A Digital Cult? The Strange Story of Bentinho Massaro

One person's cult is another person's inarguable truth, and over millenia many spiritual or cultural belief systems have been called cults. Typically organizations called cults have a few commonal traits, one of the chief of which is isolation. So can cults continue to exist in the digital age, where the average smartphone user is only a few clicks away from learning almost anything they desire? What do these movements look like in the era of instantaneous communication? Join the guys as they delve into the strange concept of digital cults.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know. M Hello,

(00:24):
welcome back to the show. I'm an expression of the
infinite one creator in sixth density. Do you do you
have a name? That's it? Oh? Yeah, I felt like
you left off with Ellipsy's like you're gonna give me more,
like some sort of celestial title introducing myself? Do you
want to be the movement formerly known as Matt or
the vibration formally known as Matt. I am an expression

(00:47):
of the Infinite one Creator in sixth density. Okay, I'll
take it. I'm still Noel, I'm non Shabbai. Folks they
call me Ben. You or you were joined with our
super producer Paul Deck, and that makes this stuff they
don't want you to know. Welcome to the show. As
you can tell, uh, since we last all got together,
there have been a few changes, spiritual changes, vibrational changes. Yeah,

(01:09):
Matt is basically just this kind of like neutron cloud
that's just slowly filling up the studio. And he does
still have a mouth, thankfully. So I'm an expression of infinity.
So you know right now what he's reminding me of,
Noel is the the gaseous creature in that Rick and
Morty episode called Fart, voiced by Fly to the Concords

(01:32):
actor similar similar, Well, thank you for coalescing into a
physical ish form. Somebody open a window. I don't want
to lose him. I'll be here for as long as
the podcast is. What is time. Hopefully we have a
enough time before you ascend to higher planes, Matt to

(01:55):
journey into a very interesting rabbit hole, which Noel, you
were the one who showed us, introduced us to this
guy off air when we first learned about this fairly recently,
right a few weeks ago. Yeah, there was a media
article that was making the rounds online and a friend
of mine actually sent it to me um as a
potential topic for the show. And more so than talking

(02:18):
specifically about this one individual who we will get to,
it kind of opened the door to talk a little
bit more about cults in the digital age, right exactly.
We have talked about cults before, both in these broad
structural terms and through more specific examples such as the
ants in the Czech Republic, uh, the Jonestown Massacre with

(02:41):
Jim Jones and many more. And although it's a little
by the book, let's start with the biggest, most obvious question,
how do we define cult? And for that we head
on over to Miriam Webster, which defines this cult as
a religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious. It's also it's
referring to the body of adherence to said movement, and

(03:05):
it also defines it as great devotion to a person,
idea object, movement, or work such as a film or
a book, like a cult film, cult classic being something
that has a small but incredibly loyal following, often for
being trash um or a cult of personality, you know,
which can also refer to a cult leader. My problem

(03:26):
with these definitions, you guys, though, is that to me,
this is what religion is, right like, it's it's a
it's some one person's unorthodox belief is another person's face.
So where's the distinction, right right? So, for instance, to
the Pope, while many other religions would have value, they

(03:46):
all are unorthodox or at the very least erroneous if
they are not Catholicism as practiced by the Catholic Church.
And if you're an orthodox Jew. Everyone else is completely unorthodox, right, right,
and maybe just has a short attention span. Right. That's
how one rabbi explained it to me. We see two

(04:07):
different approaches here in the definitions, with some overlap between them,
and I appreciate you raising the point that we wanted
to make here about cult. The idea of what makes
a cult is the idea of what makes something beautiful
or it's very similar. It's in the eye of beholder,
and it's a subjective thing. At the very most basic,

(04:29):
first density level, a cult is just a group of
people worshiping something, and they almost never outside of pop culture,
describe themselves as a cult. It's a tricky term. It's
usually regarded as an insult. If our super producer Paul
Decont started what he felt was a religious movement and
we started referring to it as Paul's cult, Paul and

(04:52):
his followers would be probably offended. Well, Paul's nodding in
a way that makes me think I may have already
cross the line. Well, yeah, because Paul's journey is the way,
the light and the truth. For me, as a follower
of Paul's journey, how many cults are you in bro
all of them? Uh? Yeah, funny story. We Matt and I.
In an earlier video audio series, we delineated the commonalities

(05:18):
between cults and the ways in which these things function
if you think of them as an engine, and we
we taught people how to start one. We taught people
how to start one. It was a little controversial. That
was in the same era when we had a video
describing how people get away with murder, which is still
up if you see it. We should probably we should

(05:39):
probably take a look at that again. But despite the
slippery slopiness of that word cult, we are making a
conscious choice and editorial choice to use that word today,
right then, Yeah, exactly, for the purposes of today's episode,
we are going to use the word cult, and we're
going to use it to describe organizations that share some
of these commonalities for more earlier videos and some will

(06:01):
explore today. And we're also using it more as shorthand
rather than an insult, because it goes back to that
that point where underlining here we're emphasizing one person's cult
is another person's real religion. And the point of this
show has never been to tell people what to believe,
but The reason we're choosing to use the word cult

(06:24):
is because today's overall question is how do cults exist
in the digital world. Are these organizations, these movements adapting,
Are the lines between a fandom and legit actual cult blurring?
And if so, how? First we have to look at

(06:45):
the facts. The world is chock full of self described movements,
intentional community, spiritual institutions, and on and on and on,
and often mainstream culture, culture interesting etymology. There allly hears
of these fringe movements when something goes horrifically catastrophically wrong,

(07:05):
such as the destruction of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas,
the alm Shinriko terrorism in Japan, or of course, the
Jonestown massacre. But as we know, you know, the the
bloody headlines sell the best, right, and there's a motivation
in most media to only show you the bad news.

