Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Child Molester Whose Sex Cult Taught Women Friendship

Episode Date: June 19, 2018

Have you ever heard of a guy named Keith Raniere? You may have heard of his cult, 'NXIVM' which has been in the news a lot lately. In Episode 8, Robert is joined by writer/comedian  Anna Salinas (badcomixbyanna, John Baxte) and they discuss Keith Raniere who describes himself as the 'conceptual founder of NXIVM, a group that focuses on the overarching philosophy of companies focusing on increasing joy and ethics in the world.' BUT we now know that is complete crap and   NXIVM is actually a creepy sex cult that forced women to brand each other. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, friends. I'm Robert Evans, and this is Once Again, Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. Our guest today is Anna Salinas, cartoonist, comedian, writer, person sitting across from me at the table. That is my greatest qualification. You have so many qualifications. Yeah. Anna, thank you for joining us today.

Thank you for having me. I'm so excited. I love this show. Well, now let me ask you, have you ever heard of a guy named Keith Ranieri? I will be honest with you. I had not until about five minutes ago, and you did introduce him very nominally. You're killing the movie Magic, Anna. Oh, am I really? No, no, it's fine. Well, no, I have to keep going, I feel like.

You introduced him as the founder of, how do you say it? Nexium, so not the heartburn medication. Truly. It's the same name. Yeah, so it's spelled in like all capital letters in XIVM. Okay. Because they're super pretentious. Super pretentious.

I was very embarrassed when I thought it was the founder of Nexium, the heartburn medication. No. Upon hearing it, it's the same. It is the same, and it's not your fault. It's their fault for naming their weird cult after a heartburn medication. Yeah, exactly. Which I think existed before the late 90s. I haven't taken it for years.

Yeah. And how long has the sex cult been going on? Well, we're going to get into that today. So, if you've heard of Nexium as a sex cult, it's probably because Allison Mack, former Smallville actress, got arrested recently along with the founder of the cult, Keith Ranieri. There were a bunch of New York Times articles about it, they called it a sex cult. And so I think that's what most people know about Nexium. Did you read the New York Times articles?

About Allison Mack? Yeah. I mean, no. I read probably the lead of the article. You got that she's in some hot water. Yeah, and I used to watch Smallville, so it was a really big shock. Well, I want to make sure everybody listening knows, even if you read those articles that the New York Times posted and remember every word of them, 99% of this is going to be new

to you, because I started by reading those articles and then I started digging and it turns out there's like 30 some odd years of stuff behind this cult. And behind this guy, Keith Ranieri, and he is a fascinating piece of shit. So, we're going to dig into him a little bit. Yeah, Keith Ranieri and Nexium kind of first hit the public mind most recently with the New York Times article last October called Inside a Secretive Group where women are branded. The article focused on the creation. That's a little ambiguous where women are branded.

Branded. Like literally branded. Yeah, with the hot iron. Oh my God, because when I first heard it, I thought it meant like brands. Like branded content. Like branded content. Yeah, where women are like. They're the brand of the content.

No, you're Cheetos, Anna. No, no, no. That's not what happened. No, there would be like 30 to 45 minute branding sessions with a hot iron for women who were like part of a special subcult within this larger cult. Can I ask a problematic question? There's no non-problematic questions in this podcast. Did they like it?

Well, you're going to get a different answer depending on who you talk to. A number of the women claimed that it was a positive experience. I think most of them were horrified at what happened. A lot of people left immediately after getting branded. They sort of like stayed there and suffered through it because they were too scared to leave. But yeah, I mean, that's part of why there's charges against both Keith and Allison Mack. And she did the branding also?

She says she came up with the idea for women within this group to be branded. What? It's a wacky story. She was acting in Smallville and she took some of those storylines too seriously because some of them got dark. I never watched Smallville. Well, Amy Adams made her debut on that show, so you missed out. Okay.

Well, you can let me know if any of these parts of the story sync up with parts of Smallville in a meaningful way. I will. Because that would be shocking. And I am the expert, yes. Okay. That's really good then because I know nothing about that show. I mean, I kind of fell out towards the end once they brought in Lois.

So Allison Mack was not Lois? Oh, no, no. She was like a journalist. She was a truth teller. She worked for, I guess it was the school paper. Gosh, people are going to probably call me on my inaccuracies. Well, that's a fun segue then because speaking of journalism, how much do you keep up with Elon Musk these days?

Only who he's dating. Oh, then you're probably a little bit bummed. Well, oh, no. Oh, no, you like it. Are you dating Grimes? Yeah. No, I hate it. Okay.

Well, that's what I was going for. Yeah. I've done a deep dive into their relationship and Grimes. She's so young. That is weird, right? That's the weirdest part. Yeah. She looks like she's 12.

I get that she's in her 20s, but she looks really young. My favorite thing to do with Elon Musk is look at pictures of him back when they were first starting PayPal and he's like a chubby, slubby guy who's gone bald. I knew it. I knew it because he looks, you can see it a little in his face that he used to be chubby, but got so rich that it's almost like the richness seeps on to his face. And you're like, he's attractive? Yeah.

I can't tell. There's a certain amount of money where you can just pay people to make you make sure that you look good. Yeah, the hair, he probably has personal trainers and personal chefs. Yeah. What he doesn't have is personal people to vet the news websites that he reads. Late last month, he got into a bit of a tiff with the entire independent news media and expressed his desire to create a service to rate news sites for bias, which is not an

inherently problematic idea, although it's hard to imagine someone executing it in a way that wouldn't piss off at least half the country. Anyway, at some point during this whole debate, a guy named Jen's Eric Gould, who's the editor in chief at a site called The Knife, tweeted out an article his site had written in support of Elon Musk. Now, the knife media purports to rate mainstream news coverage on its level of bias and slant. They rated the total integrity of several articles about Elon's proposed website, none of which scored higher than 42%.

Musk retweeted the knife's analysis and called it excellent. It didn't take long for users to inform Elon that the article he praised was written by a literal cult, because the knife media happens to be part of the nexium family of thingamajigs. Yeah. So, Musk's initial response was that their article had better, his exact quote was, sadly, it had better critical analysis than most non-cult media, which if you're praising, if you're attacking non-cult media, you should back away from the argument you're making. Yeah.

