NXIVM

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Speaker 1: Take a deep breath in and breathe out.

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Speaker 2: Your conscious mind is going to go totally away so that I can.

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Speaker 3: Speak priminantly of your unconscious mind.

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Speaker 4: You can notice that you feel rested, more alerted, confident.

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Speaker 3: From Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcasts. This is episode eight of mind Games. I'm Alice Hines, I'm Zoela Scos.

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Speaker 5: You don't know how you did it.

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Speaker 6: You did you.

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Speaker 4: You're going to a little time to Tarsian stake and you're out of it.

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Speaker 5: For seven episodes, we've been tracing the story of Neurolinguistic Programming and its founder, Richard Bandler. We've learned how a volatile young guy with a troubled past successfully sold a set of brain hacks and persuasion techniques to everyone from corporate suits to pick up artists to the US Army.

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Speaker 3: And LP started as self help, but it also began to appeal to groups that sold self help as a baden switch in order to control and exploit groups popularly known as cults.

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Speaker 5: In this episode, we're going to dig into the darkest spinoff. NLP ever spawned a group called Nexium. Nexium, a New York based cult whose leader was sentenced to one hundred twenty years in prison for sex trafficking and other crimes.

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Speaker 3: You might have heard of Nexium before brainwashing, sex abuse, and even branding. There was an HBO docu series about it called The Vow, and a ton of media coverage the time. But we're wanting to look at Nexium from a different perspective as a case study for how NLP can be used for coercion and what happens when persuasion tools fall into the hands of someone with terrible and at times sadistic intentions, someone like Nexium's leader, Keith Ranieri.

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Speaker 7: Esp Nexium is a methodology that allows people to optimize their behavior.

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Speaker 3: Keith Ranieri started out like a lot of people we've heard about on this podcast. He was an aspiring human, potential entrepreneur interested in NLP, not all that different from a young Richard Bandler or Tony Robbins. His company, Nexium offered what they called executive success programs to people looking for an edge in their personal and professional lives. TV actresses joined Mexico's political elite did too. Two heiresses to the Seagram's liquor fortune bankrolled the organization for years. On paper, Naxium looked like a lot of other self improvement groups. The Dalai Lama even showed up to one of their events, but then at least seventeen women ended up branded with Keith Ranieri's initials.

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Speaker 8: The person who's being branded should be completely nude and sort of held to the table like a sort of almost like a sacrifice.

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Speaker 3: He loved being taped, and so members filmed and recorded him constantly. This is a clip that was later played at his trial.

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Speaker 8: And the person should ask to be branded, Okay, should say, please brand me. It would be an honor or something like that, an honor I want to wear for the rest.

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Speaker 6: Of my life.

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Speaker 9: I don't know.

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Speaker 4: We begin with breaking news in a celebrity sex cult trial.

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Speaker 5: The alleged ringleader just convicted.

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Speaker 3: Keith was ultimately convicted of sex trafficking among other crimes in twenty nineteen.

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Speaker 8: Prosecutors said Keith Rennier was a mastermine sipulator who ruined marriages, careers, fortunes, and lives.

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Speaker 3: You've probably heard some of the story before, but what people don't know is that Keith was indebted to NLP.

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Speaker 6: Initially, Nancy was replaceable. I could have partnered with Anthony Robbins and other people, and I didn't feel they were appropriate personality wise and things like that.

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Speaker 3: In this clip from the Vow, Keith is talking about Nancy Salzman. We met her in our first episode. She's a master NLP trainer. Keith recruited her to co found Nexium.

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Speaker 6: She was a good student and she was willing to learn the stuff. So now Nancy's not replaceable, and ultimately that's my goal to create a thousand Nansens.

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Speaker 4: In the world.

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Speaker 3: Keith made it sound like Nancy needed him, but it was a two way street. Keith needed her NLP skills and he used them for his own purposes.

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Speaker 2: I never imagined that Keith Ranieri would misuse my work. I believe that he was as committed to finding methods to help people as I was, and it was horribly shocking when I found out that he did.

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Speaker 3: I met Nancy at her home outside of Albany, New York. It was the first interview she's done since being released from prison.