(07:26):
This does not jibe with the reality of the situation,
which is this around the planet, probably in your home country,
maybe even in your own neighborhood. As we record this,
these sorts of movements are much less uncommon than you
might think. Maybe not cartoonishly common or ubiquitous, but they're
definitely out there, and often they're harmless. There group of

(07:49):
people who have all decided to get severely on the
same page about something, whether it's a diet, right, we
see a lot of we see a lot of people
organized by their diet or by their environmental beliefs. Right.
You'll even see the C word applied to certain workout

(08:09):
regimens and groups getting together having you know, working out
at a gym. Uh, You'll see it applied to a
lot of different things. Somebody said, how can we be
both fit and cross? So in the in the days
before the digital era, and as as we have examined before,

(08:30):
these groups would typically be isolated, They would tend to
self isolate. They would be isolated by a leader who sought,
unfortunately and often inevitably, to gain complete control of the
group or community by eliminating any other source of information.
It's one of the most common things about cults. And

(08:52):
we can talk a little bit about some of these commonalities. Well, yeah,
you can imagine it, especially if you go back just
before the advent of the internet, if you didn't have
a machine that you could access in your home that
had all of the information out there, and you only
had the books, the physical books that are available, the
telephone that you can make a you know, a call,
and the only one person can really use a phone

(09:13):
at a time. In that way, Um, you realize how
much information control existed. And we do know that the
cognitive an emotional isolation of followers is very important to
starting and maintaining a cult. Um Like, if you're in one,
you can't read unapproved books. Um, you can't watch unapproved shows.
You can't really communicate much with your family because maybe

(09:36):
your family is encouraging you to not be in this
cult anymore. Um, you can't speak with those relatives, and
you know, it just moves on and on and on.
And that's one of the primary goals of a cult leader.
It's it's to isolate, not only isolate, but break people
down psychologically by instilling in them this notion that nothing

(09:57):
they do is good enough or they can't act shually
you know better themselves without the direct input and influence
of the person that is kind of setting themselves up
as being the cult leader. And then you have sexual
control as well. Yeah. Typically this and this is common,

(10:17):
the cult leader will eventually have some sort of divine
revelation whether they see themselves that divinity or see themselves
as a messenger of that divinity, and the realization will
be that either no one can have sex, that he
or she the cult leader can be the only person
who has sex with anyone, or that the followers must

(10:39):
obey the sexual dictates of the leader. That's where you
hear about someone saying it has come to me through
whatever my brand name of God is that person A
is the spiritual spouse of person B, and that's the
only people that these are the only people they can
fool around now with David Koresh, for example, he received visions,

(11:04):
one of which told him that the sister of one
of his wives was to be his new wife, and
everyone else, the males in that cult were celibate. Yeah,
and it never really starts that way. No, No, I mean,
that's it's salesmanship. One oh one. You get your foot
in the door, and what what happens with this? I

(11:24):
know it's lurid and it seems it's incredibly gross. I
really appreciate no, you mentioning that David Koresh example, because
I believe that sister may have been under age at
the time. Is that correct? I do believe so, yes,
So in Koresh's Bible studies, which were these ten hour,

(11:46):
ten to sixteen hour performances of him just yelling at
people in those things, he would he would constantly and
and increasingly make them of a sex will nature and
find Bible versus where he would interpret this as you know,
this passage of the Bible says this, what's he really saying?

(12:09):
He's saying that the women want dicks? And pardon the
crudeness here, this is a quote. He would say, what
what does this Bible verse mean? It means they want
big dicks? Everybody say it, and he would make people
say it. And to us on the outside that sounds insane,
But this is after, this is after how many days
of how many solid hours have been yelled at. Having

(12:31):
your personal life controlled, having and this is one of
the most important parts, having your ego erase, the obliteration
of the eye. And this this occurs in a lot
of organizations, military's attempt to erase the ego. And you'll
hear people say sometimes that they had a friend who
entered into a very intense branch of the military or something,

(12:54):
and that they came out changed, maybe for the better,
maybe for the worst, maybe just different. And cults actively
blake in our earlier stuff with the Charles Manson family.
Cults actively obliterate the agency of the followers, which is
why it is so important to us. Occult Is a

(13:14):
podcast is not and should not be a cult. But
that's why it's so important to us that you listening. Specifically,
you still get to be yourself and make your own decisions.
We're not gonna yell at you. Yeah, yeah, you be you.
Don't don't listen to what we're saying, don't follow every
word says the cloud to doubt your credibility. But let's

(13:41):
just rattle off a few other destructive patterns that cults
um operate under so we can get into the juice
of today's episode. Yeah, let's do a worst case scenario. Yeah,
so that we've got leaders who emotionally exploit the vulnerable,
and oftentimes the folks that flock to these types of
leaders are very vulnerable there seeking answers, and often they

(14:03):
are attracted to strong personalities who called leaders typically are um. Eventually,
as Ben said, things change and take it can take
a dark turn as that exploitation goes from emotional to
physical uh. And then we have leaders who start to
obliterate the ego, like Ben said, through social pressure uh,

(14:23):
physical abuse, shaming people putting their business out in public,
having people judge them completely, wearing them down to the
point where they can be molded in the image or
in you know, at the discretion of the leader. And
then the next one is important for today's discussion, the
leaders rambling word salad becomes the primary narrative of the group,

(14:47):
and then the group's narrative. After all, this rambling starts
to turn dark, sometimes violent, and often often self destructive,
as this leader is seeking to increasingly say things that
are shocking or something that it will be new and
incredible for their followers to grasp onto things to do
even um. And they need to maintain this this unpredictability

(15:11):
or or be viewed as unpredictable, and maintain control of
all these people listening. Yes, that's important because you have
to be providing revelations right and no one can ever
be good enough. Your authority cannot be challenged. So this unpredictability,
this increasing escalation of shocking behavior is an important tool,

(15:33):
a crucial tool for maintaining control. And that's when again,
in the worst case scenarios, we see situations involving suicides
or murders or other horrendous crimes. Now we enter the
digital age. If isolation is a key to the formation, growth,
and ultimate de cave of cults, surely the glut of

(15:56):
information available via phone or text or tablet or social
media would reduce cults. You're always in contact with someone, right,
you'd think, but it might not be. Let's hear a
word from our sponsor. Here's where it gets crazy. There

(16:18):
are digitally powered movements for me today and growing successfully
that fit, according to their critics, a lot of the
definitions of occult. And this is where we arrive at
the story that you know your friend introduced us to

