Dr. John Hunter Explains how Self-help Events are “Manufacturing Mania”

[00:00:00] At Seek Safely, it's our mission to empower seekers to have a safe and meaningful self-improvement journey. Why do we care? Seeking to be your best self is an amazing, beautiful human impulse that has led us to create art, invent technology, tell amazing stories, and reach the moon.

[00:00:19] But we saw the dark side of self-help in 2009, when a recklessly run self-improvement retreat led to the death of three people, including my sister, Kirby Brown. We want people to seek, to dream their big dreams and chase their beautiful goals, but we want to make sure they're safe along the way. This podcast is about education and empowerment and getting real about the promises and problems of self-help.

[00:00:46] We talk with people who understand and care about the self-help industry and everyone it touches. I'm Jean Brown. I'm Dr. Glenn Patrick Doyle. And this is the Seek Safely Podcast. Hello, and welcome to the Seek Safely Podcast. I am Jean Brown, and I'm here with my co-host, Dr. Glenn Doyle. Hello, Dr. Doyle.

[00:01:14] Hello, Jean Brown. Jean like the pants, brown like the color. That is right. That's you. And we're very excited that we have a special guest with us. We're talking with Dr. John Hunter today, who is the author of Manufacturing Mania, The Dopamine Hypothesis of Religious Experience. John, I'm just going to let you go ahead and introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into this research. Yes. Hi, both of you.

[00:01:43] Great to meet you. And please just interrupt me. I tend to kind of go on for a long time if you don't stop me and ask questions. Jean is very used to that on this podcast. She deals with me. So, she knows how to do this. I can do that. Great. Yeah.

[00:01:58] So, my sort of interest in the topic of large group awareness training, which I suppose for people that aren't familiar with my work, just hearing that I've kind of written a book on something called the dopaminergic defense or the dopamine hypothesis doesn't really speak to the fact that my research is really focused on large group awareness training. So, I became interested in this topic because in 2010, I took part in a large group awareness training through work.

[00:02:27] So, as you, I'm sure, are aware, Margaret Singer's chapter in Cults and Our Myths is called Intruding into the Workplace. And that's exactly how I ended up taking part. We had a chairman and CEO who was, let's just say, passionate about these seminars and asked that every new head office employee took part and went to this seminar.

[00:02:52] It started on a Thursday after work at 6 in the evening and it finished at 2 that morning and then we were given homework to do on top of that. Friday, we went to work, sort of normal working hours, then started the seminar again at 6 in the evening, went till 2 in the morning, homework again. Saturday started 9 in the morning, finished at midnight, homework again. And then Sunday, I think it started at 10 in the morning and finished at about 6 or 7.

[00:03:22] So, very, very long hours. Content. By design. And it was unbelievably psychologically stressful and, I mean, to call it abusive wouldn't be an overstatement. It was psychologically abusive.

[00:03:39] I was sitting there and I was thinking, you know, every exercise pretty much seems to be designed in some way to generate guilt, shame, inadequacy, uncertainty, fear, that sort of thing. And then often the exercises were punctuated with something quite relaxing. So, it was like very high stress and then kind of bring you back down, very high stress, bring you back down.

[00:04:03] So, that was, you know, three days of that followed by, well, then as well as sleep disruption. And I had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2003, seven years prior. And so, I had a very good understanding of the triggers of the elevated sides of bipolar disorder, which are known as hypomania and mania.

[00:04:27] And I knew that two of the major triggers were psychological stress and sleep disruption. These were things that I was really trying to manage in my life as well as possible. So, I was sitting in the seminar and I was just thinking, this is, you know, the worst. This is the worst situation that I could be in. If I could design an environment to generate a hypermanic or manic state, this is what it would look like. So, that's what I was thinking while I was going through it.

[00:04:55] And I also knew that a trigger for a manic episode is goal attainment. So, it's often a case that you strive for a goal, you're under a lot of stress, and then you suddenly reach that goal. And that's something that can lead to manic episodes. So, on the final day, the Sunday, the stress was, you know, abruptly removed. And it was replaced with the sense of you've graduated, you're amazing, you're wonderful, you're one of us.

[00:05:21] So, from basically being treated like, I mean, we were explicitly told you're a bunch of arseholes. You know, it wasn't implied. It was, you know, we were told in very clear terms. And then suddenly the trainer's like, you're great, you're amazing. And, you know, he's hugging everyone and he's dancing and this sort of thing. And you open up your eyes at the end and, you know, after one of these meditation type of things.

[00:05:45] And the person that sort of recruited you is standing in front of you with a rose and there's music playing. And, I mean, it's just the clearest case of goal attainment that you can imagine. So, as somebody who understands these triggers for these elevated states, I was sitting there and I was going, wow, this is really weird. That it's all so intensely packed into this environment. So, that was the first part.

[00:06:14] So, those were the conditions of the seminar. But then we'd also been promised something called a breakthrough or transformation as a result of participating. And our chairman had spoken to us before. And obviously, they don't tell you what's going to happen in the seminar. They're very careful to say things like, you know, there are things that you know that you know. There are things that you know that you don't know. But then there's also things that you don't know that you don't know.

[00:06:42] And that's what the seminar is about. So, it's all very elusive and sounds like it's going to be this incredible thing. But he had said things like, on the Sunday, you'll have the greatest day of your life. And as somebody who'd been manic before, I thought, well, good luck trying to beat that because that's about as good as you can kind of feel. So, I was kind of interested by that. And also, before we'd taken part, I'd try to speak to people around the office and kind of find out what was going on.

[00:07:11] I wasn't actually nervous about it because I'd never heard of an LGAT before. And, I mean, you would just never imagine that an organization would put you through this, like, bizarre mindfuck, basically. So, the people that I'd spoken to had kind of – they'd been quite secretive. A lot of people were very positive about it. But, I mean, I think that there's quite a misleading sample at organizations because they tend to just fire anyone who doesn't buy into it.

[00:07:39] So, most of the people kind of said, yeah, you just have to wait and see. It's going to be incredible, that sort of thing. But there were a couple of people who said to me, you know, strangely, a number of people have been divorced just sort of immediately after participating. And I thought, that's quite interesting. That's a very impulsive thing to do. So, that was kind of in my head as well. So, after the seminar, you know, well, on the Sunday, you know, everyone was dancing and singing and, you know, that sort of thing.

[00:08:08] But when I looked around the room, there were only 24 people in our group. So, it wasn't, you know, as big as a, you know, as a landmark or Est in the past or Lifespring or whatever. But I would say 23 people that were there were euphoric and just, you know, they looked like they were high. And from observing them afterwards, I would say euphoria was very clear.

