My Life As A Cult Leader -

And the scariest part? I think I’ve started to believe it.

I didn’t try to spin it. I didn’t apologize. I wrote a two-sentence goodbye and deleted the Slack channel. My Life as a Cult Leader

But late at night, in my back house, I would stare at the ceiling and feel nothing. That was the real horror. Not the cruelty—the absence of guilt. I had become a machine that converts human suffering into loyalty. And the scariest part

It began, as these things often do, not with a bang, but with a bruised ego and a half-empty bottle of mediocre chardonnay. I was thirty-two, a failed marketing consultant who couldn’t sell a life raft to a drowning man. My wife had left, taking the good couch and my sense of irony. Alone in a leaky studio apartment, I typed a sentence that would change everything: “You are not broken. The world just forgot to give you the manual.” I didn’t apologize

I never wore a robe. I never drank blood, never owned a compound in Waco or a fleet of Lexuses. I didn’t have a harem—at least, not the way you picture it. I was a cult leader, and for eleven years, I ran a “spiritual wellness collective” out of a converted warehouse in Portland, Oregon. We had a podcast, a turmeric latte recipe that went viral on TikTok, and a waiting list of 400 people who wanted to join our “sovereign living intensives.”

My life as a cult leader taught me one thing: the most dangerous person in the world isn't the one who wants to hurt you. It’s the one who is convinced they are the only one who can save you.