NXIVM

We'll honor the very best in podcasting from the past year

“and celebrate the most innovative talent and creators in the industry.”

And the winner is... Creativity, knowledge, and passion will all be unfolded display. Thank you so much. I heart rate you all. Thank you to all the other nominees. You guys are awesome. Watch live next Monday at 8 p.m. Eastern 5 p.m. Pacific Free.

We at feeps.com or The Feeps app. When segregation was a law, one mysterious black club owner, Charlie Fitzgerald, had his own rules. Segregation in the day, integration at night. It was like, "Septher in another world." Was he a businessman, a criminal, a hero?

Charlie wasn't an example, a poem. They had the crush yet.

Charlie's place, from Atlas Obsstra and Visit Merdow Beach. Listen to Charlie's place on the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the new me and it's the old them.

“This woman's history month, the podcast, if you knew better with Amber Grimes,”

spotlights, women who turn missteps into momentum and lessons into power. My tunnel vision of like, I gotta achieve this was off the strength of like, "I want to make a better life for us." If you knew better, brings real talk from women who've lived it. Unpacking career pivots, relationship lessons, and the mind set shifts that changed everything.

Listen to if you knew better with Amber Grimes on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I actually dropped better when I'm high.

It heightens my senses, it calms me down. If anything, I'm more careful. Honestly, it just helps me focus. That's probably what the driver who killed a four-year-old told himself. And now he's in prison.

You see, no matter what you tell yourself,

“if you feel different, you drive different.”

So, if you're high, just don't drive. Brought to you by Nitsa in the ad council. Take a deep breath in. And breathe out. Your conscious mind is going to go totally away.

So that I can speak primarily your unconscious mind. You can notice that you feel rested, more alert and confident. From kaleidoscope and I Heart Podcasts, this is episode eight of mind games. I'm Alice Hines. I'm Zoila Scaws.

You don't know how you did it, see you. You're going to a little time to start your stay. And you're out of it. For seven episodes, we've been tracing the story of neuro-linguistic programming. And it's founder, Richard Bhandler.

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 U.S. Army. NLP started a self-help. But it also began to appeal to groups that sold self-help

as a bait and switch in order to control and exploit. Groups popularly known as Colts. In this episode, we're going to dig into the darkest spin-off NLP ever spawned. A group called Nexium. Next, see him, a New York-based cult whose leader was sentenced to 120 years

in prison for sex trafficking and other crimes. 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 at 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 Reneri.

ESP Nexium is a methodology that allows people to optimize their behavior. Keith Reneri 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 Bhandler or Tony Robbins. This 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 erases to the Seagram's liquor fortune bankrupt the organization for years.

The Dalai Lama even showed up to one of their events. But then, at least 17 women ended up branded with Keith Reneri's initials. 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. He loved being taped and so members filmed and recorded him constantly.

This is a clip that was later played at his trial. And the person should ask to be branded.

“Could they please brand me it would be an honor or something like that?”

Not an honor, I want to wear for the rest of my life, right now. We begin with breaking news in a celebrity's sex cult trial. The alleged ringleader just convicted.

Keith was ultimately convicted of sex trafficking among other crimes in 2019.

Prosecutors say Keith Reneri was a master manipulator who ruined marriages, careers, fortunes, and lives. He's probably heard some of this story before. But what people don't know is that Keith was indebted to NLP. Initially Nancy was replaceable.

He could have partnered with Anthony Rappins and other people. And I didn't feel they were appropriate personality-wise and things like that. 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. 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 mansions in the world. 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.

I never imagined that Keith Reneri 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. I met Nancy at her home outside of Albany, New York. It was the first interview she's done since being released from prison. She's my second sphinx. You have to feel her.

It just kind of feels like velvet. Yeah, her skin is amazing. She's totally hairless. Totally hairless. Nancy's story with NLP starts a few decades ago. Nancy is this year of nursing school graduation?

Yes. Can I say this? This is mine. This is mine. As a young nurse, she got interested in hypnosis.

Well, here you want to see the pictures. Yeah. That's me. Oh my gosh. How old are you here?

I was 20. Nancy showed me a picture of her on her bookshelf. It's the 1970s. And she's a young, pretty Jewish girl from New Jersey with 88 or glasses and dark brown hair. How'd you start learning about hypnosis yet at this time?

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. Hypnosis for chronic pain. And biofeedback.

