No literature list on MLM scams can be complete without Bridget Read's meticulously researched 2025 book "Little Bosses Everywhere".

For a British view, I like "Spying In Guru Land" https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2487851.Spying_in_Guru_L...

Underground, by Murakami, was one of the better books I've read. It mostly covers victims, but the later chapters are interviews with various members of the Aum cult. It does a pretty decent job of presenting the psyche of the type of person who joins, stays, and some that leave. Although mostly relevant for what he calls the "Japanese psyche" I still found it very insightful.

Cultish (by Amanda Montell) is great. It also defines really well how Claude speaks currently---avant la lettre, of course. Language is a big part of the book: one example is how Scientologists can recognize each other in the wild from the language they have unknowingly adopted even for everyday conversations.

No One Would Listen by Harry Markopolos about how he knew Bernie Madoff was a ponzi scheme is a great book in this genre. Markopolos went to the SEC with proof, multiple times, and each time the SEC blew him off.

The author alluded to it, but I really think the BITE model of authoritarian control[0] is something everyone should know about. BITE stands for Behavioral, Information, Thought, and Emotional, which describes the 4 categories of controlling behaviors used by authoritarian groups (from religious cults, to the Maoist movement in post-war China, to multilevel marketing schemes). They really are surprisingly consistent, from controlling what members wear or how they cut their hair and encouraging sleep deprivation on the Behavioral side, to discouraging access to external sources of information, punishing people for asking questions or engaging in struggle sessions to get people to confess to false beliefs, and isolating people from the other people in their life that may love and care for them.

Not everyone or every group that exhibits some of these behaviors is going to be a cult. But the warning signs are something everyone should be aware of.

[0] https://freedomofmind.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/The-BIT...

Not exactly a cult, but... "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" by Tom Wolfe. Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. It sounds like fun, until it doesn't so much. Soundtrack by The Grateful Dead.

If you haven't read it already, Fads and Fallacies by Martin Gardner is a great book. A bit more focused on pseudoscience than on cults but Scientology comes up for instance.

Stripping the Gurus by Geoffrey Falk is an interesting survey in this vein, albeit covering a previous generation of problematic cults. Gurus like Chogyam Trungpa, Adi Da (or whatever name Franklin Jones was going by at the time), even reaching back to Paramahansa Yogananda and Ramakrishna. His take is perhaps a little juvenile at times, but I think the book is an interesting survey.

Never read Michael Lewis's book about SBF. It's so bad it permanently ruined him as an author in my mind, I doubt the verity of any of the other books he wrote as a result of it.

My favorite read about cults is this short interview with Richard DeMille about Ron Hubbard: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Library/Shelf/miller/interviews/... The interviewee comes across as extremely level-headed, maybe as a reaction to having been in a cult and escaped.

"Seductive Poison" is a good one. It's a story about the "Koolaid suicide" cult. It's one lady's story about how she got indoctrinated, abused, and ultimately escaped from Jonestown. It's told from her perspective, and really does a good job of showing how a seemingly reasonable person can get wrapped up in that.

Interesting list! I really enjoyed "The Square and the Tower" by Niall Ferguson. Not exactly in the same realm as these, but pretty close and definitely eye-opening

The game "Cult of the Lamb" is a great way to learn about cults :)

+1 to Cultish.

Another great one: The Confidence Game by Maria Konnikova.

If we are talking about scams an obvious one is Bad Blood, about the Theranos scam.

This list is incomplete without Eric Hoffer's True Believer, which is probably a reference/source for all of these other books. It's basically how to build a fanatic, a cult and a mass movement. It's also required reading for Terrorism studies classes, and CIA personnel, the latter, using it to conduct regime change in banarepublics and oil bearing nations.

Of course now it's used on everyone who uses smartphones and social media.

It's a Brave New World, and you're carrying the main tool to mind control you in your pocket. Bonus, you probably pay for it too!

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is a rollicking fun read

I can also recommend the book Mindfuckers - a source book on the rise of acid fascism in America. Each chapter is about a different cult from the 60s and 70s including one on the Manson's. Super interesting read.

I quite like The Cult of Trump due to the relevance to current events.

Looks like she is still trying to make money. So the cult didn't work out. I left a cult. If she wants to use the word for sympathy, talk about the really bad ones. Start with Nebraska and work back from there. Sympathy farmer.

I'm sure these are all entertaining and engaging and reveal some exciting insider details, but it's worth keeping in mind that memoirs like these are closer to fiction than most things we think of as "nonfiction".

They're individual testimonies, often nearly impossible to verify, and written in an era where "autofiction" and "creative non-fiction" are mature commercial genres with their own tropes, standards, forms, and conceits.

If you're intellectually curious about "cults, scams, and schemes", there's a whole other -- drier but more earnest -- world of nonfiction to be found in places like JSTOR or the catalogs of academic presses.