Latest / The Dustlight Archives / NXIVM: Episode 1: Keith Raniere, the Legend, and the Man

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NXIVM: Episode 1: Keith Raniere, the Legend, and the Man · The Dustlight Archives

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Some stories get so deeply wired into our cultural reflexes that they stop being stories at all.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: They become archetypes.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Say the words a cult ended violently, and your brain auto-completes the rest before you even notice.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: We have a charismatic leader with an odd magnetism, a group kept off balance and obedient, a promise of secret knowledge, a brief utopia of purpose and connection, but behind the curtain, the same machinery humming along, the draining of assets, the quiet accumulation of leverage, the slow erosion of reality.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: In the archetype, the cult is never a complex organism full of real people.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's just a projection of one man's ego.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: When he cracks, and he always cracks, everyone else is dragged through the fracture.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: His unraveling is sexualized, either into excess or into enforced purity, because that's what the genre demands.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: By the time the spiral tightens, no one remembers what normal ever felt like, and the ending is already written.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: A spectacular collapse, a body count, a cautionary tale.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: You know this story.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: You've seen it repackaged on Netflix, Hulu, basic cable.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: Comfort food for the true crime imagination.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's simple, it's moral, it's digestible.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: It lets every participant claim they were hypnotized by a singular monster.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: It keeps the institutions and enablers off stage.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: And it spares the audience from thinking about money laundering, intelligence cutouts, interpersonal coercion, or the way real systems of abuse actually function.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: But that story isn't how human systems work.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's a myth we tell because it's easy.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: And frankly, it's boring.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: This story I hope to tell you about Nexium.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: I hope it's not boring.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: This is what happens when you peel back the archetype and look at the infrastructure underneath.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: The networks, the incentives, the failures, the collaborators, the people who knew exactly what they were doing.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: This series is about those complexities.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: And to understand them, we have to start with the public narrative because you have to know the rules before you can break them.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Dust Light Archives.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: So the story goes that Keith Rainier was born in Brooklyn on August 26, 1960.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: His father worked in the advertising industry and his mother was a dance instructor.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: They got divorced when he was about seven years old, and his mother suffered from extreme alcoholism.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: He would go on to live with her until she died in his early adulthood.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: He the claim is that he was a child prodigy.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean this stuff obviously comes from him, and it's got a real vibe to it, like when Western media is trying to make fun of Kim Jong-un or something, where he's like, oh, he, you know, did a golf game with 18 hole in ones or whatever.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, there are claims about him that he was speaking in complete sentences by age one and reading by age two, that he had completely mastered high school math by age 11, and that he was an East Coast judo champion by age 12.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's not even entirely clear how often he would say these things about himself.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: And certainly I think in most documentaries that we watch, we're not supposed to believe this about him.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: But I do want to touch on as we start that like there there is a weird kind of contradictory game that a lot of these things play, where on the one hand, we're supposed to laugh at his claims of genius, and we're supposed to see them as ridiculous and you know very cultish.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: But on the other hand, we're also kind of required to believe he was, in fact, a genius, because there's no other reason he could have pulled all of these people together and done what he supposedly did.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: So, like, I I don't know, even having watched so many of these documentaries, exactly how I am supposed to take some of these facts.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, he also he went to the Waldorf School of Garden City, uh, which we can, you know, swing back to in a little bit.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: We're telling the uh very basic kind of Netflix documentary story right now, and I want to kind of circle back to a lot of this weird stuff and we can go over it later from another direction.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: He went from there to Renzalayer Polytechnic Institute in 1982, where he graduated with a triple major in mathematics, biology, and physics.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: And then we get a weird story.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: So, okay, first, from 1982 to 1988, it's basically just like a black hole.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: Like once he graduates from the Polytechnic Institute, it's unclear in most narratives exactly what happened with him or where he was for the next six years.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: I do believe I have actually tracked a decent amount of this down.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: So we will we'll once again we will circle back to it, but this you won't find in your typical telling of the story.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: What they'll cut to next is they will cut to his 1989 Guinness World Records Award.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: So he was in the Guinness Book of World Records for having the highest IQ in the world, and he was only in there for one year because the following year they decided that this entire uh category was just completely illegitimate.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: And he was not the only one in there.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: There were a few other people too with equally high IQs that also made the list.