Madness Madness!

This week it's Mankind United, a cult whose story includes a startling refutation of Chekhov's Tiny Man With a Metal Head rule; and EST, whose story includes reinforcement of Chekhov's Confused Boomers Entering the '70s Rule. Join us as we sniff through these grifts, overturning numerous tidbits of knowledge like so many cult-researching truffle pigs.

France! Australia! Oy! Hon hon! Today we go deep—down under, even—into the Raelians, France and French Canada's clone-happy UFO booster club, and see if it's a better fit for us than Kenja, Australia's sorta home-grown, sorta ripped off from Scientology cash vacuum. Raelism (not realism) is, at the very least, a cult where you're less likely to be burned to death for the knights templar than France's other entry into the series. Kenja, meanwhile, may have out-Scientologied Scientology in a few key respects. Join us for bad accents, at least one suppressive person, and the gripping origin story of Corn Thins.

Stadiumwide mass weddings! Questionable claims about organ harvesting! Richard Nixon! Al Haig! SHEN YUN!!! This episode's got it all, folks. The Rev. Sun Myung Moon and his absolutely third-grade-boy ideas about gay people fight for the elite eight against Falun Going, a relative newcomer with an omnipresent troupe of acrobats and a massive compound in the U.S. that you are not invited to. Also we would like to go on record as saying that this matchup was 100% picked by the automatic bracket creator, and that we didn't just throw the two Asian cults in a ring to duke it out.

CONTENT WARNING: The story of Tony Alamo contains details of child abuse awful enough to inspire a person to dig up Tony Alamo's body and beat the shit out of it.

The Solar Temple got pretty goddamn lucky when the randomizer put it up against Tony Alamo, let me tell you. But it does have some stuff going for it: Champagne! The Swiss Alps! Grail holograms! Arson! Meanwhile, Tony Alamo makes the impossible possible by making Susan Alamo look like Mother Teresa by comparison. Seriously. We knew Tony Alamo was a piece of shit but we had no idea how bad it was. Onward!

We had plans, you see, to talk this week about the Children of God and Aleister Crowley's religion of Thelema. These cults turned out to be, respectively, far too awful and nowhere near awful enough to talk about for even part of a podcast. So we got way better cults! This week: The charmingly earnest weirdos of UNARIUS square off against the social media influencer who is totally not a cult leader you guys, "Teal Swan." Teal Swan is in quotes for the same reason we spell out Nexium how it sounds.* In advance: You are welcome for the last-minute reschedule, folks, 'cause this one is a hoot and a holler. Yay!

* because it's dumb

Having your own cult is about not having to decide between being a wildly successful health-food restaurant pioneer or being White Human Man God. Or between telling your gaggle of model-like Californians that sex is ridiculous while also ... uh, look, no spoilers, but the dude pushing that notion may actually have had sex.

The Source Family was a foundational southern California '60s cult; Bhuddafield was, 20 years later ... another southern California cult. They go head to head in today's episode, which includes togas, the Dorothy Chandler family mansion, something like 13 albums of psychedelia, budgie-smugglers, professional videographers, and paying a dude $50 to gently poke you in the eyes. It is yet another banger of an episode in what has become a nonstop series of bangers. Let's go!

At some point in their lives, everyone ends up asking themselves "Do I wear robes often enough? And should they be maroon? And why are all these pancakes different sizes? What the hell, Self!" Bearing that in mind, there is a 100 percent chance you'll find something relatable in this episode, when we compare weirdly touching space Jesus suicide cult Heaven's Gate to the salad bar-poisoning, small town-overtaking cult of the off-putting libertarian materialist Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Come for the weirdly specific breakfast specifications! Stay for some deeply selfish ideas about what your kids can do while you go to group screeching-and-humping therapy! 

Some people like their cults real big and real ugly, and those people can fuck off! Hahaha, just not kidding. It’s the big one this week, folks. Scientology. The brain fart of L. Ron Hubbard, a man whose writing ability was only eclipsed by his Navy career, this multibillion-dollar jargon cesspit may finally answer the question: “What if I could be surrounded by insufferable batshit narcissists *and* bankrupt myself in the process?” The pile of elephant shit in the room goes head to head with a frankly quite refreshing little cult born from the visions of Terri Hoffman, a woman who refused to let the Dallas suburbs keep her from fighting creatures who weren’t there and protecting the government of Peru: The Center for the Conscious Development of Body, Mind, and Spirit. Got a lot on our plate here, folks. Get comfortable.

Sometimes your cult leader is a recovering drunk who's super into LSD. Sometimes he's a twerpy little sex pest coasting on a middle-school judo championship and a good result on an OMNI Magazine IQ test. And since we're all about making choices here, it's time to dig into both these weirdos and the cults they founded. This week's cults: Synanon, a rehab-turned-shaved-heads-and-overalls joint in California, and Nexium, a pyramid scheme-turned-Adult-Friend-Finding service which is supposed to be spelled NXIVM but we're not doing that because it's fucking stupid. THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!

Yogurt rivers? Forfeiture of property rights? Why not both? 'Cuz that's not what this show's about! Our first episode pits the Temple of Krishna Consciousness (the Hare Krishnas) against the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) (the ones that still do polygamy). Turns out both groups are appropriated versions of existing religions! Who could have foreseen this? It's apricot body wraps vs. denim prairie skirts in this battle for the ages!