Cult Followings

A review of "Cults: Inside the World's Most Notorious Groups and Understanding the People Who Joined Them" by Max Cutler and Kevin Conley

I really hope the people at Parcast will forgive me for calling them the Nickelback¹ of podcast networks, but there are too many similarities to ignore. Their shows are very popular - so much that Spotify spent at least $40M (and maybe as much as $100 million) to acquire the company - and yet no one seems to like them very much.

I’ve listened to several of their shows, and they usually involve very interesting subject matter - serial killers, unsolved murders, cults - in the most dry, overly scripted, often fact-challenged manner possible. They can be best compared to someone reading Wikipedia entries out loud.

Here’s a little experiment for you: listen to an episode of their Dictators show and follow it up with a episode of Noiser’s Real Dictators, which is much better written and features interviews with actual historians, experts, and even survivors. It’s like comparing the low-budget 1990 Captain America movie with an MCU film.

(Incidentally, the Parcast shows about serial killers…