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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. Writer, linguist, and podcaster Amanda Montel says we are living through the cultiest era on record as the hardwired cognitive biases that helped early humans survive brush up against social media and digital communication.
Studies show that social media has damaged our mental health and our attention spans, all the while making cult-ish leaders mega-accessible. Who needs compounds when you have comment sections?
She exposes three sneaky language tactics that cults use to influence us, for better or for worse, revealing why none of us are as cult-proof as we'd like to think. And stick around after the talk.
Amanda and I got together to go beyond her talk to discuss what led her to the study of cults, the role of AI in these cultier times, and what to do if we think someone we know and love may be in a cult. That's all coming up right after a short break from our sponsors.
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Chapter 2: What makes our current era feel cultish according to Amanda Montel?
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T's and C's apply. And now, our TED Talk of the day.
Hi, everyone. Or shall I say, greetings, followers. And settle in. Because I'm about to share with you a true story about one of the most zealous cults in the world. This story takes place on the group's holiest day. Acolytes arrived at dawn, some having crossed oceans and sacrificed life savings in order to get there.
They came bearing hand-beated offerings inscribed with sacred numbers, 22, 13, 89. But this, my friends, is not the story of an apocalyptic sect on a faraway compound. No, this was a Taylor Swift concert. I said it.
The talismans are friendship bracelets, the biblical books are known as eras, and the charismatic leader is a billionaire pop priestess who, let's be honest, could probably rule the free world if she really wanted to. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm a deep-dyed, red-album girlie. I'm not here to call out Swifties as cult followers. No, I wouldn't dare.
but I'm an author and a cultural commentator with a background in linguistics. And I'm here to share how we're all susceptible to cult-ish thinking, for better and for worse, and our everyday vocabularies are evidence of our devotion. I'm here to share what to pay attention to, what to listen for, so that as we move through these inevitably culty times, we can stay both enchanted and empowered.
Now, my fascination with cults is personal.
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Chapter 3: What are the three language tactics used by cults to influence people?
That's because of my dad. As a teenager, he was forced to join Synanon, a 70s California compound with matching overalls and a traumatizing truth-telling ritual called The Game. But my dad escaped, became a neuroscientist and brought up a nosy kid who became obsessed with understanding how to identify cult-ish influence in everyday life.
As I got older, I couldn't help but notice that the same language tactics that my dad described in Synanon could be found kind of everywhere, like in my high school theater program and in the wellness industry and on my social media feed. That's how I came to study the cultish spectrum, degrees of influence, none of which start out with LSD and robes, but instead, sneakily, with words.
I want to point out three cultish language tactics to listen for in everyday life. The first is called the thought-terminating cliché. Coined in 1961 by the psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton, thought-terminating clichés are zingy stack expressions that are easy to memorize, easy to repeat and aimed at shutting down independent thinking and questioning.
So let's say you're a member of a group and there's a rule that you want to push back against. You might get hit with a phrase like, trust the process, or it's all in God's plan to shut you down. In Synanon, the phrase, act as if, effectively meant pretend that you believe until you do.
Today, in conspiracy theory-type groups, the phrase, do your research, basically means, stop asking me about mine. Next, I want to talk about us-versus-them labels. In Synanon, defectors were called splitties. Today, you've got your sheeple, your NPCs, your industry plants. When a label makes all of those people seem unilaterally evil and us superior, that's a red flag.
And thirdly, I want to mention loaded language, corporate synergistic visionaries, wellness, 5D consciousness. At first, emotionally charged buzzwords like this feel like enlightenment. Then one day you wake up and you realize you've completely surrendered your ability to talk and think for yourself.
This language works because it plugs straight into our cognitive biases, these deeply ingrained decision-making shortcuts that developed in earlier human brains to help us process information from the world around us enough to survive it.
But today, mental magic tricks like confirmation bias, the sunk cost fallacy and the halo effect cause us to believe only the information we already agree with, double down on sketchy choices and worship mortal human beings we've never even met as all-knowing deities.