When Nancy was a child, her mom had debilitating back pain. Seeing her mom suffer, set Nancy on a path. 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. She was working with chronic pain patients and looking for ways to help them over come suffering

using the power of their minds. NLP did just that. 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? Nancy studied with Richard Bhandler and saw firsthand how persuasive NLP can make someone. Remember? Nancy told us how Bhandler NLP had her into letting him drive her new Volvo drunk after 11 Martinez.

Bhandler denies this. I couldn't believe he convinced me to do that. Nancy still believes strongly in the power of NLP to provoke change.

“That's why she was willing to speak to me for this podcast.”

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. What was the worst thing that you read? I had a company. It was a human performance company. We taught trainings.

We helped people. We worked with people.

People loved our training.

“And then a series of things happened with my business partner.”

And he did something separate from my company. Sex Colts. Yeah. And they called it a cult. Nancy doesn't like to call next year a cult.

She claims the company helped more than 18,000 people with its so-called executive success programs. 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.

Nancy pled guilty to charges of racketeering and served a two-year prison sentence. Keith Ranieri, meanwhile, is serving 120-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?”

No. No, I think he was just extorting them. I think he was promising them. I think he was lying and extorting them. He's promising them self-improvement.

Yes, everything he did was promising self-improvement. It seemed to me that Nancy was still processing exactly what had happened to Nexium. But I wanted to sort out definitively whether NLP was part of Nexium's abuse.

I had Nancy take me back to the 1990s when Keith first started pursuing her.

At the time, he was running a multi-level marketing company called Consumers Byline. When he started his first company, he wanted his whole staff to have NLP, and I refused. I said no. Keith kept sending people to meet with Nancy on his behalf, which she thought was a little weird. 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. Nancy was at the peak of her career as an NLP trainer, working for Con Edison in New York at their nuclear power plant. 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.

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. When I met Keith, he immediately figured out, "Or maybe I just told him that I really wanted to help people." Justingly, 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." Keith promised that together, he and Nancy could improve upon NLP. When we decided to teach the communication model of NLP, I used to teach that in 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. In 1998, Keith and Nancy co-founded the company that became Nexian. Nancy was teaching NLP at their trainings, like this one, captured in the vow. Now, the difference between having an integration and other processes is when it's gone.

It's gone. With an integration, you can't even remember what it used to be like. It changes your whole experience of existence forever. Keith and Nancy took ideas from NLP and added new jargon. An integration was a transformation achieved by redefining your reality.

When you took our five-day training, you learned about perception and about changing meaning in 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.

So the 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.

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. 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.

“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 kept myself in a good state the whole time I was stuck in prison.

The idea that these tools are so effective, you could have a great time in prison, is honestly pretty seductive. I want this superpower. Yeah. So, next year, I took this NLP technique, state control, and repackaged it.

They called the process of reframing your emotions and memories and EM for exploration of meaning. And Keith would often use it on Nancy.

When she was first working with Keith, she was still at the nuclear power plant.

And she was stressed out by her job, and going through a divorce. But they're working with Keith. I just stopped being afraid. And I stopped being upset. I just wasn't anymore.

Nancy was able to change how she felt. I was driving home after a meeting with Keith. And we had been up like till 4 o'clock in the morning because I would come home like 11 or 12. Because I was driving back from my work at the nuclear power plant in 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 always a puddle.

“And then, you know, at the end of the weekend, I remember I would say to Keith,”

"Are you going to boop me back together again? I have to leave." And he would say, oh, yeah, I was put you back together. And he would. The longer Nancy spent with Keith,

the more her professional and personal worlds blended together.

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 crying like this. As I was walking, you know, thinking, this is solid.

Why do I feel like I'm falling through the floor? Because he was making you question your reality. Yes. 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. Questioning your reality can yield a lot of progress in success, but then someone else controls your reality.

He was making the 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 is showing me how what I believed was limiting me. It's sounding like she feels some of the work she did with Keith was actually helpful.

Yes, but Keith also told Nancy one of her limiting beliefs was that she needed to sleep. I would feel like it was a limitation of a mind if I needed more than four hours of sleep. And so I started, you know, trying to get by with less sleep. It was one more thing to optimize. The less you slept, the more you could achieve.

And after a long period of time of convincing myself that wasn't okay to sleep more than four hours, I started to notice things like if I drove late in the day, like 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 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. Sleep deprivation feels like an obvious red flag for abuse.

But because it was framed as self-improvement, Nancy didn't catch it. Because 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.”

Also, are you crazy? You 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, if you needed too much sleep. Interesting, because sleep deprivation is not an LP. But Keith used an LP to convince Nancy and other followers that running on fumes was good for them. Yeah, and this was actually a pattern I've seen in my reporting on groups that use coercive control, popularly known as cults.