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Speaker 1: She's my second sphinx. You have to feel her. It just kind of feels like velvet.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, her skin is amazing.

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Speaker 1: She's totally hairless, totally hairless.

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Speaker 3: Nancy's story with NLP starts a few decades ago. Nancy, is this.

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Speaker 1: Your nursing school graduation?

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Speaker 8: Yes?

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Speaker 1: Can I see? Yeah?

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Speaker 3: This is my As a young nurse, she got interested in hypnosis.

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Speaker 1: Oh here, you want to set the pictures?

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Speaker 4: Yeah, that's me.

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Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, how old were you here? I was twenty.

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Speaker 3: Nancy showed me a picture of her on her bookshelf. It's the nineteen seventies and she's a young, pretty Jewish girl from New Jersey with aviator glasses and dark brown hair. Had you started learning about hypnosis yet at this time?

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Speaker 4: No, But I already knew that my favorite thing was psych and I was interested in that, and I was interested in chronic pain, and I started studying, like just taking courses. I didn't want to use drugs. I wanted to do something non traditional. And my ex husband was a physician, and he introduced me to the whole idea, the whole idea of hypnosis for chronic pain and biofeedback.

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Speaker 3: When Nancy was a child, her mom had debilitating back pain. Seeing her mom's suffer set Nancy on a path.

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Speaker 4: But there's something about being able to help somebody that just makes me so it's probably the biggest motivator of my entire life.

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Speaker 3: She was working with chronic pain patients and looking for ways to help them overcome suffering using the power of their minds. LP did just that.

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Speaker 4: You work with somebody their lifetime is not supposed to be sitting around talking about their problems. So in NLP it was solution based. So when people come to you, you know what's the problem, what do you want?

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Speaker 3: Nancy studied with Richard Bandler and saw firsthand how persuasive NLP can make someone. Remember Nancy told us how nlped her into letting him drive her new Volvo drunk after eleven martinis. Bandler denies this.

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Speaker 4: I couldn't believe he convinced me to do that.

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Speaker 3: Nancy still believed strongly in the power of NLP to provoke change. That's why she was willing to speak to me for this podcast.

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Speaker 4: I never would have believed how bad the media could be until I read about myself in the media and I realized how inaccurate it really was.

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Speaker 3: What was the worst thing that you read?

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Speaker 4: I had a company. It was a human performance company. We taught training, so we helped people, We worked with people, and really we had a money back guarantee for anyone who took the training, and no one ever took the money back guarantee. People loved our training. And then a series of things happened with my business partner and he did something separate from my company sex sex cult.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, and they called it a cult.

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Speaker 3: Nancy doesn't like to call NEXIEM a cult. She claims the company helped more than eighteen thousand people with its so called executive success programs.

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Speaker 4: My company taught trainings, and it created coaches, and it was a goal setting program. And we were very consistent in what we were doing. And the majority of the people who were in my company knew nothing about this other thing, and I knew nothing about it.

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Speaker 3: Nancy pled guilty to charges of racketeering and served a two year prison sentence. Keith Ranieri, meanwhile, is serving one hundred and twenty year sentence for crimes including sex trafficking. Do you think that he was misusing any of the self improvement techniques that you had showed him to manipulate these women?

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Speaker 4: No, No, I think he was just extorting them. I think he was promising them. I think he was lying and extorting them.

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Speaker 3: He's promising them self improvement.

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Speaker 4: Yes, everything he did was promising self improvement.

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Speaker 3: It seemed to me that Nancy was still processing exactly what had happened in Nexiom. But I wanted to sort out definitively whether NLP was part of Nexium's abuse. I had Nancy take me back to the nineteen nineties when Keith first started pursuing her. At the time, he was running a multi level marketing company called Consumer's Byline.

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Speaker 4: When he started his first company, he wanted his whole staff to have NLP and I refused. I said no.

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Speaker 3: Keith kept sending people to me meet with Nancy on his behalf, which she thought was a little weird.

