WTF is on my Mind?!
Author, Speaker, Whistleblower and award-winning Director Mark Vicente was behind the sleeper hit “What The Bleep Do We Know?!” Several books have been written about the film’s remarkable grassroots marketing campaign, which led to its unprecedented success.
Mark was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1965. Taking his first photograph at age four, he quickly discovered his passion for being behind the camera. After attending film and drama school in South Africa, he began working his way up the ranks of the camera department, from Assistant to Operator to Cinematographer. His first big break came as Director of Photography on the musical “SARAFINA,” starring Whoopi Goldberg. In 1992, he set his sights on Hollywood and relocated to Los Angeles to shoot his first studio picture for Disney; “FATHERHOOD,” starring Patrick Swayze and Halle Berry. At the age of 26, he became one of the youngest cinematographers to shoot a big-budget studio picture.
Over the next few decades, he went on to shoot an additional 14 feature films and numerous documentaries, music videos and commercials. Mark soon found there were in him, untold stories he desperately wanted to express as a Director. He was driven by the conviction that tales of greatness, nobility and introspection could be exciting and financially successful.
Perhaps because of the very obvious race and class iniquities in South Africa, he found himself propelled to question certain fundamental assumptions at a very young age. Beliefs about human behavior, cosmology, religion, existentialism and mysticism. Along the way, he stumbled into a few situations where leaders with malignant pathologies (masquerading as saintly philosophers) spoke the talk of self-improvement but did untold damage to their followers... and him.
Looking back, he can now say he has been in at least two cults. His last foray into personal growth and his defection from NXIVM was chronicled in the HBO series “The Vow”. Mark and a few plucky whistleblowers exposed the criminal activities of the organization, resulting in multiple arrests and indictments. He doesn’t consider himself a cult expert, but by his own admission, “I’m an expert in being screwed over, waking up, and knowing how to spot them.” He’s got a pretty salty approach to most things and is fascinated by the myriad patterns in the human psychodynamic that create the best and the worst in civilization.
Join Mark as he unpacks a whole range of topics to do with: Psychology, Consciousness, Morality, Narcissistic Abuse, Spirituality, Cults, Propaganda, Science, Filmmaking, and Philosophy.You never quite know what you’re going to get, as it really does depend on… WTF is on his mind?!
WTF is on my Mind?!
Inst@Guru: Bentinho Massaro - Jacqueline Part 1 'The Seeker'
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
I've seen this before. Not something like this. Not a similar version of this. This. The same playbook. The same psychological architecture. Just a different face.
For the video version of this podcast, head over to Youtube.
My name is Mark Vicente. I'm a filmmaker and a former member of NXIVM, the cult run by Keith Raniere, who is currently serving 120 years in federal prison. I was one of the whistleblowers who helped bring that organization down. That experience was chronicled in The Vow on HBO.
This is Inst@Guru, a new investigative podcast series going inside the world of Bentinho Massaro. Dutch. Blonde. Blue-eyed. Charming. Self-proclaimed enlightened being. Claims his penis has healing properties. Claims he's going to awaken civilization by 2035. Believes he's Ra, an extraterrestrial being in human form, here to correct a cosmic mistake.
He still has followers. He launched a new app in 2025. The machine is still running.
At the center of this series are three people who were inside his world, some of them deep inside, some of them for years. They call themselves the Three Amigos. Their names are Jacqueline Graham, Keilan McNeil, and Jade Alectra. All three broke their NDAs, agreements carrying significant six-figure penalty clauses, because they felt they had no choice.
I believe them.
In this episode, Jacqueline Graham tells her story from the beginning. Not from Bentinho... from herself. From who she was before any of this: a Canadian mother of three, a raw vegan restaurateur, a lifelong spiritual seeker who genuinely wanted to understand the deeper nature of reality. She found Bentinho on YouTube in 2013. By 2019, she was his girlfriend. By 2020, he had taken hundreds of thousands of dollars of her money.
This episode covers how it started. The teachings. The retreat in the Netherlands. The moment she watched the women around him fall apart and told herself: "I wouldn't act like that." The love bombing. The pedestalling. The first withdrawal. And the decision, standing in a hotel room in Panama after $80,000 had vanished overnight, that she was never going to doubt him again.
That decision is where Episode 1 ends. It is not where the story ends.
Bentinho Massaro, the invitation remains. Talk to me. Publicly.
CAST OF CHARACTERS link coming soon.
Want to go deeper? Join the Patreon community, people who understand this world, who engage with the work as it's being made, and who get behind-the-scenes access, early information, and invites to special screenings. Link below.
The views and opinions expressed on WTF is on my Mind?! do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the podcast or Mark Vicente. Any content provided by guests are of their opinion and are not intended to malign any religion, group, club, organization, business individual, anyone or anything.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MarkVicente
Website: www.markvicente.com
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@markvicente7
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/markvicente/
X: https://x.com/markvicente
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@mark_vicente
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/markvicente/