My name is Mark Vesente. 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, Aval. 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 everybody.

Welcome back.

I have a lot on my mind today.

I have a lot of different topics.

So this is going to be a bit of a mixed salad, so to speak.

In the conversations I have with people that I work with, friends in my private mentoring work I do, people sometimes

start to discuss boundaries. And what people realize is that they have had somebody in their

life that's encroached on the boundaries. They have let that encroachment happen and they want to fix it.

They want to sort of put up some kind of boundary. They want to push back.

But I began to realize some time ago that if you're pushing back using the same mindset

that allowed the boundaries to be crossed,

then all you're doing is sort of muscling up or armoring up against what somebody's doing.

And it got me thinking about a way to try to describe a better, a more permanent fix. And of course, it's always, it always comes back

...