There's only so far you can go with that. Also, by now, it's 2018, we know when we see a news source from something we don't totally recognize to be like, this is probably, I shouldn't retweet this. I'll say this. In fairness to Musk, number one, he deleted those tweets once he, I think, did a little bit of digging. The knife doesn't look sketchy. It looks like it clearly does have some money behind it.

The layouts find the site. It doesn't look like some crazy guy's website. I'll give him a pass. He made Tesla's. He's supposed to be so smart and he couldn't be like, huh, the knife. I've never heard of this and I am an adult man in my presumably 40s. At least, right? If he's older than that, man, Grimes is creepy.

Wait, Grimes is the creepy one? No, I mean, well, no, I would never kink shame her for dating an old man, but I will shame him for dating much younger. I feel like that's fair. Yeah. One way or the other, you can either attack Musk for not checking on it or you can say that this is a message that no matter how much money someone has, we shouldn't treat them as particularly smart just because they've got lucky with a company once.

Yeah. I have been up until now a Musk apologist because I was really rooting for him just because Tesla's and SpaceX, that's all cool and then I've heard little allegations, not a little bit, rumors that he's manipulative and he can be abusive. Yeah. I don't know. I haven't done my research on that. This podcast isn't going to be about Musk, so I'm going to steer us a little bit away

from that. I guess the point I'm making is that if Musk got taken in by Keith Ranieri's umbrella of madness, he's not the first relatively intelligent person for this to happen to. That's kind of the story is Keith Ranieri's really, really good at tricking smart people into thinking he's got something to say. So Nexium starting to read about the knife and then Keith Ranieri's the stuff with the branding of those women and the other crazy shit, like they would hook these women in this group up to brainwave analyzers and force them to watch videos of women being dismembered

and stuff. What? He was craziness. Yeah. So was Allison Mack like a partner in all this or a late entry? She was a late entry, so that's kind of what we're getting into. So at its core as a business, Nexium was a company that offered seminars helping business people be better at doing business.

It ran a series of intensive and expensive clinics, often consisting of five 17-hour days in a row for thousands of dollars. Everything in the clinics was based on Mr. Ranieri's teachings, which amounted to a new science for how to succeed at life. So let's pull back a bit. Back before Allison Mack gets involved, back before Elon Musk gets tricked by an article and talk about the life of the charismatic founder of Nexium, Keith Ranieri. I usually believe in going straight to the source first for things like this and his

luck would have it. His website, KeithRanieri.com is still up. His official biography opens with a picture of him, which we'll be putting up on our site behindthebastures.com so you can get a look at the guy. This picture is not threatening. He's a normal looking guy, right? He's wearing a fleece. You wouldn't think he was weird if you passed him on the street.

He'd just be a dude. Yeah, I think I would. I'm going to say this. I think I would trust anyone in a fleece. Really? Think about it. With Donald Trump over where a fleece? Starting a cult, anyone listening to the podcast, you've got one guaranteed member

if you buy a fleece. Look, there's other tests, but that's the first one. That's the first test. I, myself, own a fleece from Patagonia and when I wear it, I feel like a mom, you know? And you trust moms. Yeah. And I trust moms, yeah. That makes sense.

He looks like a, I don't know, like a guy you would find at a Gelson supermarket. Yeah, yeah. He looks like a guy who buys really expensive cheeses and only the like $9 a pound grapes. Exactly. There's no difference between Gelsons and any other supermarket except that it's more expensive, but there's fewer people in the lines. And you know his fleece costs like 300 bucks. Oh yeah.

Yeah. He got the special edition North Face for the super rich people. I feel like he's a Patagonia guy. Really? I don't know why that touched me. I thought that was delightful. Oh, more people should have Patagonia fleeces. Yeah, quality fleeces.

They're not attacking the man's choice in fleeces. I am going to start reading from his official biography now. So this is Keith Ranieri on Keith Ranieri quote, Keith Ranieri holds many titles to his name, scientist, mathematician, philosopher, entrepreneur, educator, inventor and author. But perhaps the most poignant among them is that of humanitarian. He has devoted his life to studying the human psychodynamic and developing new tools for human empowerment, expression and ethics. His endeavors share a drive to enhance human existence as he works tirelessly and joyfully

to help others elevate their awareness, success and ultimately experience of life. Wow. I've never heard someone who is supposedly in the line of self help call themselves a humanitarian. That's such a stretch. My favorite thing about it is that this is the first paragraph of his biography and I have no idea from that what he does or has done. Well, from that, I feel like he sounds like Elon Musk, right, inventor.

But he's not, he doesn't say what he, like if Elon Musk was writing the paragraph entry, he would say like, he's the founder of Tesla. He helped make PayPal. Like there would be accomplishments that you could list. That is the red flag, vagueness. Exactly. If you're trying to scam people, just make up companies. Don't be so vague.

Tell me what book you wrote if you're an author. Tell me what you invented if you're an inventor. Tell me what company. I would just say you're all these things and give me nothing. But also, for most of all, a humanitarian period and a paragraph. Well, that's the most poignant of his titles. Right. Yeah.

Which is- The most poignant. The title that brings people to tears. Yeah, exactly. I feel like crying a little bit. I'm, yeah. This is a safe space, Anna. His Patagonia fleece delighted me.

Yeah. And now his humanitarian credential makes me weep. Well, let's get into more Keith's biography. This is sort of him going through his background. Okay. Okay. By the age of one, so we're already off to a great start here, he could construct full sentences and questions.

He was able to read by the age of two, an autodidact. He directed his learning activities to learning itself, studying its art and science in order to find optimized learning strategies and methodologies, applying his skill to athletics. Keith Ranieri excelled in judo and was an East Coast judo champion at age 11. He also excelled in numerous other sports, including volleyball, tennis, table tennis, diving, softball, cycling, and skiing. By the age of 12, he taught himself to play piano at the concert level. His passion and aptitude for music would inspire him to master many other musical instruments.