[00:08:38] I would say, like, increased levels of confidence were palpable. You could see it very easily. Energy, motivation. People were saying to me, you know, I've only slept a couple of hours and, you know, I feel completely refreshed. Then I thought about the impulsive behavior of certain people. And I thought, you know, this looks identical to hypomania. And so, I thought, okay, well, we've got all the triggers for these elevated states and we've got now these symptoms.

[00:09:07] And then I started looking into it a bit more deeply. So, I – and again, before knowing what an LGAT was and before even looking into it, I said to the chairman, I said, listen, I think – I mean, I basically just said to him, I think that this is brainwashing. Before I really had any sense of what brainwashing was, I said, this just seems to be manipulative.

[00:09:30] And I said, I think that people with low stress tolerances are going to get damaged by this and I don't want to have anything to do with it. And, you know, I had a meeting with him and his HR manager. And I think initially he thought he'd be able to convince me that these were brilliant things and that didn't happen. So, he basically said to me, if you aren't going to agree, you need to leave the organization. So, then I resigned.

[00:09:56] And after that, I was, I think, obsessed is a fair way of describing it because I was like, this is very interesting that you can take healthy, normal people. And get them to experience this symptoms of this disorder that I've been living with. So, I found it very interesting. And I was also very – I was angry about the fact that this was happening to people. I mean, I really was. And so, I started looking into it more. And I mean, I just started typing in things into Google.

[00:10:25] And eventually, I found my way to Rick Ross' website, which is culteducation.com. Now, it used to be rickross.com. Apparently, that's a hip-hop artist in the US. So, he's bought that domain from him now. And there was a section of the website called Large Group Awareness Training. And it had, I think, at the time, like 17,000 posts by people who had been through these sorts of seminars.

[00:10:53] So, I just read through all of them. I just read it. And the more that I read, the more that I saw you've got these triggers for hypomania and mania in these seminars. And people were describing symptoms. But they were also – I mean, we had a relatively small sample of 24 people. So, I didn't see psychosis in our seminar. And I didn't follow up on people to see if it was like full-blown mania. But when you start reading these other descriptions, you hear stories of psychosis.

[00:11:23] And then you start reading journal articles that psychosis has been reported since the early 1970s. And then you hear people divorcing husbands and wives, giving a lot of money away, which is also a very impulsive, manic thing to do. You hear people going to work and telling their boss, like, you know, just saying things that they would never normally say. So, their filters are completely removed.

[00:11:49] And again, if you understand bipolar disorder, if you understand mania, if you've been manic before and you've done these things, you kind of – you recognize them immediately. And so, from there, I tried to go and speak to professors at the local university. I tried to speak to mental health professionals. I mean, at the time, I had a business degree. So, I had a degree in finance. I didn't have any formal education in psychology.

[00:12:20] And I would go and I'd speak to them and I'd say, well, you know, this is what's going on. People are being screamed at and shouted at and having visualizations of when they were children and, you know, reimagining molestation and this sort of thing and just crying and that sort of thing for days. And then, after that, they feel the best they've ever felt before, which is a very counterintuitive thing to try to explain to somebody. So, it's not very believable.

[00:12:44] And then, when I tried to explain my theory about what was going on – because basically, the theory that I published in my PhD and in my book is the theory that I had before I started studying psychology. I mean, it's not a complicated idea, but when I said to them, this is what I think is going on, I had to explain that my insight came from having bipolar disorder. And that immediately just acts as a heuristic to kill your credibility.

[00:13:10] So, I would say, well, I've experienced this and I have bipolar disorder and so I can recognize these things. And they, you know, their immediate response seemed to be like, well, you're seeing signs where there aren't, where there's not really anything going on. So, for a long time, I was just sort of ignored. And then, in 2013, I went back to university and I started studying psychology and went straight from, you know, a kind of undergrad through to PhD.

[00:13:40] And my master's and my PhD both looked at large group awareness training. It's very interesting. Like, so, you know, I've gotten into all of this because my sister had gone to a seminar and she died there along with two other people. And, you know, in trying to understand what happened to her, one of my first stops along my journey was also Rick Ross. And, yeah, like I went, I dove through all of the information on his site.

[00:14:08] I very quickly found LGATS as well and, you know, kind of started my journey to understanding what happens to people in these situations. And it's very interesting because I find, like, having gone to the ICSA conference and so many of the people who are looking at these issues within the culty world. But then for, you know, for LGATS and for our organization, it's more about the self-help industry.

[00:14:36] Everyone who's talking about these things are often people who have a personal experience because otherwise people outside of it just, it's like you said it, it sounds very unbelievable. It seems very hard for people to understand. And then, yeah, I think there's a lot of dismissiveness, you know, in your case when you explained your background. And, you know, my family, we've always run into this issue of just being, like, upset and emotional because our family member died.

[00:15:05] And we're like, no, no, there's a lot more there that we're talking about. It's not just about this one thing. So, yeah, it's interesting. You know, John, that dismissal of lived experience is something that just has always frustrated me so much. So, I'm an abuse survivor and an addict in recovery, and I kind of use that as the basis of my approach to working with trauma and working with addiction.

[00:15:30] And so often, trauma survivors especially get that, get a version of what you described kind of thrown at us. Like, well, because you went through this, you're seeing it everywhere. Yeah. And it's really frustrating because as, like, as I was listening to your story, and by the way, we've got to make time to talk about Chuck Palahniuk and Fight Club before the end of this interview because I love that article on your site.

[00:15:53] But anyway, as I was listening to that part of your story, I'm like, you know, here is such a great example of the value of lived experience because you probably would not have connected those dots without your experience of learning about your, how to manage your bipolar and the triggers and stuff. Well, of course, and I think that the thing is as well is that when you've experienced bipolar disorder or whatever disorder it is or whatever experience it is, it's different to what you read in a textbook.

[00:16:21] So, you know, you read the DSM and you've got like, you know, an elevated, expansive or irritable mood that lasts for at least two weeks and then, you know, three out of the following seven symptoms. And if you read those symptoms, they're very dry, they're very superficial and they're capturing something that could be explained in another way. So, you know, it's only when you intrinsically understand what they are that you can hear another description of them and recognize them to be those symptoms.

[00:16:51] So, I think that's the one thing.

[00:17:21] These processes. And the one thing with LGATs that you can do is there have been a couple of studies on them, well, particularly earlier on that look at the demographics. And so, what I speak about is illusory superiority. So, this idea that we often rate ourselves more competent in areas that are subjective. So, for example, things like sense of humor, we all kind of think that we've got a great sense of humor because it's not an objective thing that can be measured.

[00:17:50] Things like intuition. Things like intuition. People often think, well, I've got great intuition because, again, driving ability, which is relatively objective. You know, everyone rates themselves as above average. Everyone thinks they're a great driver. And so, there's also like a psychological incentive to think of yourself as being invulnerable to these processes. It doesn't feel good to us to think, well, I might also have bought into, you know, these things.

