CultXCosmic- INTO THE CULTIVERSE 1

Oh better there m hm. Trigger warn This podcast may include explicit content that will take you out of your comfort zone and make you question reality.

Listener's discretion is advised.

Hello, and welcome back to the show. This is part one of the brand new mini series into the Culti Verse, and we're gonna be talking about some of the most obscure cults of all time. I have my ride or die with me, Colby, how are you?

I'm hoping this is a ride.

I'm not a die but you never know. With the cosmic Peach, I like to talk about the die bart of law.

Well, with the Colts, I'm sure there'll be no shortage of.

Carnage, lots of death, lots of mayhem, and so we're kicking it old school. And I have prepared a list of cults to present to you. You have prepared some cults to present to me, but we don't know anything about the other one's cults, right.

I don't even remember which ones you picked as far as this episode goes good, I have not heard of the Solar Sunshine Flair cult.

That's not what it's called. What is it, Well, it's called the the I'll get into it in a minute. But that I mean, so, I tried to like find interesting ones that I don't feel like a lot of people talk about, but that are they should be because they got like super weirdness and like high death counts and like whyatt aren't they like somebody needs to make a documentary on this first one I got it's cray Cray.

Maybe you should make the documentary.

I just don't have the time or the patients. I hope you enjoy it, though.

Maybe you should make a podcast episode about it.

That I'm in the process of doing right now.

So, how you been splendid?

Any major changes in your life that you want to show here with the class?

Yes, I just passed my first kidney stone one kilo.

One? Yeah? Is that why you haven't been wanting to get frisky? No? Well, I guess if you're not gonna say it, I will.

What are you gonna say?

I was just gonna tell everyone that we are mister and missus cosmic peach.

This is the first time hearing of that we would you.

Like it to be the other way around? Mister and missus conspiracy play time?

Yes, I'm a tad husband, take my name.

Yeah. So, but in all seriousness, though you've agreed to sign on to a lifetime of craziness.

I don't know. Divorce is pretty easy these days, so we'll see.

Oh, thanks, Ton, Well, I'm glad you have such a positive outlook for us.

Hey, I told you when we got married that if you wanted to get divorced, I'm not because I don't believe in divorce.

Do you believe in? So if you're ready for this transaction to end, you'll just, you know, till death do us part me?

No? Okay, good, you can just go give with someone else and I'll give with someone else and we'll still be married and we'll have to explain it to people of parties.

Wow. Okay, Well, anyways, though, I think mister missus cosmic playtime. How about that?

Am I the mister?

Yeah? Okay, yeah, let's I mean, it's twenty twenty five. You can be the missus if you want. Isn't it that how things go these days?

Yeah? Get a niptuck, Sure you can.

It'll go along with your kidney stone, and.

I'll actually make passing kidney stones easier, that's what you think, because you have a badge hole now instead of a ween.

Yeah.

But the kidney stone ain't gonna come.

Out your badge hole, your man badge.

Well, are you ready to learn about some fucking cults and shit dazzle me? All right, Well, I want to take you on a little journey to Geneva, Switzerland circa nineteen eighty four.

I say, hell sinky, you hear Geneva? I know you don't know what that's from.

No, I don't enlighten me.

Pretty got fingered?

Okay, maybe somebody else got it. You ever been to Geneva, Switzerland?

Not since breakfast? No, I've never left the country except for one.

Time, not even on a cruise. You never went to Mexico.

I will not go on cruises.

Get your hair braided for five dollars? No? All right, well we are going there tonight. Have you ever heard a two men named Joseph de Mambro and Luke Gerret.

I don't believe so.

So they formed a secret society called the Order of the Solar Temple. But it's not to be confused with the Solar Lodge of the Ordo templey whatever orientis. This isn't an oto thing. They started their own shit, and it was called the Order of the Solar Temple, and they were claiming to be a continuation of the Knight's Templar and incorporated an eclectic range of beliefs with aspects of Rosicrucianism, theosophy, and New Age ideas.

So is it what was the called again?

See the Order of the Solar Temple. Okay, are you familiar with like Rosicrucianism and stuff like that, and like okay, so they basically hodgepodged a bunch of stuff together, but really they essentially just preached about other worlds and planets and they were obsessed with extraterrestrials and the Knights Templar. So if you can imagine combining the Knights Templar with like some fucking et shit, that's what it was. It was like this new ag there's life on other plane.

So like a pan Spermia doomsday.

Cult kind of. So they were also obsessed with the Dog Star serious they got all of their inspiration from ancient civilizations, like ancient Egyptians, the civilization on Malta, who built jig and tea? Have you ever heard of that jig and tea. It's one of those places that Graham Hancock talks about a lot. Okay, So they were talking about the civilization on Malta. They were talking about the civilization in ancient Turkey that built go Beckley Tepe.

That's the one I always hear in Tucker. Yeah.

And then they were talking about the ancient Egyptians because they all built structures in alignment with the dog Star Serious, and so they had like the super hard on for like these extraterrestrials that are gonna come from Serious and they're gonna come get them and they're gonna enlighten them with all this wisdom and stuff because they were our ancient past masters. Does that make sense?

Yeah, so far it's kind of a common thought process that we see a lot of today.

But this is in the eighties, right, So it's like one of the first ones to kind of catch on to that idea, right besides Heaven's Gate, but heaven Skate I don't think was as steeped in like culture as these guys were, do you, because I feel like they just made up a bunch of shit.

Well, they were convinced that they had to hop on the craft that was hiding and is it Haley's common or hell bop, I always forget Haley's. So they weren't really talking.

About civilizations and shit or theosophy. Yeah, they were kind of making their own rules anyways, like we gotta castrate ourselves, we gotta shave our heads, we gotta wear nikes, like just weird shit like that, you know. But these guys were kind of on a whole upper echelon type shit. So Joseph Demambro was a French jeweler and an esotericist with a history of fraud, and Luke Garret was a Belgian homeopath known for lecturing on alternative medicine and spirituality.

So these two guys, if they were alive today, they would both definitely have.