(16:39):
a character named Bentinho Massorrow. You may have also heard
him called Bentino. Yeah, so I was turned onto an
article um on medium that came out in December of
last year by a writer by the name of B. B. E.
Scofield Um who alleges that Massorrow is a cult leader

(16:59):
empower hard by the ever evolving nature of digital communications.
In fact, the headline of the article is the very
salacious tech bro guru inside the Sedona cult of Benteno
massorrow and and the top of it is is emblazoned

(17:20):
with some pictures from this man's Instagram account. One where
he's dressed up as Hugh Hefner with like a captain's
hat on, surrounded by scantily clad playboy bunny esque women.
And there's one where he's like the real bad joker
from the latest Batman movie with what's his face suicide
squad doing doing a mirror selfie. And then there's one

(17:41):
where he's uh, got a cigar in his mouth. In
the background you see some real, real fancy scotches. Um.
Who is this guy? And then what's he after? What
does it mean to be a tech bro cult leader? Well, uh,
he started well, at least from what we can tell,
he started posting on a YouTube channel in two thousand ten.
And uh, this is just what we know from the surface,

(18:03):
and we'll get into what we know after some research
on the surface. First video understanding life is impossible and
h here here's just some ideas from that video. We
as human beings, every situation we encounter, we constantly try
to analyze, We constantly try to understand everything in reality.

(18:24):
The life that's just here. It cannot be understood. We
have to stop trying to understand everything. Life wasn't meant
to be understood. It's the embrace of the mystery that
instantaneously reveals the beauty of what's right here. The funny
thing is when we stop trying to understand what we perceive,
we naturally understand in here. At that point, he points

(18:46):
at his chest, thinking, is just another aspect of reality
and it cannot understand itself. Life doesn't care why it's here.
It's simply here. I mean overall, that's how it's like.
First off, a restatement of things that have been said
pretty often. And uh, do people understand life? I mean

(19:10):
it's a it's a fair question. And just to say
in the video he appears to be a young man.
I mean, you know, is it around seven eight years ago?
He said? Yeah, two, Um, you know, just a young
man giving his beliefs into a laptop computer sort of
a manifesto, right, And these, these uh selfie manifestos are

(19:31):
super common on YouTube. Literally, anyone with an Internet connection
and a camera can make a YouTube account or make
a Google account and post them. Personal spirituality is nothing
new to YouTube, and you might not be familiar with
this guy. Although he is a YouTube sensation, he's built
a massive following since that video in two thousand and ten.

(19:55):
We have stats for you. His Facebook page has over
three hundred thousand people on it, his Instagram is over
twenty thousand. They've got Facebook groups that follow him. His
YouTube videos have over two million views. I think that's total,
not per video for sure. I mean his videos of individually,

(20:15):
and he's got a ton of them there in the
thirty to forty views a piece, And I would argue
these numbers are not earth shattering by any means. But
where it gets interesting is when you start to see
the kind of money he's able to bring in with
this semi modest following. Right, he has an organization called
the Trinfinity Academy. It's a website UM sort of a

(20:36):
self help kind of guru type website, and on it
you can read these courses that he has laid out,
and it's got kind of like a radiohead pay what
you will model. But apparently, according to um the media article,
he brings in around sixty thou dollars a month, which
is more than enough to cover the fourteen thousand dollar

(20:56):
a month rent for his lavish offices in Sedona, uh Arizona,
which is is home base. UM and Ben you said
earlier you felt like that sixty thou wasn't all donations
that could account for UM people that are paying to
come to his seminars. Well, you know, no, they do.

(21:16):
They suggest at the very bottom, on the left hand
side of the page, they suggest that if you're going
to take one of their uh one of their courses
on their website, they suggest a hundred to a three
d donation per per one that you're going to read.
I mean, you know that would that's sort of like
a what's the honor system kind of situation. It's like

(21:36):
when you go to the Met Museum in New York
and they say recommended donation of of thirty dollars. You know,
I usually give ten, but I'm a cheap skate. Is
it thirty? I thought it was twenty? I think? Okay, Well,
I know they're actually not to get to op topic,
but the Met is actually going to start imposing an
actual ticket price very soon, so probably a good idea
get in there while you can. Yeah. Well, and but

(21:57):
this isn't their only source of income, these online courses, right, Yeah.
Massarrow also has in person retreats that gather crowds of
up to hundreds, and when we were talking off air,
that was that was one of the things that perked
our collective ears up, because it seems like, if you're

(22:20):
going on on our system of suggested donation, sixty a
month seems like a really tall milkshake for that. But
if people are booking the seminars through that does that
count the income as well? And we also have to
ask when we will ask later just to be fair, uh,
the motivations of the scoffold the writer who did a

(22:40):
fantastic job with this article. By the way, So back
to the digital age, Massarrow is effectively used things like
WhatsApp or Facebook Live to to reach new followers. And
although you know, although as Noel pointed out, these are
not especially earth shattering numbers, it's not like the you know,

(23:02):
a musician with billions of views or something doing this.
Reaching this level of success independently is pretty impressive. It's
still small time in comparison to some other spiritual movements.
And again, let's keep in mind spiritual movement describes everything
from uh closely held personal belief you've never told anyone

(23:23):
to things like Buddhism or the Catholic Church. There's a
wide range of things here, but still it is there,
and it's and it's present. So now we have to
ask ourselves what exactly is heat teaching from From the article,
h Schofield describes it thus Lee a mashup of ad Veta,

(23:47):
Vedanta and the law of attraction. Other influences include O
show Bashar, the law of one channel by raw and
this Gadata Maharaj and some Yogic text as well. So
there's a lot of stuff in the mix. Yeah, yeah,
and the Advita. The danta Um school is a particular
type of Hindu philosophy and a path to spiritual realization

(24:11):
and focuses on um the teachings of the Upanishads and
finding basically the highest levels of metaphysical reality brahmin or
sort of something like achieving nirvana um. And more interestingly
to me is this idea of the law of one,

(24:32):
which is something I've never heard before. And I found
a page Law of one dot info that goes through
the different levels of enlightenment than one can achieve by
following this path. Uh, I'm gonna read a little bit
from that. Um The Law of One states that there
is only one and that one is the infinite creator.
It also invokes the name of raw Uh, the Egyptian

(24:55):
god Um. Raw also calls infinite intelligence and in intelligent infinity.
It's impossible to describe the one undifferentiated, intelligent infinity, unpolarized,
full and whole, but it can be activated or potentiated.
Each portion of the creation contains paradoxically the whole. It
is like an ocean. Well it's it's hologrammatic thinking as well.