[00:18:19] So, that process is making it very unlikely that people are going to accept that it could have happened to them. But if you look at the demographics of LGAT participants, it's like, well, in four different studies, I think, it says, you know, about 70% of participants have got a university degree. Another 20% have got a postgraduate or professional qualification. Only between 5% and 10% haven't attended university.

[00:18:47] And I mean, this is not a perfect indicator of the ability to think critically. But it does suggest that this is not a particularly gullible group of people. And I think there aren't any other cult-like groups that have that sort of demographic information. So, it's very easy for people to assume, well, you know, they were looking for something and that's the reason and they were particularly vulnerable.

[00:19:13] And I think that there is some truth to that sometimes because they often will recruit when people are in states of transition. Like, necessarily LGATs, although some do, they'll often go to university campuses and, you know, when people move cities and that sort of thing. But LGATs, the nature of them is that it's often through corporate. So, it's just everyone that works at an organization or it's a family member or friend who invites you to participate.

[00:19:40] So, just by the nature of their recruitment, it's unlikely that they're going to be able to just target people but have got this vulnerability to buying into something. And I mean, I'm sure you've spoken with a number of people on this topic. A lot of people that support LGATs are very accomplished. You know, they're business owners. They're very successful. And they certainly aren't pushovers.

[00:20:08] And I think that the key process that occurs in LGATs, again, and I cover it in my PhD and book, is not an inability to think critically. So, that's not what's going on. Basically, what they're doing is they're shutting down or minimizing your ability to think critically, convincing you to trust your intuition and then manipulating the levers that impact your intuition. So, that's really what's going on.

[00:20:33] So, you get a lot of people that are quite capable of thinking critically but they're convinced that critical thinking is not going to lead them to this transformation. And they're so tired and exhausted from the processes that their ability to think critically is pushed down a lot. They're also told that they should be trusting experience or natural knowing or, you know, come from your heart, not from your head. Like, these sorts of things are drummed into people for three, four, five days.

[00:21:01] And so, again, it's not an ability to think critically. It's the motivation to think critically that's suppressed. And then they'll tell you to trust things like your gut and then they manipulate this experience that feels really good, which is your gut. And you're more likely to associate that positive feeling with, you know, the obligations and ideas that they've been spouting for the previous couple of days. Oh, absolutely.

[00:21:31] Well, and it really leverages the relief from pressure or pain that you described, kind of that pressure release. It actually, it mimics, I thought about this a lot. It mimics a process that we see in trauma work that we call pendulation between sympathetic nervous system activation and parasympathetic.

[00:21:52] Like the kind of like the idea of successful trauma treatment is to get your, you're stuck in one or the other, but to be able to go from one to the other, right? But it's manipulating that. Like instead of teaching you to kind of take charge of that process for yourself, it's engineering that from the outside. So on the one hand, it mimics this process that, yeah, actually feels really good and actually feels better than probably what you came in with.

[00:22:17] But it's a complete hijacking of what would otherwise be kind of a normal, healthy process. We see this a lot now, Gads, right? Exactly. I mean, I think that's exactly it, is that there's a grain of truth in so much of what's being told. I mean, the key idea that's put forward is this idea of personal responsibility and accountability, which again is a good thing, you know? Take responsibility for your life. That's a wonderful thing to do.

[00:22:43] But they just stretch it to such an extreme that it becomes a tool of abuse. I mean, they've also got, they've got processes that seem to me to be taken directly from cognitive therapy.

[00:22:57] So Albert Ellis's REBT, rational and motor behavior therapy, you know, which was based on, you know, the stoic philosopher Epictetus who said we were affected not so much by events, but by our interpretation of the events. And I mean, again, there's a lot of power that you can take from that if it's properly applied.

[00:23:19] But they take that to such an extreme where they're saying to people, you know, the reason you're suffering from your rape is because of your interpretation of it. And they'll do that exercise in 20 minutes with somebody that they've never engaged with before. And it's in front of 100, 200 people. And it's done in a deliberately jarring way. If you look at some of the organizations, I mean, REBT, they basically said A, B, and C.

[00:23:47] There's an activating event, and then there's the belief about the event, and then the consequence. And it's not the event that caused the consequence. It's your belief about the event. That's a thing straight from, you know, Albert Ellis's playbook. And then in LGATs, well, in one LGAT in particular, they say there's a story. Sorry, there's an event. So same activating, there's an event. Then there's a story about the event, and then there's a consequence.

[00:24:16] So they've removed belief and replaced it with story, which is the same thing. And so they're using this cognitive therapy technique, but they just, they aren't professionals. So they don't know how to apply it safely. They don't have an incentive to apply it particularly safely because their transformations come, as far as I'm concerned, from causing psychological stress.

[00:24:42] So they're using this tool, but what they're wanting to get out of it is to generate the stress. And there are a number of elements like that where they're taking something that's useful in one context and just bastardizing it and applying it in a way that's not useful. Oh, absolutely. When I tell you that in the trauma world, cognitive therapy, and this matters because cognitive therapy

[00:25:09] is one of the most widely used types of therapy because it lends itself really well to research and empirical support and this kind of stuff. But in the trauma world, cognitive therapy is such this double-edged thing because is it true that experiencing trauma can distort our beliefs about ourselves and the world? And sure, and is it helpful to kind of look at those beliefs and reality test them and whatever.

[00:25:35] But it's real easy for that to slip into gaslighting, which is kind of what happens in LGATs, right? Because it goes from, well, maybe your experience has distorted your beliefs and maybe we can reality test that it goes from that to, are you sure this was a horrible thing or are you just crazy? Like, are you just, are you sure it's not just you're making up a story about this and you're telling yourself a story about this? It gets real gaslighted you real quick. Yeah.

[00:26:04] But in an LGAT, that's a feature, not a glitch. Exactly. And I mean, when you read the examples, it's just horrifying as an outsider to kind of read example after example of the sorts of things that a trainer will say to somebody, you need to take responsibility for this thing that happened. And it's a lack of, I mean, it's a lack of skill, but I think also the way that these seminars,

[00:26:30] you know, came about is through evolution rather than through intelligent design. So I don't think that they were carefully thinking about this. They just realized that the more suffering there is, the greater the results at the end. Yeah. Yeah. Again, when I was kind of doing my searching and learning after my sister's death, I had read Naomi Klein's book, The Shock Doctrine, and I have a political science background.