Podcasts, right yeah, no shit, they would be co hosts. I don't know. There's not a lot of information about how these two met though, because it seems like, Okay, this French jeweler with a history of fraud, why is he in the circles with this this Belgian homeopathic guy lecturing on alternative medicine and spirituality.

Well, you know a lot of the occult, he said. The first guy, the French.

Dude, Joseph de Mambro, they're both friends.

So he was into the occult and the other guys into alternative living and spiritualities. So I could see where those pasts could cross.

They travel in small circe.

Maybe they met at a conference or something.

Well, here's the thing about Joseph de Mambro. He actually before he started the Order of the Solar Temple, he had founded several past esoteric groups, and he had previous affiliation with a number of other organizations, and some of them included the Pyramid Organization and a new age group founded by Dimambro that was later replaced by the Temple

This kind of sounds like musicians, like you have maybe two or three bands you're kind of experimenting, and then you find the one that hits right.

Yeah.

Shit, the Pyramids not that top charts. Yeah, gold So the Solar Solar Temple that's his third band.

Yeah, that's his third band.

This is the one that sells autarinas.

And I think it didn't I think he didn't have like, you know, you have to have the other Kouk in the crew to really get people on board. Like he started the Pyramid and he started the Golden Way Foundation, but he wasn't really gaining any traction in until he involved Luke Jerra, who's like this homeopath guy. And so it's like you get you two to.

Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham.

Yet right, Yeah, you have to have your your like us, you needed me. So if you were to guess the type of members that they recruited, who would just say that.

They were, oh, probably some freaks, some people that like to you know, maybe ten years before they joined this cult, they were following the Grateful Dead around.

Do you think they would like rub ointments on each other holes?

And like it sounds like from the two mixes of thoughts that these guys brought to the I assume they call it a cult, but probably not they brought to the group. It seems like there's a wide range of people that could be into that stuff. You could get your philosophers, you're you're you know, magic practitioners, h you're Yeah, the people that were gyps and oil on each other's bumholes.

So that's what I thought too. But you know what the crazy thing is, they somehow managed like ninety percent of their members were affluent former Catholics.

Well, you said Rosicrucianism was.

Right, So when you actually look at their mid Catholics, Yeah, they converted them from Catholicism over to their brand of like religiosity, I guess because they incorporated aspects of the Freemasons, Occultism, Christianity, and Catholicism and they made this new religion I guess.

You, not necessarily, And when we get into Mike Colt in the second half of this episode, you're going to see a lot of that similar like you'll see. But yeah, it doesn't surprise me. When you look at a lot of the people who join cults. It's a lot of times people who have lived lives that were unfulfilled and they're having a crisis and they need some kind of new identity or new path and instead of finding religion or joining a book club, they they go extreme with it.

Well, it just you know, when people think of colts and cult members, you think of like the Manson family, like a bunch of long hairs with fucking Harry Pitts and shit that are just like peace and love and all like having sex with each other and rebind ointment on each other's be holes.

I don't know, there's a lot of different elements to Colts and I I don't know. I'm I don't automatically think of the Manson family with Colts.

I mean, do you think of like Mormon colts.

Like you know, I think of like Jonestown.

Yeah. Sure Jonestown wasn't picky on their members either though.

Sounds like most religions. So how old was this little girl? An infant when he was receiving the message from her?

Yes, and the cult went on for several years, so I think she was like three by the time everything ended.

Well just spoiler alert, but only last three years.

Well, they had started it before she was ever born, and then she was born. He names her Emmanuel. He says he's getting these messages.

So they had already been together for a while. Yeah, he has this daughter.

That's where things start to go to crazy town. And they were already so established at that point that they the members were like, ooh, this is just the new part of the fucking ascension.

Yeah, they were getting a message.

Right, And so basically these two yahoos went around telling their follow they're all of their followers that the apocalypse was coming, and they were getting these messages from the baby girl.

I'm sorry, did you say how many like roughly people were in there?

Well, I can't tell you yet because I'm when I reveal it, you'll be surprised at the end.

That's like the big twist is there is only three people, all right.

So the this a little backstory. The Solar Temple was heavily influenced by theosophus Alice Bailey. Have you heard of her?

This sounds familiar. That's theosophy, that's the Blevotsky I don't know if I've heard of her.

So I just put a little bit about her in my notes because I feel like it's important because she was Alice Bailey was inspired by Blovotsky. But she was a British and American writer and she wrote about twenty five books on theosophy, and one of she was one of the first writers to ever use the term new age.

So this is I think I heard of it.

Yeah, Alice Bailey was actually one of the first ever to use that term new age. And then she inspired douchebags like this and they started cults and shit. But Alice Bailey's works, written between nineteen nineteen and nineteen forty nine, describe a wide ranging neo theosophical system of esoteric thought, covering topics like how spirituality relates to the solar system, meditation, healing,

So what is it about Tibet?

Well, do you remember an episode I did where I covered Tibetan weirdness and like all the dead bodies and shit that turn up by that mountain because they're searching for that hidden kingdom.

I don't know.

So I actually did this presentation on the cult of Conspiracy, and anybody who's listening to this right now can go back and find that episode. But a lot of Theosophists and Hitler have been obsessed with tibet for the longest and they think there's like this hidden civilization there and if you get high enough on the mountain you can find it, or like these entities can be channeled there. Bolvotsky, Crowley, Alice Bailey, Hitler, they were all really really interested in Tibetan.

Well, they did bring us the best form of Buddhism and the best book of the dead.

What are they called.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead and Tibetan Buddhism.

Oh, there's no fancy name.

Maybe another languages.

So are you a big tibet fan.

I don't know. I really do like the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I tried to read the Egyptian Book of the Dead and I couldn't.

Do you want to start a cult behind it?

I already did. It only lasted about three years.

Well, listen, before I did that presentation, you know what the extent of my knowledge on Tibet was the Dali Lama watching the Golden Child with Eddie Murphy.

Oh, I mean that pretty much covers it all.

