Amanda Montel

And so I would say at that point, my career was just in a state of imposter syndrome and flailing, but also incredible enthusiasm to share subjects that may seem kind of niche, but had always felt really fascinating and also culturally urgent to me with an audience.

And as the years have gone on, I think I've become a little more confident in my voice and more broadly curious and have widened my scope from this kind of hyper-specific subject of language and gender to other questions of how language, power, society, pop culture, all these different phenomena that really pique my curiosity interact with one another.

Well, yeah.

To set some context, my dad grew up in a cult called Synanon, which was really at its peak during the 1970s and started out as an alternative drug rehabilitation center turned pretty abusive compound.

And I grew up on my dad's stories.

And...

You know, my dad, he's the most darling man ever.

I mean, he's like such a goofball.

I think he definitely meets that kind of stereotype of the like sort of absent-minded professor, like endearingly so.

And so, you know, he's not someone who lives in the past or dwells on his past.

traumas.

You know, he's like this optimist type and really gregarious.

And I don't think he'd really, you know, revisited his childhood and his cult stories much until he had this really nosy little daughter who is constantly begging him to tell me a story from your life, not a made up story, not a fairy tale.

Like, I want to hear a real true story.

And

And just to kind of, you know, entertain his kid, he drudged up some of these, as it turned out, really mesmerizing and horrifying tales of his teenage years growing up in this group where children were separated from their parents and had to live in these dismal barracks.

At a point, everybody had to shave their head and participate in these massive group wars.

weigh-ins, whatever the whims of the leader Chuck Diedrich dictated.

Everyone in the group had to participate in this ritual called The Game, which was kind of the centerpiece of life in Synanon.

It was this pretty hostile and traumatizing group therapy ritual where a