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.

So, Mark, what the fuck is on my mind. So, Mark, what the fuck is on your mind today?

I am so glad you asked because I have a bunch of things I'm thinking about and some of them I want to share.

One of the things is about how abusers or abusive systems use people's natural sensitivity

and inclination for self-experation, self-exploration, I can't even say it probably,

to sort of undermine themselves.

They sort of install this program of looking for faults.

So a couple of days ago, actually a couple of weeks ago, I'm sorry, I did a podcast with Dr.

Karen Mitchell.

She's a researcher and she talks about the predatory personality type.

Something happened in that podcast that kind of blew my mind because I started talking about

the spectrum of narcissism and she corrected me and said, no, no, no, no, hold on.

You know, what spectrum of narcissism?

...