Yeah, what else do you need to know? So because of this inspiration, like they took from Alice Bailey to and Rosicrucianism and the Freemasons and all this stuff. Night's Temple our stuff, and it's, like I said before, they hodgepodged it into one religion. So bustin if you have any questions, Okay, I have.

Been and I will continue to do so.

So there were a number of initiation rituals of a Masonic nature. The members also moved up in degrees like Masons, but they only had three degrees first degree, p second degree, third degree, and they practiced, like I said, Masonic rituals, but they also practiced a number of magical rituals. They used to leucinogens and invoked sex magic in which sexual activities were performed in order to acquire some type of spiritual gain.

This sounds like my kind of cult. Fucking unpsychedelics. Yeah, fucking on psychoedegic ald me is the easiest thing to do.

I mean, you told me you didn't want no part of it when you on psychedelics.

Mushroom sex is the weirdest thing you'll ever do.

Would you would you give it one out of five mushrooms?

Or it's just I don't know how to explain it. Just the concept of it is hard to wrap your mind around when you're tripping. I do know that certain people do have sex on psychedelics, and certain psychedelics are different than others. But yeah, I don't know. To me those two whenever they mix it is in a cult like ex setting.

It seems you want to do DMT and half sex.

That'd be impossible.

You want to do acid in half sex?

No, I'm not a fan of it.

Well, that's they had to be doing something in these sex rituals, hallucinogens and invoked sex magic. So they're just all tripping balls and just like netting all over each other out in the woods somewhere France.

Yeah, you never said where they're really really like practicing out.

Of Geneva, Switzerland.

So that's the headquarters.

Yeah, okay, But so this Colt did as Colt stew and it came down to transit time, as they called it, and Joseph de Mambro and Luke Jerra came up with a list of how their members were going to die, and it went a little something like this. There was three categories.

There's so many threes in this. There's three degrees. You said the chick was three when the cult, right, yeah, banded, and I said, there's only three members that.

Listen, all right, there's three categories. The traders who had to be murdered, the immortals who were going to be helped in death, which essentially just means they're going to be killed by other members, and then the awakened ones who were going to commit voluntary suicide. And that was the three categories.

Well, if it's involuntary, it's not suicide.

Yeah, but that's the I guess that's the traders category because they're just going to get straight up murdered. So you still want to be a part of this cult.

So you will be killed in one of those three ways. No matter like.

What, no matter what. Yes, as part of the transit, the transit is leaving this yeah vessel. Yes, the great transitioning.

And some fucking baby told them this.

Yeah, that fucking bitch tit.

Of a baby, alien possessed baby. Yes, so far this shit tracks.

So on September thirtieth, nineteen ninety four, I should have put this in the nineties. Fucking well, you didn't know about it? Yeah, I didn't.

So.

On September thirtieth, nineteen ninety four, the Duteaux family was the first to get it. They were lured into an underground tunnel of some sorts by two other members and repeatedly stabbed to death, including their three month old baby.

They stabbed the baby, Yeah, dude, damn what the baby?

Do you think?

They stabbed it three times?

But don't you think that's crazy though?

I mean, it's hard to do anything crazy when you're in a could just trying to out crazy the last guy.

But I guess they would fall into the immortals category who had to be helped in their death, because there was the ones who were going to get murdered, the ones that were going to get helped. Quote unquote, and then the awakened ones who were going to murder themselves.

Okay, so what the fuck's the difference between being murdered and being helped die the same thing? Sounds like they murdered those fuckers in the cave.

It's like doctor Kovorkian type shit.

They just wasn't that this was murdered. This is their traders, right.

I guess they must have been traders.

They had some Syrian summon them to a cave to get stabbed repeatedly. That is being helped to die. I suppose you know, that should be the one of the things you can plead in court murder in the first second manslaughter And I just helped him.

Die assisted in a cave repeatedly.

Step he was gonna die anyway.

But so, as the list suggests, all the members got different outcomes, and so their cult expanded from Switzer to France, and there was kind of like two camps, if you will. And in France they find twenty dead bodies that had been shot point blank in the head with one gun. They find twenty one dead bodies who had died from gunshot wounds but were previously drugged with sleeping pills. They were helped, they were hoped, and they find another two

Acid not like the driver Hoffmann, No.

Like like the kind that'll kill you if you get it.

Intervenious fuck that would sing. Oh, I think about it.

I bet that kidney stone doesn't.

Just traveling up? Did it? All?

Right? So but basically in the end, they found all these bodies arranged in a network of chalets in both France and Switzerland with timed explosives that went off and set these chalets on fire because they were basically trying to dispose of the bodies. But it didn't work because they were able to put the fire out and they found all these dead people.

No, I apologize if you already said this. But did the two leader dudes have to do it too?

Yeah, they also died, but they didn't they weren't counted as a part of the.

Victims victimsly slash members. So what about the baby?

She died too?

How did she die? I will have to have help because.

Yeah, well I'll have to look it up. Because there's not a lot of information on what happened with the little girl, so she was other than the fact that they all committed suicide, so I would assume they gave her pills or something.

So was there any way to like leave some of them alive so they would burn alive or they all died before they were burned.

It looked like they had all died before they were burned. And total fifty two members were counted that day, apart from the leaders and their children, and it was later determined that out of the fifty two, only fifteen were genuine suicides.

So these guys had wives that were on board with this shit. Sure advanced me.

What's crazy about this is the year that this went down with all the mass murder slash suicide. It's the same year that the Heaven's Gate cult poisoned themselves to death.

And it's the same year you were born. Well, fuck you, it was.

Do you think I'm Joseph the mom brow crazy?

This was two months before your birthday?

It was. But I'm just saying, they have the Heaven's Gate cult in this cult have so many similarities and they both killed themselves in the same year.

Yeah, why didn't this one get any press?

It makes you wonder, Well, it was a European ordeal where but we hear about stuff like that all the time.

Was this before or after I don't remember.

I think this Heaven This was after Heaven's Skates, Yes.

Spring, So yeah, these days, that's plenty of time for that ship to die out for the next one to be big in the news. I don't know. Back then, I don't remember seeing this. No Heaven's Gate shit, that's seared into my memory.

