David Farrier - Conspiracies, Cults, and Investigating Arise Church - Trust Me: Cults, Extreme Belief, and Manipulation

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Trust me? Do you trust me?

Speaker 2 (00:04):
I ever lead you astray?

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Trust?

Speaker 2 (00:06):
This is the truth, the only truth.

Speaker 3 (00:09):
If anybody ever tells you to just trust them, don't
welcome to trust me. The podcast about colts, extreme belief
and manipulation from two Dark Tourists who've actually experienced it.
I am low La Blanc of course, and I'm Meg
and Elizabeth of course. Questions, Sorry, it's a question, who
are you really, Megan?

Speaker 4 (00:29):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (00:29):
Today our guest is David Ferrier, journalist and filmmaker known
for documentaries like Tickled and the Netflix series Dark Tourists.
He'll tell us about some of his work studying strange
subcultures and conspiracy theorists and what he's learned along the way,
and then he'll delve into his investigation into a Rised Church,
the largest megachurch in New Zealand, and its former leader,
John Cameron.

Speaker 5 (00:48):
He'll explain how his interviews with ex members revealed the
church's systemic patterns of demanding unpaid internships with extreme work
hours that led to multiple memory having mental breakdowns, and
the financial exploitation and sexual assault cover ups that occurred.
Will learn how it all got exposed and what became

(01:10):
of the church afterwards.

Speaker 3 (01:12):
Plus a couple of tangents, including one about Hell House,
the evangelical run haunted house that simulates how to scare
you into joining. There's so much to get into, and
we have to go there. We will talk more about it,
but before we do, Megan, what's your cultiest.

Speaker 2 (01:26):
Thing of the week.

Speaker 5 (01:28):
Well, my cultiest thing this week is actually kind of
pro cults, okay, go on, which growing up, you know,
felt a little sad, but as an adult, I've just
kind of kept it. And reflecting on this past holiday season,
I realized I kind of love it. Why because I
can go to some a few Christmas parties I accidentally

(01:49):
missed yours, actually, but I can like go to some
Christmas parties, get a few things, you know here and there,
enjoy lights and stuff. But like, I don't have to
buy my family Christmas gifts. They don't have to buy
me Christmas grifts. I just tell my friends, don't get
me a Christmas gift. I don't want it, I don't care.

(02:09):
Just the financial strain people go through for Christmas actually
breaks my heart.

Speaker 4 (02:13):
So I've bout out of it.

Speaker 5 (02:16):
Thank you two by twos for giving me one perk
in life, which is that I don't have to buy
what essentially is.

Speaker 4 (02:24):
A car every year.

Speaker 3 (02:26):
For people, I think I forgot you were like Jehovah's witnesses,
Like you just didn't do Christmas.

Speaker 4 (02:32):
No Christmas, no Easter.

Speaker 5 (02:33):
We were allowed to do holidays that didn't have to
do with Jesus, like we had birthdays and stuff. But okay,
the two by twos would say, every day is Jesus's birthday,
and I celebrate him every day. But oddly I was
allowed And I don't know if this was for most
people and the two by twoes, but I was allowed
to celebrate Halloween. Thank gosh, thank gosh, thank God, thank gosh.

(03:00):
You know, like a lot of people who weren't even
that Christian weren't allowed to love he Alloween.

Speaker 2 (03:05):
I don't know, Harry Potter.

Speaker 5 (03:07):
I was allowed to dress like a wedge and like,
that's so surprising, it's so strange. But like as soon
as Christmas rolled around, it was like, no, no to that.

Speaker 2 (03:15):
Well, I love that for you.

Speaker 5 (03:17):
Thinks I am free from the financial burden of Christmas
and that, my friend, is gift enough for me.

Speaker 2 (03:27):
Oh it's beautiful.

Speaker 5 (03:29):
What about you? What's your cultist thing.

Speaker 3 (03:31):
Well, I learned about a cult that I did not
know about. I mean, and tell me if I'm wrong
and just completely eracist from my memory? Have we talked
about the Summum cult in Utah?

Speaker 4 (03:43):
Okay?

Speaker 3 (03:43):
I was at a party, randomly walked by some girl
and I hear her saying do you know what the
Zizzians are? To someone else? And I stopped and interrupted
and was like.

Speaker 2 (03:52):
Oh, the Cizians. That cult would kill people.

Speaker 3 (03:54):
And then we started talking about cult and she was like,
what about the some you guys know about that? And
I was like, well, I don't know what that is.
And it's this new religious movement in Salt Lake that
has a fucking pyramid, because okay, let me let me
give you an overview here.

Speaker 2 (04:10):
It began in nineteen seventy five.

Speaker 3 (04:12):
The owner, of course, had an encounter with beings he
described as Samma individuals blah blah blah. They gave him
mama individual no idea, but I think it's like an
alien or an angel or whatever the fuck like as mystical.

Speaker 2 (04:24):
But those are the same thing. Okay, gat got you.

Speaker 3 (04:29):
So their advanced beings is what they are. So he
founded the someone in order to share this gift with others,
and they began selling wine they call the Wine Nectar publications.
But one of the primary tenets of this group is mummification,
and he himself was mummified by the group. He died

(04:49):
in two thousand and eight. His body is encased inside
a bronze mammaform casket that's covered in gold and stands
inside the group's pyramid. If you go on their website,
it offers mummification as an option for your loved one,
and I'm going to read some of the offerings to
you right now. A very thorough detailed, yet gentle process
that allows one to be memorialized for eternity. Mummification is

(05:12):
the only form of permanent preservation. The rights of mummification
of transference allow you to leave this life in as
beautiful a manner as possible.

Speaker 2 (05:20):
Blah blah blah.

Speaker 3 (05:21):
A synthesis of medical technology, modern chemistry, and esoteric art. Oh,
they have a rights preserved symbol after what they've termed
modern mummification. And the current costs for a human is
sixty seven thousand dollars. Within the continental US. You have
the option of choosing an artistic mamma form or a
capsule mammiform. They vary widely in costs, from tens of

(05:44):
thousands of dollars to well over one hundred thousand dollars,
depending on how elaborate it is.

Speaker 5 (05:49):
Why wouldn't you just get yourself taxi dermaid? Right, I've
thought about that. I feel like that'd be a fun
way to go. Yeah, it's like, what six hundred dollars? Okay,
that'st effective.

Speaker 4 (06:05):
Okay.

Speaker 5 (06:06):
Why do they think the mummification process matters? It's like
a spiritual, like kind of Egyptian thought process. I don't know,
it's all this is an episode. It seems like, yeah.

Speaker 3 (06:21):
They're just like that's what they that's what the beings
told them, and that's what they landed on. And so
you can drink their wine or you can purchase their
mummification services, and that is how they are surviving as
a group.

Speaker 5 (06:34):
You know what, I'm going to start with the wine,
even though I'm sober. Oh, I'm going to start with
the momification.

Speaker 2 (06:39):
What I mean?

Speaker 3 (06:42):
But I think you can like visit and like see
the pyramid. I'm like, how, as a person partially from Utah,
did I not know this existed?

Speaker 2 (06:48):
This is like a place in Salt Lake.

Speaker 5 (06:50):
I think we should go visit it called road trip. Yeah,
road trip, I think that should be one of our
first YouTube's. Oh, our first YouTube.

Speaker 4 (06:59):
Let's do it.

Speaker 3 (07:00):
We're gonna do YouTube, you guys, it's gonna happen.

Speaker 4 (07:03):
Yeah, let's do that.

Speaker 5 (07:05):
And then I just wanted to shout out, are you
done talking about this pyramid? Or yeah, I'm so done
talking about this, because I just wanted to say that
David's a part of something that I've been really interested in.
It started last year a few two by twos, I know,
talk Data. It's the Decult Conference in New Zealand. It's
the first cult awareness summit in the region, bringing together

(07:27):
survivors and researchers. So, you know, New Zealand's pretty isolated.
It's pretty easy for some cults to gain a lot
of traction there because isolation is one of the first
things colts right off of. So David so cool, He's
part of it. He's such an interesting dude. And yeah,
what a what a life, what a career, what a

(07:48):
crazy fascinating I'm excited for you all to hear them.

Speaker 4 (07:50):
Should we jump in with them?

Speaker 2 (07:51):
Let's jump on in welcome David Ferrier to trust me
in person.

Speaker 1 (08:08):
Thank you, it's nice to be here.

Speaker 2 (08:09):
Nice to have you here.

Speaker 1 (08:10):
I love your space, I love your bookshelf. I love
the plants.

Speaker 3 (08:13):
Oh god, thank you so much. We're not responsible for
most of those things, but.

Speaker 1 (08:16):
Just take credit for it.

Speaker 2 (08:18):
The one thing he didn't say was the people.

Speaker 1 (08:20):
So I'm about to learn about the people, you know.
I don't want to go too soon.

Speaker 3 (08:27):
Yeah, okay, you have so much rich career history. We
have to talk a little bit about that. How did
you start doing journalism on weird dark Shit?