This clash between our once-useful cognitive biases and the information age is this phenomenon that I've been calling magical overthinking. And it's a problem, because studies show that social media has damaged our mental health and our attention spans, all the while making cult-ish leaders mega-accessible. Who needs compounds when you have comment sections?
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Chapter 4: How does Amanda Montel's personal history influence her views on cults?
So I would avoid saying that as tempting as it might be. I might avoid saying things like you're brainwashed. It's just, it doesn't feel respectful. Even if we deep down believe that they are brainwashed and in a cult, it's not a productive accusation to wield. And then also like if,
We're specifically talking to someone who's in, you know, an anti-science type of organization or community or whatever. I also might suggest avoiding trying to disprove their beliefs with, you know, proof from the NIH or like a study that you read from an outlet or a publication that they've deemed contaminated because these groups really demonize certain media sources. They always have.
I mean, like, Right, right. Right. As counterintuitive as it feels, if someone is really, really deep in one of those anti-science groups, I might not defend your position with citations from the CDC. And instead, I might encourage, you know, just like recognizing their humanity. And this is easier said than done.
There are some people who you might just need to like take a pause on your relationship with them, you know, because... It is really tough to get into conversations with someone who seems far gone. But if this is a loved one who you really care about and you have no interest in distancing yourself from them, then showing them your empathy, your compassion, your listening skills.
Because ultimately, I do think from what I've observed and reported on, I do believe deep down in my heart that what is driving them toward this group and these beliefs is Yeah. Yeah.
You mentioned earlier that we are living in cultier and cultier times. So I have to ask, what role do you think AI plays in all of this? Because AI, especially the large language models that have bots that we can have conversations with, tend to be so sycophantic.
Wow. I mean, we could talk about this for three days straight. Among the cultier things that these LLMs, large language models, chatbots might do are to affirm you unconditionally. As you mentioned, they're sycophantic, they're suck-ups. They will always say things like, oh, that makes so much sense, even if what you're saying makes absolutely no sense at all.
They perform what's called ego work by... propping up your sense of self, soothing shame, bolstering confidence, performing this emotional labor. And that's effective because they do a lot of linguistic mirroring. Everybody's bespoke chat is their own custom cult leader because it will start to learn the way that you use language, your semantic patterns, and reflect them back at you. Yeah.
They create this sense that they're emotionally intelligent by using those first-person pronouns. They'll spew out these pseudo-diagnoses for you or people in your life. They'll coin neologisms the way that L. Ron Hubbard did. They'll say things like, oh, what you've achieved is this chronomatic whatever.
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Chapter 5: What are thought-terminating clichés and how do they function?
It's like, it's an aperitivo spread. I, yeah, it's, it's, it's more than just cheese, but yeah, I, I got you. Okay. I will need to follow up.
All right. If you're up for sharing, when's the last time you laughed really hard?
Oh, my God. I mean, my husband and I speak in ridiculous accents and like secret fake languages in our house all day long. And he's been speaking in the worst Irish accent you've ever heard in your life recently. And it makes me fall over cackling.
Love that. Okay. And finally, what do you hope people will learn, feel, and do after hearing your talk?
I hope people will feel inspired to be a little more compassionate toward other people's irrationalities and skeptical of their own. I love that.
Amanda Montel, thank you so much. And congrats again on your TED Talk. Thank you. My pleasure. That was Amanda Montel at TED Next 2025 and in conversation with me, Elise Hu. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today.
This episode was produced by Lucy Little, edited by Alejandra Salazar, and fact-checked by the TED Research Team. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. Our team includes Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Ryan Green, Lucy Little, Emma Taubner, and Tansika Sangmarnivon. Additional support from Daniela Balarezo, Valentina Bohannini, and Banban Chang. I'm Elise Hugh.
I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.
Alex Rosenthal has aphantasia, meaning he can't visualize things like memories or even his daughter's face. I can sometimes get like a tiny flash for like a fraction of a microsecond and then it's gone. And for some people, it's just total blank slate. That's next time on the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Listen and subscribe to the TED Radio Hour wherever you get your podcasts.
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