[00:26:57] And in that book, she talks about the CIA, you know, interrogation, like the history of the research into interrogation methods. And it's also all very close to torture and then to elicit, you know, some sort of confession from people, whether or not the information that they're getting is true or accurate or not. The whole point is to get a confession from people and get information from people, but

[00:27:25] putting them through this torture with, you know, sleep deprivation and all the other types of deprivation, social deprivation and sensory deprivation. It leads to this kind of moment of a kind of a breakdown rather than a breakthrough, but it feels kind of similar to this process. And I think what you're saying is so right, that there's nothing, like it's not this deliberate

[00:27:54] thing that I don't think these people have studied the psychology behind what they're doing. It's just this trial and error and evolution. I think some of them have, but go ahead. Yeah, maybe some have. But there seems to be this general playbook that a lot of these organizations and groups and leaders are all using that they're like, okay, they might not know exactly why it works, but they know that it does. And of course, what they have sold to people is transformation and they have to make that happen in four or five days.

[00:28:25] So it's very intense. And then they deliver. Well, I think when you look at the history of the organizations, when you look at, I don't know if you know about mind dynamics and leadership dynamics as precursors and synonym. Like leadership dynamics, for example. So you had like Earhart and Hanley and Thomas Wilhite, who was Psy Seminars, and they were

[00:28:54] most of them or all of them went through the leadership dynamics training through William Penn Patrick's organization. And if you read about that, it was just overtly abusive. People are being screamed at and shouted at and locked in coffins and hung on crosses and forced to eat garbage and feces and made to like fillet a fake penis with a woman from the woman's version. So, I mean, it was just like overt, horrendous kind of abuse.

[00:29:24] And then at the end, everyone felt, you know, when Pressman describes it, like in giddy and jovial spirits. So that's kind of where, and they obviously didn't know why it was working. They just sort of realized, oh, you put people through this terrible thing and they feel amazing afterwards. I mean, I don't know if, have you read Dopamine Nation? I have not read it yet, but it's on my list. I mean, so it's pretty interesting. So Anna Lemke is a professor at Stanford.

[00:29:52] Her focus is addiction and she, and obviously Dopamine plays a big role in addiction, that feeling of euphoria, confidence, energy, motivation that you get from drugs like cocaine. But she speaks about some of her patients. And for one person, you know, managed to stop taking the particular substance he was taking, but then he needed something to fill the gap because he was using the substance to manage, you know, all of these negative feelings that he's got.

[00:30:21] And that kind of gives us a hint of what Dopamine can do. It can help us to feel like we're coping with certain things. And I'll speak about my hypothesis maybe after this. But what he did, because he stopped taking the medication, is he, after playing a tennis match or something, I think his trainer said to him, you know, if you want to stop sweating quickly, take a cold shower. So he took a cold shower and he felt that he felt really good afterwards. And then he decided to take a colder shower and then a colder shower and a longer colder shower.

[00:30:50] Then he started having ice baths and then colder and colder ice baths. And he felt that he basically said it felt like I was high afterwards. It felt like a drug. And you can see in a very simple example there that this person has worked out a process for himself to generate this elevated state by putting himself through pain and then removing that pain. And that's just, to me, on a shorter timescale and a simpler way how LGATs have evolved.

[00:31:17] So, you know, this person didn't have a background in neuroscience. He didn't understand what was going on. He probably didn't know what Dopamine was. But he knew that if he did this certain thing and he made it more intense, then the elevation and mood afterwards would be more extreme. And I think that's very much how LGATs have evolved. So, they've evolved to generate these highs at the end. And then more recently, they've evolved to, I would say, be more immune to public criticism.

[00:31:47] So, the way that they're generating the highs, it's not going to be like in leadership dynamics by getting people to eat garbage and locking people in coffins because it sounds too bad. But instead, they'll ask people to share and they'll call it sharing. They won't say confession and people will talk about, you know, these horrific things that they've been through. And then the trainer won't necessarily scream at them, but he'll say to them, well, how did you contribute to that?

[00:32:15] You know, and, you know, it won't be done in such an explicit way. It'll be done in a way that's a lot more difficult to pin down as being abusive. So, I think that those are the two ways that they've evolved over time. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, if you could, so I think in your book, I felt like you laid it out very clearly. Like, you explained all of these features which you've mentioned of the hypomanic state.

[00:32:42] And then kind of explained and drawn that parallel very clearly. You talk about the seeking arousal. The terminology cracked me up because we talk about seekers as the, you know, our kind of audience of people who are interested in self-help and personal growth and development. We call them seekers. So, could you explain a little bit? There's a bit of an irony there, yeah. I know. I was like, oh gosh, this is too good.

[00:33:09] So, after I'd noticed these parallels between the conditions of the seminars and the triggers for bipolar disorder and the results of the seminars and the symptoms or indicators of hypomania and mania, I thought, well, I mean, how can this possibly be explained? There were two theories that I looked at that I thought were quite useful. So, the first was a psychoanalytic theory by somebody named Carl Abram from 1911.

[00:33:36] So, a student of Freud's and obviously at that time, they didn't have a great understanding of neurochemistry and that sort of thing. But they were very good at observing people that had what at the time was called manic depressive illness. It wasn't called bipolar disorder yet, but it was the same thing. And he basically said that people with bipolar disorder seem to be very sensitive to criticism. So, they've got very high standards for themselves. They tend to be quite sensitive to criticism.

[00:34:04] And so, in line with the idea of defense mechanisms and psychoanalysis and that approach, he said, in people with bipolar disorder, when you're feeling a sense of inadequacy or fear or a lack of whatever, there's going to be this unconscious force that counters those negative feelings, which is really just homeostasis or allostasis.

[00:34:31] It's not, I mean, psychoanalysis has given a lot of criticism because it's not necessarily always testable. But I mean, that's a very reasonable theory that our bodies and our brains are trying to maintain balance. And so, when we have these negative feelings, there's something that counters those negative feelings. And what Abram said was that in people with bipolar disorder, this force that is supposed to count, so if you've got these negative feelings pushing you down, there's this force countering to keep you in balance.

[00:35:00] And that's in people with bipolar disorder, this force becomes too powerful. And instead of just keeping you in balance, it pushes you so far up, then you experience these elevated states. And I said, well, that makes a lot of sense. I thought about my two manic episodes before. Both of them were periods of massive stress. And strangely enough, followed by sudden removal of the stress and a kind of reward. And I was like, okay, well, that makes sense. But it's also, again, untestable and difficult to speak about in a more detailed way.

[00:35:30] So then the other theory that I found that's relatively common, and there, I mean, there was an article from 2017 that still says that this is a very plausible theory of something called the dopamine hypothesis of bipolar disorder. So for your listeners, should I explain a little bit about what dopamine is? Is it necessary? You could give a very quick overview. Okay.

[00:35:53] So, I mean, very basically, your brain is made up of about 90 to 100 billion neurons, which are these specialized cells that communicate information with each other, and they don't touch each other. So they've got to send these chemical messengers across to communicate with each other. And the chemical messengers are called neurotransmitters. And some of the neurotransmitters are things like GABA and serotonin and norepinephrine and dopamine.