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Speaker 4: I didn't even want to meet him for any reason. My ex husband's wife introduced us. That's the only reason I met him, because he was pursuing me for years.

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Speaker 3: Nancy was at the peak of her career as an NLP trainer working for conn Edison in New York at their nuclear power plant.

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Speaker 4: I worked in one division of the company and I was teaching the NLP communications model, and one of the senior vice presidents came in and watched me teach it, and he was very impressed by it, and he brought me in to be the human performance person to help them get the nuclear power plant back online.

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Speaker 3: This sounded improbable to me at first that a nuclear plant would hire an NLP trainer, but I actually tracked down the conad VP who hired Nancy. He didn't want to give an interview for this podcast, but he confirmed her story and said her work helped boost operator morale. It was this kind of skill that Keith wanted at his company. Eventually he convinced Nancy to sit down with him.

00:11:11
Speaker 4: So when I met Keith, he immediately figured out, or maybe I just told him that I really wanted to help people. Testingly, I started to feel like I wasn't helping people any longer and that maybe I would give that up. And he asked me why, and I said, because none of the change seems to be permanent.

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Speaker 3: Keith promised that together he and Nancy could improve upon NLP.

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Speaker 4: When we decided to teach the communication model of NLP, I used to teach that on a weekend, and we taught it in two hours. I think the genius of Keith wasn't that he came up with all these things on his own. It was that he could take extremely complex information and break it down into something that a nine year old could understand.

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Speaker 3: In nineteen ninety eight, Keith and Nancy co founded the company that became Nexium. Nancy was teaching NLP at their trainings like this one captured in the vow Now.

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Speaker 4: The difference between having an integration and other processes is when.

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Speaker 1: It's gone, it's gone.

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Speaker 4: With an integration, you can't even remember what it used to be like. It changes your whole experience of existence forever.

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Speaker 3: Keith and Nancy took ideas from NLP and added new jargon. An integration was a transformation achieved by redefining your reality.

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Speaker 4: When you took our five day training, you learned about perception and about changing meaning, and a bunch of different things that then made it easy for me to work with people. In the NLP model of perception, we take in the reality data and then we take in what we think it means, and we blend it all together. So our map of reality is not all about reality. Some of it is a bunch of meanings that aren't accurate. So that information comes in, it passes through filters, and we make an internal representation, and that internal representation drives our emotions, it drives our behavior, it drives our thought processes.

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Speaker 5: I don't know about this being something any nine year old can easily understand, but the point she's making about maps of reality is straight NLP. She's basically saying that your perception of the world is patchy and distorted, and once you recognize that, you can decide how you want to feel or behave, and from there you can create your own reality.

00:13:51
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is actually really important in state control. This NLP technique we heard about in our first episode. You'll remember Nancy talking about how she was able to conjure feelings of happiness and excitement to overcome depression when she was in prison.

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Speaker 4: A month in I said to myself, what is wrong with you? You have all of these tools, use them, and I put myself in a good state. And I said, you see, you know how to do this. It is inexcusable for you to stay in this state because you are making yourself miserable. And I did. I kept myself in a good state the whole time I was stuck in prison.

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Speaker 5: The idea that these tools are so effective you could have a great time in prison is honestly pretty seductive, I want this superpower.

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Speaker 3: Yeah. So Nixium took this NP technique state Control and repackaged it. They called the process of reframing your emotions and memories an em for exploration of meaning, and Keith would often use it on Nancy. When she was first working with Keith, she was still Nuclear Power Plant and she was stressed out by her job and going through a divorce. But through working with Keith.

00:15:06
Speaker 4: I just stopped being afraid. Then I stopped being upset.

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Speaker 1: I just wasn't anymore.

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Speaker 3: Nancy was able to change how she felt.

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Speaker 4: I was driving home after a meeting with Keith, and we had been up like till four o'clock in the morning, because I would come home like at eleven or twelve, because I was driving back from my work at the nuclear power plant on Friday night. And I would say, I'll meet you in the morning, and he would say, no, come now, there's food, blah blah. So I'd go to eat and then we'd start talking. Before I knew it, I'd be crying. We'd be talking. I'd be embarrassed because I was crying. Nobody seemed to notice. There's people around all the time. Nobody noticed I was. I was always a puddle, and then you know, at the end of the weekend. I remember I would say to Keith, are you gonna put me back together again? I have to leave, and he would say, oh, yeah, I always put you back together, and he would.

