72. Just because you don't like it, doesn't mean it's a scam

If you're a practitioner that works outside of mainstream institutions, you might have had your work dismissed as a scam, a grift, or a cult — or if you've watched it happen to someone you respect — this episode is for you. 

I'm pulling back the curtain on what's actually going on when people throw those words around, and why the answer has almost nothing to do with logic or concern. 

I'm inviting you to think about who gets the benefit of the doubt in our culture, who doesn't, and why this matters more than ever for anyone doing work outside the mainstream.

Transcript

Hey, you're listening to Liberatory Business, and I'm your host, Simone Seol. Today, I have a bit of a rant/critique/just something I need to get off my chest, and I don't know who needs to hear this today, but someone out there does.

Just because you don't see the value of an offer doesn't make it a scam. Just because you don't understand the value exchange that happens in a business does not make that business a grift. And just because you're not interested in a group or you don't find it credible, for whatever reason, it doesn't meet your standard — doesn't make it a cult.

A lot of the times people will call something a scam when they just don't understand it, or they do understand it, but they don't like it. A lot of people will call something a cult just because they personally wouldn't join whatever it is, don't understand why people do, and don't care to understand why people do.

What we call a cult is often just what hasn't been institutionalized yet

Christianity, Buddhism, Islam — these religions initially all started out being fringe, radical, subversive cults by the people of those times, by the mainstream opinion of those times. And as a lay scholar of religion, I can tell you that a religion is whatever cult stood the test of time long enough to become successfully institutionalized.

And a lot of times what gets villainized is just whatever does not yet have mainstream acceptance, mainstream legibility. And a lot of things that we think are good, that we take for granted, that we think are neutral, once lacked mainstream legibility.

Like vegans. Vegans are so normal. They even have the moral high perch these days. And at some point, at least in America, vegans were considered like a super fringe weirdo cult. Quakers, early labor unions were called criminal fringe conspiracies and were violently suppressed. Same thing with the civil rights movement. Gay rights, Stonewall activists were called deviants. They were called threats to society.

Now, this is obviously not to say that any non-mainstream movement or group is morally on par with the civil rights movement, but there is a pattern that I want you to notice — which is that we all, humans, have an instinct to villainize the unfamiliar. And that instinct is universal, that instinct is old, and it has often been wrong before.

What's fringe in one place is mainstream somewhere else

And I can't help but to think of another example, which is traditional Asian medicine, traditional Chinese medicine, and less referred to in the West, but where I live in Korea, we have traditional Korean medicine. In the Western world, it's called alternative — which is another way of saying fringe. But here in Asia, it's just regular medicine. It's our medicine.

So what's weird and non-mainstream in one culture is the norm for another. And if you called every healing practice that is not validated by the Western scientific institution snake oil, then you would end up insulting huge parts of ancient traditions around the world, including mine.

Of course, in things that are not validated by mainstream institutions, the quality and integrity could and does run the whole gamut, right? So my argument is not that anything non-mainstream should be accepted without question, but that we should be aware of our own subjectivity as we evaluate what's real and valuable.

A Buddhist teacher's take on calling things cults

So a Buddhist teacher that I learn from and that I follow in Korea called Pomnyun Sunim once fielded a question from someone who said, "Oh, a family member of mine is in a cult, and they're falling deep, and I don't know what to do to help them. They won't listen to me. What should I do about it?"

And this Buddhist master's answer was something that was so memorable to me. He said, "Buddhism at some point was also called a cult. Whatever you call a cult is so subjective — that's, like, your opinion. But what you can ask is, are they doing anything illegal? Because there are groups and organizations that do perfectly legal things with people who wanna participate, and then there are ones that break the law. And so if you see that they're breaking the law, that's worth paying attention to and reporting. Otherwise, it's your family member's life. Let them live their life."

And I thought that was so wise.