He taught himself high school mathematics in 19 hours at the age of 12. Only one year later, he was proficient in third-year college mathematics and was a professional computer programmer. I have so many problems with this. First of all, this is like when someone's trying to beef up their college application and they're like, oh, I was captain of the cycling club. Yeah, it's like, this is all totally irrelevant. You know, if the vagueness of paragraph one didn't turn you off immediately, this is crazy.

I love him bragging about being a judo champion at age 11, because if I ever meet an adult human being, and one of the first things they tell me is that they were a judo champion decades ago as a small child, you'd be like, oh, this person, I don't want to know you. This is someone with no friends who's deeply looking for companionship. His whole thing has the feel of that kid in elementary school who totally had an uncle that was a Navy SEAL, only like he's clearly a mature adult. Yes. In my case, that was Lance, and his dad was a book author who wrote about war pilots.

Oh. I mean, he was nice. That's a weird thing to lie about. Well, he didn't lie. He just talked about it a lot, and it was like, Lance was so boring. I almost said his last name that would have outed him too much. He was just the most boring guy, but his dad was cool. Because I'm sure he's working at an accounting firm right now, and this would, if this information

got out, it would be devastated. If I had to guess, accounting. That is the, I'm sorry if there's accountants listening right now, please keep listening to our podcast. Accountants are great. They saved my taxes. Yes. Yes.

It's a good job. Yes. They're useful people. Sure. You know who's not a useful person? Keith fucking Ranieri. So I decided I wanted to fact check his bio a little bit. Can such a thing be done?

Can you really know if he was a Jiu Jitsu? Judo. Judo champion. Well, the East Coast Judo Championships are a real thing, and they do have a Judo division for kids seven to 14 years old. We know Keith Ranieri was born on August 26th, 1960, because that's what he listed as his birthday in a sworn affidavit that he filed for a lawsuit in 2003. So thanks to Google, I was able to find old issues of Black Belt magazine that gave winners

of the East Coast Judo Champions, and unfortunately, none of them were from 1971. So there's no. Oh, yeah. You got so close. I really thought you were going to blow the lid off of that. You are just like Alice and Mac in Smallville. Oh. You did some investigative reporting.

Investigative reporting. Well, I did a little more because on his website, Keith claims to have started at Renesla, Polytechnic Institute at age 16. When I started looking into this, I found a bunch of articles from a crazy guy's website called the Frank Report. It appears to be the personal. Frank Report. Yeah, the Frank Report.

It appears to be the personal project of a man named Frank Parlato. He's a developer in Niagara Falls who worked for Nexium in 2007 and 2008 and then started a news site dedicated to attacking the company in Mr. Ranieri that's still going on to this day. Oh. It's a weird website. It has the look of like an unhinged nuts article about how the earth is flat or whatever, but the actual information in the articles is often useful.

Like he has, he does a bunch of weird Photoshop jokes and stuff like about Keith Ranieri and his. Like clearly so bitter. Yeah. Bitter and a little unhinged, but like it's also not just nonsense. Like he provided links to the affidavit, which is where I was able to prove that Keith was lying on his bio about starting college at age 16 because in the affidavit, he said he entered college just after his 17th birthday and then expands to say he didn't really

enter college. He just started taking some college classes. So basically he was taking AP courses in his senior year. That's stupid. Like a lot of people. Yeah. He's just, he's a liar. Yeah.

So thank you to the Frank report for helping us bust at least one of the myths conclusively here. And kudos to Frank for having the balls to call his report his own name. He has been doggedly calling his news site by his own name for years now. Yeah. You can imagine his wife or friends or I don't know husband were like, Frank, come on. Let's come up with a different name. He's like, no, I'm going to name it Frank.

Frank report. People need to know. People need to know who it came from and they need to be amused by my photo shops. Yeah. I don't know if he's from the South, but I'm, I think he lives up in like Albany. Well, he moved from Tennessee, so that's why he has an accent. Shots fired, Tennessee. Oh no.

It's Frank. Frank's on our side. I think. Yeah. No, more or less. Yeah. He may have stolen a million dollars, but. What?

Oh my God. So this whole story, I'm trying to tell this from this point in like a chronologic point of view, but this is a fucking twisty, turny mess of a tale. I feel like I need like a chalkboard to start drawing. If there was a component of this podcast that was like a wall covered in pictures and pieces of string. Yes. But our producer, Sophie, informs me that that is not possible with podcast technology.

So. Wait 10 years. Wait 10 years. We'll have the holograms. Yeah. The holograms and like holographic yarn connecting pictures. Just like in Minority Report. That's the dream.

So after bragging about Keith's education, his website's bio goes on to print what might be the most punchable paragraph I have ever read in my entire life. So buckle up. Quote, noted as one of the world's top three problem solvers, Keith Ranieri was honored in 1989 by the Guinness Book of World Records in the category of highest IQ. He has an estimated problem solving rarity of one in 425 million with respect to the general population. He has intellectual patents pending in the areas of human potential and ethics, expression,

voice and musical training, athletic performance, commerce, education and learning information processing and human modeling. He also holds several technological patents on computer inventions and a sleep guidance system. That's so clearly fake. It is a bucket of nonsense. But these are things that you will see as patterns as we go along here. He loves being really specific about how great he is in a totally nonsensical way because

there's no problems solving rarity of one in 400. That's nothing. He's making up words. Yeah. That's just insanity. It's very important to Keith that people understand just how smart he is on the website for his main business, executive success programs. Keith writes that he was accepted into the mega society in 1988, which is some nerd society

that requires a demonstrated IQ of 176 or higher, which is an intellectual performance of one in a million level of rarity. As proof he cites an article from late 1989 titled Troy Mann has a lot on his mind. IQ test proves what many suspected. He's one in 10 million. So I searched for this article and I didn't find it, but I found a plain text website that has the article posted on it. So we're going to get into Keith Reneary's IQ a little bit when we come back, but we

do have to break for some ads. So if you have an intellectual problem solving capacity of one in four into 25 million, which all of our listeners do, these ads will help you solve problems by things. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, Hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock.