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Speaker 3: The longer Nancy spent with Keith, the more her professional and personal worlds blended together.

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Speaker 4: But I remember also feeling like when I first started working with him, he was doing such intense work with me that I would be walking around and I would feel like the ground underneath me wasn't solid, and I would start to think, oh my god, this feels really weird. I'd be lifness as I was walking, you know, thinking this is solid. Why do I feel like I'm falling through the floor.

00:16:33
Speaker 3: Because he was making you question your reality, yes he was.

00:16:37
Speaker 4: He was actually changing how I perceived my reality. But the more he did it, the more effective I got, so I didn't question it. I just felt like everything was changing. He did it really quickly with me.

00:16:53
Speaker 3: Questioning your reality can yield a lot of progress and success, but then someone else controls your reality.

00:17:01
Speaker 4: He was making me more reality based, though I was seeing that I was seeing my own limitations It wasn't like he was trying to to cause me to believe things that weren't true. It was showing me how what I believed was limiting me.

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Speaker 5: It sounding like she feels some of the work she did with Keith was actually helpful.

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Speaker 3: Yes, but Keith also told Nancy one of her limiting beliefs was that she needed to sleep.

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Speaker 4: I would feel like it was a limitation of mine if I needed more than four hours of sleep. And so I started, you know, trying to get by with less sleep.

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Speaker 3: It was one more thing to optimize. The less you slept, the more you could achieve.

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Speaker 4: And after a long period of time of convincing myself that it wasn't okay to sleep more than four hours, I started to notice things like if I drove late in the day, like or at night, I would fall asleep driving. I ended up on my front lawn once because I fell asleep. Once I got I was like really alert as I was driving home, and once I got to my block and my house was the third house in I relaxed and I fell asleep and I ended up on my front lawn. I mean I didn't hit anything. It woke me right up, but I got a reputation for needing to be driven home at night from any training that went past dark, because people knew that I couldn't stay awake at night.

00:18:29
Speaker 3: Sleep deprivation feels like an obvious red flag for abuse, but because it was framed as self improvement, Nancy didn't catch it because.

00:18:37
Speaker 4: I kept thinking there was something wrong with me, and it never It didn't even occur to me until years after I stopped interacting with him, that I could drive at night and it wasn't ever a problem. And I thought to myself, oh my god, I was sleep deprived. And I said to a number of people who I still speak to, I think I was sleep deprived when I was working with Keith, and that you all said, are you crazy? He kept you sleep deprived. He used to announce in front of the room. He would shame you in front of the entire room if you needed too much sleep.

00:19:16
Speaker 5: Interesting because sleep deprivation is not NLP, but Keith used NLP to convince Nancy and other followers that running on fumes was good for them.

00:19:28
Speaker 3: Yeah, and this is actually a pattern I've seen in my reporting on groups that used coercive control, popularly known as cults. Basically, people like Keith used therapeutic techniques to woo followers, but these techniques can only go so far in manipulating people. To truly control someone, cult leaders layer mind games with changes to physiology, things like sleep deprivation, appetite suppression, or even encouraging followers to take high doses of LSD, which is what the Manson family did.

00:20:00
Speaker 5: Uh, it's like a toxic soup. It's just like all of these tactics blended together leave you so strung out, totally disoriented and utterly unable to question the charismatic guide driving the bus.

00:20:12
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. And on top of that, Nancy said she was often afraid of Keith.

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Speaker 4: What Keith did do a lot was he created stimulus response patterns in people because he was very good at reading an individual and noticing where their fears were, and then he used them. I don't think that was using human technology. I think he was sensitive. He could see those things, and when he saw your pattern and your fear, he was very capable of using it against you.

00:21:08
Speaker 3: At one point in our interview, I asked Nancy Soulzman outright whether Keith had used NLP against her at first she said no, but then she thought of something.