Speaker 1 (08:39):
Yeah, it started in as you can tell from the accident,
it started in New Zealand, probably in about two thousand
and five when I graduated from journalism school. And I
was super lucky in that New Zealand is so small.
We have five million people, so we only have two newsrooms.
You can really work in television, and I ended up
in one of those, and I ended up with basically

(09:00):
the job of filling in the sort of late news
arts and entertainment slot, which is basically means I could
do a two minute story on whatever I wanted, And
so I just gravitated down to sort of like do
you know Louis throw do you know who work? Yeah?
So I obsessively watched his stuff around this time, and
so my whole brain is just like, yeah, why I

(09:22):
do a similar thing to Louis but in New Zealand,
and so I gravitated to those kind of stories.

Speaker 4 (09:27):
Who is Louis?

Speaker 1 (09:29):
He's like British me, He's he's much better. I'm not
being modest. He's really good at what he does. And
he makes these documentaries where he's very he's in the
scene and he's When he started doing his work, there
was this idea in documentary that he had to be
the sort of gods I view and not be too
like participatory in it, whereas he would get involved. So

(09:51):
he would go to a swingers party to learn about
swingers and he would join in, or he'd learn about
porn stars in LA and he'd go and audition to
be a porn.

Speaker 2 (10:00):
He was with the Westboro Baptist Church, recalling he was.

Speaker 1 (10:04):
The one that really put Westboro Baptist on the map,
like his documentaries were the ones that put them out there.
So I love his work so much, and he gets
very culty and very very niche kind of subjects.

Speaker 3 (10:16):
And he's so cute, non threatening that everyone just like
takes to him.

Speaker 1 (10:20):
Yeah, that's exactly it. Because he's got this really soft
British voice, and so when he comes to America to
do his work, people don't really know what to make
of him, and so he can put forth really offensive,
intense questions to a Nazi, say, and they don't know
that he's being confrontational. They just think, oh, he's this
cute little British man, okay, which is kind of what

(10:42):
I do in America a little bit as well. Now,
whereas I think my New Zealand accent, some people don't
know what to do with it, and it can be
really helpful when you're in confrontational situations. So fast forward
to twenty fourteen. I've been in the newsroom for maybe
almost a decade, and I left to make my first

(11:02):
feature documentary, Tickles, and that was kind of where I
went really leaned into that Louis way of just trying
to be never confrontational but just curious. And I was
up against some sort of pretty horrific Americans and I
was in their faces, but I was doing it in
a very gentle way, and that kind of made the

(11:23):
whole documentary work.

Speaker 5 (11:24):
I mean that was about my ex boyfriend was obsessed
with that documentary.

Speaker 2 (11:28):
Everybody was yeah, yeah, it was like, I mean.

Speaker 5 (11:30):
I liked it, it was great, but like he was
obsessed with.

Speaker 4 (11:37):
Tickle.

Speaker 3 (11:38):
It was about competitive tickling, right for people who was
kind of yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (11:42):
It was essentially I noticed it was a very it's
a very strange story to explain, but essentially, young men
from all around the world were being flown to Los Angeles.
So there were New Zealanders being flown in and they
would take part in competitive endurance tickling. So they were
all in Adida Sports where they'd tie each other down
and they would tickle, and the whole thing was marketed

(12:04):
as this sort of sport. And I reached out from
New Zealand, going I'd love to do a little story
on this interesting thing because New Zealand is a taking
part and really quickly I got a response, we will
never deal with a homosexual journalist, and so that obviously
googled me, seeing that I was in a relationship with
a man at the time, and we're like and so
I was like, this is the gayest shit I my life,

(12:28):
Like what And so I was like Oh, there's something
weird going on. It's not just a tickling competition. And
so I started sort of pushing deeper in and then
about a month into that, they said, we're flying two
lawyers from New York to New Zealand to talk with
you about why you shouldn't do this documentary.

Speaker 2 (12:46):
Wow, two straight lawyers, too straight?

Speaker 1 (12:48):
You're very straight? Now, very straight? One of them did
seem quite gay, actually, but I didn't bring that up.
So that started this really insane journey that ended up
with me coming to America my tiny little crew and
having some really intense you know, this movie got to
be about not just tickling. It goes like quite dark,

(13:08):
and again that Louis throa thing of just trying to
be disarming and just being like, hey, this seems like
a really abusive situation happening right now, and sort of
doing it in a very low key way that seemed
to work for the tone we ended up with.

Speaker 3 (13:23):
Yeah, and so then you created a series where you got.

Speaker 2 (13:27):
To do more of that.

Speaker 1 (13:28):
I did. Yeah. So out of that, out of Tickled
made Darkturist for Netflix, which was basically a show looking
at dark tourism, where the whole concept of dark tourism
being instead of going on a beautiful holiday somewhere to
a resort, people get a kick out of going somewhere
where something awful has happened. So they might go to
you know, Chernobyl, or they might go to somewhere where

(13:49):
there's been some horrific massacre, or we ended up in
a radioactive zone in Japan, and so we were looking
at the types of people attracted to these places and
also the type of people monetizing these tragedies to make
a tourist attraction out of them. And so that was
an eight part show which was insane to make and

(14:10):
I feel incredibly lucky to have made it. And then
from there, I made another documentary about a strange, kind
of unusual man called Michael Organ in New Zealand, and
I made that for Netflix, and that's another kind of
story about a man who's kind of pulling the strings,
which is very similar to what Tickled was. Yes, And
now I make a podcast called Flight This Bird about

(14:31):
the weird parts of America. And when I'm not doing that,
I write an investigative journalism newsletter which kind of delves
into stuff that I feel you guys talk a lot
about which is a lot of culty, mainly within religion
and specifically within Christianity, because that was my background. I
grew up in the church, and so and where brom

(14:52):
I started exploring some sort of high control religions, specifically
in New Zealand, because those churches mimicked a lot of
American models. There was a lot of crossover, I think,
and so my readership on webwerem as i'd say, half
New Zealand half American.

Speaker 3 (15:08):
Oh interesting, Yeah, you have written so much about conspiracy theories.
I clicked on that sort of page you have of
all of the articles.

Speaker 1 (15:17):
Yeah, there were so many. Yeah, that's the other thing
that's right. Before sort of high control religions, webworm was
very focused on conspiracy content. And that's because I was
in New Zealand when COVID hit and New Zealand took
a very lockdown approach. So our government was very like,

(15:38):
let's not let COVID in. Let's try and keep this
away for as long as possible and save as many
lives as possible. And when that happened, a bunch of
little factions sort of popped up in New Zealand of
really extreme what we saw the world over but really
extreme skepticism towards vaccines, And then we saw things like QAnon.

(16:00):
Deep into New Zealand, people were attacking five G cell
towers because they thought that COVID was combining with five
gs somehow magically, and that was the vector. So I
got really intrigued by looking at you know, why are
New Zealanders who are these really seen as quite rational,
sort of down to earth people. Why are we getting

(16:22):
no offense to Americans, but why are we going Americas americanized?
So I was really curious about that.

Speaker 4 (16:29):
Interesting.

Speaker 3 (16:30):
What is it in you like what draws you to
these topics?

Speaker 1 (16:34):
I think I So I grew up in quite a
like a very not very like a reasonably conservative kind
of Christian home. So I had a very sheltered upbringing,
so I wasn't really exposed to like a lot of
secular music, and it was a very kind of black
and white world. And so when I went to university

(16:55):
to study journalism, I just it's a typical thing. You
go to university and you discover there's a whole other
world out there.

Speaker 2 (17:01):
You heard a rock song for the first time.

Speaker 1 (17:03):
Kind yeah, to be honest, kind of it was a
bit like that, and I was like, oh my god,
there's this whole other world. And I think instead of
just sort of dabbling, I sort of combined that with
my interest in journalism of being like, this is an
amazing way to tell stories about these really niche areas
of society and I get to selfishly dabble in those
and sort of see what they're all about. I found

(17:24):
that really fun. I love the idea of bringing those
things to a screen in New Zealand. And then that
just kind of snowballed into almost everything I do, which is, yeah,
just treating everything with curiosity and every day I kind
of can't believe. I mean, you just would be the
same thing with what you do. It's that you can't
believe what you're seeing in front of you. Yeah, so
how is this happening? Like why is it happening? And

(17:46):
I just kind of want to get to the bottom
of all of.

Speaker 4 (17:48):
That stuff totally.

Speaker 3 (17:49):
Well, we want to ask you about a rised church,
but I just feel because there's so much conspiracy content
on your website, like, yeah, do you have any per
particular thoughts on how to engage with conspiracy theorists or
why or how it happens a big question.