And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say.

For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From my heart podcast and school of humans, this is let's start a coup. Listen to let's start a coup on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the

youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the

world. Listen to the last Soviet on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

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And we're back. We're talking about Keith Ranieri and his IQ. So I was just telling you that he cited an article from 1989 that covered his joining into the mega society. So I found a plain text copy of this website. There's a lot of cringeworthy quotes in here, but here's another one of them. He's not your stereotypical genius. Watchful blue eyes look out from behind aviator glasses.

His brown hair is parted stylishly in the middle. He has the physique of an athlete, which he is. He was East Coast judo champion at age 12, tied with a state record for the hundred yard dash is an avid skier, swimmer and windsurfer. He says he plays seven musical instruments and also sings high tenor in local musical productions. Well, that is also fake. At first when I found it hosted on a plain text website, I was like Keith Ranieri just

lied and made up an article. But the actual website that hosts it is some dude who's obsessed with IQ tests who has cataloged every article about IQ tests for the last like 40 years. And I think he just typed up news clippings he had and hosted them online. Wow. It's an exercise in madness, but I don't think Keith faked it. I do think he lied to this journalist and it wasn't a good journalist. Yes.

He just like said, of course, he's telling the truth. Look at how smart this piece of paper says he is. He even like tilts his hand a little and is like, he says this. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Wow. Yeah. So it's possible Keith actually is a member of the mega society and has a very high IQ.

However, Keith also claims the 1989 Guinness Book of World Records honored him for having the highest IQ that is clear and provable nonsense because Marilyn Voss-Savant had the highest recorded IQ on the and was in the Guinness record for that from 1986 through 89. I don't even believe this man has had an IQ test. Yeah. That's I could totally see that being a lie from the beginning. Yeah. Because in the 1980s, you could say anything.

You could. Yeah. People couldn't Google it. Yeah. And Albany. Albany random newspapers and a check. No one was looking. No.

I don't know. The way this guy writes, he doesn't sound very smart. He doesn't. Right? He sounds like someone who's pretending to be smart. We're going to listen to him later. I don't disagree with you. Okay.

But we're going to listen to him later. He clearly has a type of intelligence, just like Donald Trump has a type of intelligence. Yes. Otherwise he wouldn't be able to do what he does. It's very comparable. But he is not a genius in the sense that like he's able to usefully add to the human experience for people. Right.

What an interesting thing to get people, and I guess Trump does this too, by being like, I'm smarter than you. Yeah. And he does it in such a almost more frustrating way. Yeah. Like Keith does it. Like his focus on like, I have this IQ. I am this much rare.

My brain is so this rare in the world. Yeah. I'm one of the three greatest problem solvers on the planet. Yeah. Well, he is even more nonsense than, yeah. He reminds me of what we used to do in speech and debate in high school. Did you ever? Oh, I was a speech and debate kid for four years.

Oh, were you? What did you do? LD. I did a lot of Lincoln Douglas debate. Well, I did extemp. I did extemporary speaking. Oh boy, you were one of those kids. And what you learned in extemp was, you know, you gave a speech for seven minutes extemporaneously

and what you learned is to just make up things. And to say them with confidence. And no one would ever know the difference because these were just parents. He sounds like how we sounded. Making up those. But also like looking back, it's like, nah, the adults knew it was fake. We just, I don't know. I once gave a whole speech about, is Macedonia going back to civil war?

Oh, wow. Were they? I don't know. How's Macedonia doing these days? I made up everything from the beginning to the end. Beautiful. Yeah. And I thought I did great, but looking back, well, it was not unlike that bio.

No. I mean, the great, like if you're a student of history, the most important lesson of history is that if you get up and you lie with confidence, most people will buy it. That's just human history from like 10,000 BC to now if you just get up and you're full of shit. Like LD debate was a lot of that. Was it really? Yeah, LD's regarded debate as like the smart ones.

There's a lot of research involved, but in a pinch, lying will do the trick sometimes. Especially if you're like me, like a tall white guy, because if you're a tall white guy and you say things with confidence, people just tend to trust you. It's true. It's amazing. It's like when I saw Keith in the fleece, I was like, I guess I trust him off of this. I mean, look at this guy. Yeah.

He looks like he's someone who talks avidly about hiking. Yeah. Someone who looks exactly like me and I'll be like, I don't trust her. No. Oh boy. Okay. Well, moving right along. Keith claims to have started his first business in 1984.

He called it the concept school and then later the Life Learning Institute. Again, Keith gives almost no details as to what these businesses were. This is all from the affidavit, which I'm using because he presumably lied less on it because it would be perjury, right? Yeah. So that's that. Anyway, that's why I'm using the affidavit so much. Yeah, that's smart.

To start these businesses, he claims he distilled a lifetime of careful thought in his genius intellect into their creation, but he never actually says what they did. These first ventures wound up closing due to irreconcilable differences between Keith and his backers. So this is 1984. Which is code for he couldn't return on the money. Yeah. He wasn't actually doing anything.

Keith did get up to something else in 1984 though. Molesting teenagers. Yeah. Oh, he was a little busy. He had a new hobby. He's getting up to, well, okay. He was living in an apartment building in Troy when he met Gina Malita. She was 15 and he was 24.

They struck up a friendship and went to the arcade together. Ranieri was obsessed with Pac-Man and a game called Vanguard. He told her he was a genius and a judo champion, which he always, he loves bringing up that judo championship. Yeah. Why? Which, again, nothing against martial arts, fine way to stay fit, great pastime. If you brag about the martial arts that you do, that is the immediate, well, that's also

just the immediate like, oh, okay, I'm going to disregard you as a person. Yeah. If the first thing you say to me is bragging about your martial arts career and we're not like at a martial arts competition or something. Yeah. I immediately doubt it, first of all, and I wonder if he said it just because it was like, yeah, I'm tough. Yeah.

Don't mess with me. I could fight. I can judo. But I couldn't fight in a, maybe it's like, no one knows judo so they could never challenge him. Yeah. He was like safe. He had to be like, okay, well, how do you do good at judo or whatever.