(25:18):
And there's a book called The Raw Material Uh. An
ancient astronaut speaks uh. The Law of One by a
man by the name of Don Elkins, and the um
synopsister that on Amazon is pretty interesting. Poses a few questions.
What are the ancient astronauts? Why did they first come
to Earth? Why are they returning now? What part did
they play in building the great monuments of antiquity? What

(25:40):
part did they play in the formation of present and
earlier civilizations? With? What other beings do we share our universe?
And where does the Earth fit into the cosmic scheme
of things. Almost twenty years of experimental work with telepathy
led to the breakthrough contact recorded in this book, the
raw material as an account not me for the events

(26:00):
leading up to this contact, but of over two hundred
pages of verbatim transcripts of each and every conversation. Two
things real quick, No, I swear you have heard this
concept before, but it was packaged very differently. You're a
Bill Hicks fan, right, Bill Hicks talks about this sort

(26:23):
of thing. He probably got it from a very similar um.
He probably got it from his very similar source, maybe
even the apponishads. He was a constant reader. It's interesting.
The second thing that's really interesting about this is what
we're seeing is syncretism, combining of aspects from different religions,
and the Danta itself is kind of syncretic. So we're

(26:46):
seeing a and I don't want to say a mixtape
of a mixtape because I don't want to be dismissive,
but we're seeing like combinations of combinations coming through, which
honestly I applaud if we're talking about spirituality, I really
feel like you should find what works for you. A
little later, we're gonna get into a direct message from

(27:09):
Benino Massorrow and it says that very thing that you're
talking about ben where his teachings over time, he says,
have been a collection of different teachings and different movements
and all these paradoxical even at times things it seems
less about worshiping a god too, as much as it
is kind of treating yourself as a god or an
extension of the universe. And it's interesting because the law

(27:32):
of One has these these layers, almost scientology esque layers.
They're called densities, and at first through eighth density, and
it's something that Massorrow touches a lot in the teachings. Absolutely,
he definitely talks about it, and it's it's it's a
little hard to wrap your head around. And I think
for good reason, just to read a couple of these,
I'll do the first and the last. The first density
is the density of awareness in which the planet moves

(27:54):
out of the timeless state into physical manifestation. It's elements
are earth, air, water, and fire. On Earth, after matter
had coalesced in spacetime had begun to quote unroll its
scroll of livingness, first density took about two billion years.
Then eighth density is also the beginning of the first
density of the next creation. It is both omega and alpha.
The spiritual mass of the infinite universe is becoming one

(28:16):
central son or creator once again. Then is born a
new universe, a new infinity, a new logos, which incorporates
all that the Creator has experienced of itself. So what
this sounds like to me is essentially the Big Bang
they're describing in the first density, right after after the
Big Bang has occurred, and now we actually have an Earth,
we have a place where consciousness can exist. Then going

(28:39):
through all these other densities through here to getting to
the eighth density is when it's snapped back together. Essentially,
if you look at UM, some of the their infinite
universe models that believe big bangs occur as expansion, and
then there's a collapsing back down into essentially one singularity,
and then another expansion, and then it just continues on
this cycle cycle of contraction and expansion. And that's one model.

(29:04):
And then also this has a lot in common with
the views of alchemical experts, right, alchemical scholars and the
great work. This is not the I think the point
we're making is this is not, by any means a
new idea. But also i'm Sorrow's defense, he's not really
saying it's a new idea either right, and it would

(29:27):
be it would be unfair of us to say that
he thinks he discovery. He does believe that he put
it all together in the right way, but he doesn't
claim that he did everything. Another another interesting part about
this in the digital age is that a lot of
his teachings or courses or videos or lessons or talks

(29:47):
have um a quantifiable aspect to them. It's not just
reach level, you know, reach this density, density x or whatever.
It's how to reach it in X amount of steps,
how to understand concept a in why amount of time?
And this clicks with a lot of people in today's

(30:09):
age where we want to we have so many things
to pay attention to or spend time on that we
want to know about how long it's going to take,
or how to measure our steps to success. As appealing
as sitting under a tree for an indeterminate length of
time to reach enlightenment may sound in theory, very few

(30:29):
people are doing it in practice or fewer now. You
can even see it in the furniture A lot of
us choose to purchase. If you if you imagine like
getting just some wood and making a table or you
could get the ikea one that has a list of
steps to follow, and then you've got yourself a table man.
And this kind of results based, quick, results based attitude

(30:51):
really plays into that kind of uh, you know, lightning
fast communication. Everyone's attention span is shorter than it's ever been.
We want everything in blurbs and nuge it's and like
give it to us quick. Even his videos, He's got
longer videos, but a lot of them are distilled down
until like ten or twelve minutes, a little sound bites
that are easier to digest for folks. So he's very

(31:11):
much aware of his audience. I would say, uh, they
are not easy to understand, at least as a layperson
who has not taken all the courses yet. I've attempted
to watch six videos today again like rewatching videos to
just understand some of the density stuff to understand, uh,
taking two to five seconds out of every like x seconds,

(31:31):
and the I don't understand a lot of the messages
will let me rephrase I I don't either. I guess
all I'm saying is that I'm at least able to
watch uh ten minutes of this stuff rather than you know,
two hours. And it's interesting because Massarrow's followers themselves, a
lot of them. We found some. There's a SoundCloud page
from bat Girl that interviews some folks from some of

(31:55):
these conferences. Um, they say that it's totally fine, did
not understand what the hell he's talking about. The message,
they say, is between the words, and that's another thing
you see with gurus or light masters throughout human history.
There's this idea that the leader functions as sort of

(32:15):
an antagonistic ror schack ink blot. You see what you
want to see and hear what you want to hear,
and you're always bad. You're always wrong, unless you're no
longer you. We'll be back after a word from our sponsor.

