A Little Bit Culty
Cult survivors Sarah Edmondson & Anthony “Nippy” Ames (HBO’s “The Vow”) have one simple mission: to get people out of cults.
A Little Bit Culty is a wildly compelling podcast that aims to help audiences understand, heal from, and (ideally) avoid abusive #cultculture. Sharing their personal stories and those of other cult survivors and experts, Sarah & Nippy ensure that victims are never shamed but always taught the red flags of cult life.
“Sarah Edmondson literally stole the show at our event. She was well-prepared, funny, thoughtful, and emotionally vulnerable (i.e. authentic). She was also a MAJOR draw. Most importantly, she was a joy to be around. I can’t recommend Sarah highly enough.”
-John Dehlin
Founder of THRIVE
“Nippy is a singular voice in the cult recovery space, bringing a rare honesty, vulnerability, and curiosity to important conversations about why we commune and what can go wrong along the way, without a touch of self-pity or maudlin. He’s a guy you could share both a profound conversation and a beer with, and that in itself is the work of destigmatization.”
-Amanda Montell
TOPICS
Culture or Culty?
A talk about building healthy teams at a time when burnout rates are high and work/life boundaries have never been blurrier.
Think your company could never be culty? A word of warning: That’s probably a sign that your organization is already more vulnerable than you think. In this interactive keynote, Sarah Edmondson and Anthony ‘Nippy’ Ames bring their hit ‘A Little Bit Culty’ podcast format directly to corporate teams in order to help them understand how things like coercive control, gaslighting, and word salad can easily turn a growing organization into a culty one. With clinical data on the science of cultic abuse, and personal anecdotes from their time in NXIVM—a workplace so culty that the founder is now doing 120 years in prison—this informative talk is a must for anyone interested in building healthy, connective teams in a burnout culture where work/life boundaries get blurrier by the minute.
Back from the Brink
A talk on charting your own trauma-informed path to emotional healing after the unthinkable happens.
After escaping and blowing the whistle on NXIVM, married couple Sarah Edmondson and Anthony ‘Nippy’ Ames had another job to tackle: Doubling down on healing themselves. In this candid keynote, they share what helps them continue to recover from the emotional, spiritual, and moral wounds they sustained during their 12-year cult experience and the aftermath of their highly public exit. Balancing evidence-based strategies from leading cult recovery experts with their own tried-and-tested practical tips and personal anecdotes, Sarah and Nippy’s presentation helps connect the audience to gentle ways of navigating everything from self-care and guilt to fight-or-flight mode and victim-blaming. You don’t have to be an ex-cult member to take away powerful insights on trauma, resilience, and recovery from their story. It’s a must-see for anyone with a stake in survivorship; from clinicians and caregivers to survivors and the people who love them.
Finding the green flags in a red flag world.
A talk for seekers about safely navigating the spiritual marketplace and personal transformation industry.
The multi-billion-dollar self-help and new age spiritual marketplaces are highly unregulated magnets for con artists, charlatans, and all kinds of culty types. As co-hosts of the hit ‘A Little Bit Culty’ podcast, Sarah Edmondson and Anthony ‘Nippy’ Ames help their audience identify and understand the ‘red flags’ that can indicate cultic abuse, coercive control, financial exploitation, and other abuses of power along the journey of self-transformation. But they also want you to know that living well isn’t just about spotting red flags: it’s also about embracing the green ones. As former NXIVM cult members turned whistleblowers, they’ve got some hard-won lessons to share that can help you avoid the pitfalls along the self-discovery path. They’ve also got practical tips on how to define the ideas, practices, and modalities that are healthy for you. In this informative and uplifting talk, the pair offers practical tips on spotting spiritual and self-help red flags, and identifying your authentic ‘green flags’. It’s not easy to cultivate openness and trust in a world that begs skepticism, but armed with their insights—you’ll be better prepared to seek safely.
