Bonus Ep: HBO's "The Vow," Starz's "Seduced" & the NXIVM Cult - w/ Ann Bradney & Piper Sample

Deep Dive with Jamie Stein

With cults becoming a hot topic in the Housewives universe, it seemed like the right time to drop this previously-unreleased episode: Jamie welcomes good friend of the pod Piper Sample and founder of Radical Aliveness Ann Bradney for a roundtable discussion of HBO's The Vow, Starz's Seduced and their combined depiction of the NXIVM cult led by Keith Raniere. The conversation kicks off with the question, "How do intelligent, successful people like Mark Vicente and Sarah Edmonson end up susceptible to a cult in the first place...?" and then develops into a broader exploration into what exactly constitutes a cult, ways in which we're willing to defer our personal power to the leaders in our lives (and why), what we must be willing to tolerate in order to shatter the type of binary thinking that helps cults to thrive, contemporary politics, and much, much more.

Follow @radicalaliveness, and learn more about Ann's work at radicalaliveness.org; follow @jamiestein, and learn more about his work at hollywoodreadings.com.

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