting on a show and creating an echo chamber where everyone should want to pay him to be like him. Which brings me to our next question.

Kate, do you remember how you first learned who Tony Robbins was and what were some of the first red flags you noticed about him? I honestly didn't really think twice about him. Like he's always been around like the power thing he was doing in the 90s with its tapes and the infomercials. And I noticed like celebrities would go to his seminars a lot. And then I was listening to some wellness podcast

and they talked about like manifesting the like six grand to get to go to a Tony Robbins seminar. I was in the thick of business ownership at the time and I thought, oh my God, that's the biggest waste of money. Like if you have no money and you're having to manifest the money just to go to get... I didn't understand that line of thinking why you wouldn't invest that money in yourself

in your own business or in something scalable. Then I watched the Netflix documentary, I Am Not Your Guru, and saw how he spoke to victims of abuse and was horrified that this was considered motivational. And I was like, no, this is charisma exploiting legitimate conditions of mental health for the goose bumpy good feel of others,

but to the detriment of the traumatized. That was before I had a podcast and I just kind of sat with it. And then when I did a Rachel Hollis deep dive because she had her issue with the video in April, somebody wrote into the podcast and said that they stayed after hours at a Rachel Hollis seminar.

And she got up and said, I'm gonna tell you the secret to everything I'm doing. And now that it's just us, I own you. She goes into this huge speech about how like, anything I sell, you'll buy. Anything I do, you'll say. And it was the creepiest thing I ever heard. And I was like, surely that's not right.

That wouldn't happen. The more I looked into it, this is kind of part of like the Tony Robbins canon of his hyper masculine kind of chest beating a reverence of saying he owns people. When I dove into what Rachel's been doing, I noticed on her blog, she called him at one point, her idol.

She saved all of her money to go to his seminars and six months to a year later, what did she do? Start having the rise conferences. People would write in saying, they went to Rachel Hollis's conference to learn about how to be better business. She would then explain how she sold to them, how she artificially created tiers of tickets.

So people would think they were getting more value, but weren't. But then she's talking to the people who paid for that. The inception of the product being the focal point and the thing that's being sold to the subject that bought that is so crazy to me. I realized her business model was kind of based off of Tony Robbins, whose charisma is there,

but entangled with his exploitation of legitimate mental health problems he's not qualified to solve. Then I found the Buzzfeed expose. And so it was kind of me tying all these things together and then realizing he was mentored by a man that was both the head of an MLM and an evangelical preacher.

Tony Robbins bridges religion, MLM, and he also practices NLP, which as we know is Keith Ranieri's bread and butter. NLP really quickly, by the way, stands for neurolinguistic programming, which is the sort of debated, if not discredited self-improvement technique. I think Tony Robbins interests me because like,

if you want to talk in blanket terms about like a cancel culture or whatever, like there is a lot out there about him and it is not good. But like he's worth over 600 million dollars, has planes, has an island, he sells out his seminars for six grand a pop. People go to him for being this business mastermind,

but he preys on people that probably need traditional psychotherapy or elements of mental health counseling. And people don't even realize the danger of that. And he's like bodyguards, former bodyguards have spoken out where people have like mental breakdowns. And it's like a huge problem.

And I just, I think he's an interesting case that gets away with a lot. Yeah, you mentioned cancel culture and there is so much about him out there that should get him canceled. But unfortunately, he's everything that America idolizes. He's this good looking white guy with like an amazing sounding voice.

And so we don't want to cancel him because that's what we idolize, right? Yeah, like Rachel Hollis, by contrast, is this sort of like white lady Karen whose roots of authority in our culture don't go as deep. So it would take a lot more for us to want to cancel fucking like self-help daddy Tony Robbins. Like in the end, we give people the power

we think they deserve. Yeah, and I think too, when people have their own like stories of hardship, he talks a lot about like his mom and his, you know, cycle of abuse, stuff that's deeply sad and tragic and relatable and awful. When those stories are kind of used as a means for why you do what you do,

it becomes hard to discredit it because it theoretically comes from a good place. I just think that people get those like goose bumpy church type excitement vibes. And that's what people are chasing and they're fleeting. And then you just go back to feel that again. Totally. It's like no matter how much he tries to convince himself

that he's in the business of helping people, he's really not because if he did, then people wouldn't need to keep going back. If you were really in the business of helping people, he would be more like hinge the dating app whose tagline is made to be deleted. Do you think he's still having people walk across coals? Remember when that was all the rage?

Oh my gosh. Yes, we were talking about that earlier. That was a big part of his shtick was almost shocking the system, making them do the impossible and kind of the mental high you feel after you do something you think you can't do, even though if you walk across hot coals fast,

it's like, I don't think it's that big of a deal. I haven't tried it. Yeah, it's like we all do it when we go to the beach and the sand is hot. It's like whatever. But why do you think Tony Robbins specifically has gained such a bigger following than other motivational speakers?