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: I think there was like four of them, and they had all come from two kind of bullshit accredited societies that could determine this, and like the one that Keith Rainier came from in specific is he took a test from a group called the Mega Society that was supposed to establish genius IQs, and what they would do is they would send you a test, and then there was no time limit on this test, there was no monitoring, you just had to complete it and you had to send it back, and that's where he got this just ridiculously high IQ from.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, uh that that that is a thing that was able to be parlayed for several decades after the fact in order to portray a certain image of him, and in fact, I think it still is in a lot of documentaries, so he he has that happen.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: He goes from there to working for Amway, briefly.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: He is apparently a pretty good salesman there, and decides to jump from that into creating a group called Consumers By Line Inc.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: And the basic way that Consumers Buyline Inc.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: work is it was like a uh, I don't know, it was a pyramid scheme based on buying things as a group cheaply, like as far as I can understand it, it's a little bit convoluted, but you pay for a membership, and then by paying for a membership, you are able to get things at a discount because this group is buying stuff in bulk and then reselling it to you.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: But the problem is the math doesn't really work out, and the real way you're able to make any sort of money and get any sort of real discounts is by basically pulling in people beneath you, signing up other people into the program, and then your percentages on what you have to pay continue to go down.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: But it's it's it's pretty clearly a pyramid scheme, you know.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: And it gets sued in over 20 states, and while he kind of has all these troubles and consumers byline, he jumpship from there and starts this national health network, which is a vitamin and supplement brand.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: And he does that for a little bit as he's kind of fighting these various interstate lawsuits from his first company.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: In 1996, he makes a deal where he is no longer allowed to run a chain distribution scheme.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's what they call a pyramid scheme in New York, and this is basically just completely ignored and never punished, uh, which some might some people might find to be kind of odd because by 1998 he has his he has started ESP, the executive success program, which is the main uh like it's it's a subsidiary, it will end up being a subsidiary of Nexium.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's what he starts with, but over time the umbrella will kind of it'll be will become Nexium, and then it will have all of this stuff underneath it.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: One of them being the executive success programs, other programs being I don't like I'm just gonna I'm just gonna read you these programs because I think they're a good example of kind of the ridiculousness of Heath Rainier.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: So he has Jeunesse, and Jeanesse is just a flat up made-up word, like it's never really been given any sort of explanation at all in anything I've ever seen.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's a uh women's program.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: And if you want to laugh slash get like really annoyed, depending on how much this like emotionally affects you, you definitely can look up Jeanesse program seminars.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, they're they're insane, they're like absurdly misogynistic.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh there are a lot of like um lessons like all right, so women, you know, you'll do this thing where you nag all the time and you nag and you nag.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: And what that's doing is that's putting negative energy out.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: And then so the man who's supposed to be there to protect you, he's he's going to resent the nagging and he's going to want to avoid you.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: And what you need to do is you need to turn this entire dynamic on its head, and instead you need to be positive.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I it just lessons like that, just almost like almost parodies of what you would expect to see in a misogynistic program.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: And okay, because I will say one thing I don't have any doubt of is I don't have any doubt of the fact that Keith Rainier himself believed he was a super genius.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: I really think he was largely set up.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: He was a Patsy for all of these kind of larger forces, but one reason he was such a good patsy is this guy absolutely just loves smelling his own farts all the time.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: He is super into Ayn Rand, like he's one of those guys.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: He has reportedly said to multiple women that they are his Dagny Taggart, which is the you know the main character in Atlas Shrugged, and just I mean, an incredibly cringy, embarrassing thing to say, which is one of the reasons that I I I find this story so hard to believe as well, because like I know I kind of touched on it a little bit, I think, in the prologue and a little bit in the little scripted intro that I did, but if you believe that we have this kind of archetypal story of cults that are in our head or whatever, I kind of see Nexium is the moment where they had to stop trying it all in order to just kind of insert this stuff into the culture.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: Like, this guy is a fucking dork.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: He is we'll we'll get back to the Polytechnic Institute stuff, but there is absolutely no nothing he has proving his intelligence that couldn't easily be explained by him being helped by some sort of a larger network.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: He is an absolute blowhard to listen to, and he is he puts out real incel energy.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: So like the idea that he just had all of these women fawning over him is really hard to believe, and it's also hard to believe too because he's incredibly boring.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: Like I might I might use it as part of the cover, but if not, I would definitely encourage you to look up him playing volleyball.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: Like he, you know, there's pictures of him, he's wearing like knee guards and elbow guards, and he he looks like a little kid.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: And one thing you will hear too in every single one of these documentaries or books or whatever, I swear, like I got to the point where I was just waiting for it, is some moment where they will be like, I met Keith after hearing all this stuff about him, and I was immediately very underwhelmed because this wasn't the guy I was expecting at all.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then basically everybody kept telling me, like, no, no, this is the smartest guy on earth, he's the world's best problem solver, and eventually, like, I started to believe it.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of the time, too, this will be mixed with like really simple, obvious pickup artist tricks like nagging, and you know, like he he would love to do this thing to women where like they would meet him for the first time, and he would be like, Well, do you have a question for me?