If you want to critique something, do it properly

If you wanna critique something outside of the mainstream, it's lazy to just call it a scam, a grift, or a cult. Like, I'm not saying don't critique. Critique — but critique what exactly is problematic and name why it's problematic.

Does it break the law? Okay, that's a problem for obvious reasons, right? Is there a specific assumption that you disagree with? If so, name it and say why you disagree with that assumption. And before you even go there, ask yourself if you've actually engaged with the thing in good faith, right? Like, have you looked into it, or are you just going off of vibes and secondhand accounts? Do you understand? Can you articulate why some people are drawn to it? Because if you can't explain the appeal, if you can't explain the strongest version of what it's offering, then you probably don't understand it well enough to even critique it.

Like for example, you can criticize, let's say, a fringe Christian cult for the fact that it allows a lot of sexual abuse. Okay. Sure. But is that less than the amount of abuse that happens in more mainstream Christian denominations? Have you actually looked into the data? Or no matter how true that might be, is the fringe sect just easier to attack because it's, well, fringe?

The double standard with the coaching industry vs. mainstream psychiatry

For example, I know that the coaching industry gets a lot of flack — some of it definitely deserved — for, you know, not being able to do what it claims, not being scientific, doing harm. And okay. But have you ever looked at the data on mainstream psychiatry and psychotherapy and whether those fields are actually delivering on what they promise consistently, and to what extent the practices are evidence-based? Have you done research on the unintended consequences, the harm that these fields have done and continue to do?

Because it's kind of scary once you start looking into it.

In 2013, Thomas Insel, the director of the National Institutes of Mental Health, the biggest psychiatric research funder in the world, publicly announced that the DSM — the diagnostic manual that is like the Bible for psychiatrists and psychologists across the world — he publicly announced that it lacks validity. His words. The director of the National Institutes of Mental Health. He said that its diagnoses are, and I quote, "based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure," and that in the rest of medicine, this would be kinda like diagnosing illnesses based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever, as opposed to, like, looking into what's actually happening in the body.

This is the foundational document of his own field. And then after that, the NIMH stopped funding research that used DSM categories.

And let me tell you, the DSM was, and still is, considered widely to be the Bible of, quote-unquote, "legitimate scientific mental health," whatever. And there is a serious crisis in academia right now about — well, actually, it's been there for a while, but if you're paying attention — about whether psychology and psychiatry even qualify as legitimate sciences. And this is not me being conspiratorial and inflammatory. There is genuinely a crisis that's spoken out loud by, from the center of this world.

The replication crisis

In 2015, the Open Science Collaboration tried to replicate 100 experiments from top, most prestigious psychology journals. Only 36 to 39% were successfully replicated. That means out of 100 findings published in the most well-regarded prestigious journals in the world, less than 4 out of 10 could be reproduced when someone else ran the same experiment. In any hard science, this is like a five-alarm fire.

And then there's research showing that the studies that fail to replicate are actually the ones that are cited more than the ones that do — because the flashy, counterintuitive findings get the headlines and the TED Talks and, you know, continued funding, regardless of how true they are.

And there's no shortage of alarming information about medication — the alarmingly small difference between the efficacy of psychiatric medication and a placebo, especially when it comes to antidepressants.

And, oh, let's talk about psychotherapy. Research consistently shows that somewhere between 5 and 10% of patients are actually worse off after psychotherapy than when they started. For substance use, it's 7 to 15%.

Now, this isn't, again, conspiratorial fringe critique. These are — the calls are coming from inside the house. These things are being discussed in peer-reviewed journals from inside the field from the most well-respected scientists.

And so when people roll their eyes at coaches, alternative practitioners and say, "Where's the evidence?" — well, okay, fair question. Evidence matters. But why don't you ask the same question to mainstream scientific institutions, medical institutions?