But if those two happened in the same year, you would think that they would have gotten equal coverage, especially since they had such similar beliefs.

Yeah, there's gotta be some dateline episode out there about this.

But you know, it's crazy. It doesn't even stop there, because apparently there were surviving members of the Solar.

Temple they like boogied before the death ritual.

Well, they backed out last minute, and some were not chosen for the transit as they were told.

So some backed out and some were told you're not coming. Yeah, you don't need to die by murder.

Help or they wantide they wanted it.

Yeah, so it was like getting cut from the varsity team.

Right, so on dissembled twenty third, nineteen ninety five. A year later, fourteen more members surviving members of the Solar Temple, including three children, were found in a circular star formation and an isolated clearing of some park in France.

So the JV squad finally got to travel, right, they made the transit. I wonder if they were just like, let's just try, and I know they said we couldn't come.

Peter, dude, they thought about it.

Part Maybe they were getting messages. Did any of them have a baby?

They had? There was three children there.

Who are like, hey, no, could come now.

So there were two other bodies that were found near the fourteen, right, and so the investigation hypothesized that the fourteen people, including the three children, had taken sedative pills. Then the two others that they found near the fourteen, they were identified as Jean Pierre and Andre Friedel, shot each member in the head one by one with two

So that they would fall into the fire.

Nope, the two the bodies of the two perpetrators were found alongside the burned ones, but they were not themselves burned. So that's I said fifty two before. Yeah, but you was fourteen fifteen, sixteen.

Yeah, but that number fifty two you said didn't include the family members.

It didn't include the members, the founder, the founders, So we're talking just cult members right now, that'd be fifty two plus sixteen.

Well, why don't the families of this founders.

Count because they're not technically cult members? Right? Would you count Jones in with the Jonestown?

Well, there's cult leaders and there's cult members, and it just seems to me that it's weird that they differentiate the death total.

Well, to look into this, which I tried to find, they make no mention of wives, and they make no mention of other children except for Emmanuel. And it's almost impossible to find information on how they uh ended up killing themselves.

I wonder why.

Yeah, it's interesting.

Check Reddit.

It's almost as if they maybe didn't go through with it and skip town or something.

Or like, but it did say they did die or did I just assume that?

But you know how they'll say like, oh, yeah, and the members were or in the cult leaders were found in there in a house nearby, and they had all committed suicide. But it's like, how do we know that, Like I like, we didn't see their bodies.

Well that's what I always say, how do we know any of it's real?

But so anyways, there goes another sixteen but it doesn't even stop there because on March twenty second, nineteen ninety seven, two five more surviving members of the Solar Temple died in a mass suicide in Saint Casimir, Ca, Quebec.

So at this time you could just off a bunch of motherfuckers and make it look like they were Solar Temple members. Yeah, I guess, because seems like there's not a lot of there's not like a roster you can go check for membership of this thing.

If you looked hard, well there were they were members that had been So this cult did a lot of like video ritualism where they'd film it, and a lot of these surviving members were on like the videos and stuff, and they knew who they were and had been identified in like the You remember how was his fuck from Heaven's Gate used to film himself and his members all the time. So these mass suicides that they kept finding

Maybe the transit comes in waves, I don't know.

But so they basically burnt their house down with them inside of it.

And Marie, did you say how many there were.

Five more the family? It was two couples and one of the people their dad, So it was two couples and a dad of one of the people apparent, so five total. And then the responding officers found three teenage survives at the scene, the children of one of the couples who were found to be completely drugged out of their mind, and the teenagers burned the house down at their parents' request after being drugged and begging for their lives,

Kind of quick really well as far as cult stories go.

In the aftermath, many conspiracy theories quote unquote quote revolved around the event's most allegend government and organized crime involvement.

See I was looking for like somewhere to go with that, and you didn't really see anything. But so what was the speculation on that?

So Luke JARREI there's not much to find on him, but Joseph de Mombro had been caught up in a bunch of fraudulent schemes where he was like transporting illegal weapons and stuff like that. And there was a lot of money laundering going on with the Red Cross in the Solar Temple, and with the members being so affluent and wealthy, and they kind of were picky and choosy

I think I need more information. It just seems like it's a pretty There had to be so many details in there that we need to.

Know, Like just on what I gave you, I would give it six solar temples. Six Yeah, m.

I'd go five. It's like your average cult story. It's it's interesting. I mean, it seems like it's got a lot of foundation.

Do you not find it so interesting though? That it's one It was one of the first New Age cults, and it had so many connections back to Heaven's Skate who we know. Seems like there was more going on there.

Yeah, that part's intriguing too, that they were kind of going on at the same time. There was some alien aspect to both of their belief systems. And I mean, suicide's pretty common in these these big cult stories, so yeah, I mean there's probably a lot more in there that we could uncover.

I also just think it's interesting how like a lot of these things that get started on these like new ag weird theosophical principles, they always end up in like just skill your just die.

Well, if the Tibetan Buddhists are ray, they're gonna come back as Ambas on dog shit do it all over again. They just lost like five karma points, maybe even three.

So did you find it interesting at least?

Yeah? It was? It was a good one to hear about that I like I said, I'd never heard of this one. Well, thanks for listening, Thanks for sharing.

On October the fifth, nineteen ninety four, five people were found dead in this house in Canada. Ten hours later, in Switzerland, twenty five bodies were discovered in a chalet in the small town of Salva, and twenty three more in a nearby village. In less than twenty four hours, fifty three people had died there remained set alight by identical incendiary devices. Among the dead eight children, several senior civil servants, and two millionaires. But they had something else

Do you have something for me? I do I feel like yours is going to be better than mine?

You feel like mine's going to be better?

Yeah? No, I don't know, because it doesn't seem like you were very impressed by the Solar Temple.

Well you didn't start to fucking think if you want me to be impressed, if you want to impress me, start a real cult.

I want. But I was trying to go for these ones that nobody's heard about. So I mean the ones that have like all the obvious cult or like government connections or like weird CIA stuff. Everybody knows about those ones, you know, but these lesser known ones that are not as researched are harder to dig stuff up on.