00:21:19
Speaker 4: Well, eventually he puts some fear angers into me, Yeah, some fear anchors. Yeah, and that would cause me not to want to approach him about things.

00:21:32
Speaker 5: We've heard about anchors throughout the series. It's the classic technique NLP got from hypnosis, where someone uses a sensory cue like a tap on the knee or a specific sound to trigger an emotional state. In NLP, anchors are usually established to trigger positive feelings like excitement or confidence.

00:21:54
Speaker 3: But Keith used anchers to make people feel scared and uncomfortable.

00:22:00
Speaker 7: Wear in your body that there's a censation that you try to try to ignore, try to suppress, it just gets stronger and stronger.

00:22:08
Speaker 3: In this scene from the Vow, Keith is talking to one of his many girlfriends. We noticed some hypnotic techniques we learned about while reporting this podcast, like permissive language, deliberately ambiguous phrases and stories that can induce a trance state.

00:22:24
Speaker 7: And perhaps there are areas in your body you haven't noticed before, Like certainly you've noticed your stomach at times, and maybe the sensation in your stomach now is changing but not going away, maybe intensifying, maybe not but probably intensifying. It may even becoming less comfortable, but that's okay.

00:22:47
Speaker 3: The woman looks uneasy and asks him to stop.

00:22:50
Speaker 7: I guess you're.

00:22:51
Speaker 1: Finish my report?

00:22:53
Speaker 7: None trying to read? Yeah, I took an you can vision report.

00:22:57
Speaker 1: Can you stop?

00:22:58
Speaker 7: I can stop anyway, I know what else.

00:23:01
Speaker 3: But Keith doesn't stop. He leans over and taps her arm.

00:23:05
Speaker 7: I will slape.

00:23:09
Speaker 3: A classic NLP anchor.

00:23:13
Speaker 9: He did a lot of physical touch anchoring. Do you know when you put your hands up and you kind of clasp, you're kind of like you're clasping, you're holding like that.

00:23:20
Speaker 5: Yeah, do you know what I mean, like.

00:23:21
Speaker 4: You're He would do that.

00:23:23
Speaker 9: He'd touch your hand and he did this to me if I've seen him do it to others, where he'd like touch certain parts of your hand and hold your hands in a certain way while he was talking to you. Like I've said, just to be really good. Did not have an intimate relationship with him, but the women who had it have verified that this is a big part of how he got close to women.

00:23:43
Speaker 3: That's Sarah Edmondson, a former next to a member who was in the group for twelve years.

00:23:48
Speaker 9: I was basically in charge of bringing people to the to the infoinites and pitching it to them and helping them sign up, and embarrassingly, I was quite good at that, and that's something I was proud of at the time.

00:24:02
Speaker 4: But yeah, I was.

00:24:03
Speaker 9: I was trained in all of the things, sales, all the NLP, all of the CBT, all of the techniques that Keith was really good at.

00:24:13
Speaker 3: As Anxium field trainer, Sarah was taught an NLP concept called rapport to convince people to sign up for trainings. To build rapport, Sarah would mirror someone's tonality, gestures, and emotions, then try to influence or lead them. It could be totally innocent.

00:24:32
Speaker 9: Leading my kids to like brush their teeth and it's gonna be so fun. Yay, we'll play the Elmo song. That's probably a good use of pacing. But if I was going to, you know, try to get you to take a training that you couldn't afford and that would be bad for you and your family, Like that's really bad, or you know, on the extreme level, certain people, you know, trying to manipulate me and get me to believe that getting branded would be good for my commitment to my myself and my growth because they were using all sorts of words, anchoring of different concepts commitment and how that was accessing my subconscious world to even someone saying like, what does it mean if you don't do this, you're a leader?

00:25:16
Speaker 3: So branding actually got sold to Sarah, believe it or not, as women's empowerment.

00:25:21
Speaker 5: So wait, how did they get Sarah to get a brand? Then, Alice, it doesn't sound like she was into the idea.