Speaker 1 (18:07):
Yeah, I think that's the stuff we're all kind of
trying to grapple with. And I think I think it's
most simple. Like people that are drawn into these conspiracy
kind of rabbit holes, I see it as in a
very similar way to people that are drawn into certain religions.
It's a simple answer to something that's incredibly complicated, and
I think that's I feel like that's an idea that

(18:29):
we've sort of gotten a bit more used to now
since the pandemic, and I think a lot of people
have sort of taken more interest in going, why are
people talking about these crazy things? And I think it
really is that simple. I think it's just people look
at this very scary, confusing world and it's much easier
to go, oh, there's this giant thing behind the scenes

(18:50):
pulling all the strings, and that is an explanation that
kind of lets you off the hook for how crazy
the world is. And then I think once you go
down that road, it's a bit like religion, where once
you're kind of locked into it, it's really hard to
get yourself out of it, because to get yourself out
of it, you've got to admit that maybe some of
my ideas were not correct, and that's really embarrassing. Yeah,

(19:14):
like it's really embarrassing to come out of that.

Speaker 4 (19:16):
We had an ex q and on remember was he
from New Zealand.

Speaker 1 (19:19):
Oh god, he might have been let's just say Australia.

Speaker 4 (19:24):
Put it on in Australia.

Speaker 2 (19:26):
I can't remember.

Speaker 5 (19:27):
Yeah, but he you know, it was something he really
bonded with his father over. So then to say, oh,
I don't believe this anymore was like a fraction in
that relationship that he at the time of our interview
was not able to repair.

Speaker 1 (19:40):
So he's like lost his father exiting from that, which
is like horrific. That stuff horrible and people are it
is also that thing of it is a social thing.
I think, especially during the pandemic, people found themselves on
message boards and group chats and it was something we
have all got this common language to talk about out.
And also I think it's this idea that you're solving

(20:03):
a puzzle, because once you go down a conspiracy rabbit hole,
it's like you're being a detective and you're trying to
like solve the and you're swapping information. It's so exciting.

Speaker 3 (20:12):
It seems exciting to me, Yeah, I'm going to solve
the like all of the world's problems with one easy answer,
which ends up being actually many complicated answers because of
the mental gymnastics that you have to do.

Speaker 2 (20:23):
But like, yeah, it seems fine.

Speaker 1 (20:25):
Speaking about mental gymnastics. I feel like the way I've
noticed people get out of it mainly, you know, often
it's just coming to these conclusions on your own. And
what it feels like to me with people i've observed
sort of snapping out of it is the logic just
goes a step too far, Like it literally gets a
bit too crazy, and if one bit of information gets

(20:46):
a bit too intense, the rest of that kind of
structure can shatter. And so there's a technique that I
was told sort of if you've got a friend or
a loved one that's deep down the rabbit hole, instead
of just sort of arguing with them endlessly. I believe
I might be wrong on this. I think the term
is like steel manning, and so instead of like trying
to like poke holes in their argument, you basically just

(21:09):
you just ask some questions, like it's straw manning, that's the.

Speaker 5 (21:13):
Usual everyone, Yeah, that's steel is like building up their argument.

Speaker 1 (21:17):
Yeah, yes, you lean into it and you go, oh, okay,
so nine to eleven, you know, you know, so how
were the bombs planted in the building? You know, the
steel being just you just get them to explain things
more and more, and the more people explain it, eventually
they might get to a point where as they try
and explain this thing in this conspiratorial way, their own

(21:39):
explanation is a step too far for them when they
start to kind of like get stumped.

Speaker 3 (21:43):
It is interesting how once something is verbalized, it becomes
more real in a way, a completely When you're just
in your head, it seems more plausible.

Speaker 1 (21:51):
Yeah, completely one. And I think you can have things
buzzing around in your head that seem logical. You try
and explain it to someone and that's where you see
your arguments starting to fall over.

Speaker 2 (22:01):
Therapy.

Speaker 1 (22:04):
Yeah, yeah, that's journalists journal to be doing.

Speaker 3 (22:07):
Well, look at what I've written, I'm like, I am
kidding myself, ridiculous.

Speaker 1 (22:12):
Yeah yeah, totally.

Speaker 2 (22:14):
Well love that insight, thank you.

Speaker 4 (22:16):
Yeah, that's a good one.

Speaker 3 (22:17):
Yeah, So tell us how you came to investigate a
Rise church.

Speaker 1 (22:22):
So a Rise is New Zealand's or was New Zealand's
biggest megachurch. So you've got Hillsong here in America that
was is do you know Hillsong. Oh, yeah, it's a
big one. It's less big now, it's kind of fracturing.
But Hillsong was actually founded by originally by a New
Zealander and so the model of Hillsong was a New
Zealand idea got exported to America kind of came back

(22:45):
to New Zealand. And so in New Zealand, we have
a bunch of these big charismatic Pentecostal churches and they're
largely seem pretty like not very offensive. From the outside.
They look very like the congregations families. It's a lot
of white people. It's very generic, and they're not particularly

(23:06):
loud about anything politically. They're just getting on with what
they do. And so in New Zealand there's a few
churches that do get criticized. One of them is an
incredibly culty church called Destiny Church, which is it's largely
not white, so it's a large Maldi population in there
and Pacific population, and so that church sort of because

(23:29):
they're loud, because they stand out and they're not generically white,
they get criticized by the media all the time for
some of their some of they are incredibly the leadership
is incredibly manipulative and awful. And so while that criticism
was happening, I was looking at these other churches that
were much bigger that we're getting zero criticism, and I

(23:51):
sort of became curious about what those churches were doing
and whether their behavior was like hell Song, And so
I started talking to x men and certainly interns that
had volunteered and given their time, and just found this
incredibly manipulative system where the leaders of that church was

(24:12):
the leader John Cameron and his wife. They were so manipulative,
and they had church members so under their fingers they
people felt they couldn't leave. The interns were burning out
and giving so much of their time. There were sexual
assault allegations just being swept under the carpet, all the
stuff that you probably if you've looked at these churches,

(24:32):
you're kind of like, oh, of course, But at the
time in New Zealand three years ago, it was just
completely unknown. And so when I started writing about that,
the whole thing kind of blew up and it became
a big story in New Zealand. It was on the
six o'clock news, was in all our newspapers as more
and more interns came out going yeah that we had
a horrific time here and this was awful and it

(24:53):
led to the resignation of the leadership. John Cameron left,
which was great, and that church's fractured. But of course
what has happened and literally in the last six months
is those leaders have now opened up churches across the
ditch in Australia and they're using the same model just
to start again, which is I feel like something we

(25:13):
see in so many of these places right again and again.

Speaker 2 (25:16):
And what is the model? Is it like a lot
of live music.

Speaker 1 (25:21):
It's yeah, so's it's happy clappy, very modern. They have
a really slick band. So you walk into this church
and they're very targeted at youth, and so they do
a lot of their recruitment at university open days. They'll
get students who are maybe a bit like lost and
looking for a community and they'll say, hey, we're having

(25:42):
like a big pizza night this night down the road,
come and join in, and.

Speaker 5 (25:46):
So they joined it, yep, going yeah, So it's.

Speaker 1 (25:51):
Like it's that thing. It's like, oh, yeah'll do this thing.
It seems cool and fun, and so they have a
huge turnover. But they basically get young people and they
use them to staff all of their church services and
do all the hard work for no money. And they're
just getting volume in, just more and more people, and
then of course pressuring them to tithe ten percent, because

(26:12):
that's what the Bible says, you know, And these are
students that have student loans and can't afford it. Some
of them stay and keep tithing for years and get
taken into church leadership. And I would see it as
a slow brainwashing essentially that happens over time. And so
some of the people I spoke to had been at
a Rise for almost two decades and they're just left

(26:32):
and we're like, this is just my whole life was
this place, Yeah, and I don't know what I am
without it.

Speaker 3 (26:38):
Did you write that not only were they unpaid, but
they were paying separate from the tithing as well.

Speaker 1 (26:45):
Some of them were paying for leadership courses within the church,
so they're like paying in for that.

Speaker 4 (26:51):
I hate, I hate, I hate it.

Speaker 1 (26:54):
It's a whole Yeah, it was just a whole built
in system that no journalists in New Zealand had really
looked at before. It was very critical of these other
smaller churches that were like much. They stood out because
they were minorities that were there, and so you know,
the media always tends to focus on those kinds of people,
whereas this white, seemingly perfect place was never touched. It

(27:18):
was much worse and much higher volumes than the other
churches that were typically criticized.

Speaker 4 (27:24):
This is just an aside.

Speaker 5 (27:26):
Is it harder to get into these communities in New
Zealand where you can't use the accent as like a.

Speaker 1 (27:34):
The trouble I have in New Zealand is because it's
so small, and because I've been in the media for
a long time, people sort of know who I am,
and so yeah, walking into these churches becomes more difficult.
These people are going to close up. So with my
reporting and to a rise, it was mostly talking to
former members, meeting up with them, not actually going into
the church itself, but really talking to people that had

(27:57):
been in there or that were still in there and
thinking of leaving, and getting the story out of them
that way.

Speaker 3 (28:14):
Well, tell us a little bit more about the internships,
because you know, most churches I know have like volunteering
that some people are doing, but rarely do I hear
about this many people having like mental breakdowns due to
the amount of time they're spending.

Speaker 2 (28:29):
Can you talk about that?