Let's brawl. Yeah. Let's judo. Yeah. So he, anyway, but so he brings, he tells the 15 year old girl that he's was great at judo at 11 and then he takes her virginity. They had a, what some sources call a relationship and I think what the law calls statutory rape off and on for about four months.

Okay. Keith Ranieri told her not to tell her mother and also urged her to lose weight because she was too fat for him. Oh no. Yeah. That's going to be a pattern too. He's a lot like Trump. They're not as different as I think he would want to be seen as.

Yeah. The weight thing? Mm-hmm. Although he's a big randian. I in Rand. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Keith met another girl in 1984 also. Her name is Gina Hutchinson. She was 16. They started having sex when Gina's sister Heidi found out she confronted Keith Ranieri. Quote, Heidi said Ranieri told her that she did not understand her sister's soul was much older than her biological age. He explained Gina was a Buddhist goddess meant to be with him.

There aren't goddesses in Buddhism. I mean, I don't know. There's a lot of different little sects, but I'm going to guess this is just bullshit. I mean, it's obviously bullshit, but I'm going to guess he was just lying about Buddhist goddesses existing anywhere. Man, what a thing to tell someone. Yeah. Look, I know it looks bad, but their soul's really old, and I can see it.

Their soul's really old and Buddhist. And Buddhist. So that makes this fine. Yeah. As if just that alone would make the sister be like, well, I did never notice that. He did say Buddha's name. Yeah. I guess he's fine.

That quote was from the Albany Times Union, which has done a lot of good reporting on Keith Ranieri. Okay. Yeah. I'm going to work for the Albany Times Union. Congrats. Anyway, none of the rapes are mentioned in Keith's official bios, obviously, or the affidavit. He claims that during this time, he decided he was called on to teach people his remarkable

theories on learning. I'm going to quote from the affidavit here, to test my theories and earn money, I became an independent contractor for several marketing and sales organizations with one organization that had more than 200,000 representatives nationally. I was able to personally recruit and train using my motivational methodology, six of the 10 top producers in a month. It doesn't give the name of the company he was working for, probably because it's a lie.

Yeah. Definitely. Which is a big Keith Ranieri move. Yeah. Just say the thing without being specific. Just say the thing you did. Like people who have accomplished things do. Yeah.

Like you can still be kind of a scammer and have a, like, but you just say like, I did this thing. Yeah. Even Donald Trump, people would say, I built this building. I ran this company. Yeah. I ran this company. Like Keith Ranieri, there's never anything specific.

And he mentioned, but it worked. Clearly. People listened. Mm-hmm. They were usually younger though, I assume. Yeah. Or at least in this, in this actual way. Yeah.

So he wound up quitting that unnamed organization because he says they didn't gel with his ethical foundations, which he never elaborates on, never tells us what those ethical foundations are. Oh, God. But, you know, by the time the 80s are over, he has sort of started to settle on a new thing that he wants to do. Mm-hmm. Here's another quote from the affidavit.

In 1990, I held a meeting with four of my friends in my living room to determine the principal structure of a new business. We called this business Consumers Byline, which, like, buy as an purchase. Okay. And officially started business on May 1st. The business was based on my projective human model with ethics, which does not tell you anything about what the business is. It was a multi-level marketing scam.

It was a pyramid scheme. Oh. People would pay $200 plus dollars for access to discount buying groups, which were supposed to give them access to cheaper groceries and stuff. But if they signed up other people, then they'd get monthly commissions. Okay. The grocery discount program was canceled, but the company kept charging people for it. And they didn't actually pay people for selling memberships either.

Eventually, they had something like a quarter of a million members, but also were paying out millions in legal fees because they were defrauding tons of people. Very brazenly defrauding people. Very brazenly defrauding people. Like, they're gonna complain that they're not getting paid. Yeah. If they're getting in enough new members fast enough to pay the legal fees, Keith Reneary can live well.

So in 1990, the year that Keith and his friends came up with consumers' byline, Keith also allegedly sexually assaulted a 12-year-old. Oh, no. Yeah. Yeah. This is a pattern for him. This anonymous girl was the child of a saleswoman who worked for the consumers' byline. According to the Times Union, her mother called Keith Reneary an Einstein.

Quote, Reneary would call staff meetings to deliver sometimes tearful emotional messages. He frequently showed a film about a man who plants seeds in the desert to build a forest. He suggested he was that type of noble cultivator of people, which the desert's the desert. Don't plant seeds in it. It doesn't need trees. I mean... Like, not that it doesn't have. I wonder what that video was.

Yeah. Like, did they stitch it together and make it seem like the guy did it? Yeah. Like, he planted a whole forest in the desert? I don't know. It makes me... If I were to do that, it would be like, I'm going to start an ocean in the desert. I'm just going to start dropping fish and water and eventually we'll have us in oceans.

Like, no, that's not what it is. Yeah, that doesn't work. But like, if I were in his shoes, I think I would just show people a real documentary. Yeah. About an actual inspiring person. Yeah. Of whom there are. And like jump on that train.

Yeah. So he apparently, you know, saw himself as a man who was planting seeds and he apparently decided to molest this 12 year old girl. So Keith Ranieri told the girl's mom who idolized him that he wanted to tutor her daughter. At the same time, Keith's girlfriend apparently hired the young lady as a dog walker. The girl alleges that Keith started by showering her with attention and then quickly moved on to molesting her. Quote, they told me I was smart and took an interest in me.

They let me spend every afternoon at their house, she said. It was exciting to be somewhere people wanted me. I was perfect picking and secure at the time to have someone that mature and that well thought of be interested in me. It was flattering. It was exciting and experienced, overwhelmed and out of my league. Yeah. So Keith continued to have sex with her for quite some time in his townhouse and empty

offices in an elevator in a broom closet at the plaza that hosted the consumers byline. She claims the relationship went on for about a year with at least 60 individual sexual encounters. In 1993, she reported it to the police but withheld her name. The report didn't go anywhere. It's hard to say why since police in the capital region of New York purged all their files in the late 1990s. So it didn't, nothing happened.