Actually, yeah, I was surprised that you looked and couldn't find like details on the guy's families and that kind of stuff, because seems like that was almost deliberately left out.

Well, there's more information on Alice Bailey than either Luke Gree or Joseph Demambro. I mean, it's hard to find fucking dogshit on them, and a lot of the not Wikipedia, but like a lot of the other sites you can go to if you google the Solar Temple, they have the death count wrong. They say only sixteen died, So it's like they purposely manipulate the numbers too.

Yeah, which time were they talking.

About, right, that's because it was over a span of a few years.

There, you go, maybe that's the missing number because you said there was. I did the math when you were talking about the deaths in France forty three and then in Geneva. Yeah, you said fifty two in total, forty three plus sixteen is fifty nine, So maybe that extra five is luxure right the families? Yeah, who knows that they need to make a documentary on Netflix about it?

That's what I said.

Well, I was being facetious, but it'd be a good one.

If they could find more info.

On it, Well they would netflixify it. Yeah, they sure won, and then Tom O'Neill.

Would cry, So what cold do you have for me?

Yes, for my cult? On this edition of Inside the CULTI Verse, I chose I probably way more well known one than the one you talked about. In fact, definitely more well known. And it's called Synanon any.

Relation to the nutmeg or pumpkin spice cult?

What's that.

Cinnamon?

Some reason? I don't think you're gonna edit that one. Well, it's kind of funny why they named it Synanon. Why, Oh, we will get to that. But so Cynanon is kind of something that maybe older people would know about because it was kind of a phenomenon when it was taking place, and it did get a lot of attention and coverage,

This one is probably more well known.

Yeah it is, and I just I.

Started to actually haven't heard of it though.

Yeah, I hadn't either. When Brandy Renee came on Conspiracy Playtime to talk about Matthew North, we ended up going down a lot of different rabbit holes, and se Do is one of them, and we ended up mentioning c do ce do. It's all caps ce edu. It's one

Was he a good looking guy.

He should sue Sam Tripoli for copyright infringement. He was not a good looking guy. In fact, he was kind of weird looking. He was kind of a heavy set dude. He'd had about with meningitis when he was a young kid, and so like half his face was kind of.

Almost paralyzed Bell's palsy.

Well, yeah, here, I'll show you a picture of him and you could even clip it in.

But oh let's see. Oh no, no, no, I mean he looks like he could be a He looks like John Wayne Gacy with Bell's palsy.

Okay, tell me he doesn't. I mean all fa why guys look alike?

Oh my god, So he's big daddy.

Yeah. So Chuck's story is he was born in Ohio, one of the least good states out there. Fuck you, no, I've never been about to go right, but he was born in Ohio. No hate, I'll check it out, report back. But he had a father who was kind of a raging, drunk, not very nice guy, and he ended up dying in a car accident with another woman who he'd been running around town with. And I think Chuck was four at

From him talking about his mom.

Yes, So anyway, one of Chuck's brothers died from complications of the flu, and he kind of always blamed himself for that. He kind of was aimless. But somehow he managed to get into Notre Dame and he got real close with one of the I don't know the title, but one of the Catholic guys there. Spent a lot of time with him, said to have had a lot

For it, so they were trying to get help.

Yeah, they were okay, it was like AA, so people trying to quit.

Drinking and also heroin a.

Well, Heroin kind of started coming into this into the circle. These these heroin addicts that wanted help, like you said, and they kind of rubbed the alcoholics the wrong way. They thought they were like a lower class of people. And a couple of the alcoholics ALKI.

Thought the heroin addicts were a lesser class of people.

That's what they said. A few of them had some concerns with the people that they were starting to let in. And at this point it was called TLC for Tender Loving Care. That's what he had on the building. But so to kind of get into like why the heroin guys liked it and gals was because he it's called attack therapy. He incorporated this technique into these sessions and they called it the game.

What was fun about it?

Okay, so the game, I'm going to read a little excerpt from an article from Cabinet that talks quite a bit about this Synanon group. The game consisted of a dozen or so addicts sitting in a circle. One player would start talking about the appearance or behavior of another, picking out their defects and criticizing their character. But as soon as the subject of the attack tried to defend him or herself, other players would join the barrage, unleashing

Damn.

Faced with this unrelenting group assault, the recipient would eventually have a little choice but to admit their wrongdoing and promise to him in their ways. Then the group would turn to the next person and begin all over again.

So they got braided until they got clean. Yeah, that's the thought behind it.

And to go back a little bit with these sessions that he was having and when it was like an official meeting place and it was in that brick building. His only rules there was two was of course no drugs or alcohol and no violence. And so in the in the game, the rule was you were encouraged to stay seated while you did it, but you could say anything you wanted as long as it wasn't like threatening vio it.

But they took turns, right, everybody got berated.

Yeah, And well, that's the funny thing is Chuck was not a participate part of the game unless he was helping Barid somebody else. And you're going to see was he still ALKI No, he took his last drink the day before he went to the AA. Mab at hypocrite until later in the story. But no, he's a hypocrite. You're going to see like the rules of this thing as it grows, it all kind of suits Chuck, Sure,

So do you think this started out as like something that was actually helping.

People for sure? Yeah, because in the beginning, I was to say, this thing goes from like addiction treatment to a societal experiment to eventually almost like a terrorist organization. Oh god, And I mean all along you're starting even now, you're starting to see like cult undertones with the thing about alcoholics Anonymous was there was no leader, and that's why so many people love it to this day. It's just, you know, a group of people and this was not that.

They were all heroin addicts.

No, but they liked the game, and they.

Like they just liked telling people what pieces of shit they were.

Yeah, I guess Lennard Nimoy loved to go just fucking scream at people. He was probably like Chuck, I doubt anybody would fucking start talking shit to Spock. So this thing out.

So another star Trek involved in a cult.

Weird And there was a movie in nineteen sixty one made about this Synanon and there was like a motown jazzy song that was because I guess they would just have parties. And I guess the heroin addicts really knew how to dance. That's what a lot of them were saying.