Speaker 1 (28:30):
It was just they really, you know, what they had
over these young people sort of you know, seventeen eighteen, nineteen,
twenty years old, is that they had convinced them that
this church was going to get them into heaven and
it was going to give them a better life, and
to have the best life you could have, you had
to follow their leader, John Cameron, Like everything he said

(28:52):
was you know, godlike almost you know, and at conferences
he'd have his own green room and you weren't allowed
to look them in the eye. Everything was like insanely structured.
So he almost had the celebrity status within the church,
which in New Zealand is so unusual because we're so
low key. We don't really do celebrity. We have some
famous rugby players maybe, but like people don't really care otherwise,

(29:16):
And so the fact you had that power over them
was kind of amazing. And then you know, when you're
told by your church that the way to serve God
and to make God happy is to give you your
Monday night and your Tuesday night and your Wednesday night,
and you're setting up before services on a Sunday and
after into the night, and when conferences are coming, you've

(29:36):
got to be there for the whole four days. You
just you do it. And these were kids who you
know what it's like being a teenager. Life is kind
of busy. You've got school and sport and your personal stuff,
and then suddenly this church comes in and takes over
most of your life and you're trying to hold down
a job to pay for your school fees, but then

(29:57):
you're also doing all the stuff for the church for free.
People were just hitting burnt out. They were exhausted physically
and mentally, and then add to that, various kind of
coercive sort of things were being run behind the scenes.
People just cracked, and a lot of them cracked.

Speaker 5 (30:13):
It seems like how they cracked too as seen as
almost godly. You know, like somebody burst into tears and
it's like, oh, you're having a release.

Speaker 1 (30:19):
Kind of and if you're not, and you know, if
people were breaking down as well and starting to complain,
the thought was no, like you've got to like, don't
be weak for God. You have to like push through this,
and if you push through this, that's when you know
you're holy and like God loves you. So it was
all this kind of spiritual manipulation to get these kids
just doing so much work. And I should say these

(30:42):
churches had campuses all over New Zealand, so you know,
there was a really big one and all the main
centers and then smaller ones and smaller towns, so it
was a really big network and a lot of people involved.

Speaker 3 (30:54):
Yeah, because you went public with some initial stories at first,
and then stories were flooding in right.

Speaker 1 (31:00):
It was crazy. Yeah, I did sort of. I did
my first story where I've spoken to a few people,
and my whole idea was like, this is the biggest
church in New Zealand you haven't heard of, and they're
doing some incredibly dicey things. And since I published that
on Webraam, I just started yet the floodgates opened. So
many people started emailing in with stories. It was almost

(31:23):
like they've been waiting to have a vector to basically
tell their story, and so I was getting these You know,
when people are very passionate, they will they will write
for a long amount of time, and so I was
getting these, you know, two three four page emails from
people just outlining their year at the church, or some
of them had been there for ten years, and just

(31:43):
these stories, and they all started following the same kind
of pattern. I've got a Google doc of all of
these and it's four hundred and fifty pages long, just
to people writing in with their experiences. And so I
started feeding some of them into my other reporting, and
of course, you know, the church just closes ranks. And
that's when I really got to see how these places

(32:05):
operate in this megachurch structure where there's no real accountability
from the leadership. It operates purely to protect the people
at the top. And you know, they ended up commissioning
an external report to look at the culture. And when
that report came back incredibly negatively because they started talking
to the sorts of people that were talking to me,

(32:26):
the church then attempted to bury it. So they buried
their own report that commissioned. I ended up leaking that report,
which was full of more horrific information. The church didn't
like that very much, and then they ended up taking
legal action against the person that hired to write that report,
and so they ended up being out of pocket I
think about ten or twenty thousand dollars and had to

(32:46):
do a fundraiser to make the money back.

Speaker 2 (32:48):
Oh my god.

Speaker 1 (32:49):
So it's just every level of a rised church was
just horrific. And I guess the overriding thing I kind
of took from it is that these churches, who individuals
at the church, they justify it because they are there
to bring forth the Kingdom of God, like they have
a higher purpose. And so so what if Sophie and

(33:11):
Mark are complaining about this thing at this church, if
we have saved twenty people that night who have come in,
you know, because they're going to heaven forever, We've saved
them from hell, and so that becomes the important thing.
So someone moaning about sexual assault from a youth leader,
or someone saying I've almost had a breakdown, no, yeah,
but stop complaining because this is important for the cause,

(33:36):
which for the cause.

Speaker 4 (33:37):
Saving souls, saving souls. Yeah, when you believe.

Speaker 3 (33:40):
You're saving souls, everything will seem petty comparatively completely.

Speaker 1 (33:44):
I mean, this is I'm going to do a tangent now,
but I have have you heard about hell houses? Do
you know what these are? Are?

Speaker 4 (33:51):
These the Christian haunted houses.

Speaker 1 (33:52):
Yes, oh my god, what, Yes, sir, I knew about
this back in New Zealand that these are things that existed.
I didn't think they were running them anymore. But I
went to one and I'm going to mispronounce this Wittier.
It's between La City and Orange County. Sorry and Wittier.

(34:14):
So a Christian hellhouse is essentially because Christians aren't allowed
to celebrate Halloween because it's evil. Evil spirits will escape
and will haunt you or whatever. So Halloween is off.
So what some Christian churches do, especially sort of the
more conservative Pentecostal evangelical ones, they'll put on a hell
house and that is essentially it's marketed as a normal haunt.

(34:37):
So secular Joe blogs will come and going, oh, what
is this thing that's popped up in my neighborhood that
sounds really scary, But when you get in there, what
it is. It's a whole lot of really graphic and
really high production values of youth doing sinful things. And
so when you walk in, there's a club. You walk
into a club, and I walk in there's a bar

(35:00):
that there's beautiful woman and hot men coming out to
me offering me drinks, and you walk through that room. See, okay,
people drink. This sounds amazing. Yeah, let me stay here.
The next room horrific drink driving car crash. Kid's got
his head split open, he's screaming. The next room, you know,
I'll summarize as a heroine drug room. So a lot

(35:22):
of people are shooting up, some of them are overdosing
on the floor. You walk into a domestic violence room,
women are getting beaten by I suppose that that partners.
There's an OnlyFans room, a sex workers room, and it
sounds so silly, but the production values are really high.
They are really shocking.

Speaker 2 (35:43):
And the actors are good.

Speaker 1 (35:45):
The actors are doing it. A suicide room. Someone shoots
themselves in the head. Someone else has got open wounds
on their arm, and they've got a knife in the bathtub.
The idea being you walk through all these scenarios and
then you end up in Hell, which is a very
intense room full of demons, and it's this giant it's
like a big holl that sort of looks like rock.

(36:05):
It's like you're in a cave. There's demons, there's people
screaming in cages, the soundtracks really loud, and the idea
being that all those people that you saw die in
these hideous ways, they weren't saved, and so they all
died horribly and they went to hell.

Speaker 2 (36:22):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (36:22):
And then you emerged into this big auditorium. We were
showing YouTube footage and news clips of real deaths. So
there was five minutes of suicides, five minutes of murder,
five minutes of drug overdoses. And then a pastor comes
out and he's like, hey, we showed you those clips
just to show you everything in the Hell House happens.

(36:43):
Only way you could drive home tonight, die on the
street in a car crash, and you're going straight to
hell if you're not saved, So come up the front.

Speaker 2 (36:51):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (36:51):
I would say about between fifty and seventy people went
up from my group that had just gone through the
Hell House, arms up, converted, got let off to a corner. Really,
I couldn't believe it. It works and it's huge, and
I would say they'd probably be about one thousand people
a night going through in different groups. So I'm just

(37:12):
ramming on about.

Speaker 4 (37:15):
How much is it.

Speaker 1 (37:17):
It was twelve dollars seventy five to get in I
bought two tickets because I hope a friend would go
with me or my friends were like, we're not going
to that. I wouldn't come with Next time, you're both
coming with me. And if you go in as an
outsider and you know what to expect, you know it's fascinating,
but you know the way. I should also say, twelve
and up is the age limits. So there were kids

(37:38):
going through seeing the stuff, and again it works like
you've put the fear of Hell in someone and they
will follow along, like that old fashion thing works.

Speaker 4 (37:47):
Oh my god.

Speaker 5 (37:48):
Like the cult that I grew up in, the two
by Tiars is just there's no real doctrine. It's just
don't go to Hell because Hell is so scary, Like yeah,
it's just all that we learn about is Hell.

Speaker 2 (38:00):
Essentially.

Speaker 1 (38:00):
That's because I grew up in a f I had
a really great family life, but Hell was certainly want
my church to have taught us. And so I'm this.
I thought that Hell until I was about twenty was
a real place, and so the Hell House was surreal
because by the time we got to Hell, I was like, oh,
this is what I actually pictured this place.

Speaker 2 (38:17):
As you described it.

Speaker 4 (38:18):
I was like precisely.

Speaker 1 (38:19):
I should also say the two by two's I believe
are in New Zealand.

Speaker 4 (38:23):
Oh, there's like a PM.

Speaker 1 (38:24):
And there's a there's a we've got a member of
parliament who really is a member.

Speaker 4 (38:28):
Yes, and that was.