How can nothing happen off of that? But that's the case with Cosby and with Weinstein, it's always nothing happening for a long time. Yeah. That's true. That's true. We're in such a radically different moment right now. Yeah.

Yeah. This was still the dark ages for that shit. Yeah. Wow. It's weird how this idea of telling a young girl she's smart and showering her with attention. As shitty as that is, I feel like that's still so common on college campuses and at high schools with teachers kind of coming up toward that line. I mean, it works for everybody because high schools, if you're a thoughtful, smart person,

usually not your favorite time. It's rough for a lot of kids. And if an adult who is well thought of says that you're special and takes an interest in you, that can be a big deal. Yeah. Cosby's film is understood. You're doing Lincoln Douglas debate, which a lot of people probably thought wasn't cool. Certainly did not get you dates.

I'll tell you one thing. Speech and debate at my high school got you dates. We had no sports, so it was like, I mean, I thought it was like the sports team. Yeah. I grew up in Texas, so it was one of those like, if you're on the football team, you can murder people, but if you're anything else, they didn't really care all that much. Anyway, you remember that girl Gina from before? Yeah.

Okay, so Keith convinced her to drop out of high school. This is during the same time he's dating that 12-year-old. He convinced a 16-year-old to drop out of high school, promising he would tutor her. The two had kept seeing each other and Gina's family assumed they would marry. She turned 17 at some point during this, which was the age of consent, so he was no longer statutory raping her. He was just a creepy man in his 30s dating a high schooler. It's weird that that is a line that exists.

It's fine now. I guess it's not a crime anymore. She's over 17. Welcome to the family. Yeah. It's hard to say exactly how long their sexual relationship continued. She did eventually start going to college, and Keith reportedly got angry when male teachers would praise her for being smart because he's an abusive prick.

Yeah. Yeah. Good for her for going to college. Good for her for going to college. Not a story that ends happily. Oh, no. We'll move on for right now. Oh, no.

So when you dig into Keith's life, you get essentially two stories. There's the Keith's story of what happened and the everything else that you can actually back up with objective evidence story of what happened. So in the everybody else version of reality, Keith spends the early 90s building a pyramid scheme in molesting young girls. His pyramid scheme falls apart in 1993, which is also the year that he gets reported at the cops from molesting another girl, which I think we're up to four now, three. That's when investigations in 1983, yeah, his pyramid scheme collapses because investigations

by 23 states and two federal agencies determined that the consumer's byline is in fact a pyramid scheme. So Keith can't do that scheme anymore, and he has to find another scheme. Now in Keith's version of reality, he just used his experience running a totally legit and awesome business, which was super successful and then sadly had to shut down due to people's bigoted ideas of the world. He used that experience, though, to learn about people. He was studying human beings the whole time.

He was working with the consumer byline. Yeah. He's a humanitarian in his work in exploring human psyche. And a scholar. And a judo champion. Don't you forget that. I was leading up to that. I was going in order of importance.

Good. When we get out of here today and someone asks, who are you talking about today? You'll say Keith Ranieri and they'll say, what's that guy? And you'll say he was pretty fucking good at judo 30 or 40 years ago. Yeah. And they'll say, sounds legit. Sounds cool. Where can I give him my money?

Yeah. Anyway. And they'll say, just Venmo me. Just Venmo me. If you get the fleece, you can make that work. I own the fleece. Well, you got to be wearing it. But I'm not.

I don't look like you and Keith. Whoa. Whoa. Okay. All right. That's fair. You know, I don't know if I can pull off a period scheme. I'm too suspicious of women.

Well. Yeah. That's probably fair. Okay. So Keith spent his time running a pyramid scheme and molesting girls also learning about humanity. And he discovered in his own claims that minds work the same way as computers, only using words instead of numbers to program them. So he built a new form of communication called rational inquiry.

And the R and the I are always capitalized and it's always followed by a trademark sign. Oh. Oh, no, this is serious shit we're dealing with here. Don't you dare dismiss rational inquiry. It sounds like a thing. Can you hear the capitals when I say it? The capitol? The first time I didn't.

Okay. But then when you said it again, I did. Rational inquiry. Now, yes. Okay. Now it sounds like a patented line of TM. Something. CM.

RM. I don't understand. Trademark. I don't either. Okay. So you're probably wondering what is rational inquiry. I've got a quote from Keith Ranieri, trying to explain it here, quote, it enabled a person to find a common understanding with others and to logically build a belief system that

matched a person's subjective world, highly individually at consistent. Using this model, people seem to understand themselves and each other better. Do you get what rational inquiry is now talking? That is 100% of what Keith Ranieri does is talk very quickly and throw out a bunch of big words. So we're going to get into the opus of Keith's life, the main venture that would define most of his time on this earth and would be his most successful project, Nexium. But before we get into Nexium, we need to go talk about ads for products that are actual

things that you can buy rather than nonsense words sent by a child molester. So please buy some product. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, Hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock and I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into

a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to

do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. When I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

So at this point, Keith's first business may have been a gigantic and possibly criminal disaster. In 1998, Keith met a lady named Nancy Salisman who he described in the affidavit as an international authority on human potential. What? How can you be an international authority on potential? What do you do for a living? Oh, you know, I write for television.

What do you do for a living? Oh, I'm an accountant. I'm an expert on human potential. It's like going up to everyone and being like, you can be anything you want. Or is it the opposite, going up to people and being like, I think dentist. I feel like it's just reminding people of what human beings can do. Everybody's sitting around talking about how to build a road and you're like, you know, we landed a man on the moon at one point.

We could build a road. That is definitely what it is. A bunch of executives are trying to figure out a new flavor of Doritos and you're like, you know, human beings made the Holocaust happen. Just reminding people of what the human potential is. Right, because potential can go either way. Yeah, potential can go either way. And it's important that the Doritos people not fly too close to the sun.