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: And they would be thrown off because they don't have a question for him, they're just meeting him, and then he would act put off or offended that they did not have a question for him because you're getting this moment to speak to the smartest man in the world, then why would you not have a question ready?
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, no, this is Dork.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: He uh so his other societies he has his other things under the Nexium umbrella.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: He has the Society of Protectors, which is like the men's version of Janesse.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's and I I feel like I really probably don't even need to get any more into that.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: I think probably you can imagine with the name, the sort of MRA adjacent vibe he's going for.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: Then he has the Knife of Aristotle, which is it's an arm of their company that basically does PR and Crest.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: And then he uh the the one other group he has under Nexium is, and we will definitely be spending a lot more time on this going forward, is the Rainbow Cultural Gardens, which is barely touched on in the vast majority of Nexium stuff, which is weird because it is absurdly sus to the point where I alarm bells were immediately going off all over in my head when I first discovered it was even a thing, which I didn't really know before doing this research.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's a set of schools for very young children that had they were all set in these weird locations, like they're Mexico City, Guatemala City, Miami, Albany, which one might also recognize all as trafficking hubs.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: And the goal of this school was to basically create leaders for the future, and they would do a lot of really weird psychological stuff that reads as incredibly sus.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like even on the face of it, like they were taking kids as young as six months, and then they were putting them into these schools where they would have a different nanny each day that spoke a different language, and these would typically be immigrants that were shipped in.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that's one of the things they ended up actually getting him on was human trafficking in that regard.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: And the idea supposedly was to make children who could speak like seven different languages.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: The problem is that also what this could do is make a child very emotionally detached and non-lingual.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: And we don't know which one it did, because even though there were at least four of these schools running, we have absolutely no access to basically anybody involved.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: Like the one person that we have any real access to as far as like their direct involvement with it would be India Oxenberg.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: She was an administrator for these schools.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: She also is the granddaughter of a Yugoslavian princess, and she's definitely very controlled in anything she ever writes or says, I think comes from a long line of aristocracy that is naturally very good at that and has instilled that in their children.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: So you're not gonna get a lot of information out of her.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: And if you try to look anywhere for nannies who worked in this school or children who were in this school, you can find absolutely nothing.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I trust me, I have fucking tried.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: So next up he meets Nancy Salzman, and in the official stories I have read and heard, there's quite a bit of discrepancy as far as when they actually met.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: You'll hear 1997, you'll hear 1999.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: I have a theory I will definitely be wrapping around to near the end of this episode, where I think it's possible they met a lot earlier than that.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: And she is an expert in neurolinguistic programming.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: She was caught directly under a guy who ran a hospital that was doing MKUltra programs.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: And it's funny, basically everything you'll read will tell you that Keith Rainier pulled Nancy Salzman into this and then started using her neurolinguistic programming as a tool in this cult.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: And immediately, I mean, if I just look at the two of them, not that I think I I think they're both basically middle managers, if I'm being honest, but if I look at the two of them, I do not believe that Keith Rainier was the one in charge of the neurolinguistic programmer.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: I think it was definitely the other way around.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: And what neurolinguistic programming is, if you're unfamiliar, it's a weird mixture of kind of pop science and hypnotism.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: And there's been real academic work on it, which we will get into when we come back to this story from the Nancy Salzman perspective.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_00: We're actually going to do Nancy and Lauren Salzman because her daughter, also, who comes of age in this cult, is one of the more fascinating people to me.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: But so she has a degree in psychology.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: And it is under real academics who have done academic work in neurolinguistic programming.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: So she's kind of she's the real deal, I would say.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: She definitely seems to be.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of people in the more pop science area will give this a bad name and really, I don't know, use it in ways that are borderline silly, like Tony Robbins, if you're familiar with him at all.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: He's a neurolinguistic programming guy.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Mystery the Pickup Art is one of those people.