Just throw them out there and let them few call over everybody.

Well they're not on heroin at that time, they're recovered.

So can I ask you something? This is working just based on pure humiliation alone.

Well that apparently people needed to like be shamed in order to look at themselves. This attack therapy model wasn't unique. He made it big, and I mean there's elements of that stuff that I've seen in other cults.

Well, you sure don't like it when I use it on you?

What do you mean? It's like a nat there, It's like a nightly ritual, I'm not allowed to turn it on you. So around the time that like he's taken in all these heroin addicts, this one thing is this thing was always like egalitarian he had. I mean in the days that this was going on in the late fifties, it was still pretty integrated. But yeah, so a woman named Betty she ended up joining, and.

She was they were they calling them in's and.

Well, I'm sure in other parts of the world.

But that was part of the attack therapy.

I wasn't in all these game sessions. It's so curious, but you could call anybody anything, who knows. But there was a guy who was a football player. I don't remember what school it was. It was a big college in California, somewhere where John Madden was like the defensive coach.

Gonna say, you can at some point they just start fucking each other.

Well, it gets weird with that, and so he would make the kids go to this Synanon school and instead of teachers, they had people who were nowhere near being certified to teach. They were called demonstrators, and they would they're just ex heroin addicts who would I guess always an addict or once an addict, always an addict. So they were heroin addicts in recovery, and they were in charge of these kids. And if you had kids, or you came in there with kids, you thought of everybody

Where was it taking place at?

So it started in Santa Monica and California. Yeah, and it started in a seedy neighborhood when he was in that brick building. And once he starts getting like some donations from members, he kind of moves into I think it's called the del Mar Club, and it was a kind of ritzy thing.

And how was he able to move into some ritzy thing. It's not like heroin attics are huge contributors to shit.

No, But he actually at one point started getting people who were just entranced by the thing he was building and they wanted to be a part of.

It, and they would just give him money.

Well, they joined, and he said, you can join, but you have to sign stuff over to me. I mean, he had one guy sign over an entire mortgage company. He had one woman donate a what a million dollars?

Shut the fuck up.

So in his mind he starts seeing this and he's.

He sounds like a TV preacher.

Well his mind he goes from like wanting to help people into I can turn this into a business, and he actually starts like buying properties and building more like little communes. And at one point he had this nice house that he bought and it was called home Place, and everybody knew home Place was where Chuck lived, and if you were lucky enough to be in his inner circle, you could also go up there and like to be called to home Place was like the highest honor.

And this fat guy with Bell's Paul, see that screams in people's faces.

Yeah, so he.

Did not see like how mentally unstable we are as a nation when you hear stuff like this.

Well, the guy had a talent, Like you said, he was like a TV preacher. That's what he did in these earthies.

Yeah, but when I see people signing stuff over to TV preachers, I get just as mad. It's still the same, it's still the same mental illness.

Well, at least these people had a personal relationship. They weren't just like going to a megachurch and signing away their livelihoods. But it is very similar. But this thing was getting so much attention and being like prage.

After they got clean, they just go out and do more drugs and come right back and get more screamed at.

And well, that's when he decided to not let them graduate. He once you graduated, you were still part of the community. You didn't really leave this thing at a certain point.

Oh, you were just enslaved.

It's not even enslaved. You could leave in the early days. It kind of became a problem later on. But at first, anyway, this was all voluntary, and I would say it was voluntary except for these kids, and that shit gets dark with the kids. But we're not quite there yet. So I started to mention that the government stepped in and said you're not certified to be doing this, and rather than to fight it, he pled guilty and he ended

Took turns.

Well, i mean, I'm sure just one punch. I'm sure with this particular instance, it only took one punch.

So his solution to unruly teenagers was just kicked the shit out of them.

Yeah, and he was quoted as saying, there's a difference between child abuse and corporal punishment. And so the Punk Squad kids, you know, they were kept in line by having the shit kicked out of them if they didn't listen. And they straight up started this like military program for kids who wouldn't listen, and that was called the Punk Squad, like I said, And these kids were kind of beaten into shape, and some of them.

So it worked well, they didn't rebel.

Some of them did not like it. And we'll step ahead to the next part of the story where they had this property next to you, a few ranches, and the kids would run away and there wasn't a lot of places to go. So there was this family I've got I want to say they were called the Gambaninis, and they had a ranch and they ended up helping a run away and so to nip that in the bud, Chuck and some of the other people told the kids that that ranch over there, if you even go onto

What that's like, Jeffrey, don't type shit.

Well, one of the or two of the debt pops.

Take the kids back to the abusers.

It was alleged that the sheriff of this area was in, you know.

Just in and on group No.

The two deputies were members and the sheriff was getting paid off.

Oh my god.

And then in one instance, this girl escaped. It was the girl I told you about that they decked in the face, rade her take her glasses off. She escaped and her mom came and picked her up and took her right back to senning On, and she ended up eventually getting away. She her dad ended up finding out what was going on. She went and lived with him. So she was one of the lucky ones who was

Dies it always come to like cutting the dicks and stuff.

Well, that's another thing I failed to mention. So they if you broke a ruler, you got caught lying, or if you got caught using, they would shave your head and it was kind.

Of not another humiliation.

And if you were a woman and you were caught doing one of those things, you had to wear a baseball cap, and.

That doesn't seem nearly as bad.

Well, then they made Betty actually was kind of like, you know, first wave feminist, and she decided that this isn't equality. So they had this thing called the Wire and it was an FM radio feed that was wired directly into all the Synanon buildings and you could broadcast a video on it too, And she shaved her head and then a bunch of the other women started doing it too. And so when you're into like the seventies. They're all bald. Every member in there has.

A shaved like Heaven's skate.

Well, this is before Heaven's Gate.

Well I'm just saying, look at the patterns, just the.

Oh yeah, this is before Heaven's Gate.

Gate also made the members cash straight themselves.

Yeah, but this was just a sect me, babe.

But why does it always go go to like the outer limits of like humiliation, cutting dicks, shaving heads, killing each other, sucking each other.