(32:38):
So Massorrow speaks often about interpreting vibrations, what he would
term his vibrations. His followers claim to be able to
interpret and internalize the vibrations he puts out, and they
feel that a lot of the content, or the message
or the enlightenment that he is conveying comes from these

(32:59):
vibrations more so than maybe the actual words. And this
quote should be on the jacket of of his first book.
It is you are a vibrator, and you are a
vibrator and you're vibrate. Okay, no, that is that is
a verbatim quote there, but he said that to me,
I'd slug him. Well in a way. He's kind of right, guys,

(33:21):
all of our energy just it's just vibrating. It's true,
physical matter is relatively illusory. Can we talk a little
about Sedona and just the scene in Sedona, like, not
with too much detail, but just in case anyone's not familiar.
And I really wish I had a chance to talk
to our coworker Julie Douglas, who just did kind of
a tour of that part of the country. But Sedona,

(33:42):
Arizona is kind of ground zero for a lot of
this New age teachings and self betterment through self actualization
and yoga, and they are all of these different retreats
and it is a really rife with these kinds of gurus.
And what makes it interesting to us is that it
feels like um a new approach to this kind of thinking,

(34:06):
or that this kind of recruitment or and it's a
it's an amalgamation of startup culture, which leads to that
other thing, right, is what's the difference between startup culture.
And what's the difference between you know, an old school cult,
because we do have in startup cultures. We see this
sent up in so many satirical pieces like Silicon Valley

(34:29):
or something. Uh. We see these commonalities. There is a
cult of personality, right, and there is a there is
a drive to dedicate oneself entirely to a cause, whether
it's making the you know, newest app to hand deliver
bags of artisanal badgers to people or you know, or

(34:50):
whether it's to figure out a way to have a
drone that will I don't know, bring you shoes and
pizza and pizza, you know, shoes and and like the
best startups, they begin with a product that that's kind
of tangible you can get, like Ben Bentino's teachings and
the videos. But then there's this much larger goal, Like

(35:12):
you said, Ben, it's down the road. Oh, I'm so
glad you mentioned this. Yes, because Massarrow's trinfinity, which which
Noel introduced earlier, is a step in a larger plan,
and his seminars and his speeches are part of a
much larger goal, a four phase plan to create an
enlightened society by twenty thirty five. So not that far

(35:35):
down enlightened, right, Let's hear from the man himself with
the work that I'm doing. What I'm trying to achieve,
quite frankly, as to have a one enlightened civilization by
two thousand five, to make it specific, so that gives
us twenty years to to share this message and in

(35:57):
many different kinds of ways, not just educational ways, but
also though in terms of products, inventions, technology, and education obviously,
so that everyone can start to act on their inspiration
and be guided by that higher intelligence which picks in
our heart in the sense of passion and excitement and inspiration.
When the whole world starts to listen to that impulse

(36:18):
and be aware of the fact that they are already
free beings, that they're already awake, powerful beings, then the
world would be amazing place to be. So steps along
the way in this plan include the creation of apps, film,
TV and record studios, VR technology and astral projection inducer. Yeah,

(36:43):
a couple of labs, and you know you could you
could ask yourself, is that astral projection inducer encouraging lucid dreams?
Or is it real remote viewing? The US government did
work on remote viewing for a long time. That is true,
uh publishing reliable, none love. You know, we have an
episode on it. I think that we want to interview

(37:05):
one of those guys one day. So if you're listening,
hit us up or you might be in the room now.
But they also have, interestingly, a system to foster open
contact with aliens. This all culminates in the construction of
something called Trinfinity City, a metropolis built in hopes of
being prepared for open interstellar contact, in contrast to the

(37:28):
clandestine contact that Massarrow believes has occurred in the past.
That might sound controversial, but he has plenty of beliefs
that might seem controversial to the mainstream. I wonder if
he and Stephen Greer have ever gotten together, because you know,
Stephen Greer's The Encounter of the Fifth Kind is all
about contacting aliens through meditation. It's also about you know,

(37:51):
getting gullible rich people to drop mad cash to go
on these excursions. Burn You have to wonder though, you
know from from what we hear, uh Mas Sorrow has
been controversial with other teachers other like other spiritual teachers.
We have examples of that, so I could see him

(38:11):
also being controversial with other secular leaders of movements as well.
And we have to give serious credit to be Scofield
again for this media article. It is very, very in depth,
UM and I recommend you guys seeking it out. Their clips,
their videos, their audio samples, all kinds of stuff. Because
she actually embedded herself in one of his groups under

(38:31):
an assumed name. UM. And you know we'll get to
this a little later, but the Trinfinity folks in Manteno
uh did publish a response UM to this article. UM.
But in the article she talks about the fact that
in his early days, he was invited to be part
of a collection of speakers UM by a group called

(38:56):
Sounds True, which I think is a really funny name
for organizations like this, Like, Wow, it sounds true. I
guess that it must be true. It's like a spiritual symposium.
Spiritual symposium, but I just feel like it's a it's
a little bit the name is is almost sounds sounds
a little jokey to me. But um he some of
the other speakers you might have heard of, Eckhart Totley,

(39:17):
who is much beloved, and I know people who I
find completely rational, intelligent people that are really into his stuff. Um,
but he kind of wanted to distance himself from these
types of folks and just sort of talked a lot
of trash and really did not want to be associated
with them anymore after this first UH symposium that he
was a part of, and wanted to kind of go

(39:37):
out on his own and make it all about him
and his specific teachings and not have to answer to
anyone else's world view and has a little cult leaders
to me, Yeah, well maybe it's just the question is
always do these people genuinely believe this stuff or is
it sort of a flame flam show are they Are

(39:57):
they objecting to the views of another spiritual leader because
they feel that those views are business competition, or they
objecting because they honestly believe it's wrong, you know, And
that's a question that's tough to answer. But we we
do know that we do know that he has several

(40:18):
beliefs that would be considered controversial, not just not just
controversial amongst spiritual peers, which of course he and his
followers believe he has none, but not just in the
sphere of the spiritual, but in the secular sphere as well.
One of the big ones is suppressed technology, which, for
the record, I'm not that. I'm not going out of

