My name is Mark Vissente. I'm a director, producer, writer, and troublemaker. I'm most known as the director of the film What the Bleep Do We Know, and as one of the next-team whistleblowers featured in the HBO series, The VAL. Let's just say, I know a thing or two about cults. I don't consider myself a cult expert, but I'm definitely an expert in being screwed over, waking up, and

knowing how to spot them.

And let me tell you, they're everywhere.

My mission is to help people see patterns of abuse across multiple contexts.

From personal to family, to group to societal, it's all the same pattern at every scale.

As you'll hear, I have a pretty salty approach to most things.

So there might be some blasphemy.

One or two sacred cows might get knocked over, and there'll likely be some foul language.

You never quite know what you're going to get, because it really does depend on what the

fuck is on my mind.

Well, hello there.

If today I don't piss at least one person off on my YouTube channel or my podcast,

I will not be doing my job.

And by the way, those of you on YouTube,

there is a preamble on my audio-only podcast.

It's about 59 seconds long, and it sort of explains, you know, who I am and that I'm likely to piss people off.

It's really worth listening to, but what I did is I put a trailer on my YouTube channel page.

So if you go to the top, it's about 59 seconds long, you can listen to who I am, what I talk about, and the

sacred cows that I tend to enjoy knocking over. I will anger some people. And as I said,

today if I anger nobody, I have not done my job. So I want to talk about self-sealing systems that you see in cults. And what is a

self-sealing system? It's sort of like, it's like when you talk to somebody who has a very

strong ideology who has very cult-like thinking, they have this sort of circular logic. Like you

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