You're gonna have to do whatever it takes to uh, getting rid of your kids, show your loyalty. And so you see all of these cults in pop culture. It's it's shaved heads that started with these guys.

But didn't the Mansons shave their heads?

Uh maybe after the fact, not at first, but they did. They did like after, like after during the trial if I remember correctly, because he did right, So anyway, I don't remember where it was.

Now you were saying they had vasectomy parties.

Yeah, and so this is a darker element. And I had to kind of dig for this one because I looked through a lot of these stories and this didn't come up. But once there was, when he decided no more kids, there was five women who were pregnant, and Chuck decided that they should all get abortions.

Oh pregnant.

Well, one woman said fuck this and she ended up leaving. Another woman was eight months.

Pregnant, Oh my god, stop it.

And she was one of the four that had an abortion.

That's not an abortion at that point.

And a lot of people left over this. So there's, like I said, we'll hop back a little bit, probably go back and forth in time, but you know, the rules kind of always revolved around either what Chuck's doing in his own life or what he wants. So at one point, you know, it was like any recovery group, you could drink coffee and smoke cigarettes. Chuck decided he was a smoker that he was going to quit smoking, so he decided no more smoking. A lot of people

So what's good for the goose?

Basically, it's good for big Daddy. Yeah, And so oh with Yeah, so the vasectomy. Oh so this guy who was I don't remember his name off the top of my head, but he was a writer die with Bill up into the point with the vasectomies. He just saw it as like these some of these kids are as young or some of these men are as young as eighteen, and they don't have, you know, the faculty to decide this is what they want to do. And so he he kind of spoke out against it, and he was silenced.

And so really, yeah, so they had he had like people on the inside all over the damn place.

Well, the two of the deputies remembers, and the sheriff was on the payroll.

So yeah, so how does this like come to a boiling pole?

Oh, we'll get there. So when all this was going down, Betty was diagnosed with cancer and she ended up slowly dying, and he was pretty grief stricken. Everybody said, you know that he kind of changed permanently after that, but that didn't stop him. He ended up not very long after she died, he said, I'm taking applications, probably over the wire, I'm taking applications for a new wife. Oh boy, and

Yeah.

He picked this thirty one year old demonstrator slash what we would call a teacher, and they got married, and he was so happy with this. He decided, you know, what is marriage really? It's kind of confining, Like why don't we all do this? And so he decided that if you were married, you had to take place in this ceremony and you and your spouse would say all the things you loved about each other and then part ways. And a lot of the married couples were like what,

But a lot of them wanted them to split up.

Yeah, and a lot of them stayed. He didn't only want them to split up, he wanted them all to remarry somebody else.

Oh my god.

And so there was a lot of people that did this, and a lot of people, from what I can tell, remained in love. Some of them ended up reconciling and getting back together after this all kind of went down.

Can you imagine? I mean, what do you think would have been the straw that broke the cam for you? Like, out of the series of events because you said, oh, some said fucking and last some said fucking left. Like where would you where do you? Where do you think you draw the line at?

I probably would have set in on the first game and then went and did Heroin that night and never came back. That's just me.

It definitely would have been where they took away my SIGs, because if you were like.

So, you would have stayed through a lot of that other stuff.

Well, if you were a legit Heroin.

At what about when you give birth to your baby and they take it to the the what did they call it. It wasn't a nursery, so you can't even be that the hatchery is what they called it.

You can't even be with your baby.

Well that's another detail I omitted. But you would take turns breastfeeding each other's babies.

So you couldn't just have your baby.

No, yeah, no, fuck that was against the rules.

But in the beginning days, if he was really just trying to help heroin addicts, like have a place to stay and maybe some food and get off drugs, I mean, I feel like I could get behind something like that, but it just has spiraled into like a complete mayhem. Yeah, how does I want to help people get off drugs and alcohol? Turn into abortions, bisectomies, You can't smoke, You gotta give your kids up. You put your babies in a hatchery, or let us beat the crap out of them,

Oh and in the early days before any of this, like changing partner stuff went down, when we were recording somebody you had to like fill out paperwork and go to this specific building to have sex. So it was like conjugal life Fay, because he's controlling everything.

This is just when you give it, you know, you give them an inch and they take them My oh just wait this this shit.

I mean, we're getting close. Say that he dies, doesn't everybody? I mean, this guy when this thing started, he was like I think he was like in his fifties when Sinnanan started.

So he's just an old cragley fu with the thirty year old wife.

Now you're gonna have to just be patient and wait to the end, like everybody else. Well, I want to know, Well, we'll get there. So a lot of people when they I think that the changing partners thing really drove some of the people that he considered like real close to him away. And so that's when some shit went down because like one of the couples left and they found out that or they didn't find out they still had

Did you say it?

Like the Gambini. I just remember the Gambinos eating paninis to remember that name. But one time after they had like helped some kids get away, they kind of started like an underground railroad to get kids out of there. And imagine, so one of the things they did is they used their their punk squad like the older boys, and they ended up going to the foothills of the Sisku Mountains, which isn't far from us. It was this place called Badger and that was where they trained and

Probably would rather be on the policequog.

Yeah, there were some older stories about how.

They would work in the cafeteria.

They would police themselves. But Chuck kind of found out that, you know, these are addicts. They they lie, and so he ended up starting his own police force. That was kind of earlier on. But so he just decided to have his own marine corps called the Imperial Marines. And they, like I said, they trained in Badger, California, in the foothills of the Sierra Mountains. They would like make them go out and stay the night in the woods, and

Said, well, that's how colds go.

Our members don't leave. You never leave a religion. This isn't a treatment facility. And so he started kind of drawing attention that he didn't even know about. The Iras had already been looking into him, but then the FED started looking into him. And how he found out was Jimmy Carter was president and he decided to go to d C with a couple of his other guys and they got there and he tried to get in like on the you know, the floor of the White House, and he wanted to be in with the drugs are,

Oh my god.

And one of the little kids was standing in the doorway and saw the whole thing happen and.

This is horrible.

Well, most cult stories aren't uplifting, and this one.