(40:39):
my way to unfairly defends someone that I've never met.
We do know suppress technology exists. We just now we're
just as a species arguing about the degree of suppression. Yeah,
Inventino's mind, we're decades, if not centuries behind with the
the known technology to the average consumer. Let's let's read

(41:02):
a quote here. We have bases on the Moon, a
bunch of slave colonies on Mars that have been mining
the asteroid belt. We have been colonizing galaxies of our
solar system. We haven't needed fossil fuels for the last
eighty years because we have anti graphic mechanisms. The Nazis
won the war. The U. S. Government gave up their control,

(41:23):
their governance, so we would not be exposed to free
energy devices. If free energy gets released and we're working
on it, and he's referring to tri Infinity Corps, it
changes everything. We've had free energy for eighty in years.
That is a direct quote. Also, mis Sorrow absolutely believes
in aliens, by which we mean extraterrestrials. Another quote would be,

(41:46):
don't be surprised that the aliens will meet and we
will meet them. Look like the things you see in movies.
Don't be like, oh, this story of this guy's nonsense,
because I've seen that in the movies. He just got
it from the movies. Well did he get it from
the movie or did the movies get it from then?
And this ties into belief that we've we've touched on

(42:06):
in the past where you'll see people arguing that there
is a large and largely hidden movement in pop culture
to acclimatize the general public with the idea of extraterrestrials
by making them a familiar trope in fiction. But the
issue for for me here is there's no evidence. This

(42:26):
isn't evidence based claims at all. It's it's just stuff
that that he says, taking it face value. UM. And
you know it goes so far as to say things
we talked about those density levels UM. Apparently UM. He
and his followers and he also has a very close
team that he keeps around him. UM talk about folks

(42:47):
like Buddha and Jesus being sixth maybe seventh density UM.
And againists from the medium articles and that's the density
of unity. But didn't see of unity exactly, but that
Benteno is at a if he just blows all of
those other spiritual leaders out of the water, that's not
even on the thing. It is the new Coming, It's

(43:08):
it's him and that that's one of the one of
the errors that Massorrow points out about Jesus Christ is
that Jesus, he says, it is pretty much well and good,
did some good stuff. I think he called him a
fabulous person, but he claimed he was the son of
God and not a God. So it's a differentiation there.

(43:30):
And the density stuff that Tranfinity ascribes to as an
organization does have, you know, the one to seven deputies,
with the eighth density being, as Matt said, forthcoming. You're
probably wondering how far this goes, folks. There are claims
of extraordinary powers as well, and several of his videos

(43:52):
Massorrow claims have supernatural powers that have come easily to him,
but there are reasons why he doesn't use them all
the time. He says, it's not more important that I'm
able to teleport and by locate and levitate and move
mountains at will. That's not what's most important to me,
because my soul knows that's easy it's not hard at all,

(44:12):
It's absolutely easy. So one of these powers would be
weather controls. Several of his followers claim he has the
ability to control weather to a degree, specifically UH stories
about dispersing clouds before they cause UH inclement weather or storms,
similar to UM William Reich attempting to bust clouds with

(44:34):
wargo and energy, but without the mechanisms or the artifacts
that Reich built. Is a quote from one of his
followers that we found that says, I've watched him control
the weather a lot of times. We'll be at a
party and I'll be like Nino, these clouds are not good.
It looks like rain. Within ten minutes they're gone. He
does it all the time. I've watched him move objects

(44:54):
on tables. I've seen him multiple times change whether or
move cloud. Of course, it's telekinesis also in their the
ability to move objects, specifically at a table, without physically
touching them. Um, magicians and skeptics in the crowd, I
am sure that you know the numerous ways in which

(45:17):
people can create things that appear to be that effect.
I'm not saying that MS sorrow is purpose. Again, I'm
not saying massarrows purposely misleading people. But I'm saying between
between physical manipulation and between credulous observers, it's very possible

(45:39):
for somebody to mistake something kind of mundane for something
like telekinesis. I think the next two are really interesting
because they are attributes often ascribed in Catholic doctrine to
saints and religious figures. So we've got something called by
location um, and what that is is the supposed phenomenon
of an individual dual being able to be in two

(46:01):
physical locations at the same time. Um. You, it's kind
of this isn't exactly the same thing, but it's kind
of like in the Catholic eucharist Um the concept of transubstantiation,
where supposedly the bread and the wine that you take
of actually transforms physically into the flesh and blood of
Jesus Christ. But more specifically, a really interesting example of
this is from a man by the name of Padre Pio,

(46:24):
who lived from eighteen eighty seven to nineteen sixty eight,
was an Italian friar, a cup Pushian priest um. He
suffered from stigmata wounds, and he was ultimately made a
saint and was said to possess the power of by
location to tell his quick story UM as a seminary student,
he claims to have teleported during prayer to the home

(46:46):
of a wealthy couple, where he witnessed a woman giving
birth to a child, a daughter Um, all the while
her husband lay dying. He claims the virgin Mary appeared
to him, told him she was entrusting this newborn child
to him and that he should take care of her.
PO asked how he would know her, and was told
that she'd find him first and they'd meet in Rome. Um.

(47:07):
Then it said the mother saw him leaving the room.
So supposedly the daughter gave confession to Po seventeen years
later in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, and that he
took her in and took care of her physically and spiritually.
A year later, seventeen year old girl. Often conflated with,
or closely related with, the concept of clara voyance, which

(47:30):
is not telling the future. It's realizing events that have
transpired in a way that would not normally be observable,
So it's sort of sending your mind or your awareness
to something. By location is different. By location is appearing right.
Either appearing in some sort of intangible but visible form

(47:51):
or appearing in a legitimate physical substance. So Massaris says
he can do this, but says it is not really
the point of his mission or his existence here on
this plane. He also says it's easy. It's so easy,
I could buy locate. Well, he doesn't. From his perspective,
he doesn't want it to distract from his actual calling,

(48:15):
sort of the same way that Anthony Hopkins doesn't want
you know, like Anthony Hopkins is acting and he's an
amazing actor, but his first love as piano, and that's
why he feels like he's here on earth. Massaro actually
claims to be purposely blocking these abilities because they are
not what he wants to be known for. And his
followers often say that, like with that quote, that they