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the the sorts of like self help gurus who will tell you the real basics of it.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: Stuff like, oh yeah, you know, if you're talking to somebody, start matching what they're doing.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: If they move their hands, you move your hands.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: If they breathe a certain way, you breathe a certain way.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: And this will subconsciously make them connect with you.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: And then what you do once you hit a certain point is now you switch it around.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: And now you start doing things.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: And if they imitate you, then this has worked successfully.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: But I have my own theories about when they met.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I will say even official journalistic sources are not clear on this.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: And so basically him and Nancy either set up the executive success programs together, or he sets he starts doing it, and she comes along very early on in the process.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: And it's, I don't know, it's like a weird mixture of like executive seminars, you know, like day-long kind of game playing and pop psychology and stuff like that, you know, meant to make you a better manager or business owner, like that sort of a thing.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: Mixed with like some stuff that's like really directly taken from places like Scientology.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: And as this proceeds more into Nexium being the controlling kind of apparatus over top of the executive success programs, this will become even more apparent.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they they will literally so they have these things called explorations of meanings or EMs.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, they're just they're quite literally, I mean, they're just odd uh Scientology auditing sessions, you know, like they're taking difficult memories and regressing into past lives and recording all of this as blackmail and methods of manipulation later on.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: They would call people who left Nexium suppressive persons, which is almost gutsy in how much it's just ripping off Scientology.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_00: And then so at some point early on, too, he will meet Barbara Boucher, who he meets through Nancy Salzman, and ends up becoming the main financial advisor for Nexium over the next like next 15 years or so.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: And then he will meet most of the other players that will be importing to this story in pretty quick fashion.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: Most sources place him as getting involved in about 2003.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_00: But if you read Sarah Edmondson's book, Scarred, she will claim that she was at a Nexium meeting in 2001, or an executive success program meeting, I should say, in 2001, and Emiliano was there with his girlfriend at the time.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'd be inclined to believe it because she also includes a girlfriend that he is known to have had at the time that he wouldn't have had in 2003.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: He gets hooked up with the Bronfman sisters, and initially their father, Edgar Bronfman Sr., lends some money to the program.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: He is supportive of it, and then in an expose around 2004, he will call Nexium a cult, and after that, he the general story is that he is at odds with them in trying to get his daughters out of there.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_00: The Bronfmans now are an old bootlegging family that if you have ever read One Nation under Blackmail by Whitney Webb will pop up quite a bit.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: They're like old organized crime, I mean, for at least a hundred years at this point, and we're definitely going to be spending an episode or maybe two on them.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, I I'll have a lot more to say on them as kind of time goes on.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_00: But at least at this point right now in the mainstream story, the idea is that these sisters just get enraptured with Keith, uh, because he's just so incredibly brilliantly manipulative, and they start giving him just insane amounts of money.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'm talking like$150 million that he manages to lose on bad investments.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_00: We will be tracing where a lot of that money goes later on, and I certainly do not think it's anywhere near that fucking simple, but that that is what you will see on most documentaries.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_00: Sarah and Claire Bronfman are their names, by the way.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: And they also know a guy named Frank Parlato, and Frank Parlato is an incredibly odd character.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: He was in business with the Bronfman sisters initially, before he ever works with Naxium, he is in what appears to be a pretty serious legal dispute with them over a business deal gone bad.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: Then they recommend him to Keith as a PR guy, which is incredibly odd because Frank Parlado in the early 2000s, when he comes to do PR work for them, he has no history in PR, he has no history in journalism, he is in fact a property manager and a slum lord, and he gets paid one year by Nexium to do PR for them, and the PR he does is also very unclear.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's not like he's putting out a ton of positive stories or using connections that we didn't know he otherwise had or whatever.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: He just kind of he gets paid for public relations.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I've got a lot more to say on him in the future, but I will just say that maybe if I were Nexium and I was moving people through Mexico and the US and Canada on a pretty regular basis, that maybe if I were going to be interested in a guy with no journalistic experience, and I were going to be paying him for something, I would probably be more willing to pay him for access to the property he owns at one Niagara Center, which is right on the border between the US and Canada, and is a tourist destination where it is very easy to move back and forth between countries quietly.