Basically, people like Keith use therapeutic techniques to woo followers,

but these techniques can only go so far in manipulating people.

To truly control someone, co-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. Uh, it's like a toxic soup. It's just like all of these tactics blended together.

Leave you so strong out, totally disoriented, and utterly unable to question the charismatic guy driving the bus. Yeah, exactly. And on top of that, Nancy said she was often afraid of Keith. 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. Next Monday, our 2020 six-eye-hard podcast awards are happening live in South by Southwest. We'll honor the very best in podcasting from the past year, and celebrate the most innovative talent and creators in the industry. And the winner is...

Creativity, knowledge, and passion will all be on full display. Thank you so much. I heart rate you all. Thank you to all the other nominees. You guys are awesome. Watch live next Monday at 8 p.m. Eastern 5 p.m. Pacific Free. It feeps.com or the feeps app.

Segregation in the day. Integration at night. When segregation was the law, one mysterious black club owner had his own rules. We didn't worry about what went on outside. It was like sipping on another world. Inside Charlie's place, black and white people danced together.

But not everyone was happy about it. Can you saw the cake cake cake? Yeah, there was a dress up in that uniform. The cake cake set out to Ray Charlie take him away from here. Charlie wasn't an example of power.

They had the crush in. From Atlas Obscura, Rokoko Punch and Visit Murdoch Beach comes Charlie's place. A story that was nearly lost to time. Until now, listen to Charlie's place on the iHeart Radio app. Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, ambitious, well-intentioned, vorotious and wealthy mother. Looks like in the black community. This woman's history month. The podcast, Key to Puzzle Sweety, celebrates the power of women choosing healing, Purpose and Faith, even when life gets messy.

“Love is not a destination. You have to work on it every day.”

Key to Puzzle Sweety creates space for honest conversations. On self-worth, love, growth. And navigating life with Grace Ingrid, led by women who have lived inspire and held the truth out loud.

To hear these in more, listen to Key to Puzzle Sweety on the iHeart Radio app.

Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the new me and it's the old them. Everybody's on their journey and your journey is different to this. This woman's history month, the podcast, if you knew better with Amber Grimes, spotlights women who turned missteps into momentum and lessons into power.

“I think coming out of where I came from, from the Bronx, I think I grew up really poor.”

I didn't know that then because I very much used my creativity to romanticize life. And I'm like, my mom did a really good job of like, you set back and you're like, whoa, we, I don't know how we made it. So a lot of my life was like built out of like survival to get to the next place. Like, my, my drive, my like tunnel vision of like, I got to be better.

I got to achieve this was off the strength of like, I want to make a better life for us. If you knew better, brings real talk from women who've lived it unpacking career pivots, relationship lessons and the mindset shifts that changed everything. Listen to if you knew better with Amber Grimes on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

At one point in our interview, I asked Nancy Solzman outright, whether Keith had used NLP against her.

At first she said no, but then she thought of something.

Well, eventually he, he put some fear angers into me. Some fear angers. Yeah.

“And that would cause me not to want to approach him about things.”

We've heard about anchors throughout the series. It's a 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.

But Keith used anchors to make people feel scared and uncomfortable. Anywhere in your body that there's a sensation that you try to try to ignore or try to suppress. It just gets stronger and stronger. 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 trans state. And perhaps there is 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 intensify.

Maybe not. But probably intensify.

“It may have been becoming less comfortable.”

But that's okay. The woman looks uneasy and asks him to stop. I guess you're going to have to finish my report. No, you're all done. Yeah, that's okay. You can visual report.

Can you stop? I can't stop anywhere. I know what else. But Keith doesn't stop. He leans over and taps her arm. I will stop. It's great.

Sort of. A classic NLP anchor. He did a lot of physical touch anchoring. You know when you put your hands up and you kind of clasp your kind of like your clasp being you're holding like that. Yeah, do you know what I mean? Like you're he would do that.

He would touch your hand and he did this to me if I've seen him do it to others. Where he'd like touched certain parts of your hand and hold your hands in a certain way while he was talking to you. Like I've said, it's just to be really good. I 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. That's Sarah Edminson. A former next to a member who was in the group for 12 years.

I was basically in charge of bringing people to the to the infonites

and pitching it to them and helping them sign up. And I embarrassingly I was quite good at that. And that's something I was proud of at the time. But yeah, I was 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.

As an exium 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.