Speaker 1 (38:29):
A big story from I believe last year. Yeah, I
didn't realize it. It's spread out that far.

Speaker 4 (38:35):
Oh yeah, it's everywhere.

Speaker 1 (38:37):
Yeah. Yeah. And you just wanted to like, you have
this thing and you just want it to collapse, right,
you just want to pull everyone out, Yes, but it
just keeps.

Speaker 5 (38:45):
These systems are perfectly created to keep repeating.

Speaker 1 (38:50):
Because if you leave, how hell?

Speaker 2 (38:52):
Yeah, I mean Hell is the period period?

Speaker 1 (38:54):
How better? Yeah? Yeah? And again real place, physical place
that you go, oral eternity not good.

Speaker 3 (39:02):
I feel so blessed that I didn't grow up with
hell mythology, none of it, because I was Mormon, and
Mormons have a different.

Speaker 2 (39:08):
Conception of totally Hell goes, yeah, not about other things.

Speaker 1 (39:17):
Weird from it's the craziest.

Speaker 3 (39:20):
Hell house sounds like the Museum of Psychiatry for scientology,
like a that's ostensibly a tourist attraction.

Speaker 1 (39:27):
Totally it tricks you. Yeah. And obviously there were some
church people that were in the hell House because I said,
I listened to some of the conversations, some of them new,
but there were definitely some people entering that place that
had no idea it was a religious thing because on
the outside there's no crosses or Jesus stuff. It's just
like some skeletons. No, it's just around Halloween. I'll send

(39:52):
you the info because you should go. You should do
an episode around it because it is wild.

Speaker 4 (39:56):
Yeah, we should do it.

Speaker 2 (39:57):
We should bring like a recorder or something.

Speaker 1 (39:59):
No photograph, not very edman secret, take a little secret in.

Speaker 2 (40:03):
Yeah that's illegal.

Speaker 1 (40:05):
Just do it. It is. You're right. That's what I
found out and tickled is that recording did both parties
very annoying when you're trying to make a documentary.

Speaker 3 (40:15):
It's weird that there are states where only one party
needs to consent.

Speaker 1 (40:18):
In New Zealand, it's a one party system. And if
you're that you can be the one party. So if
we're in New Zealand, I could meet up with either
of you and be secretly recording because I know I'm
recording completely legal.

Speaker 3 (40:33):
So if anyone present knows that the recording is happening,
it's legal.

Speaker 2 (40:36):
No matter what.

Speaker 3 (40:37):
It's so crazy to be really, especially with the advent
of did you guys see this Doja cat ad with
for the for the meta glasses?

Speaker 1 (40:45):
Have they done an ad with them? Yeah? I like
I like her?

Speaker 2 (40:49):
I like her so much. I was so bummed.

Speaker 3 (40:51):
And the ad is just her like riding around on
her bicycle with these meta glasses looking cute, and it's like,
you realize, this is an ad for a surveillance state, right,
this is not ah.

Speaker 1 (41:01):
So I always look at I'm just you know, they
don't need she doesn't need the money. Yeah, And if
you're going to get them get the money for something else.
It would be a lot of money though, wouldn't it.

Speaker 2 (41:09):
Yeah, it would be a lot of money. So much
trying to get a celebrity. Absolutely, yeah, yeah, but depressing.

Speaker 1 (41:16):
Just read there's some sort of security software that's coming
out now which automatically stops the recording in someone's classes
if they're in the room, because they're having problems now
with people wearing these glasses and recording and message parlors
and intimate moments.

Speaker 2 (41:29):
Of course they are, because how would that not be what.

Speaker 4 (41:31):
It's used for?

Speaker 1 (41:32):
Exactly? Humans can be the worst We suck any new
technology or use it for something awful.

Speaker 2 (41:39):
Yeah, pretty much.

Speaker 1 (41:40):
Of course, chet GPT was always going to end up
having an adult's only version, which is just hawny chet CHPT.
You know, there's always going to be the endgame of
all of this stuff that's.

Speaker 3 (41:48):
The least harmful. I mean, they're a lot worse things happening. Yeah,
But anyway, back to the church, back to another horrible person,
you know.

Speaker 2 (41:57):
Other horrible things.

Speaker 3 (41:58):
So you post did on your website a checklist of
things for members to renounce if they had become more
important to them than God.

Speaker 2 (42:08):
Oh wow, I'm going to read some of this list.

Speaker 3 (42:11):
Okay, here's what it says, as the Holy Spirit brings
to your mind the things or people that have become
more important to you than the true God Jesus. Christ
thought God and Jesus were separate. Okay, use the prayer
following the checklist to renounce them. It might be helpful.
Blah blah blah. Okay, Ambition, food or any substance, money, possessions, computers,
game software, financial security, rock stars, media celebrities, themes. Sure,

(42:34):
not sure why those are in the same.

Speaker 2 (42:37):
Church.

Speaker 3 (42:38):
Activities, sports or physical fitness, fun, pleasure, appearance, image, work, busyness, activity, friends, popularity, spouse, knowledge, children.

Speaker 5 (42:48):
Honestly, I appreciate them writing it out. I would have
appreciated something like this as a two by two child,
so I the OCD wouldn't have completely taken over and
I could have just been like, none of this.

Speaker 3 (42:58):
Every everybody is every single thing I could possibly enjoy
or derive meaning from other than God.

Speaker 1 (43:05):
Pretty incredible.

Speaker 3 (43:06):
How do you know when you've crossed the line of
something being more important to you than God?

Speaker 1 (43:10):
That's the thing, It's like, it's it's they play so
well with guilts. Yeah, you know, that's all they want
is just to elicit that guilt response, and so you're
always just feeling like anything you're thinking about that's any
of those things. You're thinking about those too much? Then
oh no, I'm not cold enough. I must get out
my Bible, I must go to church more, I must

(43:31):
volunteer more. It just goes back into all of that.
I mean, it's a completely unattainable list of things to
not have to think about and to deal with, because
they're literally the things that make us a human on
the planet, and they're wanting to get rid of all
of that yeah stuff, you know.

Speaker 2 (43:46):
So it's just a constant threat.

Speaker 5 (43:48):
Yeah, And I don't know if y'all experience this dichotomy
of like being told nothing on Earth matters, but then
also having to go to school and like worrying and
getting your homework. Yeah, it's like so odd and like
really confusing, very because you have to live and that
includes this list.

Speaker 1 (44:07):
Yeah. Well it's the whole thing of I mean, you're
not allowed to be of the world, right, Like everything
has to be focused on God, and yet we're here
on earth, right. But it's almost like it's that idea
of year none of this stuff matters, which is why
it's sort of a sidetrack. But climate change is such
a non starter for the conservative Christian movement because in

(44:28):
their minds, like they're out of here and like we're
going to a much better place, so let's not worry
about this environment.

Speaker 2 (44:35):
Think he cares.

Speaker 1 (44:36):
It becomes so damaging. But yeah, when you're a kid
growing up in this stuff, but it is super confusing, yeah,
because it's like you do your homework, but at the
same time you're being told nothing on Earth matters.

Speaker 4 (44:45):
Yeah, I'm like, I don't want to learn math.

Speaker 1 (44:47):
What do we Yeah, why are we doing this? Yeah,
it's very confusing a lot of weird hoops to jump through.

Speaker 3 (44:52):
Yes, I don't really know why I didn't have that,
because we also believed that, well prior to my like
proper cult guy or whatever it means stream Mormonism, we
also believed that the Second Coming could be at any moment.
But also I feel like there's a strong culture and
Mormonism of like going to college and having a career
in a future. I think maybe I remember people in

(45:13):
church being like, it could be tomorrow, or it could
be one hundred years from now, So you don't really
it doesn't It didn't necessarily feel like it was definitely
going to happen tomorrow.

Speaker 5 (45:22):
I feel like your attitude might have been more like, well,
it might be in one hundred years then, whereas mine
might be more like it'll be tomorrow.

Speaker 1 (45:28):
Right. I was definitely brought up with thea it might
be tomorrow kind of philosophy because it definitely keeped john
your toes. Yeah, and it was also quite quite a
stressful thing.

Speaker 5 (45:38):
Yeah, and it was very literal, Like I remember my
dad and I were once sitting I don't know if
I've ever told you the story of my ad half.
But my dad and I were once sitting there and
we saw the northern lights when we didn't know what
they were, and I do not know why we saw
them in the state but where my dad, highly educated man,
said Megan, I think Jesus is coming back.

Speaker 2 (45:58):
I've never heard this story.

Speaker 4 (46:00):
Like, I don't think so.

Speaker 1 (46:02):
But you're smarter, you excited or you instantly like no, Oddly,
I was like.

Speaker 3 (46:08):
Dad, you're such a skeptical child. It's so impressive to me.

Speaker 5 (46:11):
It always But it was like freaky to me because
I knew he said these things.

Speaker 4 (46:16):
But I was like, I was like, are you okay?

Speaker 2 (46:19):
Oh my god?

Speaker 5 (46:20):
But but like also there was another side of me
that was like, you should be freaking out right now.

Speaker 4 (46:23):
This could be Jesus. I don't know. Anyway.

