I'm sorry Tony Robbins managed to extract $3,000 from you but at least you got a story out of it and it hasn't permanently hurt your finances, eh?

It might be my incurable introversion, but self-help gurus who have this "rah rah" pushy sales techniques push me away. There are just way too many similarities between the gurus and cults to make my Spidey senses tingle.

Your peanuts part of the story reminded me of something I read a few years back.

Apparently, it's a "thing" for cults to organise whole-day events where they deliberately withhold food and drink from people. The idea is, as soon as the blood sugar levels start dipping, people's mental defenses to the programming begin to dip. They don't question what they're told so much.

Towards the end of the day, they tend to feed their members with sugary foods and beverages. The idea here is that their blood sugar levels will spike. That's when the event will shift towards the happy-clappy, rah-rah content. :)