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Welcome back to Geek Time advanced. I'm Brad.

Hi, Brad.

How's it going Lulu?

Yeah. I'm good. I'm ready to talk more about cult.

All right. So we're gonna talk a little bit about some of the early cults before like thousands of years ago those types of cults. Oftentimes, cults were considered to be part of like minor religions .

So just like pagan beliefs.

Definitely, like smaller groups of people having different ideas when the movies we often see them as cannibalistic or something like that really sinister kind of like the Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and ripping hearts out of your body, stealing your soul kind of thing.

Honestly, I think in terms of Indiana Jones, if you don't mind me saying it, it is a little bit of racial prejudice and it's like mystifying or even vilifying cultures that you don't know perhaps.

Yeah, they have those...now one of the actual cults that was kind of like it was almost a runner up to early Christianity was called mithraism.

Mithraism.

Mithraism yeah. Now that was in the Roman empire. You could see they had these underground places where they would worship and mithraism was kind of like... it was an astrological type of cult, they worshipped space and that type of... it wasn't a particular god or anything like that they worshipped, it was the closest thing to a god you could see was like the Taurus, the bull

Almost sounds like the earlier definition of cult is basically just outside of the mainstream. It doesn't have that destructive element.

Yeah. Some of them did, some of them had like they might have had sacrifices, although some people think that those sacrifices may not have actually been people they killed, they may have been people that have just died.

And so it's kind of hard to see where it actually happened. It could just be that the bigger religions were trying to vilify them as mentioned earlier, but that's something that was actually this mithraism was actually quite common. They found over 400 sites around Rome where they did worship.

Actually if you dig a little deeper into history like world history, you'll find lots of different “cults” , what about some of the more modern or contemporary ones.

Within the past ten or twenty years, there was heavens gate and heavens gate is kind of like one of these destructive but also UFO type of cults that we call them UFO cults.

This sometimes baffles me. It's like cult. You really have all sorts of varieties. You have the ones that look for more ancient belief, obviously the almighty deity, but there's also something that's more futuristic that looks towards aliens and space technology what not.

So there's a comet called the Hale-Bopp comet. A kind of pseudo religion kind of cult came up because of that comet, the leader said that the comet was actually a spaceship.

And every time it came by the earth, they came to pick up souls, and so those people who readily committed suicide, their souls would be picked up and brought to another world where to that I mentioned, through the comet.

I know like right now when we talk about it sounds so outlandish.

However, like you mentioned last time when people are vulnerable, if they are in a very fragile frame of mind, and then you have this community who's like join us, we can provide you this and that salvation, think that probably why it attracts people.

You actually get someone with a strong personality, and they can attract a lot of people, especially nowadays with the internet, you get people on there. If they don't have something going on in their life, they'll look for something.

To be honest, I think the internet has made us more tribalized.

In a sense.yeah.

Yeah. you follow your own little tribe or tribes.

Those were more the traditional definition of cults, even the one that you just mentioned heavens gate. But honestly it just reminds me of something, they are not really a cult cult by the traditional definition but they just feels more like a cult, for example, some sort of marketing scheme like pyramid scheme.

In the us, we've started to call them multilevel marketing. They're originally pyramid scheme. But since that word is kind of illegal, you can't really be a pyramid scheme anymore. They've switched the name around and just kind of re-branded themselves as to multilevel marketing.

The whole idea is, for example, if I'm a member and then I want to persuade more people into joining the organization, so I can go to you, I can go to James and I can say you join the team and then you will be my subordinate, for example, you’re one level below me and I can collect money from you and then you go out and get your support in it. That's the whole idea.

Basically. It's kind of like you get a portion of their sales and so you get your sales, you get a portion of their sales. And it goes down a few different levels and that's where that whole pyramid scheme is in there, but they change it a little bit. So it's not given the same definition. But the whole ideology is that.

It's like a cult

It is  the cult of money.

Exactly.

They tell you it's like if you work for a year, you might make $100,000 if you get a really good job. But they tell people you don't need to go to university, actively persuade people to drop out of school.

Wow.

They have closed door meetings. They bring you in and they try to convince you into joining them, quitting your job don't work for a job that's gonna pay you $20 an hour, get a work with us and whatever you sell you make money.

You see those in China as well.

One of my friends actually joined multilevel marketing.

You have these friends that joined cults?

This was like just after high school. Still I was kind of in my...what do you call, my gap year, I hadn't quite gone to university yet, but I was still working at a movie theater. A few of my friends they didn't join cults, so to say.

They joined the marketing scheme.

Well. They went....a few of them went to like vacuum sales and things like that. You can make money doing vacuum sales if you're good at it, it wasn't like a cult thing, but it was getting close to cultish because the way they get you just to kind of like work for free, and you do all the sales work but you only make money if you sell something that kind of sales thing, but not like multilevel marketing.

My friend who was working at the movie theater with me, he went into this. And at the movie theater people were making $10 an hour back then a little bit less than that probably. But that was like 20 years ago almost.

So he joined this readily and then like his personality changed and when I didn't really want to get into that type of thing. I just wasn't interested in, I called it a pyramid scheme.

He got really defensive when I said I didn't really want to get into it, and he got really angry and they just completely stopped talking to me. He dropped me as a friend...

That sounds completely, total brainwashing.

I think they've been told like if someone goes against what they believe in or they have been preached about, then they have to get these people out of their lives.

Yeah, I think you're right. People might not believe in god or any supernatural beings, but a lot of people would believe in the power of money.

Definitely, and it's like the whole reason why a lot of cults are started, people want money.

This is also how pyramid schemes are like in China. They are definitely illegal. But there are also more probably prevalent in places with lower income, traditionally lower income because people have no other way out, so they sort of bank on trying to strike it rich overnight.

OK. The last question that we are going to talk about is why start a cult. It almost sounds like a moot point. Because obviously a lot of people are after the money, whether you're preaching aliens or god or salvation or money itself, you are after money.

A lot of times, yeah some sort of monetary benefit. Some people will do like the doomsday cult and let's say give me all your money. We can advertise, get everyone to know that we can stop this and so it becomes a thing where people are giving all their money out. But it's not even that like you can use the power of the cult to sell a product.

I mean, look at Apple, when you look at like that's probably one of the biggest business studies into how to cultify your product.

Cultify your products.

If you like, it's serious though if you want to sell a product, you sell a personality, it's a cult of personality behind it, right?

That’s true.

You have Steve Jobs, everyone still knows Steve Jobs. If you put a picture up of Steve Jobs, people will still know who that is. He's passed away years ago, but people still know who he is and still actively buy his product. A new one comes out, people are like I need to get the new one.

Lining up overnight to do it. I kind of get what you're saying.

Interesting topic to think about really. If you have any thoughts about especially modern day cult or cult like things, leave us a comment in the comment section. Thank you, Brad, for coming to the studio. No problem. We'll see you next time.

See you everyone.