Speaker 2 (46:26):
Meanwhile, I'm on.

Speaker 3 (46:26):
The dance floor on December thirty first, nineteen ninety nine,
thinking the world is for sure about to end.

Speaker 4 (46:32):
What are you dancing to? Surely not primis?

Speaker 2 (46:36):
I do remember?

Speaker 1 (46:37):
Oh fuck.

Speaker 3 (46:38):
There was one song where my crush wasn't dancing with me,
and then he chose to dance with me, and I
was like, like, mid dance, he left the girl he
was dancing with to dance with me.

Speaker 2 (46:45):
And I was like, this is how the world dramatic.

Speaker 1 (46:47):
That's like a movie. I almost want the world to end.

Speaker 4 (46:53):
Should have it, should happen, saying.

Speaker 2 (46:58):
The girl gets left behind crying.

Speaker 3 (47:00):
I will remember the song because whenever it comes on,
I'm like, oh, that's the song, but I can't remember.

Speaker 1 (47:03):
It's so interesting that you looking at your dad and
kind of not believing it, because I do. I do
wonder with the people, including a Rise church and the
beliefs of the leaders, how much of them really believe
that stuff and how much of them are doing it
just to fleece the flock.

Speaker 4 (47:19):
I wanted to ask you that as I.

Speaker 1 (47:21):
Still haven't really figured it out. You know John Cameron,
who you know left or eyes disgraced now trying to
start a new church in Australia. I could never figure
out whether he really believed in the stuff or whether
it was just a convenient thing for him to have
that's made him very wealthy and popular. Yeah, certain number
of people, and I don't know.

Speaker 5 (47:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (47:41):
I sometimes I feel like any anyone who starts anything
that they're the leader of in any way must be sociopathic,
which I know is.

Speaker 2 (47:49):
Not true but only close to it.

Speaker 3 (47:52):
But whenever, like because I feel like the strong desire
constantly to like create stuff and to create community and
to start projects. And then like a few weeks Anama
I was like, this fucking sucks, Like dealing with people sucks. God,
it is so difficult to manage personalities and to make
sure there's not conflict and keep the peace and also
have it be democratic. So everyone feels hurt, Like it's

(48:14):
so fucking difficult. I feel like you have to have
such a particular personality type and narcissistic to do it,
I mean, or just really really dedicated to the thing
that it's sure, but I suspected attracts more people who
are just like I want to be on top.

Speaker 2 (48:30):
I want to be the leader.

Speaker 1 (48:32):
So it's worth it absolutely, And that's what that was
a power structure thing in a rised church and a
lot of these churches, hillsong is that people want to
be top dog and they look at, you know, the
leader wandering around and is like with his fancy watch
and his cool haircut and cool design of clothes, and
they want to be like that, and so again they'll
work their asses off to where they think they will

(48:52):
at some point be at that level, and of course
they never will be.

Speaker 2 (48:54):
I'm gonna say, do they ever advance now? O?

Speaker 1 (48:57):
Barey takes years And if you're a woman, you don't
stand it. Chants, you know, it's a thing, you know,
it's such a sexist environment.

Speaker 3 (49:03):
As well as yah, yeah, oh yeah. Can you talk
to us about John's brother, Brent.

Speaker 1 (49:09):
Oh Brent? Yeah. So John had a brother, Brent, who
sorry and yeah, Brent led one of the other Arise
churches with his wife, and so Brent was sort of
struck me as more of kind of the blockheaded sort
of brother. He was a bit more of a sort
of a jock, you know, a bit more of a

(49:30):
sort of a rugby sort of guy, and he was
that kind of leader who would be The story that
came out that kind of stood out to me at
the time was that he would on away camps, he
would like chase members of the church around naked, like
as like a like a joke, you know, like a
locker room. Yeah, like my dick's out ha ha, knocking

(49:52):
at their door trying to get in, very like blow key,
you know, sort of old fashioned sort of things you
hear about happening in yep.

Speaker 3 (50:00):
You know, it's one thing if you're in a frat
and you are also a teenager.

Speaker 1 (50:04):
Frat behavior, yeah, from a leader of a church. Yeah,
and I don't imagine, you know. I talked to one
of the young people that was in the hotel room
as Brent was naked knocking on his door, and he
was fucking terrified, my god, you know, and that was
treated as lighting up. It was a joke, you know,
don't worry about it. And so that was Brent to

(50:26):
a t. And he fortunately resigned at the same time
that his brother resigned. They both went out the door
and Aria started collapsing after that. But yeah, Brent was
just a blockhead. He was like a blockheaded version of
the main guy in John.

Speaker 3 (50:39):
I was reading about how he would give people dead legs,
like punch people all the time.

Speaker 1 (50:44):
Yeah. I loved punching people, loved whacking them on the ass,
you know, just like low key sort of It's not
how I can't sort of describe it because it's not
who I am, but just I imagine locker room kind
of football jock behavior, you know. But he's a lead
of a church, right, which is just so so bizarre.

Speaker 2 (51:04):
Right to what extent were people shunned when they would leave?

Speaker 1 (51:07):
Oh? Completely yeah, completely cut out. So that's the thing, right,
It's like you get to this point at a rise
church and you like, this is I want to be out.
I want to be free of this. You leave, you're
cut off from anyone inside. So you hear about this
with other religions as well, but it's your friends in
there will stop talking to you because you're now evil.

(51:30):
Because you've left, you lose all your community support. You know.
Imagine if you're like a single mum in there, a
single dad, and the church was your people you'd call
on if you needed help. Suddenly that's instantly cut off,
and so you're suddenly completely adrift in the world. And
that was enough for some people to go back to
the church again because they just couldn't live without that,

(51:51):
or it was so much of a fear that it
stopped people from leaving, and some people that did leave
just found I could eventually build a life back. It's
just really really hard to do.

Speaker 3 (52:01):
Yeah, the people who suffered from like mental breakdowns, like
how I mean this is I guess maybe too broad
of a question, But I'm just curious about what some
of those journeys have looked like after, Like did it
lead most of them to leave the church?

Speaker 5 (52:17):
Did?

Speaker 1 (52:18):
Yeah? A lot of the people that fully broke did
leave because they just had that breakthrough where it was like,
my whole being is attached to this place that's making
me feel terrible, and they left and they slowly rebuilt.
The difficulty when you're spat out of a church like
that and you're you know, late twenties, thirties, forties, you know,

(52:38):
some of the hardest stories came from people that were
in that forties. When you're normally you know, you've sort
of by then you built up your value system and
your worldview and what's important to you. When you're suddenly
ejected from one of those high control religions at that point,
you're like you're starting from scratch, because like, what without
a Bible, how do I know what's right and wrong?

(53:00):
How do I even act in the world? Am I
what am I meant to be interested in? It all
falls apart at once, And so that was that those
are the hardest stories to hear. The people that had
been in there for ten fifteen years that were coming
out that were just completely starting and you and trying
to you both know this. You're trying to build up
your world again, and that's really really hard.

Speaker 4 (53:21):
Oh so sad. It breaks my heart.

Speaker 3 (53:25):
How to construct an identity from scratch as an adult
is just.

Speaker 1 (53:29):
Yeah, start again now, yeah? Yeah? And what does dating
look like? What exactly what am I meant to watch
on TV? What am I consuming like? What?

Speaker 2 (53:37):
What do I believe about? Whatever his life means? Anything?

Speaker 1 (53:41):
Completely, And you've been sort of had your head filled
with some very specific ideas of what is evil r
what is good and suddenly having to reassess all of
that moral code again. So oh, maybe gay people aren't evil,
Like maybe me being gay isn't a bad thing. Like
everything just starts from scratch.

Speaker 3 (53:58):
I've encountered number of young women who've exited polygamous communities
just through my mom and some of the work that
she does, and it's very very Kimmi Schmidt in most cases,
like they don't know about anything, they don't know who
celebrities are, they don't know what to wear, they don't
know what's normal sexually, and so there's always this awkward

(54:19):
first two years of like going way too far, like
in the opposite direction, because they just don't know what's normal.

Speaker 2 (54:25):
Like I just can't. I feel so lucky.

Speaker 3 (54:27):
That my journey like kind of culminated when I was
a preteen and then teenager because starting over in like
like twenty five thirty five, Like.

Speaker 5 (54:38):
But it's doable, and people they do it, and there's
a journey there, and there's a story there, and there's
a lesson there for other people.

Speaker 2 (54:45):
It's not impossible.

Speaker 5 (54:48):
And I think one of the cool things that I've
heard a lot of people do is take it. And
this is like so minimizing it and sounds tripe, but
like taking a class of something they're interested in is
just gat a quick way to kind of up into
a new community and be interested in.

Speaker 1 (55:02):
Yeah, it is. It's just like not having not going
out to a bar to meet people, but no meat,
like have something specific that is a group of like
minor people, and that's I think that's so important.

Speaker 3 (55:13):
Yeah, as long as it's not another cult, because that
happens exactly exactly.

Speaker 1 (55:17):
I know. And some people do fall straight into other things.