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, across a rainbow bridge is the name of it, and you're like, don't think too much about all of this weird rainbow symbolism that keeps popping up.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure it's nothing.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_00: So they hire him for a year, they supposedly have a falling out, then he disappears for about 10 years, and when he comes back, he will be instrumental in Nexium being taken down.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_00: He, in fact, uh runs a blog called the Frank Report, and he would start publishing private stories that would oftentimes get picked up by bigger newspapers, and the blog itself got a certain amount of momentum being featured in places like Vice, as everything started to burn down.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_00: He will be hooked up with several of the other kinds of media people in the general sphere, including Katherine Oxburg, who is India Oxburg's mother and is an actress in Hollywood, as well as Mark Vicente, the documentarian behind What the Bleep Do We Know, which uh, if you're not familiar with that, it was a documentary that came out, man, when I was a teenager, probably like 20 years ago, and it's uh real kind of like, I don't know, woo-woo, new age documentary that doesn't really understand quantum physics as well as it wants you to believe it does, and makes a lot of assertions that are pulling from stuff like the secret, you know, a lot of like your intention controls your life, sort of stuff, which you know, I think that sort of stuff is really complicated, but definitely uh that movie is dumb.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I guess let's let's let's jump into Mark Vicente for a minute right now, too, because Mark Vicente will come in around 2005, and he's coming from another cult called Rampha at the time, which is the cult he made the What the Bleep Do We Know documentary for.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_00: They're a little bit subtle about that, but if you watch the documentary, uh there's the cult leader and a lot of sev uh several other people from the cult will be pretty prominently in it, and it was produced by them, and so he jumps from one one cult to another, which a person could hypothetically read as somebody being a naive seeker.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: I were definitely doing an episode on him at one point, and I do not believe for a fucking second that's what he was.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_00: I in fact have what I would say is a lot of evidence that's not the case.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, if you watch the documentary The Vow, which he will film in tandem with Nexium burning down, so that a ton of this stuff is captured on camera as it's happening.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_00: He will talk about his dad being a spy in South Africa, to give you a little hint about where this is going.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the things that was covered in Sarah Edmondson's book in specific as well, is that he came to her and basically said, I'm turning on this cult and I want your help.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_00: And the very first thing he had her do before he would say anything else is sign an NDA, which is an odd fucking thing to do for some naive seeker who is escaping a cult they no longer trust.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: But nonetheless, we we'll get back to we'll get back to that fucker.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so at this point now, basically, we have all right, so we also have Kristen Crook who joins the cult very briefly before leaving.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: But what she does more importantly is bring in Alison Mack, who is her co-star on Smallville, and Alison Mack will play a fairly large role in some of the Nexium events.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_00: She's probably the most well-known person involved in Nexium.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_00: Nexium gets labeled sometimes as a celebrity cult, and I've tried to do a lot of research into this too, and I would say that you can find celebrities like Rosario Dawson or Gerard Butler who went to Nexium meetings.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_00: I wouldn't hold it against them.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_00: Feel free to hold plenty of other stuff against them.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_00: You know, Gerard Butler's, I believe, got a little bit of Me Too stuff going on.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Rosario Dawson dated Corey Booker for however many years.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_00: So there's reasons to not trust them in general, but as far as Naxium goes, I don't think that they're I don't think they're too culpable.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think they were too involved.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_00: I think this place attracted some celebrities sometimes.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_00: They would come, they would get sussed out, and they would leave.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, at one point Alison Mack even like writes a message to Emma Watson on Twitter asking her to join.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_00: But either way, so you've got Alison Mack, and just to recap at this point, so kind of the structure of Nexium, the way it would work is you had officially Keith Rainier and Nancy Salzman sort of at the top.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_00: He would be called Vanguard, she would be called Proctor.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_00: And then they had a sash system for everybody beneath them, and the sash system would kind of determine where everybody else fell in the cult.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_00: And people like Mark Vicente and Alison Mack and the Brompman sisters would all be kind of like the highest level sash, or I guess I should say second highest level sash, because Nancy and Keith would wear the highest level was, but they were the only ones who were allowed to.