00:25:27
Speaker 3: Yes, So to be clear, NLP didn't make Sarah get branded. NLP was one part of Keith's seduction and eventual control, but there was also a lot more to it. She got invited to join this secretive group with a nexium called DOS. It was all women, and how it was pitched to her was that if she joined, she would accelerate her personal growth. So in addition to giving brands, the group asked for collateral. So Sarah had to give compromising information like nude photos of herself when she joined, and supposedly this was going to keep her accountable to her progress.

00:26:06
Speaker 5: Okay, so they framed blackmail as helping you keep track of your goals or something like that.

00:26:12
Speaker 3: I think it's really illustrative that Nexium and this subgroup within Nexiom where all the women were branded. They couldn't just rely on manipulation and NLP to get people to do something truly awful. They had to blackmail them, right, Like, manipulation only gets you so far. If you really want to control people, you need sleep deprivation, appetite suppression, you need to dose them with drugs, or you need to blackmail them. You cannot just truly brainwash someone into doing something against their own will. I think we see that over and over again in these groups. Human technologies like NLP can be used in recruitment and also to dissuade people from leaving a group like this, But to truly make someone do something against their own will, I e. Like mind control, it doesn't really work. You need force.

00:27:02
Speaker 9: That's where like a more specific understanding of a term like brainwashing or indoctrination fits in. Brainwashing is one way to say it, but I can also say NLP was used on me to access my subconscious using words, matching, mirroring, leading, anchoring. All of it was an inherent sort of like web of deception within everything we did in Exiom.

00:27:23
Speaker 3: None of this happened all at once. It happened slowly and after the leaders had established trust.

00:27:29
Speaker 9: If someone had said to me on day one of my five day when I was twenty eight, that in twelve years I was going to be branded with the leader's initials, I would have clearly given them the finger and ran out the door. And there's another element. I would say, you don't want to be rude, and you kind of want to just like see where things go and give people the benefit of the doubt.

00:27:49
Speaker 3: Some of the techniques were genuinely helpful. Sarah was actually a big fan of state control, which we've heard about before.

00:27:56
Speaker 4: Honestly, I loved it.

00:27:58
Speaker 9: I loved it, especially as an actor, to be able to, you know, to walk into a situation and have to bring up a state of joy or intensity or power.

00:28:08
Speaker 4: It was amazing.

00:28:08
Speaker 9: It was a button that I could push and I still use some of those things today.

00:28:13
Speaker 3: That wasn't the only technique from NLP that Sarah appreciated.

00:28:17
Speaker 9: And just to give your listeners like a positive version of that. And why I so much trusted this whole system from the beginning is at my very first em exploration of meaning was so powerful and really it was a reframing I won't get into the whole thing, but I used to have this really extreme reaction anger, like rage to my boyfriend at the time, not nipping, not my husband leaving dishes in the sink and leaving a mess. Like I would just go into a rage. And I knew it was unhealthy, and I knew it wasn't based in any sort of reality, but it just happened. And my first em was basically looking at what the dishes meant to me.

00:28:53
Speaker 3: And when Sarah dug into the dishes thing, it took her back to her parents' divorce. She realized she was connecting messy kitchens to their split.

00:29:02
Speaker 9: And all the facilitator had to say is what if the dishes didn't cause the divorce? So all shit to do was say that, and I go, oh, my goodness, my parents were twenty six.

00:29:11
Speaker 4: I had a whole bunch of.

00:29:12
Speaker 9: Things going on. The dishes didn't cause the divorce. They weren't a good fit. Like that's a reframe.

00:29:17
Speaker 3: Reframing was supposed to make Sarah's understanding of reality more objective, but it got twisted.

00:29:23
Speaker 1: When I left.

00:29:25
Speaker 9: How I knew that when I was speaking to somebody who was still hooked in is. They would say things to me, like, because I was telling people about the branding right at a certain point, and they would say like, but what does that mean exactly? Like what if that's not bad?

00:29:39
Speaker 3: What's bad about it?

00:29:40
Speaker 4: Exactly?

00:29:42
Speaker 9: And I would say, dude, branding is what farmers do to cattle. It means that they own the cattle. Keith thinks that I am. And then they would say something like what if it's only that? If you make it mean that trying to reframe.