[00:36:22] And dopamine, it's not that it's a very important neurotransmitter because it's involved in our ability to be motivated to find things and seek things. So when we speak about the seeking system, an elevation in dopamine basically makes us see something in a more positive light. So we will be motivated to go out and get it, to work to get it.

[00:36:48] So if you see rats that are bred without the ability to produce dopamine, you can put food right next to their heads and they won't turn their faces to get it. But if you put it in their mouths, they'll still enjoy it. So it's not about the pleasure of consumption. It's often referred to as the pleasure of anticipation. So when you feel that sense of something's going to be amazing, excitement, that sort of thing, that's dopamine. So the dopamine hypothesis of bipolar disorder very simply states that high levels of dopamine

[00:37:17] in a particular part of the brain are a major contributor as opposed to being entirely responsible for it. So are a major contributor to mania and hypermania, so these elevated states. And if they're low levels, it plays a significant role in the depressive side of bipolar disorder. And there are a lot of good reasons for thinking that's the case. So there's pharmacological evidence. If you give people drugs that elevate dopamine, then you start seeing hypermanic and manic-type behavior.

[00:37:45] If you electronically stimulate the part of the brain that dopamine would activate, like the nucleus accumbens, you start seeing the same sorts of symptoms. People with Parkinson's disease have got a breakdown of dopamine-producing neurons, and they're given something called levodopa, which then becomes dopamine, and it helps them with movements in the one pathway. But in the pathway kind of next door, that's the pathway that's more relevant to bipolar disorder. It also elevates dopamine.

[00:38:13] There's a lot of people that are given this medication for Parkinson's start displaying these hypermanic and manic symptoms. And then there are actually some people that have got bipolar disorder and Parkinson's disease. And we know that Parkinson's disease symptoms are caused by a lack of dopamine in a particular part of the brain. And if they have manic episodes, that mean case studies of their movement problems clearing up while they're having manic episodes, which is a pretty strong indicator that dopamine might be playing a role.

[00:38:43] And so there are a lot of reasons for thinking that. So I kind of looked at that and I said, well, okay, if dopamine can lead to these elevated states, is there anything about these conditions in the seminars which might be leading to an elevation in dopamine? So I just went through the literature. There's a ton of literature that speaks about the fact that stress in a certain context is going to lead to an elevation in dopamine.

[00:39:12] So initially when I started speaking to people that I thought were knowledgeable and I said, well, what's the relationship between stress and dopamine? They said, well, stress leads to like a down regulation of dopamine. And I was like, okay, well, that's the opposite of what I was sort of thinking. But it's kind of like sweat. So if you go for a run, initially you will produce a lot of sweat because it's trying to kind of cool you down. But if you run forever and you don't hydrate, then eventually there's not going to be any sweat left.

[00:39:41] And it seems like dopamine's doing something kind of similar in terms of regulating your mood. So if you're in a situation that's highly stressful and you threatened in some sort of way, dopamine is a useful chemical to be produced because it makes you feel very confident. It makes you feel decisive. It gives you energy. It makes you feel like things will get better. It provides a sense of hope and optimism and that sort of thing. So if you think about it, it seems like it would be a useful thing for your brain to produce.

[00:40:10] And the literature also shows that in acute stress, so short-term, escapable stress, dopamine seems to be elevated. And I'll get, you know that you're going to get out of it. You know that this is not something that's going to last forever. So it makes sense that your brain would be, okay, I need to just manage through these couple of days and then I'll survive. So there's a relationship between stress and dopamine. Then you look at the relationship between sleep disruption and dopamine.

[00:40:36] And the literature is a little bit, there's different information on it, but sleep disruption is a form of stress. So it does the same thing in terms of elevating cortisol and that sort of thing. So it's also a form of stress. And so it makes sense that it may also be contributing to an elevation in dopamine. And then goal attained is basically a reward. And the dopamine pathway was initially known as the reward pathway because that's initially

[00:41:04] when you receive a novel reward, like a reward you've never experienced before, dopamine spikes to code that reward. It basically says to you, remember this, this is something useful for survival. So dopamine elevates when we see, when we experience rewards, but particularly when those rewards are kind of unexpected or novel. And in the case of an LGAT, you've really got that situation.

[00:41:30] So you've got a process that theoretically the stress and the sleep disruption are elevating dopamine to allow you to cope with the situation. And then also at the end, you've got this kind of sudden removal of stress, replacement with love and whatever, and this massive kind of sense of goal attainment or reward, which theoretically is going to lead to a further elevation in dopamine. And so, well, okay. So there's a very logical explanation for what is kind of going on.

[00:42:00] And if you look at euphoria, confidence, motivation, energy, productivity, impulsiveness, and then at the extreme side, psychosis, these are all things that are associated with an elevation and dopamine. So schizophrenia, which is a psychotic disorder, there's like 7,000 journal articles that are focused on the relationship between dopamine and psychosis. Most antipsychotic medications are blocking dopamine activity for that reason.

[00:42:29] So, you know, you've got this very plausible explanation. At the moment, it's still a hypothesis. I say to my students, you know, in the scientific process, you make an observation, you come up with a theory, find somewhere to test it, and then you've got to test it for it to be purely scientific. So we haven't sent anyone in and looked at their dopamine levels before and afterwards. But the theory or the hypothesis, I think, makes a lot of sense. Yeah.

[00:42:58] It makes sense to me too. And a few things occurred to me as well that align with it. I think you also talk about that sense of anticipation, right? And I think when people are going into these types of experiences, there is a lot of anticipation. They're seeking out these experiences. So even if they don't know exactly what's going to happen, there's like, almost like the word

[00:43:25] that occurred to me was like yearning for a lot of the people who are really seeking these things. They are looking for that transformation. So they have primed themselves for it. And it's also promised. And it is, exactly. So that was the other side of it, was that this is what they're promised. And then, you know, throughout the entire thing, even during the negative pieces of it, they're being told that this is what's supposed to be happening and that this is all part of

[00:43:53] the process and that it's leading to what they are expecting at the end. And so I felt like all of that anticipation and that priming would also contribute to this elevation at the end once, you know, you're at that point. It makes a lot of sense to me. I mean, if you read descriptions, you know, you often hear people kind of saying, well, I wish they would just get on with the training instead of spending the first few hours telling us how great the training is and how great it's going to be.

[00:44:21] And they don't realize that's actually part of the process because that generates the anticipation which forces their, I'm assuming, forces their brains to remain optimistic and push them through the seminar. So they kind of think that this is just an annoying part at the beginning, whereas actually it's a vital part in terms of generating the states at the end. Yeah, exactly. Self-help books are very much follow that format too.