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_00: And then also hovering around this, you would have several people who died mysterious deaths, multiple people who were claimed to have brain cancer, but were never actually checked out and were diagnosed either by doctors in the cult or sent to Mexican doctors whose names we don't know in Mexican clinics to be treated.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_00: I'd say even your basic mainstream documentaries a lot of the time will treat these deaths is pretty questionable.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_00: You also have the death of Kristen Snyder in 2003, and the other mysterious deaths I think we can get into at a later point, but I do want to tell you about Kristen Snyder's death because I think it's interesting.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_00: Alright, I'll start here.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_00: While it and this is from Don't Call It a Cult by Sarah Berman.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_00: She is a journalist who wrote about the Nexium cult after the fact.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_00: And while it didn't happen in every session, some coaches were known to introduce controversial interpretations of events that pinned crushing responsibility on new students.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_00: Students told me they'd heard rape victims question about how they may have been responsible for their rape, or a breast cancer survivor might be asked about how low self-esteem could have contributed to their illness.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't unheard of for Nexium followers to be convinced that they were partly responsible for major world events.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_00: Nancy Salzman was known to tell students that the World Trade Center attack might not have happened if she joined Rainier sooner.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_00: In Kristen Snyder's case, Kenny Powers had heard her talking about being responsible for the Challenger Space Shuttle explosion and suggesting that the world might be better off without her.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_00: Forbes had already interviewed one Mexican woman who'd begun hallucinating and suffered a nervous breakdown during an intensive and was later hospitalized.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_00: An Albany-based psychiatrist also claims to have given psychiatric treatment to two other students.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_00: Howers told me he has a medical background and had assessed Snyder's suicide risk before her disappearance.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_00: He said he'd strongly encouraged her to see a doctor, but that Esther Carlson, the lead trainer for Nexium, discouraged us.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_00: Snyder's suicide threats were described as cries for attention.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_00: A volunteer search and rescue team searched through the night for Snyder on Friday, February 7th, and Powers personally put in 48 hours straight before taking time to get some sleep.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_00: An official search involving Alaska State troopers, fire and emergency service workers, the U.S.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_00: Coast Guard, Seward Police, and Civil Air Patrol began the morning of Saturday, February 8th.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_00: One of these search parties found Snyder's abandoned car, and it was a chilling note in a ringed notebook.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_00: Cleese gave Yusko a copy of the note, who is just a journalist, in 2004 when he came across the story and the Times Union published a photo of it.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_00: I attended a course called Executive Success Programs, in parentheses, aka Nexium, based out of Anchorage, Alaska in Albany, New York.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_00: Snyder's note reads, I was brainwashed in my emotional center of the brain, was killed or turned off.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_00: I still have feeling in my external skin, but my internal organs are rotting.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_00: Please contact my parents.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_00: If you find me or this note, I am sorry, life, I didn't know I was already dead.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_00: May we persist into the future.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_00: A second page reads, No need to search for my body.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_00: And they would never find her body.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that story is interesting because one thing we will also be getting into more that a lot of these documentaries don't cover very much as we head further into this series is the doctors connected to Nexium.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the doctors, I mean, was doing like literal like experiments on women where they would have women maybe.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_00: We don't know if he was at these schools too, so possibly children, but definitely grown women, where he would force them to see a bunch of gore and blood and upsetting visual imagery and be like monitoring their brain waves and stuff.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, like really like MKUltra shit.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, we have the other doctor who was there for all of the DOS ceremonies where these women were branded and was responsible for branding them.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_00: She's also got a strange history.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_00: In DOS, by the way, is the thing that ended up getting most of the media attention and really sunk Keith Rainier and Nexium.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_00: And it was a program made right around the end of Nexium's run in like 2017.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_00: Uh that stood for Dominus Obsequious Sororum.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_00: And it was supposed to be for women's empowerment, is the story.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_00: And Alison Mack and Keith Rainier supposedly came up with this and were running it.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_00: Keith Rainier from The Shadows is the story, and Alice and Mack more directly.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_00: Now they would have a symbol branded on them that was claimed to just be a symbol of the sorority, it's just a proof that they were like strong enough and that they were part of this thing and they were willing to do it.