Speaker 4 (55:20):
Very very common, so hard. So join a few groups.

Speaker 1 (55:24):
Join a few, keep an eye if any of them
are a bit Colsey, then extract yourself.

Speaker 2 (55:29):
Take a different immediately.

Speaker 1 (55:31):
But there are so many people. I mean, since I
wrote about a rise, I still get emails from people
that are discovering those articles now and are sort of going,
oh shit. I think my church is doing the same thing.
And that is the most rewarding thing because if these
articles I wrote and kind of if people can read
them and be seen in them and go, holy shit,

(55:52):
this sounds like what's happened to me And I had
no idea this was bad, but this is probably why
I'm feeling exhausted and horrible. Then it can be the
thing that starts to like snap people out of it.
That's why what your podcast, it's like the reason you
do the show right, Like people can listen and stead
of go oh, they can latch onto this thing. It's
so important, think because you're alone when you're in those places.

Speaker 5 (56:12):
And what they've done is so important as well. It's
just we're trying exactly at least.

Speaker 2 (56:18):
Trying some of us are trying.

Speaker 1 (56:23):
It's true.

Speaker 4 (56:23):
It's true.

Speaker 3 (56:24):
Yeah, where did things land with the church? Ultimately, after
all of these came out and the investigation went.

Speaker 1 (56:31):
Through, so Brent the Jock and John, the main leader.
They both resigned because the report they commissioned was just
too damning, and by then they were being talked about
on the New Zealand six o'clock news and they are
in all the newspapers. So they left. The church sort
of splintered. A lot of people left, which I think
is a very positive thing. Some of them renamed to

(56:55):
other things and are trying to carry on with the
same model, which is annoying, but just what they do.
There was the legal spat between the church and the
leader of the report that commissioned to look into how
awful the church was. That turned into a thing. But
where its now arise is now much smaller in New Zealand.
It's much more fractured. It still exists, but I would

(57:18):
argue it's not quite as horrific as it was. The
downside to it all is what happens a lot of
the time, which is what I talked about a little
bit earlier. These two leaders have now started their own
new churches in Australia, so they've left New Zealand and
they're just starting afresh. And that's the thing with a
lot of these megachurch structures. That other churches will just

(57:41):
accept them. And you know, anything they have done that
is seen as bad, that's reported on, that's seen as
martyrs essentially. And so John and Cameron went to Australia
and they were invited into these other churches that were like, oh,
you poor people, you'll be martyred, come in here. And
they have slowly grow in that church and then they've

(58:03):
gone out inside of their own churches. And so that's
the thing. These churches all just like soak each other in.
If one gets blown up, there'll be another horrific church
that will just happily open them in with open arms.

Speaker 3 (58:14):
Okay, question because like, surely there are instances of churches who,
you know, whose leadership was exploiting people and then we're like, oh, fuck,
we didn't realize we were doing that or whatever, like
or oh.

Speaker 2 (58:29):
We shouldn't be doing that totally.

Speaker 3 (58:31):
So what do you think the recourse would be or like,
are there steps that a community could actually take to
repair that.

Speaker 1 (58:41):
I think in smaller congregations you might have a chance
where there is more of an even structure between the
people that are in the congregation and the people that
are serving, and then the leadership I think in these
bigger structures, I think there is nothing authentic there. I
think it's all built on this system of cont and
I think if there aren't people being abused in the

(59:02):
church financially, then the church falls apart. And so I
think there's no hope for like these bigger structures, whether
it's a Hill Song and a Rise. There's other churches
in New Zealand like Life and Equippers. These churches are
just built to exploit people, and so there's no way
for it to be fixed unless the whole thing blows up.

Speaker 3 (59:21):
What if the leader's like, all right, I'm cutting my
salary to a fifth of what it was.

Speaker 1 (59:28):
That happens. I've never heard of it happening. I think
the people that get involved in the leadership of these
churches are out to make a lot of money, and
I just I've never seen an instance of it happening. Yeah,
I'd love it too, I know, but I just I
don't see it happening anytime soon.

Speaker 3 (59:44):
Yeah, it does seem whenever the leader is being enriched
to that extent over the people, well.

Speaker 4 (59:50):
We just thought with Doja Cat everybody.

Speaker 1 (59:53):
People will sell out so quickly, Yeah, so so quickly.
And I mean I'm always wonder like if I got
offered a certainly money to do like wear some metaglasses,
am I going to like turn on myself righteous question?

Speaker 2 (01:00:06):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (01:00:07):
I mean, yeah, this is a question I've been grappling
with as well, like in music whatever that's not that's
not a good story.

Speaker 2 (01:00:15):
But basically just like, yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:00:16):
When you do need money or you are like seeking security,
like it's understandable to make a decision that will help
provide some financial security. So how do you know, like
at what point is it's so unethical and do we
judge people?

Speaker 1 (01:00:29):
Well, it's fascinating. I often think of it with with
the podcast I make. We have ads on it, and
you know, I'm always thinking about like who these companies
are and what they're doing. Right, It's like this there's
like a you know, I'll say a hard no to
like a gambling ad for instance, I'm not going to
do a read and say go and buy this alcohol
or go and gamble at this online casino. It's a

(01:00:49):
hard note. Then there's other things that are like more
in the middle. It's like us supplements, is that like we.

Speaker 2 (01:00:55):
Have a no supplement rule.

Speaker 1 (01:00:57):
Yeah, that's the thing you know I'm wearing that same ca. Yeah,
but it's like you also need to pay your staff
and keep your and keep your podcast running, right, So
what are the levels? And then like what if you
have a brand that was good. We had a supplement
on our show called ag One, which was made in
New Zealand. I thought, this is great, it's like green I.

Speaker 4 (01:01:18):
Got I've been looking into that because that guy.

Speaker 1 (01:01:21):
Oh yeah, no, he's a horrific Yes. So ag One
is marketed as it's basically like, if you don't eat
your vegetables, which is me, I hate vegetables, have this
green powder and it will give you a vegetable intake.
So I was like, this is great, I will This
is like seems like a saying supplement you know I
used it. Turns out the New Zealander that founded ag

(01:01:42):
One had his previous businesses had left people completely decimated.
He completely ripped them off, left had this whole other
life a horrific business leader. And there were also questions
around how valid the ag one powder actually was. Yes,
and so that's an advertiser that we I said, no,
we're not going to use this anymore. So it takes

(01:02:02):
like a couple of months for your deal to run
out and that advertiser goes. But my point being, you
can have an advertiser that seems good and then suddenly
you find out their leader is like a massive con man, right,
and you're like, oh god, I can't win here. Yeah,
you know.

Speaker 5 (01:02:15):
Because capitalism is course of control and we're all a
part of it and we're born and otherwise you'll die
on the side of the streets.

Speaker 3 (01:02:22):
Also, blood corporations are completely anthocholic. It's like that's the
system of we're fed to our advertisers.

Speaker 1 (01:02:31):
No, it's really hard. I mean I webrem. I started
webrom on a platform called substack, and I left substack
about three months ago for another platform because substack has
a really dicey moderation policy around things like having Nazis
on the platform and that kind of thing, And so
I felt very safe writing webrom and substack. It was

(01:02:53):
like I'd build up this whole ecosystem and community there,
and suddenly it was like, oh is it ethical to
be on this shit? You know, everything is compromised, and
I think we all just have to make the best
decisions we can along the way and compromise the best
way we can sometimes completely ditching some awful things, sometimes
trying to have a relationship with it where it works

(01:03:13):
and that the good offsets the bad. Ye can't what
my point was, but it's hard to be a human,
it really is.

Speaker 5 (01:03:20):
And then my capital is and I will take feedback
from anyone who wants to talk about this, besides rich
kids who don't have to work.

Speaker 1 (01:03:27):
Yeah, totally. And often the people that will, the people
that will write to you and sort of point out
what ethically horrific thing you're doing. They don't have much
of a leg to stand right.

Speaker 5 (01:03:38):
It seems to be the way of the world. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
so just a little.

Speaker 2 (01:03:44):
Most of us are doing our best and trying to
be ethical.

Speaker 4 (01:03:47):
Most of us, as you said before.

Speaker 1 (01:03:48):
Most of us are like we are, like most humans
are trying to do well. It's just the bad actors
are the ones that get amplified and we hear from
them way more than we should.

Speaker 3 (01:03:56):
Yeah, well, what are you investigating next?

Speaker 1 (01:04:00):
Oh my gosh, I'm actually looking for Flightless Bird my podcast.
I'm looking into First Amendment auditors. Have you heard of
these people? They are a certain subset of the American culture.
It really only exists in America and they start filming
strangers at their place of work. So they will do

(01:04:21):
this to prove their First Amendment rights. So they will
get in people's faces, they'll latch onto a certain person,
and they will just randomly, they'll just latch on. If
you're unfortunate enough to become a target of a First
Amendment auditor, you have your details online, your job, your face,
your actions, you at your desk, and basically from what

(01:04:42):
I can tell, I'm learning about this as I'm talking
to you, they're just trying to prove the point that
it is my First Amendment right to be able to
stand in the street and film and do this. You
cannot stop me, you can't arrest me. It's my right,
and that's their whole mindset, and they'll harass the shit
out of people to prove that point.