I'd rather be part of this solar temple.

Well, she'd rather be helped die than this. So there was a lawyer and his name was Paul Morantz, and he kind of took it upon himself to like shut this shit down, and he was helping. I think he ended up winning a case where one of the members

Put a rattlesnake in this man's mailbox.

Yeah, and right after this happened, guess what goes down in South America. I don't fucking know Jonestown.

Oh, for fox sake, see how they're all related to.

Kind of get this. So one of the guys was watching the news and he's like, Jim Jones, look at all those Adidas. So one of their businesses had put together a bunch of care packages with the d it is in.

There, the synanos, and they sent care packages to Jonestown. Yes, stop it right now. Whah.

And so Paul Morants, the lawyer, he was like, all right, I've got it. I can do this now. And he like went hard and he got the law enforcement involved, and they went and raided the compound, and.

Uh did they use the ATF?

Chuck wasn't there. No ATF. Maybe, I mean they were stockpiling guns. But they didn't shoot anybody, they didn't shoot any dogs. They just went looking for Chuck and he wasn't there. He was in Lake Havasu and they ended up finding him there and he was just fucking hammered. When they found him. They said he could barely function.

Said, so he gets off scott free.

Well, the only thing they did was they said he had to officially step down as the leader of Synanon. Now, this guy I didn't mention when he had started Synanon, and he was just kind of I told you, he was just kind of a low life drunk in Santa Monica. He'd already had two marriages and he had two kids, and two of the kids ended up in their later life joining Synanon. One of them was Chuck Junior and the other I think the daughter's name, but god, I want to say it was JD is what they called her.

It's part of the Synanon group.

Well, the troubled teen industry. They branched off, and see DO was one of the bigger ones, or I think it's still going and that was founded by a next Synnon member, and so they use all the same tactics. I mean, these kids die or they get severely abused all the time.

And so literally nothing ever came of this.

Well it branched off into other horrible things. Like the worst aspects if you ask me of Synanon was what they did to the kids. I mean these adults, yeah, brainwashed whatever they were choosing to be there.

Maybe they put somebody in a coma, input a rattlesnake in somebody else's mailbox, you don't. I mean they were just on the total outskirts of fucking. They should have been in jail all of them.

Well, listen to this.

They beat that other dude's dad to pieces that was trying to help the kids. Nobody goes to jail. He just went and got drunk and a drunken stupor, and he still got to run the place via his daughter. Like, I don't feel like this this is a happy ending.

This was something he said when I think when the the beef with the media and all that was going on, he went on the wire and all this shit was recorded. You could actually go find some of it today. I listened to a bunch of it. He announced the organization's new religious posture, and this was in September of seventy seven, after he had lost three hundred thousand dollars for abducting and brainwashing a member that Paul Morantskuy won that case.

But he doesn't go to jail, even though he made statements like that.

Nope, no jail time.

So this is not a happy ending.

I don't know if any of these will have happy endings. Did you pick some for future episodes? For the people listening the proud cult members of.

You know what I considered a happy ending. The motherfuckers who start the thing dies horribly. I mean, like the Solar Temple for example, they suicided themselves.

I think a lot of them were either murdered or helped to die.

Okay, but good, they're dead. We got rid of them. This guy get literally nothing happens to.

Him and his tactics remakes to this day.

And yeah, in these they live on, they survive on, and they just abuse more and more kids. So my happy ending is he would have went to jail or he died horribly with like a colostomy bag.

I don't know why you're getting so bent out of shape. I never promised a happy ending.

Well, it's kind of reminds me of that movie I said I wanted to make where the bad guy wins in the end, because that's real life shit. The bad guy wins in the end, like some pedaphocracy type shit.

That's the moral of the story. Sleep tight, everyone, So.

Are you giving it one out of ten? Synanons?

I give this one ten because I think in Sinana, I think it has all the elements of all the mainstream cults that we know about. And like I said, most people out there have probably at least heard of Cynanon, if not even watched one of those documentaries I was talking about earlier. So I just think this one needs to be known about.

Because yeah, I didn't know about it.

I mean, this thing goes from fifty eight to ninety one. Remnants of it thrive today in this troubled teen industry where you send your kids to get help and sometimes they die. Yeah. Joe Rogan's booker for the mother Ship, and I think he met this guy at the comedy store. I don't remember Adam Eager or something like that. Eagres he was someone who went to see do and like he tried to expose it. But yeah, these things still

So she loved it.

She said it taught her structure and made her a good you know, instilled work ethic and well, well don't so not all of it's bad, but a lot of this shit when you send your kids to these programs that are running stuff that was going.

On, end up helping kids.

Though for sure, I would say we know about those ones more. You don't hear it. You don't watch a documentary where they're like, I went to a work camp and I learned how to ride donkeys. I'm happy nobody wants to watch that shit. But yeah, it's not good. I mean to me, it's just like if you're a parent and you can't handle your kids so you send them away. That's a failure on your part. That's neither here nor there.

Do you know which cult you're covering in our next installment?

For next episode, I will give you a hint, Anthony Fauci with a smile. That's all I'm going to say.

I am covering one that goes all the way back in time. For mine. It's it's one of the og cults, if you will, a cult, granddaddy of all cults that kind of like sin and on bits and pieces of it still remain today.

Christianity, honey, what you have to leave that in there?

Any closing thoughts.

Don't forget to leave your house with an umbrella and join a cult. And if you do, you probably won't hear the next episode.

Well, what if it's the Cult of Conspiracy.

Well they've already joined if they're listening to join another one, you don't have to leave this Cult of Conspiracy. But that's your homework consignment. Go join a local cult and report back to.

Us, and Cult of Conspiracy doesn't count.

And maybe we'll cover your cult in the bonus episode only on Patreon.

And with that being said, there is one very important vital piece of information I need you to learn, just as soon as humanly possible.

That RASSA shut down on me, sent down on you. No, mad, that's what.

I'm not.

RASA in town.

It's a family.

Let's be bum suits.

Hey y'all, this is cosmic peach coming on at you. Whoo, something like that.