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like on their pelvis area.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_00: And one thing that got pointed out after you know the police became involved in Nexium was if you turned this brand one way, you can read AM on it, like Alice and Mac.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_00: And if you turn it another way, it very clearly says KR, like Keith Rainier.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_00: Which it is unclear exactly how involved he was in DOS.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_00: I think even if he was involved fairly heavily, that does not mean he was not goaded into it and given ideas by other people who were already planning a controlled burn of this group.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_00: But if you were trying to create a Patsy to put all of this on, I can't almost think of a better way to do it than to literally have his initials burned onto women.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I should say, real quick, too, because I keep using this word patsy for Keith Rainier, I do not think Keith Rainier was a good guy.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_00: I do not think he was an innocent guy.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_00: I think he is absolutely a sexual predator, a an abuser, manipulative, uh an absolute garbage human.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's just that I don't think he was the only one.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_00: So anyway, around the time of these DOS ceremonies, Mark Vicente, the filmmaker, jumps out of the cult.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_00: Well, actually doesn't jump out right away.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_00: He quietly assembles a group of people, willing to exit the cult with him and to give testimony to people in the FBI that he just knows.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_00: Don't don't think too hard about that.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_00: Just what what this guy just knows people in the FBI and can call them at will to get testimony and start building a case.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_00: And then he also hooks them up with Frank Parlato, the guy who was originally the slumlord who began inexplicably doing PR work for Nexium that nobody can find, and then turned around and created a blog that was instrumental in turning public opinion against them and bringing them down.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_00: The New York Times does.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: Big expose at this point, and you have the vow being filmed by Mark Vicende, who partway through filming it goes from being a guy who supposedly is filming this for the cult to a guy who is filming this in order to have evidence once he leaves.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_00: On top of that, you have at least two podcasts with odd origins, Escaping Nexium and Uncovering Nexium, that both were able to hover around and get interviews prior to the Colts dissolution, be there for its dissolution, and then release afterwards, which starts feeling a lot like a very coordinated public opinion campaign.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_00: And as the years start to tighten on Keith Rainier, he runs to Mexico with Lauren Salzman, who is Nancy Salzman's daughter, once again, and Alison Mack, Nikki Klein, who is another low-tier celebrity, who I really feel bad for because if there's anybody I think is a true believer, it's it's probably her, and I think this whole thing really fucked her up, but and then a couple of people from his inner circle in Mexico, and he ends up getting captured by Mexican forces that do not arrest him, which is interesting on its own, because if you were to arrest him, now you have a whole extradition process, which includes things like discovery and all sorts of red tape.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_00: But they don't do that, they extradite him, where the US is waiting to arrest him right away, and they're able to just cut Mexico completely out of this, which will definitely dive deeper into that and uh all the fuckery in that general area.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_00: So Mexican forces come and arrest him.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_00: Some of this is on videotape.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_00: He runs and hides in a closet, which makes for a great kind of ha ha moment of this guy.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_00: He was thought he was on top of the world and the world's smartest man and manipulating all these people, and now the emperor has no clothes, and he's literally hiding in a closet being dragged out by Mexican forces.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, the whole thing's very cinematic.
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_00: He goes to trial, the Bromfmans will pay his legal fees, or one might say own his lawyers, and Alison Mack will get four years, Lauren Salzman will get 82 months, and Keith Rainier will get 120 years in prison.
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_00: The vast majority of the people involved will get away completely unscathed to go on to write books and make documentaries about their time in Nexium.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_00: Keith Rainier will have filed several patents about psychological work the cult was doing.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_00: The government will seize all of it.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_00: So things like the Luciferian patent, which was one that he had, which was about controlling difficult people, and a lot of the psychological tests they were running are now property of the government.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_00: So that's fun.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_00: He is charged with racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking conspiracy, forced labor conspiracy, and wire fraud conspiracy.
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_00: And nowadays he sits in a cell, occasionally gives dumb interviews, and is being guided by a legal team completely controlled by the Braffmans.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_00: But let's rewind.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_00: Let's go back now.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_00: Let's travel back to when he was a child, and I want to just hit you with a couple of facts that maybe we look at a different way.