Leading my kids to like brush their teeth and it's going to be so fun. Yay, we'll play the Elmo song. That's probably a good use of pacing. But if I was going to 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

anchoring of different concepts, commitment, and how that was accessing my subconscious.

“World, even someone saying, like, what does it mean if you don't do this?”

You're a leader. So branding actually got sold to Sarah believe it or not as women's empowerment. So wait, how do they get Sarah to get a brand than Alice? It doesn't sound like she's into the idea. 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 next CM called Dawson. 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. Okay, so they framed Blackmail as helping you keep track of your goals or something like that. I think it's really illustrative that next CM and this subgroup within next CM, 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 somewhat 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.

That's where like a more specific understanding of a term like brainwashing or indoctrination. Fits in brainwashing is one word 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 next CM. None of this happened all at once. It happened slowly and after the leaders had established trust, if someone had said to me on day one of my five day when I was 28,

that in 12 years I was going to be branded with the leaders initials. I would have clearly given them the finger and ran up 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. Some of the techniques were genuinely helpful.

That was actually a big fan of state control, which we've heard about before. Honestly, I loved it. 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. It was amazing.

It was a button that I could push. And I still used some of those things today. That wasn't the only technique from NLP that Sarah appreciated. And I just to give your listeners like a positive version of that and why so much trusted this whole system from the beginning.

Is it my very first EM, exploration of meaning was so powerful and really it was a reframing.

I wasn't going to the whole thing, but I used to have this really extreme reaction anger, like rage to my boyfriend at the time. Not nippy, 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. 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.

“And all the facilitator had to say is, what if the dishes didn't cause the divorce?”

So all she had to do was say that and I go, oh my goodness, my parents were 26. That a whole bunch of things going on, the dishes didn't cause the divorce. They weren't a good fit, like that's a reframing. Reframing was supposed to make Sarah's understanding of reality more objective. But it got twisted. When I left, how I knew that I, 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'd say like, well, but what does that mean exactly? Like, what if that's not bad? What's bad about it exactly? 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 what it means. Reframing is supposedly a tool of self-help.

But in this case, it's doing the opposite, right? Exactly, 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? Another member of the group suggested that Sarah questioned her perception of reality. Classic NLP.

It's like a tattoo. I don't want to mark on my body. I've never had a tattoo for this reason.

How come? What does it mean? Well, it's like a scar. It's a permanent blemish.

“What if it's a permanent commitment to your growth?”

And commitment in growth are like words that you and I both understand is English. But those are what you've been sure you've heard the term now in your research loaded language. In retrospect, Sarah thinks the brand was itself an anchor. A concept 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.

Honestly, I look at the women who are branded as far as I know there's only less than 30. 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.

Since leaving Nxeum, Sarah has become a spokeswoman for cult survivors. She co-hosts the podcast a little bit colty with her husband Nippy, who also left Nxeum. Many of the groups they examine on the podcast use NLP, Sarah says. They may not call it NLP in other groups, but every group that I've ever looked at does something like that. I asked Sarah if she still uses any Nxeum techniques.

Not everybody agrees in X members, like that we've left together. Some people have had to throw it all out because they believe if you have like a particle of shit in a cake, it affects the whole cake, obviously. The way that I have approached it is that because I spent 12 years there, if I throw it all out, that's a huge waste of time. I've had to figure out what tool I want and where it came from originally and not pay any tribute to Keith. Nancy's not so different. She still believes in NLP and for the most part how it was used in Xium.

She's currently coaching clients over Zoom from her townhouse outside of Albany. The last seven years has just been a lot of loss for me. So now it's up all the way.

“How like soon did you start coaching when you came home from prison?”

The minute they said I could. Really? I was doing it in a half way 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. It's horrifying. Can NLP be used for a good or evil is it a neutral tool? 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. What's Nancy's relationship with Keith 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.

Narcissists are very 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 smart as I've said.

Nancy now recognizes tactics like sleep deprivation as abuse. But she also still parents some Keith propaganda. You'll have to understand something Keith Reneri. According to the Guinness Book of World Records is one of the top three scores in IQ tests. Ever in history.

We fact-checked this. And while Keith was listed in the 1989 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 1990.

“Yeah, 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.

Or for not acting against him.

“But how do you know she actually feels guilty, Alice?”

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. 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 Vanlar drive your brand new Volvo 10 martinis in? He didn't sing drunk.

This guy had something. He did. What did he have? I don't know.

“Richard Vanlar and Keith Ranieri had a few things in common.”