And I wanna be very clear, I'm not anti-psychiatry. I'm not anti-therapy. These fields help a ton of people. I have been helped a ton by psychiatrists and therapists. I know wonderful people who are psychiatrists and psychologists who do incredible work. So that's not — I'm not saying mainstream bad, fringe good. But I'm just saying whatever we're talking about, we gotta look into things with nuance. You don't have to swallow judgments of good or bad whole. You have to think critically. You have to think. You have to hold complexity.

The double standard with universities vs. coaching programs

Another double standard that I get really fired up about — people don't bat an eye when someone takes out five figures, six figures in student loans for a university degree whose value is increasingly questionable. Bachelor degrees, master's degrees — very expensive nowadays, very uncertain as to what that actually gets you in life. But the same person spending a fraction of that on, say, coaching or an online course of their choosing that they think is going to meaningfully improve their lives, or some non-traditional program? Automatically suspect. Automatically a scam. Automatically falling for a cult.

Okay. Let's look at the data. 42.5% of recent college grads are underemployed, which is to say working in jobs that don't require a degree. A different set of data says that 52% of college graduates are underemployed within one year after graduation. 45% of them are still, if not unemployed, underemployed — meaning, you know, their jobs don't require that degree — 10 years later. A decade after tens of thousands of dollars in tuition.

And I know this is not research, just anecdotally, I know so, so, so many people — very smart, ambitious, hardworking people — who tell me, "I'm still paying off student loans from a master's degree that did me absolutely zero good, that gave me zero advantage in the marketplace, in the job marketplace, or in terms of giving me a salary boost. Nothing." I have had this conversation with so many friends.

That's a lot of money being funneled without question into what? But you don't hear — well, you don't hear enough people calling universities scams. You don't hear people calling student loans grifts. You don't hear people interrogating the ROI of an English degree the way that you hear people interrogating a six-week business coaching program. Because university is mainstream. It's institutionally legible. You know, there's buildings. They've got a football team. And so we don't ask the same questions. We don't hold it to the same standard that we ask when it comes to something more unfamiliar, less mainstream.

And again, I'm not anti-university. I'm not saying universities are all scams. I'm just saying — what gets the benefit of the doubt and what doesn't? What institutions, what fields are allowed to underperform without anyone questioning their legitimacy — and in fact, underperform hugely and get rewarded for it, and, you know, nobody says anything? And which ones come under hyper-scrutiny because, you know, some people who had a bad experience were really loud about it?

So that's what I'm saying, okay? Mainstream — not necessarily good or bad. Depends. You gotta look at it with nuance. Outside of the mainstream — not automatically good or bad. You gotta look at it with nuance. And so if you allow this much complexity, this much nuance, then you really have to critically think for yourself, and you have to come down for yourself: "This is what I think. This is what I'm doing. This is what I stand for. This is what I believe in and why." And you have to be able to defend it using your own values, your own research, your own logic.

Why we treat individuals and institutions so differently

And you know what is so interesting? I think that a part of what's going on here is psychological, okay?

When you pay a university, for example, or a hospital, it's not a single person receiving that payment going into that single person's bank account. It's an institution. And when you pay money to an institution, it goes into a system, right? There's administrators and faculty and facilities and endowments and marketing budgets, ba, ba, ba, ba. You don't see any one single person getting rich off of your tuition. The cost isn't any less real, but it's abstracted. It's kind of like been neutralized through the bureaucracy, right?

Whereas if you pay a coach, a healer, someone running a small course, you see a human being. You see a person, one person receiving your money. And I think something happens psychologically that people don't name enough. I think it's kind of like tall poppy syndrome. Like, who are they to charge that? What are their qualifications? Like, where does she get off?

It could be the same dollar amount going to the same kind of service. It hits people psychologically differently. And I think when I call it the tall poppy syndrome, I think there's a psychological thing that happens where it creates resentment. When money's funneled towards an institution, there's not one person who's, like, visibly winning, right? You don't know what the university president's salary is, what the dean's salary is, what the professor's salary is, right? The endowment manager could make millions, and you might have never heard of them. So when there's no one single person getting rich in front of us, there's not that pinch of envy, right?