(48:36):
have seen him do some of these I'm gonna call
him miracles, um, but never does he offer to demonstrate
them in any of his dozens and dozens of YouTube videos. Well,
you know, if they're really on that plan to buy
five have lightened society, what's going to have to happen
is Ventino is going to have to teleport, which is
the next thing we're gonna talk about in one of
his YouTube videos somehow or in public somewhere where people

(48:59):
have cameras on him, and then that's when he starts
getting three million followers, four million followers, then he can
really start changing society. So at this point, what we
have described are the aims of the organization, a brief
description of Massar himself, and we didn't We didn't talk
about his childhood. We didn't talk about some of the

(49:20):
criticisms of his personality that you could you could read
at length, and please, you know, read them with a
grain of salt, because we have to winner with the motivations.
The people might be sure that's that's being fair, but
we do know that former core staff members have talked
about darker sides of this. One said, I feel he

(49:41):
is setting people up for mass suicide. He talked about
the harvest. I always had a weird feeling about this,
And on the Somber nine, I want to say twenty seventeen,
one of Massarrow's longtime devoted students, a fellow named Brent Wilkins,

(50:01):
committed suicide by jumping off a cliff near the Midley
Bridge in Sedona, Arizona. And you can see news stories
about it. You can see some I don't know, some
different media mentions. But the thing is that for people
who opponents of this guy or this this movement, this

(50:22):
budding movement, this is taken to be a sign that
something is woefully rotten in the town of Sedona. However,
to be fair, it is, you know, it's it's difficult
to ascribe the exact cause for that suicide without more information.
Every suicide is a tragedy, and it may be that

(50:44):
Mr Wilkins was troubled for other reasons unrelated to his
involvement in the movement. But the reason this thing becomes
disturbing to people, whether they consider themselves neutral observers or
whether they consider themselves already prejudiced observers. The troubling thing

(51:04):
with this is that if is that we have seen
presidents before in the United States. The United States is
a hotbed of movements that, for one reason or another
got sour. I personally do not think it is fair,

(51:25):
nor do I think it is productive to call a
leader of a YouTube movement a new Jim Jones or
new David Koresh or new Charles Manson, because at this point,
thank god, no one has been murdered, right, But we
would be remiss if we did not mention that that
suicide occurred. And we would also be remiss if we

(51:49):
did mention this harvest concept And what what is it?
Is it a is it supposed to be a massive
spiritual awakening and ascension of the group. Yeah, it's weird
when you when you put whatever concept the harvest is
and you winded up with that enlightened society by goal,

(52:09):
like what is that? What is that? What the harvest
is like by harvesting all of the egos maybe so
that we're all enlightened. Maybe that's what he's talking about,
but that's just me thinking on the top of my head.
He did post on his Instagram page and exert from
a book about a yogi by the name of Sara
dama Um and in it it says, whatever the guru

(52:30):
does is correct. The guru is the self and he
cannot do wrong, even though his actions may well appear
to be wrong in the side of the world. If
it devotee sees the guru's actions is bad and thinks
badly of the Guru, bad power will come to the devotee.
If you think that whatever the guru does is correct,
then good power will come. So this is almost Nietzschean
and it's beyond good and evil idea. There's also there's

(52:54):
there's also a quote from an ex member named Gabby Petris,
who is able to go on record or with their name.
According to Petris, Massora predicts planet Earth is at the
crossroads of splitting into two planes of existence, high vibration
and fourth dimensional beings who embodied love, as do his students,
will ascend to a less physical realm featuring telepathic group consciousness,

(53:16):
low vibration, third dimensional beings that's you, me and Paul.
Now the massive cloud load vibration third dimensional beings who
embodied negativity are on a quote ship going down. So
there's nothing specific or physical here, right, I think that's
very important. There's no prediction of an imminent physical apocalyptic events. However,

(53:41):
for people who again are reading into this, there seems
to be a dark disturbance. And this is so new
that we you know, we're we're reporting on something that
is happening now. It's quite possible that it changes in
the future and we have to update it. For me, though,

(54:02):
the thing that's that's striking about this this guy is.
You know, when you think of a true guru or
a true leader, often they isshoe material things. But if
you check out this guy's Instagram, he is a big
time all about material things. He has you know, rented
million dollar mansions, and is you know, constantly taking selfies,

(54:27):
smoking fine cigars and posing shirtless in the mirror. I mean,
he is clearly quite into himself, and not to say
there's anything wrong with that, and in fact, part of
his rhetoric is that that is okay, and that that's
a part of it. You are a god, you know,
you are the best version of yourself. You should be
this kind of hedonism the idea of sort of pursuing

(54:49):
your bliss, I guess, but it doesn't quite jive with
his you know, sort of self actualization kind of. But
it actually, actually it gives perfectly. And I'll tell you why.
There's a video on their on the Trnfinity page called
Meet Bentino mas Sorrow, a Spiritual Teacher for the Next Generation.

(55:11):
Here is a quote from that video and it's Bentino
talking after after it has him like a set up
to the video. Then it has a long montage of
like uh a dance party, rave kind of thing in
the middle of wherever it is that they're having this
talk along like slow motion dance party. Then it cuts
back to Bentino and he says this technically, feeling good

(55:34):
is your only job because when you feel good, literally
everything else takes care of itself. Now, this doesn't mean
that we don't take action, we don't act on our visions.
It simply means that without feeling good first, you're not
even in the same wave wavelength as inspiration. You cannot
get access to thoughts that offer solutions instead of problems,
joy instead of depression. So in order to be in

(55:56):
the proper state, all you have to do is be
in the moment, tune into yourself, and ask yourself intuitively,
what is the most exciting thing I could be thinking
of or doing right now? So I think for me,
that's that purposely perfectly embodies smoking a fine cigar, hanging
out in a mansion using the money that I got

(56:18):
from these donations, I'm doing what's making me happy right now.
And yet he pushes fasting on his followers, where he
says they can only drink grape juice and it shouldn't
need any food or water. It just it just kind
of feels like the rules don't apply to him. That's
all I'm saying. It's really important that I put this
in here, because gosh, those folks, as you're listening, you're
wondering why one of us doesn't say this. This is