Like Richard Vanlar could look at you and see patterns. But no one could look at you and see patterns like Keith Ranieri. 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 Ranieri 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. Was he charismatic? When he wanted to be? Who was more charismatic, Richard Vanlar or Keith Ranieri?

Or were neither of them cares about it. That's kind of what I'm weighing. As we left Nancy, she packed us some leftover lunch for the train ride back to New York City. You guys are going to be on the train for three hours. You're going to need food.

I thank you. I should pack up the cheese and bread. You guys can have it on the train.

“You should take it. I'm telling you, you're going to be hungry on the train.”

I spent the train ride home wondering about the people who've used NLP for their own purposes. And about the men who started it all. I kept wondering where in the world Richard Vanlar 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 refer to as a "it jar." And I find this very fucking offensive. Very fucking offensive. What that looks wrong with you. Well Richard, for someone who, wow. Richard? That's next time online games.

Next Monday, our 2020 six-eye-hard podcast awards are happening live in South by Southwest. This is the biggest night in podcast. We'll honor the very best in podcasting from the past year and celebrate the most innovative talent and creators in the industry. Creativity, knowledge and passion will all be on full display.

Thank you so much. I heard radio. Thank you to all the other nominees. You guys are awesome. Watch live next Monday at 8 p.m. Eastern 5 p.m. Pacific Free at feeps.com or the Feeps app. Segregation in the day. Integration at night. When segregation was the law, one mysterious black club owner had his own rules.

We didn't worry about what went on outside. It was like seven or another world. Inside Charlie's place, black and white people danced together. But not everyone was happy about it. Can you saw the cake cake cake? Yeah. There was a dress up in that uniform.

The cake cake set out to Ray Charlie taken away from here. Charlie was an example, a poem. They had the crush in. From Atlas Obscura, Rococo Punch and visit Murdoch Beach comes Charlie's place. A story that was nearly lost to time.

Until now, listen to Charlie's place on the iHeart Radio app. Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, ambitious, well-intentioned, vorotious and wealthy mother looks like in the black community. This woman's history month, the podcast, Keedit Posit Sweety, celebrates the power of women choosing healing,

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Keedit Posit Sweety creates space for honest conversations on self-worth,

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“I think coming out of where I came from from the Bronx,”

I think I grew up really poor. I didn't know that then because I very much used my creativity

to romance the size of life.

And I'm like my mom did a really good job of like, you step back and you're like, whoa, we, I don't know how we made it. A lot of my life was like, bill out of like, survival to get to the next place.

Like, my drive, my like tunnel vision of like, I gotta be better. I gotta achieve this was off the strength of like, I wanna make a better life for us. If you knew better, brings real talk from women who've lived it.

Unpacking career pivots, relationship lessons, and the mind set shifts that changed everything. Listen to if you knew better with Amber Grimes on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast,

or wherever you get your podcast.

Mine games is a kaleidoscope production in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The series is created and hosted by me, Zoila Scas, and Alice Hines.

“It's produced by writer Alsop and Dara Lookpots,”

edited by Kate Osborn, editorial consulting from Adiza Egan, original composition and mixing by Steve Bohn, fact checking by Amen Willin. From kaleidoscope,

our executive producers are Oz Wollotion, Mangesh Hatika Doer, and Kate Osborn. From iHeart, our executive producers are Katrina Norville and Nikki E. Tor. Next Monday, our 2026 iHeart Podcast Awards

are happening live in South by Southwest. We'll honor the very best in podcasting from the past year, and celebrate the most innovative talent and creators in the industry. And the winner is...

Creativity, knowledge, and passion. We'll all be on full display. Thank you so much, iHeart Radio. Thank you to all the other nominees. You guys are awesome.

“Let's live next Monday at 8 p.m. Eastern 5 p.m. Pacific Free”

at feeps.com or The Veeps app. When segregation was a law, one mysterious black club owner, Charlie Fitzgerald, had his own rules. Segregation in the day, integration at night.

It was like stepping out of another world. Was he a businessman, a criminal, a hero? Charlie wasn't an example, a poem. They had the crush him. Charlie's place.

Listen to Charlie's place on the iHeart Radio app. Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the new me. And it's the old them. This woman's history month.

The podcast, if you knew better with Amber Grimes, spotlights women who turned missteps into momentum and lessons into power. My tunnel vision of like, I got to achieve this was off the strengths of like, I want to make a better life for us.

If you knew better, brings real talk from women who've lived it. Unpacking career pivots, relationship lessons, and the mindset shifts that changed everything. Listen to if you knew better with Amber Grimes

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