It is, because they've been flying real close lately. I know. Cool Ranch, we were never meant to have it. No. We can't handle it. I also hate Doritos. Cool Ranch is a disgusting line of chips and a sea of terrible chips. I just want to note to all the listeners that it is not the official standpoint of this

podcast that Cool Ranch Doritos aren't delicious. No, I understand many people like them, but. We're just trying to get the Cool Ranch people to put some ad dollars our way. Oh yeah? Do they sponsor a lot of podcasts? I don't know, but we could be the first. And I just want people to know if there is anyone from Doritos listening, please have a Doritos Tastic Day.

Yes. God, I love a good Dorito. Anyway, back to Keith Ranieri. Yes. A good segue. A great. Speaking of chips. Super clear.

Speaking of chips. Speaking of cheesy flavor. So he met this lady, Nancy Salisman, international authority on human potential. He tutored her for six months on the techniques of his new breakthrough learning science, and then the two started Nexium. At this point, you may be wondering what the fuck was Nexium. Well, Nexium was an umbrella company, and its main initial purpose was to host professional development seminars focused around executive success programs, all caps again, devised by

Ranieri and Salisman. You're probably still wondering what the fuck any of that means. This is by design, and the affidavit Ranieri had to file. He claims that the basis for the training was a 12-point copyrighted mission statement. The actual text of that mission statement is a trade secret, and you aren't allowed to know what it says unless you pay to take the class, at which point you're required to sign a confidentiality agreement, promising not to tell anyone about it. Oh, that's so sneaky.

So again, if you are sitting at home wondering what the fuck is he actually doing, it's impossible to know. Well, it's not impossible because we have some inside data, but yeah, we did some digging on this shit. Did people break their NDAs in the course of this investigation? And how? And these aren't NDAs, they're confidentiality agreements, so we're not talking about a Weinstein level where somebody who has very smart lawyers is drawing up actual ironclad legal documents.

We'll get into what these are in a little bit. So what happened in these executive success programs? Thankfully we have reports from actual attendees, the following quotes are from a woman who showed up at one of these seminars in 2007 after being urged to do so by professionals she admired. The whole process started when the class received, quote, a document entitled Rules and Rituals, which informed us to never speak of any of our experiences in ESP. Attendees were also told to, quote, remove our shoes, bow, and pay tribute to founder

Keith Ranieri. There was a lengthy explanation of how to perform a perfect handshake, as well as the ESP secret handshake, an explanation of how different colored sash hierarchy works, which seems based entirely on recruitment rather than a measurable skill set, and the request that Keith Ranieri was to be referred to as Vanguard and Nancy Salisman as Prefect. So first off, the game that Keith Ranieri played to impress the teenager he fucked was Vanguard. I just think that's interesting.

Oh. Don't know if there's a connection there, but weird, right? It's weird that people have to take off their shoes and bow to him. That is weird, huh? Like, that's weird, but then I started thinking, I've been an assistant for various bosses, and you start to do weird stuff that you kind of normalize where it's like, well, this person is above me. I have to please them.

If I please them, things will go well. I guess what I'm saying is I'm the kind of person that would be in a cult. Well, you might be able to join this cult, still depending on how the court cases go. But there's a lot to dig into in that paragraph, and I do want to talk about the handshake thing for a little bit, because back in 2003, cult expert Rick Ross received several internal nexium training documents from a disgruntled attendee. He had them analyzed by cult experts, including Dr. Paul Martin, a licensed clinical psychologist. This is where the affidavit comes from, because Keith sued Rick Ross, saying that he was exposing

nexium's trade secrets. He lost, and so the stuff is still up there, and now we have quotes from several sections of the ESP training manuals and guidelines, including Keith Ranieri's explanation of how to shake hands. Are you ready to learn how to shake some fucking hands? Yeah. Okay. Okay.

Quote, handshaking is a sign of respect and affords us an opportunity to make direct physical contact with others. We believe that many of society's problems have developed because people have come to view each other as objects rather than human beings. So far, not entirely insane. Spoken from a man who has sex with 12-year-olds. Spoken from a child molester? Yeah.

Absolutely. But you know, society is fucked up because people don't make direct physical contact enough. That's an arguable point. Okay. Although creepy from the mouth of a child molester. It is super creepy, but I'm listening. Here in ESP, we use a two-handed handshake.

This conveys warmth and a sense of community. One of the left hand denotes rank. Individuals of higher rank place their left hand on the top. Individuals of the same rank shake vertically. Lower rank places the left hand on bottom. So simultaneously, society is fucked up because we don't spend enough time connecting with each other, but also shaking someone's hand should be a sign of dominance. Wow.

You know what? It makes sense, though, because he still had to maintain this illusion that he is always superior. Exactly. And you've got to reinforce that by changing the way people shake hands. But what's also crazy is handshakes are that in real life. Only with people who are lame. Okay.

Make that argument. But I am not, uh, I'm not much of a toucher. I am not much of a handshaker. I feel like it's very awkward, even a hugger. Yeah. But. It's fine. When someone goes in to hold your hand, not to hold, but to shake it, and they have a

steady stern grip, there's a little part of you that's like, oh. A steady grip, but not like a crushing grip or anything like that. Like I spent some time, you know, working as a war correspondent for a while in a couple of different places. And I met a lot of really formidable human beings and none of them did the like crush your hand. It was always just like a short, like firm, but it was, it was never like, like the people I've met who have always like really gone into it and like grip the hand, like they're

always lame. They're always like sad little men who don't have any other way to feel powerful. That's true. If you have to overcompensate. Yeah. Yeah. I bet, I bet Keith had a very crushing. I bet Keith tried to fucking rip your hand apart.

Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, there is a detailed explanation for how to shake hands. Okay. And you tell me if this gives you any good information on hand shaking, because I can't understand what the fuck he's going for here. Okay. The hand is the portion of the hand between the thumb and forefinger where they form a

right angle. Wrist cock refers to the angle of the wrist, which can be used to gain control of the handshake. It is important to control the cock of the wrist slightly down as you move into the handshake. Positioning of the feet determines dominance. Stepping into the handshake with the right foot creates a more dominant position. Expressing strength for the handshaker. Stepping into the handshake with the left foot will be perceived by both people as a more passive expression.