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, first off, the Waldorf School is an alternative school that a lot of wealthy kids go to, and it's into anthroposophy, which is the esoteric philosophy of Rudolf Steiner.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_00: It is the exact sort of place.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not saying this happened, I don't know, but if you were going to cultivate an asset from pretty early on, this would be a good place to do it.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_00: I would say that the fact that he goes to the Renzelayer Polytechnic Institute after this, which is a hard school to get into, and he does a triple major in it.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_00: It is a little bit odd because he was a C student at Waldorf.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_00: And let's not forget the RPI is deeply embedded with the Department of Defense, NASA, and major defense contractors.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_00: So he is definitely swimming in a certain sea right now that I find to be pretty interesting.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_00: Then he gets out of there and then gets in the Guinness Book of World Records for one year for being the smartest man in the world or having the highest IQ.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_00: And if you were trying to create a legend for an asset that maybe you had been cultivating for some time, that would be a pretty good way to do that.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_00: And the Guinness Book of World Records is not an easy thing to get into.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_00: I get that the story is that this was like a weird, shortly lived kind of loophole, but still pretty odd for a C student who has not shown himself outside of his inexplicable triple major in college to be anything special to do.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then this is where it gets really interesting to me.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_00: So, and we'll we'll end it on this.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_00: And this is a bit of speculation.
• 50:29
  SPEAKER_00: I know it, we're gonna be hitting on a lot more hard facts in a lot of the episodes going forward, but I don't know, I think this is interesting to think about.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_00: So, in that period between 1982 and 1988, after graduating from RPI, Keith Rainier went to work for the New York Justice Department, and he was a computer programmer at prisons, basically a data analyst and an IT guy.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_00: And this is interesting because obviously prisons are one of the main places where historically behavior modification and things like that have gone on.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_00: And it's also interesting to me because another thing that doesn't get talked about that I discovered is that Nancy Salzman was doing classified work for the New York for New York State.
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_00: I can't say for sure the New York Justice Department, but I can't say she was doing classified work for New York State in the exact same time period.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_00: And now, if you were a psychologist trained in neurolinguistic programming, where do you imagine your skills would be used when working for New York State?
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_00: Especially in a confidential way.
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_00: I can tell you that I can't imagine a better place for them than the New York Justice Department, than possibly the exact same police stations and prisons and parole offices where Keith Rainier was working.
• 52:25
  SPEAKER_00: In this, friends, makes me wonder if maybe him and Nancy Salzman knew each other a decade earlier than what they claim.
• 52:37
  SPEAKER_00: All right, you guys, thank you so much for tuning in again.
• 52:41
  SPEAKER_00: I know I say it every week, but if you can give me five stars and a review on iTunes or Spotify or wherever you're listening, that really helps a lot.
• 52:53
  SPEAKER_00: I always appreciate you guys.
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I realize I didn't give my sources last week.
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I want to try to be better about making sure to do that every episode to make it clear I'm not, you know, pulling this stuff out of my ass.
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_00: So, like I would say this week, uh Scarred by Sarah Edmondson was a source, the program by Tony Natalie, don't call it a cult by Sarah Berman, The Frank Report, Still Learning by India Oxenberg, Captive A Mother's Crusade to Save Her Daughter from the Terrifying Cult Nexium by Catherine Oxenberg, the HBO documentary, The Vow, Escaping Nexium by the Canadian Broadcasting Company.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's it.
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_00: Alright, I'll see you guys next week.
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_00: Hey guys, so in the process of editing this, I just noticed a couple of little things I wanted to clarify.
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_00: Uh just to not lie on his name, Gerard Butler has not been accused of anything Me Too related.
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_00: Not really.
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_00: Uh there was a spat he had with Brandy Glanville of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, where she threw that term around in a situation where it really didn't apply.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_00: Uh also I realized that I accidentally called Keith Rainier Vanguard and Nancy Salzman Proctor, when actually her name would have been Prefect, so it's Vanguard and Prefect.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_00: And then the one other thing I noticed was that when I mentioned the two podcasts that were filming simultaneously during the time that Naxium was crashing out, it was escaping Nexium and infamous inside Nexium's inner circle.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_00: All right, thank you very much, guys.