One of my favourite podcasts is Dear Franklin Jones, a seven-episode 2018 production that detailed the narrator’s immersion into, and gradual estrangement from, an American cult led by Franklin Albert Jones (1939-2008)—aka Bubba Free John, aka Da Free John, aka Da Love-Ananda, aka Adi Da Love-Ananda Samraj. As a boy growing up in California, Jonathan Hirsch would listen to recordings of Jones’s speeches, and become mesmerized by his rambling, self-glorifying claims about human destiny. It was only when Hirsch got older that he suspected Jones was just another manipulative narcissist with a gift for exploiting the confused and vulnerable.

The podcast includes snippets from Jones’s recorded sermons. As a listener, you cannot believe that anyone would take his vapid exhortations as the basis for an all-encompassing system of belief. Here’s a small sample, taken from one of the dozens of cassettes that Hirsch found in his family’s storage locker:

Give me your attention. At any moment, you will receive this grace. It is always pouring through this body-mind. Which is no longer a person, you see? There’s nobody here. No Franklin Jones. Nobody like you, you see? It’s not here any more. Totally absent…This is the moment of happiness. And every future moment after death. On this world and other worlds. Higher worlds. Afterworlds. No worlds. It is all the moment of infinite delight.

It’s all a circle of gibberish, with Jones using one ludicrous claim to justify the next. Yet the narrator, clearly an intelligent, self-aware person, confesses to having been utterly convinced that Jones was a modern-day prophet. To listen to Dear Franklin Jones is to understand that even the best among us can be indoctrinated into cultish ideas. On a more practical level, the podcast also shows how cults impose discipline on wavering members. Hirsch’s mother was Jones’ personal acupuncturist. And her clients, many of them Jones’s followers, abandoned her as soon as she lost Jones’s favour.