#2137 - Michelle Dowd

Michelle Dowd (0:14)

Thanks, Joe, for having me.

Joe Rogan (0:15)

My pleasure.

Michelle Dowd (0:16)

I love your man cave.

Joe Rogan (0:17)

Oh, thank you.

Michelle Dowd (0:18)

I really do.

Joe Rogan (0:20)

Yeah, it's fun.

So when I heard your story, I was like, this sounds completely insane. And just to fill people in, just explain what happened.

Michelle Dowd (0:34)

Well, I was born into a cult, a high control group that I didn't know to call a cult because, you know, I was born there.

Joe Rogan (0:41)

You were a child.

Michelle Dowd (0:41)

That was my whole experience. My grandfather started in 1931, so my mother was also born into the cult in the 1940s. My dad was, let's just say he was 12 when he first met my grandfather, who would later become his father-in-law, and my grandfather became his father figure. So my mom was married off to this man who was a follower of her father, and I am the second child of their union.

And, yeah.

Joe Rogan (1:14)

Where did all this take place?

Michelle Dowd (1:16)

So this took place, that he originally started it near LA in Pasadena, which most people know because of the Rose Parade and other things like that. And when he first started it, it started, my understanding is he was a Boy Scout leader, and he was an orphan. He had come from Oklahoma when he was a young man, and the Boy Scouts didn't allow him to have as much control as he wanted to have of the boys.

So, yeah, which is a lot of control. So he left the Boy Scouts and he took the boys with him, and some of the boys from his original troop in 1931 stayed with him past his death. One of the first boys took over after him in the late 1980s, or the early 1980s, actually. Yeah, so he was really good at getting followers.

Joe Rogan (2:00)

What was his background? Like, what did he do before he did all this?

Michelle Dowd (2:06)

Nothing.

He was completely... I don't think he graduated from high school. I don't know that for sure. He lied about everything.

And he said he had a PhD from Stanford later when he got...

I'm not even 100% sure he knew how to read, to be quite honest. He came from a family where he was the only child that lived out of his particular mother who was married to a man who was a second marriage. And his first wife had died, and then he had a bunch of kids or whatever. So he had a bunch of half-siblings, but no full siblings. And apparently... Now, this could be lore too. They kind of excommunicated him. He compared himself to Joseph of the multicolored clothing and everything. So he was put down a well, he liked to say, and he escaped. And he came to LA in the height of the silent films, things like that. He said he was in silent films. There's no chance that is true, but he said he was. And he got some sort of probably church education when he got here. And he declared to everyone he was the prophet of God. He was going to live 500 years, and he was going to lead the army of God in the second coming.

Joe Rogan (3:16)

Wow. That's your grandpa.

Michelle Dowd (3:18)

That's my grandpa. It certainly is.

Joe Rogan (3:25)

Wow. You can't pick your grandpa.

Michelle Dowd (3:29)

No, you can't.

Joe Rogan (3:30)

No.

Michelle Dowd (3:31)

But it was a male organization for a very long time. It was all men. And it wasn't until...

Joe Rogan (3:35)

All men?

Michelle Dowd (3:35)

All men. It was all men. It was from 1931 to 1966, when my mom married my father. No one was allowed to get married there.

And they were all presumably celibate. And it was just men.

Joe Rogan (3:48)

Presumably.

Michelle Dowd (3:49)

Presumably.

Joe Rogan (3:50)

It's like prison. They're gay for this day.

Michelle Dowd (3:53)

Absolutely. So I was raised by a bunch of older men who had never been with a woman.

You can see how well that ended.

But he didn't want his daughter to be an old maid. And she was getting older. She was 24 by the time he married her off to my dad. And at that point, I think the women, like his wife said, you know, it was their fourth child. They had three boys first. And so this was his first daughter. And he decided that since the world had not yet ended, that maybe he should marry her off before she either became an old maid or maybe a loose woman. Who knows?