(56:39):
spot on with l Ron Hubbard, a k a. The
commodore in scientology. This is spot on with the pigs
in animal farm. There is a very it's very there
is any convenience of equality, equality for me because I
get it, because I'm in on it. That's why I'm

(57:00):
in charge, right. And the people who are in the
fasting programs are not experiencing this kind of joy. What
they're experiencing our chronic health problems. Their teeth are falling out,
their hair is falling out. And this is similar to
things you'll hear like the Scientology's infamous niae in treatments. Yeah,

(57:20):
or the whole or the whole. Right, So we we
want to be I want to be as fair as
possible with this, but that is that is paradoxical, and
it does stick out and paradoxical as a word that
Mussorrow uses in his own defense because as we mentioned earlier,
at the top of the show. We we felt it

(57:44):
necessary to give you a couple of excerpts from Trinfiniti's
reply to this article. The blog post was called our
first official response to the cult accusations quote. At some
point something like this was gonna rise. It always does
for people in my community. I encourage you to exhibit
no anger or judgment towards the author. That's nice. You

(58:07):
could pick the most saintly figures in history, and if
you really wanted to, you could pick them apart and
reassemble them to meet any agenda you may have in
how you wish to think of them. There's an important
part there too, where they say the author of this
article was out to create a false sensationalist peace, and
my transparency and paradoxical but innocent expressions over the years

(58:28):
made this an easy picture for her to paint. It says,
I am not an abuser, and I am not out
to gain power over others. But decide for yourself if
I have any upset over this. It is for the
people who have put in tremendous effort and commitment to
applying the work and elevating their lives and are now
left represented as people who have no ability to discern
and are lost in their following of me. And then

(58:49):
he goes on to say that calling it a cult
is quite an assertion to make and honors no one. Uh.
There is ever so much more to an entity than
meets the eye. This is part of the message I
is to embody through my occasionally paradoxical appearances. Never judge
the surface of any situation, person or motivation. In fact,
never judge at all. See beyond the surface and be free,

(59:11):
be love. And I do want to say too that
in UM the SoundCloud page from that girl that you
can find UM, there's an interview with one of the
followers and the person very casually asks how they feel
about being referred to as a cult, and the person says, well,
it's a cult. That's a cult I want to be in. Yah.

(59:32):
You know there's that there's a lot of positivity that
you will see at least again, I'm not I'm trying
not to judge them on the surface, but on the
surface there seems to be a ton of positivity and
things that you would want to take away that feel good.
Like that when we were talking about you know, uh,
find joy and pursue joy and everything else is going

(59:53):
to fall into place. That sounds great, Yeah, but what
how do we define joy? A great deal of you
and tragedy is people selfishly pursuing something that brings joy
to them at the expense and the physical emotional danger
of others. People are selfish dicks, It's true. And this
leads us to some questions. Is it's a shame. There's

(01:00:14):
a lot of stuff we didn't get to today, folks,
but we're running a little long, so we may have
to come back for an update. As we said this,
this is developing. We hope that we have fairly represented
both the concerns and the claims in here. So as
Matt said, not to judge at the surface, but these
things sound inspiring, hopeful, and even attainable. And Matt, you, uh,

(01:00:40):
you dropped the quote here in their notes that I
want to give you the honor of Oh yeah. Well, basically,
what he's saying is let your passion guide you follow
your dreams, right. Uh. For some people, it means I'll
finally make that podcast about badger bags that I've been
talking about for the last two years. For others, it
means I will become the next top chef. I feel
like it you took an indirect shot at me there,

(01:01:00):
buddy the Badger Bags podcast. It's coming man, And I
think you can follow your passion one day and you're
gonna be able to do it. I believe both of you,
even you and your current gaseous state. Oh thank you
so much. But but the question I wanted to leave
here is with these kinds of teachings, they are very
positive for somebody who has an aspiration that is positive

(01:01:21):
for other people or even for themselves, but it's not
gonna harm anybody else. What if somebody's joy that they're
really following kind of the point that Ben made earlier,
What if their joy is harming other people? What if
they're the most exciting thing they could be doing right
now is a brutal crime. Have you guys heard of
McCamy manner no M A N O R Right. Yeah.

(01:01:44):
It's like an extreme haunted house that was in San
Diego for a long time where they like kidnap you
and and you and shave your head and force feeds
you horrible things. This is a really extreme example. But
the guy that runs it, his last name is McCamy
um he videos everything. Everyone that comes in there, they
all come in there willingly waiver that that totally signs

(01:02:07):
away all their rights to sue. There's no safe word.
You're in there until he's done with you, and he's
up in your face the whole time, you know, getting
footage of you being brutalized and tortured. And some people
sign up and come back and do it again. I'm
not saying that its directly with This is Life, but
it's sort of an extreme example that I think warrants
comparison because, like you're saying, if people will willingly submit

(01:02:30):
to something that is not ultimately good for them, right,
and especially given the promise of uh, something new, you know,
something different, something beyond, something beyond understandable, like the same
reason people open the Limma Hunt configuration in hell Raiser exactly.
Pushing yourself as far as possible, whether spiritually or physically. Yeah,

(01:02:55):
quite possibly. I mean we know that for many people,
many for many people, joy emotions in general are complex,
often difficult to discern things. We have questions for you
as well. We'd like to hear from you. Do you
think what's your take on these sorts of movements and

(01:03:19):
how they exist in the digital age? Are they harmless?
New iteration of some tale as old as time? To
steal the line from Beauty and the Beast. Is there's
something new that's fundamentally changing them? And if so, how
is it for the better? Is it for the worst?
Is it dangerous? Do you consider this movement and things

(01:03:40):
like it a cult as our author bestco Field clearly does,
and this one I really want to know. Do you
have any other examples for us? And also have you
been to Mussarrow Retreat or maybe been to a talk
or you know, and you feel like you've come out
with something positive? And Europe? Hey with everything? Is the

(01:04:01):
author being unfair? Yeah? Are we being unfair? Let us
know righte to us on social media. We've got conspiracy
stuff on Facebook and Twitter, conspiracy stuff show on Instagram,
and um, if you don't want to do any of
that stuff, just write to us the old fashioned way
through an email. We are conspiracy at how stuff works

(01:04:21):
dot com.