[00:44:51] Mike, so as somebody who's read a couple of hundreds of help books at this point, absolutely. They spend the first half of it saying later on, we'll learn how to blah, blah, blah. But first let's look at whatever. So it's interesting that structured parallels. I mean, the other thing, John, that occurs to me about what you're describing is that in the wild, kind of out there in the world, the pursuit of dopamine is a really uncertain and potentially risky thing.

[00:45:19] Like the stuff we need to do to achieve goals, like meaningful goals, like we move toward, like our caveman brains are moving toward killing the thing and eating the thing and whatever. And I think a lot of people can internalize this idea that to feel that entails a certain amount of risk. Like in an LGAT, not only is it, as you say, kind of guaranteed or promised, right? That you will get that dopamine payoff. A certain amount of the risk seems to have been reduced, right?

[00:45:48] Because we tell ourselves, well, clearly this is a safe environment because they are a company and they would not design a program that would kill people. That would be bad business, right? Like, unfortunately, you know, in some cases, and I mean, spiritual warrior and James Arthur Ray is only one example. God, I mentioned him again. Gene, he's gone and I can't stop mentioning him. But that's not a guarantee. But I think one of the reasons why we kind of fall for it is because, again, we kind of do that mental math and we figure out like, well, probably pretty safe and it's promised.

[00:46:17] So it seems to me like it seems to us in that moment, like a reasonable investment. And then afterwards, like, God, how could I have possibly made that deal? Yeah, Andrew Hubum, he's got a very useful episode on dopamine. And I mean, the examples that he gives is when we were foraging and hunting and that sort of thing, dopamine was about motivating us to go out and do that in spite of all the risks. So it was the risk of death. It was the risk of infection. It was the risk of whatever.

[00:46:46] And so it's about getting through challenging situations. And if you read, so this is the book. This is the book by Yark Panksepp on the seeking system. And so this is the neuroscientist that focuses on effective states, on emotions. So he speaks about the seeking. And he says, you know, the seeking system, which is driven by dopamine, has got to do

[00:47:11] with overcoming dangers, getting through fear, all of these sorts of things that you are trying to essentially survive in an LGAT situation. It's just been created in an artificial environment. Yeah. And also, if we're no longer, you know, in our modern world, many of us are fortunate enough

[00:47:34] to not be seeking, like the motivation is not directed at, you know, finding our food or shelter or safety. So then where is it going? What is that seeking system? Where is it pointing us now? Yeah. And I mean, I think that's a massive thing. And I mean, I know that Anne Peterson and, you know, a lot of people that have left these organizations are trying to kind of figure out, well, you know, people are still looking for something.

[00:48:03] They're looking for some way to grow and challenge themselves and develop. And, you know, if we can order our food and we don't have to leave our homes, we don't have those challenges out there for us. So what is the thing we replace it with? And yeah, I don't know what the answer is. I'm trying paddle. I don't know if that will work for everyone. But yeah, I think, I mean, it's true that you've got to kind of find some way to challenge

[00:48:33] yourself. And I mean, so for me, like writing a book was difficult and trying to get it published was a challenge. And, you know, I think we've got to create challenges in our life. Like a life without challenges is going to be a very unfulfilling one. But I just think that the ALGAT model is obviously problematic. And Glenn, something that you said in terms of, you know, you go into these things believing that they are relatively safe and relatively well run and that kind of thing.

[00:49:02] Daniel Kahneman in his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, he talks about the fact that when we, the more we believe in the value of, and he actually uses the word a technology, which is something that ALGATS use. So he says, the more we believe in it, in the value of a technology, the more we underestimate its risks. So when people come out of these seminars, they've got this really strong belief that this is an amazing thing.

[00:49:27] And they are the only source of real knowledge about whether this thing is going to be risky or not. So they are being used as the barometer of, you know, is this okay for me to participate in or not? And it's unlikely that they're going to be giving accurate information to their family members and friends and colleagues that they are recruiting, particularly in that initial period of, you know, about a week afterwards where they really elevate it and they think that they've transformed.

[00:49:56] It's highly unlikely that they're going to be giving accurate information to people that are thinking about participating. The more invested we are in a technology, the less we appreciate its risk. It brings to mind all of the stuff about AI presently, right? Yeah. Like the entire world is in love with AI. So no, I think that's a super good point. And in terms of what we do to find that dopamine thing, like in our current world, we can get our food delivered to us.

[00:50:26] Like I often think about that. I'm one of these masochists who runs marathons and Jenny Brown is always asking me, why would you do that to yourself? Why would you do that to your knees? Why would you do that? Now I have an answer for her. I need to replace my hunter-gatherer brain needs to go to something. Yeah. Oh boy. One of the things that really, as you said, it's theoretical. What you have laid out in your book is theoretical. I would love to start measuring it somehow. How do we start?

[00:50:54] How do we get people to attend these events and measure what's actually happening, right? Well, I think it's unethical. Yeah. Well, it's so tough because everything that somebody seeks from going to an LGAT is a version of what they seek by going to, say, psychotherapy. It's a version of what, honestly, they seek going to a movie in some ways, right? Like they seek something that will reliably, hopefully safely help them change their state

[00:51:22] and their focus and their understandings of what's possible, et cetera, et cetera. And so, I mean, I think that the things that drive us to, like we've talked with Christine Whelan about this ad nauseum, like the things that drive folks to self-help are not all that different from folks that drive folks to anything, religion, right? What we're really seeing, though, is an underappreciation, because I feel this way about religion as well, of an underappreciation of the risks and the mechanisms. Like this is what you're really talking about is the mechanism that makes that work when it works.

[00:51:52] And is there a downside to engaging those mechanisms in certain settings where they're not guardrails? And, you know, we were talking, as we were talking about a while ago, when the people designing the experiences may not even, they may not understand the principles involved, right? Like they just know what works. And so, they're not really adequately prepared to address the risks. Or, I mean, as with AI, they also are unwilling to look at it because now they're invested. You know, they've put their lives into it. They've created these organizations.

[00:52:22] So, I mean, it's funny you mentioned, you know, movies, but I think we see this pattern often in safer ways. Because, I mean, a movie that's good is going to create tension. It's going to create a sense of uncertainty. You're not going to know it's going to end. And then you get this resolution at the end. So, you get a very similar sort of process occurring on a shorter timescale and then hopefully a safer sort of way. I mean, I've had people contacting me. Have you dealt with anyone from ISTA, the International School of Temple Arts?

[00:52:52] Are you aware of that group? It rings a bell. So, this is kind of like an LGAT cross with Tantra sort of organization. It also operates all over the world. And a lot of the – I mean, I've spoken to two groups of people now that are doing documentaries on this organization. So, there's a lot of problems going on with them at the moment. As with a lot of the LGAT organizations, there's a lot of exposure. But it involves a lot of sexual things. So, it's supposed to be sexual healing.

