Trust Me: Cults, Extreme Belief, and Manipulation

This week’s guest is Theo Pratt, survivor of Gloriavale, an isolated Christian cult hidden deep in rural New Zealand, and author of Unveiled: A Story of Surviving Gloriavale. She’ll talk about being raised on the strictly controlled commune where people were assigned new names, women wore identical dresses and head coverings, and children weren’t taught the real days of the week—or even where they were in th...

Renee DiResta, professor and author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality, joins the show again to dive deeper into disinformation, propaganda, and "pseudo-events," or manufactured controversies and news stories.

She explains why it’s so difficult to tell fact from fiction online, how propagandists stoke real, often legitimate tensions to create division, how American politicians are amplifying fal...

This week’s guest is Renee DiResta, professor, and author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality. In part one this week, she talks to Lola and Meagan about propaganda, disinformation vs. misinformation, and how social media algorithms push us all into highly individualized, “bespoke” realities.

They discuss how she became interested in this topic after social media algorithms started sug...

This week, Lola and Meagan continue their conversation with Mike and Abbi Prussack, former members of Meagan’s childhood church, the 2x2s. In part 2, they walk the girls through the abuse crisis that has shaken the group in recent years and the long-standing patterns that allowed the harm to continue. Mike and Abbi explain how church leadership handled reports, why victims felt they had nowhere to turn, and how secrecy and ob...

This week, Lola and Meagan talk with Mike and Abbi Prussack, former members of Meagan’s childhood church, the 2x2s, also known as The Truth or The Way. The couple, who now help moderate the Ex-2x2 Facebook community, share what it was like growing up in a secretive religious group with no name, no building, and strict rules about who could be “in.”

They open up about meeting and marrying within the church, ...

This week, researcher Tim Squirrel joins Lola & Meagan to break down the manosphere: incels, redpill, MGTOW, and the differences between some of the misogynistic subcultures in the online world of men. They discuss how isolation can leave boys vulnerable to harmful internet communities, and how the algorithm can radicalize young people looking for identity.

From Andrew Tate to Jordan Peterson, Tim shares why an...

In part 2, Sarma Melngailis, subject of the docuseries Bad Vegan and author of The Girl with the Duck Tattoo, tells Lola & Meagan how Mr. Fox consumed her time, overwhelmed her with information, and dangled promises of financial freedom that was always JUST around the corner as a way to get her to send him more and more money.

She’ll share about the fabricated online personas he created as part of the manipulation, how he...

In part 1 with guest Sarma Melngailis, subject of the docuseries Bad Vegan and author of The Girl with the Duck Tattoo, Sarma shares about her life as the owner of a successful vegan restaurant in New York, how she met the man who called himself Mr. Fox on Twitter when he seemed to know her friend Alec Baldwin, her first impressions of Mr. Fox, and some of the initial red flags she missed.
They discuss the wa...

This week, the girls are joined by Arabelle Sicardi, writer, image theorist, and author of The House of Beauty: Lessons from the Image Industry. Lola and Meagan confess the cosmetic procedures they've each had, and Arabelle explores how the beauty industry preys on our deepest fears, giving us a false sense of control and training us to worship ideals that are impossible to reach. They reflect on the high rates of plastic surg...

This week, the girls are joined by Anthony Cesar Duncan, an artist, mental health advocate, and survivor of ChatGPT psychosis. Anthony opens up about his descent into a psychotic episode, led by an unlikely new cult figure: ChatGPT. He describes how his episode began innocently enough, how the platform’s responses started to amplify his delusions and isolate him from his loved ones, and how quickly the line blurred between re...

Aaron Goldenberg, actor, comedian, and (hilarious) content creator, joins Lola and Meagan to talk about being gay as a Christian child, what it was like learning Bill Gothard’s IBLP homeschool curriculum as a boy, and how his parents discovered his queerness and sent him to conversion therapy.

He talks about Exodus International, a now-disbanded “ex-gay” Christian ministry that taught that you could heal your gayn...

Journalist Sarah Stankorb comes on the show to talk about her book, Disobedient Women, and the deep dive she did on why a series of evangelical women in America began to leave their communities as the internet came into prominence. They discuss patriarchal teachings within cultures like the Quiverfull movement, including stories like Vyckie Garrison’s, who was pressured into having repeated pregnancies that defied her doctors...

Guests Erika Lantz and Elin Lantz Lesser join to discuss season 3 of their investigative podcast The Turning, which follows the journey of a young woman named Lindsay, a former member of a Christian group in Minnesota called River Road Fellowship. They talk about the background of the leader Victor Bernard, how Lindsay’s parents moved the family to the cult compound, and what it was like living there—with rapture drills...

Journalist Jane Borden joins the girls to discuss her book Cults Like Us, a gripping investigation into how cultic thinking is woven into the fabric of American life. Jane delves into the radical roots of early Protestant settlers, how the deep-rooted American mythology of a strong rebel cowboy who can save us from the bad guys makes us more susceptible to demagogues and authoritarians, and why pronatalism is just another form of d...

Megan Elizabeth Cox–not to be confused with our Meagan Elizabeth–shares how she first started Gwen Shamblin’s weight loss program as a child, when her mom began listening to the cassette tapes in the 90s. She opens up about what it was like growing up in a family that was fixated on weight loss, how it felt meeting Shamblin, the high-haired woman behind the voice, and how the program evolved into the Remnant Fello...

Journalist Claire Hoffman joins us again, this time to discuss her new book Sister, Sinner: the unbelievable true story of Aimee Semple McPherson, a glamorous Pentecostal preacher who pioneered entertainment evangelism. McPherson was so famous in the 1920s she could have been a Kardashian.
Claire talks about how the early televangelist used theatrics and mass media to build an empire around her preaching–only to mysterious...

In Part 1 of our interview with journalist Claire Hoffman, Claire shares what it was like growing up in an Iowa trailer park community built around the Transcendental Meditation (or TM) movement and its charismatic leader, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi–whose followers included The Beatles. Claire shares what the daily routine was like in the TM community, how it felt believing every adult she knew could levitate, and the powerful mys...

Attorney Carol Merchasin didn’t set out to expose cults, but after investigating allegations about a high-control Buddhist organization and discovering that the abuse had run more rampant than she’d imagined, she became a lawyer and focused her practice on getting justice for survivors of cults and abusive groups.

Carol discusses the legal ins and outs of suing cults and spiritual leaders, where American law stands in r...

Artist and writer Akina Cox returns to share more about her experience growing up in the Unification Church (also known as the Moonies), its physical punishment rituals, and where the church stands now. The girls then transition from the topic of her particular cult to a discussion on the cult-like patterns of the current American political landscape, and how to approach political disagreements with loved ones.

Akina also reflects ...