00:29:54
Speaker 4: What it means.

00:29:56
Speaker 3: Reframing is supposedly a tool of self help. It's supposed to help you gain more agency and control over your reality. But in this case, it's doing the opposite right exactly.

00:30:05
Speaker 9: Every question set was a series of questions that were about concepts about your values, your beliefs, your understandings of the world. But I do think everything was controlled and everything was designed to get you a little bit unstable. And I say, I don't want to get a brand. Why what are you making it mean?

00:30:24
Speaker 3: Another member of the group suggested that Sarah question her perception of reality classic NLP.

00:30:31
Speaker 9: It's like a tattoo. I don't want to mark on my body. I've never had a tattoo for this reason.

00:30:35
Speaker 1: How come?

00:30:36
Speaker 3: What does it mean?

00:30:37
Speaker 9: Well, it's like a scar, it's a permanent blemish. What if it's a permanent commitment to your growth? And commitment and growth are like words that you and I both understands English. But those are what I'm sure you've heard the term now in your research loaded language.

00:30:54
Speaker 3: In retrospect, Sarah thinks the brand was itself an anchor concepts straight out of NLP. Seeing and touching the mark on her body was a physical sensation that conjured an emotional state of commitment to a leader she ultimately broke free of.

00:31:13
Speaker 9: Honestly, I look at the women who are branded. As far as I know, there's only there's less than thirty. I personally had mine removed. I had physical like I had plastic surgery and had it cut off. But if you look at those women, some of them are still completely loyal to Keith.

00:31:28
Speaker 3: Since leaving Nexium, Sarah's become a spokeswoman for cult survivors. She co hosts the podcast A Little Bit Culty with her husband Nippy, who also left Nexium. Many of the groups they examine on the podcast use NLP.

00:31:43
Speaker 9: Sarah says they might not call it NLP in other groups, but every group that I've ever looked at does something like that.

00:31:51
Speaker 3: I asked Sarah if she still uses any Nexium techniques.

00:31:55
Speaker 9: Not everybody agrees in ex members like that we've left together. Some people had to throw it all out because they believe if you have like a particle of shit and a cake, it affects the whole cake. Obviously, the way that I've approached it is that because I spent twelve years there, if I throw it all out, that's a huge waste of time.

00:32:12
Speaker 3: I've had to like figure out.

00:32:13
Speaker 9: What tool I want and where it came from originally, and not pay any tribute to Keith.

00:32:21
Speaker 3: Nancy is not so different. She still believes in NLP and for the most part how it was used in Nexium. She's currently coaching clients over Zoom from her townhouse outside of Albany.

00:32:34
Speaker 1: The last seven years has just been a lot of loss for me.

00:32:39
Speaker 4: So now it's up all the way.

00:32:43
Speaker 3: How like, soon did you start coaching when you came home from prison?

00:32:48
Speaker 4: The minute they said I could, really, I was doing it in the halfway house, really on my phone. They couldn't figure out why I couldn't, so they said I could, and everyone I would set it up so you couldn't tell where I was.

00:33:02
Speaker 1: It's horrifying.

00:33:04
Speaker 3: Can NLP be used for good or evil? Is it a neutral tool?

00:33:11
Speaker 4: You know, when people ask me about that, one of the things that I say is a knife in the hands of a surgeon is an amazing tool. A knife in the hands of a murderer is a weapon.

00:33:32
Speaker 5: What's Nancy's relationship with Keith.

00:33:34
Speaker 3: Like now non existent? Nancy called him a psychopath in our interview, saying that he didn't have empathy. She blames him for all of the bad things that happened to her, as well as the group's broader abuse.

00:33:46
Speaker 1: Narcissists are very.

00:33:49
Speaker 4: Kind in the beginning to get you enrolled, and that's exactly what he did, and so in the first couple of years he was incredibly kind to me, and then the abuse started a little at a time, and he was very as smart as I've.

00:34:02
Speaker 3: Said, Nancy now recognizes tactics like sleep deprivation as abuse, but she also still parrots some Keith propaganda.