This is not a good or proven theory, but you know how there was that period in the 2000s where the cool thing was to be like Simon Cowell or the weakest link lady or Gordon Ramsay? It's almost as like angry, tell it like it is tough love vibe that is positioned as refreshing. Yeah, like Donald Trump being positioned as honest when he was really just completely filterless.

And toxic and evil. Yes. Oh, the apprentice. I think Tony Robbins is a white man with an irreverent approach and a tough love mentality that a lot of people resistant to taking their mental health seriously like because it's kind of a loophole and tells people to like buck up and figure it out and get past trauma.

And it defies any and all actual processing that we know to be effective. Any problematic thing, it benefits the most privileged echelon of that thing and can be detrimental to the smaller margin. So for people that are just struggling with the general life seeking and wanting to be able to weather some difficulties of life

and love and loss and grief like these things, I'm sure are very moving. But in the context of him calling you out in a crowd and prompting you and inviting you to address the deepest of traumas and excavate it in public in front of a group and you do the performance of changing somebody's life with no follow up. It's almost like reading chicken soup for the teenage soul.

Like I feel better being there, even though nothing meaningful is actually happening. Yes, we should mention that Tony Robbins will do this thing where he'll make someone in his big congregation make a difficult phone call in front of everyone. Like he'll try to make someone make peace with their estranged father or break up with their abusive husband.

And like you said, there's no follow up. So everyone's just really running on the emotional high of the group and like crying and hugging the person. But whose life actually ends up better at the end of it all? Tony's. Yeah, that would be such a funny sketch or like reality TV show following the people who just went to one of Tony's conferences

who like have to deal with the consequences of their actions. Like getting the call back from their mom after they just broke everything off. But on another note, it is really Nixxiom vibes. The way that he has people, especially women, open up in a super vulnerable way, like on stage publicly in front of everyone, so that he ends up looking like the hero.

Well, both Tony Robbins and Keith Runieri had horrible relationships with their mothers and both are major, major misogynists, allegedly. Allegedly, our favorite word here at this podcast. I mean, the way he berates females like openly in his documentary, look up any YouTube video, look up the BuzzFeed expose, it's very much like you're choosing to be a victim.

You're choosing to not forgive him. It's very male favoring to your point about what's the appeal. It might not be easy for a lot of men to be in touch with their feelings and their shortcomings and how to address mental health issues. And I think some macho dude up there being like, toughen up, walk across coals, be a leader, is like, yeah, cool, six grand, I'm cured.

It's just not that simple. But for the sector of the population going that their problems aren't that complex, that'll probably do something for them. Yeah, like I don't think walking across coals is gonna solve your college debt crisis. What do you think is the coltiest part of Tony Robbins in both good ways and bad ways?

In good ways, bottom line, anytime people are suffering and come together and are able to collectively heal, feel better, establish community, make friendships. As an adult, community is hard. And I think that is the biggest thing that a lot of these things provide. I have a voicemail for my podcast.

It's countless people calling every week asking the same question. How do I make friends as an adult? We all seek this life we were promised only to realize it's a lot messier and more chaotic and out of our control, then we perhaps thought and feel unique in that suffering until we meet people who feel the same way.

And if there are remedies to control that, like all the better, and I think the community part, making people feel better for simple issues is great. But on the flip side, you know, forced extreme vulnerability, if you have mishandled abuse recovery, the repercussions of that are no joke. Well, now, if you don't mind,

we're gonna play a little game. It's called Coltty Quotes. And it's basically a game of who said that. So we're gonna read you a list of quotes. And for each one, you're gonna have to guess whether it is a Tony Robbins quote or something that was said by a cult leader. The first quote is,

expectations always lead to frustrations. Expectations are the seeds, and frustration is the crop that sooner or later you will have to reap. I'm gonna say cult leader, because I don't know if I would, you know, say Tony Robbins would be ripe for a farming metaphor. Yeah, you're correct.

Yeah, no, that is a quote from Rajneesh, aka Osho, the wild, wild country guy. Oh, yes, yes. You are correct. All right, next quote. Knowing what to do is useless without the emotional strength to do what you know. That's like such a non-sentence.

That doesn't make sense. Like, what does that even mean? Yeah. Nothing. It's like... He was trying to do like a JFK thing, like ask not what your country can do for you, but it just, it flunked. It doesn't make sense. Yeah, that's a Tony Robbins.

No, that's a Keith Ranieri. That was Keith Ranieri who said that. Watching Keith Ranieri videos is like, am I stupid or does he make no sense? Yeah, no. He reminds me of like that nerd in middle school who raised his hand and like, you could tell he just wanted attention

and would go in circles and circles and circles. Quote number three, Tony Robbins, or a cult leader, what we can or cannot do, what we consider possible or impossible is rarely a function of our true capability. It is more likely a function of our beliefs about who we are. Is that Tony Robbins? He's very big into limiting beliefs.