Speaker 3 (01:04:59):
This is just like people on Reddit like where is
this coming from.

Speaker 1 (01:05:02):
They're out in the world. I'm talking to a woman
whose mother is a librarian and she is currently being
harassed by a First Amendment auditor outside the library every day,
So her whole life is being followed and uploaded onto
YouTube by this person, thank god, trying to prove a
point but.

Speaker 3 (01:05:20):
Trying to prove a point, like is there a subculture
they're emerging from?

Speaker 1 (01:05:24):
Like, yeah, it's online. It's absolutely online. It's on forums,
it's on Reddit, it's in person meetups. It's just wow.
And you'll see them around occasion if if you're ever
walking along, you see them in LA occasionally you're so
usually have a handicam, sometimes just on a cell phone,
but usually like a dedicated video device, and they'll just
be off and outside someone's work, just standing there filming.

(01:05:46):
And often you'll see someone in their face saying like
please don't film me, and they'll just be standing their ground.
You'll see them around.

Speaker 4 (01:05:54):
Wow.

Speaker 5 (01:05:54):
One guy who kind of does that with the Scientology Center.
But it's more I mean, I wish they would do
it more.

Speaker 1 (01:06:00):
It's the same kind of philosophy they're doing with Scientology
to kind of like out the scientologists.

Speaker 3 (01:06:04):
I wish they would do it more towards those people. Maybe,
I agree organizations that are secretive.

Speaker 1 (01:06:11):
You know, they do it towards individuals that have just
been rare.

Speaker 2 (01:06:14):
Yeah, that's that's what's the point, just to.

Speaker 1 (01:06:17):
Prove your First Amendment rights. So that's a subculture that
I'm sort of going down that world all.

Speaker 3 (01:06:22):
Now, do these First Amendment people care about the deportations
of folks where their speaking?

Speaker 1 (01:06:29):
No, no, no, no, that's their interests of very specific,
very very selfish. Yeah yeah, yeah, and most of them
are white. Also yeah, yeah, you've got a band trick
record of doing loopy things.

Speaker 2 (01:06:42):
God damn it.

Speaker 1 (01:06:43):
Yeah, I know.

Speaker 2 (01:06:44):
I can't wait to learn more about it.

Speaker 3 (01:06:46):
Thank you and about all the other weird subcultures you're
bound to be exploring.

Speaker 1 (01:06:51):
No, thanks for having me on the show. And again,
like you, but you both do amazing work. I think
like talking about the stuff as much as possible is
like all we can do because I feel like the
world is getting weirder. But I think there's also more
awareness of some of the weird and I think that
I like to think that it is like a net
good that's happening, that people being more aware of, Like
how I'm gonna.

Speaker 2 (01:07:10):
Go with that? Yeah, I'm going to join you there.
I think you're right.

Speaker 1 (01:07:13):
Yeah, you're good.

Speaker 3 (01:07:14):
Okay, Well on this I'm not I'm I'm on the fence.
But I appreciate you guys.

Speaker 1 (01:07:19):
I changed daily about how cynical I am about.

Speaker 2 (01:07:21):
The state of the every minute every minute. Yeah, yeah,
where can people find you?

Speaker 1 (01:07:28):
WebM is my main thing. It's www dot webworm dot co.
Because I couldn't afford the dot com. That'saw my investigative journalism.
And I have a podcast about weird American things called
Flightless Bird, which is on all places that you get
your things. And I think Tickled is on Netflix at
the moment. Doctoris is on Netflix, mister Organ, I think

(01:07:49):
is also on Netflix. If you google any of these things,
it all pop up where it is. If you're listening
in Australia, everything I've said will be incorrect because you
know every country has got a different thing.

Speaker 5 (01:08:00):
Right Well, my ex boyfriend is probably watching Tickled right now.

Speaker 1 (01:08:03):
Every day he watches Ye turns it one gets into
the spirit of the day watching some competitive endurance tickling.

Speaker 2 (01:08:11):
It's super normal. Thank you for joining us.

Speaker 3 (01:08:14):
Pleasure all right, and that's the end of our interview
with David.

Speaker 2 (01:08:19):
Thanks to David for coming on. Megan.

Speaker 3 (01:08:22):
I wanted to ask you about something we talked about
besides the Rise Church, which is the Haunted Hell House
or whatever it's called. You said the hell the Hell House,
you said that you would not want to go.

Speaker 2 (01:08:36):
Please tell me more.

Speaker 5 (01:08:37):
There's no way I'm going to any haunted house, whether
it be the Universal Studio haunted house, really never, there's
no way, much less one involving my greatest fear, which
is hell. You couldn't pay me to go to a
hell house. I know Hell isn't real, and I know

(01:09:00):
that the actors at Universal Studios also aren't real.

Speaker 2 (01:09:04):
But there's a little part you know, they're not real characters.

Speaker 4 (01:09:09):
They're they're real actors.

Speaker 5 (01:09:12):
But I there's a little part of my brain that
doesn't understand what's real and what's not because it's called trauma,
and I just would not enjoy that one single bit.

Speaker 4 (01:09:25):
It sounds horrible.

Speaker 3 (01:09:26):
I mean, it does sound disturbing intentionally, so I get
that's that's by design.

Speaker 5 (01:09:32):
Yes, I mean it's a haunted house, so they're supposed
to be disturbed, but.

Speaker 3 (01:09:35):
It was one that's supposed to scare you into joining
their church.

Speaker 2 (01:09:38):
So like that.

Speaker 5 (01:09:39):
Yeah, it's weird because I love scary movies, so you
would think I would like haunted houses, but I don't.

Speaker 2 (01:09:46):
I'm actually I didn't know that.

Speaker 5 (01:09:48):
I'm surprised to learn this. I love haunted houses, I
don't like it. I do not like it at all.
You know what, I'm going to tell you something really quickly.
I went to a haunted house when I was little,
and they did something too scary in my opinion, And
you tell me if this is too scary.

Speaker 2 (01:10:01):
Okay.

Speaker 4 (01:10:02):
You walk through a.

Speaker 5 (01:10:02):
Tunnel to get to another part of the haunted house, right,
And as you're in the tunnel where I grew up,
there was a ton of train tracks everywhere. As you're
in the tunnel, a bright light suddenly appeared and the
sound of a train came on, so it looked like
you were about to get hit by a train.

Speaker 3 (01:10:17):
That sounds cool to me, but I mean, it just
depends on like is the child old enough to be
going to haunted houses in general, because that's.

Speaker 5 (01:10:25):
A lot of not there is to do with like Halloween.
That's just like you're actually getting hit by a train.

Speaker 2 (01:10:31):
It's definitely very specific.

Speaker 5 (01:10:34):
That's like not haunted, that's not ghost like, it's not
anything except just like, hey, let's make a fifth grader
think she's gonna die for real.

Speaker 4 (01:10:44):
So that was my last Turah. I'm over it. I
don't want to go to a hou house.

Speaker 5 (01:10:51):
I'll go to a haven house with whoever wants to
go with me. Oh that sounds nice. Yeah, I wonder
if that exists. Probably not like a spot or something.
I'm sure sure, I okay.

Speaker 3 (01:11:03):
I will go to any haunted house anytime, except for
the ones that are like the extreme ones, which maybe
we should do an episode on those at one point.

Speaker 4 (01:11:11):
Absolutely.

Speaker 5 (01:11:12):
Also, one of my best friends worked at the Universal
Haunted House last year, the year before last, and she
was wearing like a mask and her crush came in
with another girl and she was bawling underneath her mask,
and it was like a haunted house inside a haunted
house is so sad, but like such a good movie scene.

(01:11:34):
I'm so sorry that happened to her. I know, I
love her so much. Well, thanks again for listening to us, y'all.
We can't wait to see you again next week. Leave
us five stars if you're so inclined, and as always,
remember to follow your gut, watch out for red flax,
and never ever trust me.

Speaker 2 (01:11:54):
Bye bye. This has been an exactly right production Hosted
by me Me.

Speaker 5 (01:12:00):
Lola Blanc and me Megan Elizabeth. Our senior producer is G.

Speaker 4 (01:12:04):
Holly.

Speaker 3 (01:12:04):
This episode was mixed by John Bradley, our associate producer
is Christina Chamberlain and our guest booker is Patrick Kottner.
Our theme song was composed by Holly Ambert Church.

Speaker 5 (01:12:14):
Trust Me as executive produced by Karen Kilgareth Georgia Hardstark
and Danielle Kramer.

Speaker 3 (01:12:19):
You can find us on Instagram at trust Me podcast
or on TikTok at trust Me coult podcast.

Speaker 5 (01:12:24):
Got your own story about cults, extreme belief, our manipulation,
Shoot us an email at trustmepod at gmail dot com.

Speaker 3 (01:12:30):
Listen to trust Me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
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David Farrier - Conspiracies, Cults, and Investigating Arise Church

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}David Farrier - Conspiracies, Cults, and Investigating Arise Church