00:34:10
Speaker 4: You have to understand some that Keith Ornieri, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, is one of the top three scorers on IQ tests ever in history.

00:34:22
Speaker 5: We fact check this, and while Keith was listed in the nineteen eighty nine Australian edition of the Guinness Book, his claims to being the smartest man in the world were based on taking an untimed, unsupervised IQ test. A lot of IQ tests, including the one Keith took, are totally bogus. Guinness deleted the highest IQ category in nineteen ninety.

00:34:45
Speaker 9: Yeah.

00:34:45
Speaker 3: I think the real reason why Nancy is still invested in Keith being some kind of genius, even though she hates him, has to do with her own guilt. If Keith is an evil mastermind. It's easier to forgive herself for not knowing what was going on in the group if we take her word for it, or for not acting against him.

00:35:06
Speaker 5: But how do you know she actually feels guilty?

00:35:09
Speaker 4: Alice?

00:35:10
Speaker 5: Are we just trusting her on that. We know she has a gift for controlling her emotions and for persuading other people. She could just be an operator.

00:35:19
Speaker 3: I've thought a lot about that, but here's something I keep coming back to. Nancy has this personality type of someone who falls under the influence of powerful men. These guys who position themselves as geniuses with all the answers. She's weirdly gullible towards these guys, and it seems to happen to her over and over. Recall the Volvo you let Richard Vandler drive your brand new Volvo ten martinis in.

00:35:45
Speaker 1: He didn't seem drunk.

00:35:47
Speaker 3: This guy had something he did.

00:35:49
Speaker 1: What did he have?

00:35:50
Speaker 4: I don't know.

00:35:51
Speaker 3: Richard Bandler and Keith Ranieri had a few things in common, Like.

00:35:55
Speaker 4: Richard Bandler could look at you and see patterns, but no one could look at you and see patterns like Keith Raniery. Keith Ranieri could look at you, have a five minute conversation with you and understand exactly what your limitations were, and then he would tell you and you would feel like he was reading your mind. I felt like Keith Renary could read my mind sometimes, and when I first met him, it was almost scary. I sat and talked to him. I felt like no one had ever known me better in the first conversation I had with him.

00:36:41
Speaker 3: Was he charismatic.

00:36:44
Speaker 4: When he wanted to be?

00:36:45
Speaker 3: Who was more charismatic Richard Vandler or Keith Ranary or were neither of them charismatic.

00:36:55
Speaker 4: That's kind of what I'm weighing.

00:36:59
Speaker 3: As we left me Nancy, she packed us some leftover lunch for the train ride back to New York City.

00:37:05
Speaker 4: You guys are going to be on the train for three hours. You're going to need food.

00:37:11
Speaker 1: Oh, thank you.

00:37:13
Speaker 4: I should pack up the cheese and bread and you guys can have it on the train.

00:37:18
Speaker 1: You should take it.

00:37:20
Speaker 4: I'm telling you, we're going to be hungry on the train.

00:37:28
Speaker 3: I spent the train ride home wondering about the people who have used NLP for their own purposes and about the men who started it all. I kept wondering where in the world Richard Bndler was and whether he bears any responsibility for his tool NLP getting used as a weapon spoiler in our last episode. I finally get to ask him, this is what we referred to as a IT job, and I find this very fucking offense, very fuck offention of what the hell let's.

00:38:03
Speaker 1: Wrong with you? Well, Richard?

00:38:05
Speaker 3: For someone who wow.

00:38:09
Speaker 5: Richard, that's next time. Online games mind Games is a Kaleidoscope production in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The series is created and hosted by me Zoe Lascas. And Alice Hines. It's produced by writer Alsop and Dara Luk Potts, edited by Kate Osborne. Editorial consulting from Adeza Egan.

00:38:34
Speaker 3: Original composition and mixing by Steve Boone, fact checking by Aman Whalen from Kaleidoscope. Our executive producers are Oswaloshin, Mangesh Hattikador, and Kate Osborne from iHeart. Our executive producers are Katrina Norville and Nikki Etour.