Elise Hu

Amanda, congratulations on your talk.

Oh, thank you.

How do you think your work has evolved through three books and now with your TED Talk?

Okay.

Well, let's dig into your talk because you share in your talk a little bit about your dad's past and how he was in a cult when he was a teen before he managed to escape.

And clearly that story had a huge influence on you.

So what sorts of conversations did you have with him growing up about this?

Yeah.

But as you suggest in the talk and in your book, not all cult-like or cultish things are necessarily bad.

Loving Taylor Swift, for example, or people who go to SoulCycle religiously, that's not inherently bad and can lead to a lot of community building and feelings of connection.

Where is the line for you?

Yeah.

What do you think about parasocial relationships?

Because, you know, cults tend to have charismatic leaders.

I can't help but to hear you talk about cults and then especially when you're talking about like changing my beliefs about things or abandoning my previous positions on policy and seeing, you know, people who used to believe one thing completely believe something different because of a charismatic leader.

Yeah.

How is it that believers or members of certain groups continue to stay in the organization or continue to follow leaders who act against their interests?

How do we help people in our communities or people that we love, maybe who have gotten indoctrinated or we believe they've become indoctrinated?

How do we help them break out?

What do we say to them without pushing them away?