People don't resent Harvard the same way people resent the lady on Instagram making six figures from her course, even if Harvard is taking far more of our money for a far more amorphous outcome.

The legibility of mainstream authority

And then secondly, there is the legibility of mainstream authority, right? Institutions come with credentialing systems like degrees, accreditation, peer review, board certifications. No matter how flawed those systems are — the credentials themselves feel like authority that people can accept. They seem familiar.

Whereas an individual practitioner, on the other hand, has to build up a case for their own legitimacy from scratch. And that, again, tall poppy syndrome — like, "Who are you? Let me put you in your place." That's, you know, presumptuous. Like, what gives you the right? You know? With the institution, that question doesn't arise because the institution is what creates the authority.

When in fact the authority of the institution comes from an agreement that some people made at some point in time. And most likely that agreement was made in close quarters, in gate-kept quarters by people in power, which was, I assure you, not the majority of the population. And then they said, "This is the authority. This is the standard," and the rest of us accept it. Okay.

The illusion that institutions are above financial interest

And then I think a third psychological thing happening is that I think with institutions, there is an illusion that they're above financial interest, even though in reality, not at all. Like, a professor just pursues knowledge. Professor isn't here to make money, right? Even though her entire salary might depend on tuition dollars and the endowments, and she might have to fight for, you know, her research funding — the framing of like, "Oh, she's a professor," it's protective.

An individual coach does not have such a frame, right? Her financial interest is right there in your face, which makes her seem mercenary. Even though every actor in every system — every professor, every doctor, every researcher — has financial interests. It's not as clear. It's not as straightforward.

A lot of this is misogyny

And I have said this before and I'll say it again — a lot of this is misogyny. Academic institutions — it's not even that long ago that they were like, "Okay, I think we can accept women now." You know? Medical research, for most of its history, heavily male-dominated. Coaching, healing spaces, heavily female. And the work — intellectual work, emotional work, intuitive work, relational work — heavily female, not least because we've been gate kept, locked out of a lot of these traditional institutional places still in 2026, and underpaid for them.

And so women charging — and I would say women and queer people charging — directly, openly, shamelessly, visibly for their wisdom and sort of invisible forms of labor activates a core cultural discomfort that institutions that are historically run by men simply do not trigger.

You know, a dude with a PhD charging 300 bucks an hour, that's a professional. But a lady without the letters after her name charging the same for her emotional, intuitive, relational, intellectual labor? Grifter, right?

Again, none of this means that individual providers, practitioners outside of the mainstream are automatically legitimate. Like, some are great, some are not, just like institutions. The point is that what's asymmetrical is our suspicion. Who are we holding up to what standard and why? And I want you to see a pattern.

Stand on the ground you stand on

If you are involved in something non-mainstream, if you stand for it, if you believe in it, if you stand behind it for reasons that make sense to you and are true to your values, then I want you to feel good about the ground that you stand on. And if you don't, you should interrogate that — and care less what other people think.

The point I'm trying to make is that underneath people's judgments of "this is a scam, that's a grift, that's a cult," they pretend like all there is underneath that is logic, well-meaning concern, common sense. But a lot of the time what's hiding is actually ignorance and misunderstanding and lazy thinking. Envy. Resentment. That deeply human trend of wanting to cut down the tallest poppy. The fear of the unknown. The very well-worn evolutionary impulse of rejecting and villainizing the new, the unfamiliar, the non-mainstream — which was once responsible for the witch trials, the crusades, every form of institutionalized racism, misogyny.

Having these impulses does not make someone a bad person. It makes them human. We all have these impulses. But when you break it down that way, well, the next time someone accuses what you do of something less than legitimate, you know what you're contending with.

Okay. That's all I have to say today. I hope that this was helpful for some people out there. I'll talk to you later. Bye.