You are correct. It was Tony Robbins. Limiting beliefs is wild. That is one of the biggest red flags if you use the term limiting beliefs. What a great way to get people to believe what you're saying to say that it's a limitation that they can't believe it.

Dude, Keith Ranieri was into that too, and I talk about this in my book, how that's a thought terminating cliche. It's like a stock expression that's aimed at shutting down further thought or questioning. All right, last quote. Is this Tony Robbins or a cult leader? The quote is, be the alter, not the alternative.

Ooh, I mean, I hope it's a cult leader because that's, I mean, it's a lover of wordplay. Catchy as hell. You are correct. Who is it? That is from Yogi Bajan, who is the Kundalini Yoga happy, healthy, holy organization.

He's dead, but that later. Long gone. R.I.P. Be the alter, not the alter. It's clever because you took a root word and played on it, but like, what? I just have to say, I've never jinxed the phrase root word with anyone until just now,

and that's kind of beautiful. I love a root word. You know, SAT prep stays with you. It really does. Does it? Oh. When you learn Latin root words, it makes you able to freely figure out

the definition of most things. Yeah, that's true. I should have taken Latin, but I took French. You're literally fully bilingual, though. Yeah, I speak fluent Spanish, so I'm Latina. I don't need to take Latin. All right, this has been a true delight. If folks want to follow you and engage with you,

where can they do that? Yes, my podcast where I talk to myself for hours on end, which is why I take such liberty when I get to talk to other interesting people. Thank you for having me on. It's Be There in Five. My Instagram is at Be There in Five. My book is called Twinkle, Twinkle, Social Media Star.

You guys are awesome. I love your work, Amanda. I think it's so important. People are so interested in this, especially right now. There's nothing more important than giving people a more critical eye to the things that influence us as we've been in dire circumstances in this country for several years now.

Wow, thank you. Well, I love just hearing you pontificate, and I really appreciate you coming on our pod. Yeah, thank you so much for coming on. It was a pleasure meeting you. Of course, thank you. Thank you. Bye.

So Issa, out of the three cult categories, Live Your Life, Watch Your Back, and Get the Fuck Out. What do we think about Tony Robbins? We always kind of start in the middle. It's like sexuality. You know, it's like everyone's bisexual. Like this is life. But that's the whole point of this podcast.

This is a gray area podcast. Yeah. All across the board. I mean, that's the big lesson in life. Nothing is a binary. Exactly. So when we start with a subject, I usually am right there in the middle.

But after the conversation we had, and after we talked with Kate, considering the BuzzFeed expose about sexual assault allegations, I think that's when it starts getting in the get the fuck out level that are now ultimately victims. Yeah. When we first started this podcast, we had a much more complicated taxonomy system

to determine whether or not something was a Live Your Life, Watch Your Back, or Get the Fuck Out. We had this list of criteria that included us versus them dichotomy and justify the means philosophy, supernatural beliefs, charismatic leaders. We had all these different things. And we've always, this whole entire time, kept that stuff in the back of our mind,

even though we don't state it explicitly. And when I think of that list of criteria, he really does check off almost every single box. The level of exploitation here, emotionally, psychologically, and sexually puts it for me in the get the fuck out category for sure. Yeah. I know that some people do come away from a Tony Robbins concert.

I keep going at a fucking concert. Because it is. That probably is what it's called in the tickets. It's probably called a performance. Yeah. People come away feeling empowered. Adrenaline is coursing through their veins. And I think some people do have a net positive experience

with Tony Robbins. But some people had a net positive experience in the extremely destructive cult that my dad was in when he was a teenager. So that doesn't mean that just because you had a good experience with Tony Robbins, that it's not a get the fuck out. It's like you could have had good sex with an abuser, but that doesn't make him not an abuser.

Yeah, exactly. And the problem is he's casted such a large net. I mean, even if one person is negatively affected, that's horrible. But there are large groups of people being negatively affected, probably thousands and thousands that have been. Oh, for sure. I mean, the only thing on our unspoken list of criteria

that I think he doesn't check off is the exit costs aren't super high. You can leave the cult of Tony Robbins. I think that's where the gray area enters, right? Like, yeah, if you go to one thing, you can leave, you can walk out the front door. But once there's like mental manipulation involved, like. You want to go back.

Yeah, you kind of like lose your sense of self. Like he is in the business of getting in your fucking brain. Yeah. And that is a get the fuck out level cult. And he, he owns an island, which as we all know, historically speaking, any man who owns an island and holds conferences. Red flags.

It's like reddest of flags. Well, that's our show. Thanks for listening. We'll be back with a new cult next season. But in the meantime, stay culty. But not too culty. Sounds like a cult was created, produced, and edited by Amanda Montell and Issa Medina.

Our theme music is by Casey Cole. And if you liked this episode, feel free to give us a rating and review on Apple podcasts.