[00:53:22] But there's a lot of exposure of trauma from the past and that sort of thing. And people are leaving with these elevated states. But also, there are people that are – it seems that are being hurt. So, you see it in that context as well. Somebody contacted me and spoke to me about Tibetan Buddhism and the seminars that are run in the West by these people that are – and she was saying they follow a very similar process. You go away for a week.

[00:53:50] It's very heavy in terms of suffering and negativity and that kind of thing for a period of time. And then there's this resolution at the end. You suddenly are given enlightenment or whatever it is by the person running it. So, it seems like we've got this pattern that may have emerged. I think it's not right to think even with LGAT to kind of go, okay, well, there was this organization doing it and then these guys did it immediately afterwards.

[00:54:20] They must have – and I mean, maybe there was some interaction between them. But I also just think that this process emerges independently because it's something that works. It's like that guy in the book on dopamine that just had the ice baths and sort of figured it out. So, I just think that there's a lot of these similar processes. People have sort of figured out that they work and that they lead to these elevated states. And then a kind of narrative is generated around it to bring it more meaning.

[00:54:48] So, in a Western context, maybe it's more likely to be Christianity. But in another context, maybe it's a different religion or it's not a religion, but it's some sort of personal developments or something else that's spiritual. But again, as I said earlier, with bipolar disorder, you can see different words that are describing the same thing. And I think if you understand the essence of what's being described, you can kind of see the parallels more easily.

[00:55:16] I guess a kind of wrapping up question that I would have then is for people who are looking for personal transformation, self-help, personal development resources, do you think understanding this process is enough to kind of protect them from being manipulated? Or do you have other advice for how people can seek safely? I'm not sure, to be honest.

[00:55:42] I mean, I hate commenting on things that I don't know enough about. So, I'd have to think about that question quite carefully because I think you can often know exactly how something works and still, I mean, I think that there are addiction specialists who are abusing drugs. I think that understanding the damage is not always going to be a good protection. I think... I can verify. Yeah.

[00:56:10] So, I mean, I think that with a lot of these organizations now, it's not like 20, 30 years ago that you couldn't get information on them. I think that if you're thinking about taking part in an organization, really look into it properly. You'll find and don't ignore the people that have got negative stories. You might want to trust your friend and you might feel uncomfortable saying, actually, it's not something for me, but it's about kind of going, have a proper look.

[00:56:39] I mean, I think a nice thing to think about in this regard is the troubled teen industry, which as I'm sure you know, makes use of essentially LifeSpring seminars in a lot of their facilities or at least did for a long time. And I've engaged with, you know, a woman, Kimberly Swade. I testified in a lawsuit in Arizona last year, basically saying that what this school was

[00:57:06] using was effectively a LifeSpring seminar and we ran through all of the evidence for it. I mean, this is a very sharp woman. I mean, she is not somebody that you could pull the wool over her eyes very easily. And I think a lot of the people that are sending their kids to these schools also have the ability to look into these things and find out information. But there's an intermediary between them and the information.

[00:57:36] The way that they get the information is through like an educational consultant who comes across as being very credible, knows what's going on and wants what's best for your child and whatever. So you outsource your thinking to that person. You assume knows more about it than you do. And again, people often say, well, these parents, what were they thinking? And I mean, I think some of them were just maybe trying to get rid of their kids and they weren't taking responsibility. But I think a lot of them wanted the best for their kids or want the best for their kids,

[00:58:04] but haven't done the due diligence. And I think that if you are claiming that you are aiming for personal development and growth and responsibility and accountability, and you're not looking into these seminars beforehand, that's a massive paradox. You've got to, part of that personal accountability, which is a good thing, is have a look. There's usually information about the organizations. So yeah, look into them beforehand. Yeah, that's good advice for sure.

[00:58:33] And John, I think you do, you and others like you really do such a service in helping explain the mechanisms, the neurological and other mechanisms behind how this stuff works. Because I've always been of the belief that if we understand sort of how, or if we have a good working hypothesis about how something works, it does work and we can harness it in a way that is chosen, right?

[00:59:02] Like we can harness it for our goals and our development. But the key thing there is we need to understand what we're looking at. And we need to understand, I often think of it in terms of magic. When I was a kid, I loved magic, David Copperfield and whatever. He made the Statue of Liberty disappear. It was amazing, right? And now I'm an adult and I can go on YouTube and I can see how he did it and the entire thing. But if I suspend my disbelief for Mullen, I can still get that rush that I got when I was a kid.

[00:59:30] I think LGATS and honestly, like all sorts of things like CBT, right? If you understand the mechanism, again, it doesn't disqualify you from taking advantage of the technology, but you can do so in a way that seeks a little safer, right? Like that accounts for some of the risks. I was recently thinking about this. We're about to do Ash Wednesdays next week as we're recording this. And I was thinking about this, that we have six weeks of Lent where we give up something that we like, right?

[00:59:59] And then we hit to this massive, like this peak stress for Christians, like Good Friday, like he's crucified and stuff. And then we head into this massive release of Easter, you get to do your thing again, and he's risen and it's a celebration, et cetera. It's the ultimate. And it's clearly taking advantage of some of those same principles, right? Yeah. Yeah. But again, if you know what you're looking at, you can say, look, I see the strings, right? I see the strings again, but I'm going to do it anyway because I like, like I'm going

[01:00:26] to purposefully use it safely because I can understand what's going on. Yeah. I mean, I think if we understand why food makes us feel good, it's not going to make us not want to eat food. So I think as you said, it does allow us to just make more informed choices. I think that the challenge with something like an LGAT is that our stress tolerance is quite a complicated thing to understand. And so I think it's based on our biology.

[01:00:56] It's based on our psychology. So how do we interpret information that's coming at us? But it's also based a lot on our past experiences. So if you're a person and you're hearing somebody share about a horrific rape, for example, and you've personally been through something like that or somebody you know has been through something like that, it's going to affect you more than maybe somebody that hasn't been through that. So I don't know how you would screen people out safely or how you would self-screen, particularly

[01:01:26] when the first rule of these seminars is that you don't tell anyone what actually happened. So you don't have the information to know whether it is going to affect you badly or not. And I think that's a real challenge. Yeah. That is something that we talk about with self-help practitioners as an aspect of being a more ethical practitioner is that we know that the kind of secrecy is sometimes part of the sales pitch, but it's just not ethical.

