Diane’s speaking engagements are solution based and will examine how to strengthen existing efforts or create new approaches. Collaboration techniques and effective communication skills are the tools of peace. My speaking engagements help build these skills as stand-alone speaking engagements or in conjunction with workshops.
I am dedicated to speaking out about extremism and how to lower vulnerability to what I define as ” viral memetic infections.”
Diane Benscoter is the author of Shoes of a Servant – My unconditional Devotion to a Lie. She is a speaker and workshop facilitator.
Diane completed her memoir, Shoes of a Servant – My unconditional Devotion to a Lie, following decades of research and study, and has been consistently tapped as a highly-qualified resource and speaker. Her highlights include presentations to the National Counterterrorism Center, the State Department of the United States (given in Tunisia) interviews with MeidasTouch, Variety, Vice, Rolling Stone, The Huffington Post, NPR, OZY and consulting on projects like HBO’s The Vow.
The more she made herself available, the more often she was contacted by distraught people asking for help. Eventually she knew it was time to take her work to another level and she founded Antidote.
Expert Knowledge.
First hand Experience.
Her compelling 2009 TED talk includes elements of her 5 years spent in the cult, her subsequent 5 years as a deprogrammer, and introduced of her theory of “extremist viral memetic inoculation”. Having garnered nearly 1.3 million views and counting, this talk was the jumpstart for Diane’s Own Your Brain Stories Campaign on YouTube. She travelled the country and interviewed former members of cults, hate groups, terrorist groups and gangs, with the hope that their candid stories and authentic voices would shine a light on how tactics of manipulation can take advantage of certain aspects vulnerabilities inherent to being human
Diane’s TED Talk: How Cults Rewire the Brain