[01:01:55] You need to tell people what to expect at any event that you're trying to get them to come to. Yeah. The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club. Yes. So everybody should go to John's website, which is it's johnhunterphd.com. Am I remembering that correctly? Yeah, that's right. And John has articles that he's written and links to other resources that talk about some

[01:02:21] of these principles we've been talking about in addition to an article that I really enjoyed about Chuck Kalaniak and Fight Club. So let me tell you, I'm going to take just two minutes. Go for it. I have to. I'll send you a presentation, which is quite visual, which I think is probably better than the essay, but probably not too safe to share online, but I'll send it through to you. No, thank you. So I'll tell you, once an episode, I have to hijack the podcast and talk about something I love.

[01:02:51] And when I was looking at your website and I found that article, this is the thing that spoke to me. And I'll tell you why. So when I was in graduate school, so I always loved the book and the movie Fight Club. And when I was in graduate school, I did a long paper for my course in psychodynamic, like psychoanalytic psychology about what was going on there, about how the person, the character of Tyler, this is a spoiler for anybody who hasn't seen or read Fight Club. You've had plenty of time. Right? Right? I don't know.

[01:03:21] So it was all about, so this paper that I wrote was all about how the character of Tyler was just, it was an embodiment of all the psychological defenses of the narrator. They kind of call him Jack, but it doesn't really have a name. But so I am Jack's psychological defenses. And I was all in on this like psychodynamic explanation of Fight Club. And I love this paper that I wrote. I'm not a narcissist. It was a really good paper. But when I read this article that you wrote, it occurred to me that I missed a whole piece

[01:03:47] of that thing about how, I mean, so the thing about Polaniak himself having been to an LGAT and having that, having kind of galvanized him to write is interesting in itself. But the piece of the Fight Club story that I'd really missed, because I was being a psychologist instead of a sociologist, right? Like I was focused on the individual thing. But the group dynamic there, the first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club and there is this big cathartic experience of a fight and the, you know, they're chanting

[01:04:15] mantras there, you know, it's, and so it just really framed it in this really interesting way. That's like, you know, Fight Club itself is clearly like now that I look at it, I can't unsee it. Yeah. It was clearly an LGAT. So I loved it. I think that was such a useful thing for me in terms of trusting myself because, you know, as somebody with bipolar disorder, I've experienced delusions before. I've thought some very strange things. I've experienced psychosis.

[01:04:43] And so one thing that happens when you live with an illness like this is that you've got to kind of reality test yourself against other people. You've got to say, you know, does this make sense or not? And with my insights into LGATS, when I watched Fight Club in 2013, because I heard that Paul and Nick was a, was, I heard that he was a big supporter of one of the big organizations. And I thought, I mean, I also liked Fight Club. Let me go and watch it again.

[01:05:09] And then I just started seeing, you know, thing after thing that was, it wasn't kind of subtle. It was, if you know the industry, the names that are used, the people, the names of the roads, the, I mean, there's just the books that have been written that are referenced. It was very clear that there was this commentary going on, but I would go to people and it's quite complicated. Obviously the essay is quite long. And I would say to a friend, what do you think about this?

[01:05:37] And again, they look at me as, you know, this guy with bipolar disorder and be like, oh, you found some hidden messages in Fight Club. And obviously they assumed that I was nuts. So it took me a long time. So, I mean, I noticed it in 2013, I put it as an appendix in my PhD in 2017. And I thought maybe if people have read the whole PhD, then it will make sense to them. But I mean, it's hard to get people to read a 500 page thesis. So nobody really read that.

[01:06:05] And then my girlfriend at the time in 2019 read it and she was like, no, this makes complete sense. And I sent it to the person running the David Fincher sort of fan website. So www.fincheranalyst.com. And he read it and he came back and he said, it's brilliant. And he did all the illustrations and pulled in the pictures and whatever. And it had literally taken from, so six years from noticing it to actually realizing that

[01:06:35] I was kind of right about it because, you know, it's wise to doubt yourself. And that's why even with this theory that I've come up with for a long time, nobody was paying attention to it. And I thought, okay, well, maybe I'm just crazy. And it was only at the EXA conference in 2023 that I got this really good response. And I was like, okay, well, maybe I'm not completely insane.

[01:07:01] So, yeah, I think that essay was kind of very important in me learning to trust my thinking. Really, really loved it. I recommend everyone go and especially if you love that book or love that movie, definitely go and read John's article about Fight Club. And I'll tell you, John, after I watched your presentation at ICSA in 2023, for me, it was

[01:07:26] like, finally, I have an explanation, like a scientific explanation for what we kind of intuited. We knew, like we could see that this was what was happening at these events and not just LGATs, but all types of self-help events. So, for me, like on a very personal level, it was very affirming as well.

[01:07:51] So, if that makes you feel any better too, I very much appreciate the work that you have done. Thanks. And I think that it's really valuable for people to understand that these groups, these teachers, these events really are manipulating us at a psychological level and that the experience that you have, good and bad, is really being manufactured for you, as the title of your book says. So, yeah, I think your work is very important and I am grateful for your work and for having

[01:08:21] this conversation with you. And I look forward to maybe meeting you in person. I'll be in Montreal this year at ICSA. I'm presenting something there again too. So, yeah. Okay. Well, where are you based? My brother actually lives in the States. I'm there relatively frequently. Okay. So, I'm in Toronto, near Toronto. I live in Canada now. My family is in New York State. So, I'm down there a lot too. And Glenn is in Chicago. I'm in Chicago if you're ever passing through O'Hare or whatnot. My brother's in Chicago.

[01:08:50] So, I was actually there December last year. Yeah. Awesome. Cool. Awesome. Yeah. If you're in town, look me up. Absolutely. Congrats. All right. Cool. Well, thank you so much. We'll put links to everything, including your book and your website and Glenn's new favorite article. We'll get that up there for everyone. I'm going to have to re-watch Fight Club now or read it again and then read your article as well. Maybe we should do, Gene, maybe we should do a watch-along episode. That would be fun. Like a commentary watch-along episode.

[01:09:21] All right, gang. This has been the Seek Safely Podcast. I'm Dr. Glenn Patrick Doyle. This is Gene Brown. Thank you for tuning in. And if you love our episode, give us a five-star rating. Give us a good review. If you hated it, forget I said anything. But thanks for listening. All right. Thanks, guys. Good night. Ciao, ciao. Thanks for listening to this episode. We hope that you have found it enlightening.

[01:09:47] And we'd be so, so grateful if you'd share it with the seekers in your life. We all know at least one, right? Until our next episode, you can find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at Seek Safely. Connect with Dr. Glenn Patrick Doyle at Dr. Doyle Says and me, Gene, at Gene C. Brown on Twitter. Feel free to send us an email, info at SeekSafely.org.

[01:10:11] To support Seek Safely, you can make a secure donation on our website, SeekSafely.org slash donate. The Seek Safely Podcast is produced by Citizens of Sound. Thank you.