The middle and ring fingers are used to gain control of the handshake. Okay. I get it. No. I get, is this still a rational inquiry? Oh yeah. I mean, I guess. Yeah, I get it.

It's hard to say where one part ends and the other begins. All he's doing is taking ways that people interact and explaining them as if you've never heard of it. Yeah. Like you're an alien. As if you are an alien. Making stuff up. Because it never in my life have I thought about where my feet are in a handshake or

been like, that guy stepped forward with his left foot, he's showing submission. Yes. And I feel like I should acknowledge the fact that something can be said for like the way we stand and the way we sit subconsciously. Like when you, and this is something I've heard in all that like lean and talk for women, but when you stand in a powerful stance and put your shoulders back, that can affect your confidence. Absolutely.

But this, the way he's explaining it is not like feel more confident. It's very. Dominance. Yeah. Dominate the other person. This is how to take control of the handshake. Yeah. Which, so sad.

Yeah. These leaked documents are also how we know the exact content of the confidentiality pledge that attendees were forced to recite. The methods and information I learn in ESP are for my use only. I will not speak of them or in any way give others knowledge of them outside ESP. Part of the condition of being accepted into ESP is to keep all its information confidential. If I violate this, I am breaking a promise and breaching my contract. But more importantly, I am compromising my inner honesty and integrity.

You know you're doing something embarrassing when everyone's like, yeah, but let's not tell anyone. Don't tell anybody about this. Yeah. Let's not. No. There's, every great thing people are a part of includes a confidentiality pledge. Yeah.

Anytime someone says that to me, I immediately want to tell the whole world. So I'm like, you don't get to tell me that. I feel like that's why some of these documents leak. Yeah. Like, whoa, whoa, whoa. This is weird. I'm going to tell everyone. Going back to the experiences of the lady we were quoting earlier who attended an ESP

course and wrote about it. She also reported hearing an awful lot of nonsense about Keith Ranieri's IQ. Quote, at times it was 211, at other times it jumped to 240, depending on who was praising his amazingness. Attendees were forced to watch a video of Nancy Salisman where she insisted that Vanguard was one of only two or three people in the world who could solve all of the planet's problems. So this attendee actually sat through the whole session and says that she benefited

from some of the exercises in the course once the instructor got done praising Keith Ranieri. It does sound like there might be vaguely useful stuff buried in the nonsense, but the session ended with a two-hour lecture on why ESP wasn't a cult, which is the number one warning sign that something is a cult. Yeah. Come on, guys. This isn't a cult.

This isn't a cult. It's going to get a little weird, but it's just how we do things. We're just worshiping a man who makes us isolate ourselves from society and our family, but it's not a cult. No. I wonder if this guy had any experience with Scientology. Oh, boy. He sure did.

Oh, did he really? Oh, yeah. No, Scientology. So we'll get into some of this a little bit, but everything that he's done is essentially a melange of Ein Rand's philosophy and Scientology, including using some of the terms from Scientology. Worst things to mash up. Yeah. It's Libertarian Scientology.

Oh. Yeah. Okay. So buckle up. So the session ended with a two-hour lecture on why ESP wasn't a cult. The attendee who wrote that report noted that a majority of the other attendees seemed to be women under 25 who did not have a lot of self-confidence. Yeah.

Now, her report doesn't go into an awful lot of detail about the contents of the class, but fortunately we do have direct quotes from Nexium's source material. First off, here's an actual definition from the class of rational inquiry. Rational inquiry is a science based on the belief that the more consistent a person is in their thinking, the more successful the individual will be. That's bullshit. Well. That is, in keeping with vagueness, that is the vaguest way to talk about human thinking.

Just be consistent. Which also, that's bullshit, because if you've ever worked a creative job, one of the keys to being effectively creative in a productive way is to change your circumstances and situation, mind state and whatnot, so that you can have better ideas. What does consistent even mean in this context? Yeah. Consistency is great if you're making car engines. Yeah.

It's not great if you're a creative person trying to make a creative product. No. Yeah. Anyway, Keith Ranieri does go into more detail about what rational inquiry is. So we'll see if by the end of this paragraph, you have any fucking idea what his breakthrough science is. Okay. All adults have disintegrations because when they were children learning to be adults and

learning about the world, our perspective was based on the perception, intellect and wisdom of a small child. These lessons become the foundation of our whole adult reality. Rational inquiry lets you reexamine these childhood beliefs from an adult perspective. So Keith Ranieri claims he invented growing up. Yeah. What literally all he's doing is taking things people do anyway and naturally and giving them a bad name.

Yeah. Giving them a bad name. Yeah. Claiming that like, yes, of course, we all learn things about the world that aren't true as children. Yeah. Yeah. Which is childhood.

But I can see, maybe I'm giving him too much credit, but I can see the way that this grasps at the edges of like psychoanalysis and question what you know to be reality, but in the like most useless of ways. Yeah. Yeah. I can't see how anyone could benefit in a major way from this stuff, but I can see how, because then this is something you'll see when we play some of his audio later, he will start with like, this is like citing an actual concept in psychology or developmental psychology

or whatever. Right. Yeah. And for a minute or two, he'll say something that's not nonsense. And he'll use that actual fact to make the nonsense that comes later sound like it's got some basis in science as opposed to just Keith Ranieri being full of shit. So let's discuss the mission statement of Nexium. If you remember from the affidavit, Keith stated that his mission statement was so important

that he had to sue a guy over it. Here's how Dr. Martin, who's one of the experts, Rick Ross had reviewed the materials, described the mission statement. The first point is success is an internal state of clear, honest knowledge of what I am, my value in the world, and my responsibility for the way I react to things. The second point is there are no ultimate victims, therefore I will not choose to be a victim. There's a pledge to purge oneself of all parasite and invi-based habits.

There's a pledge to control as much of the money of the world as possible within each student's success plan. Quote, a world of successful people will be a better world and indeed a world devoid of hunger, theft, dishonesty, envy, and insecurity. People will no longer try to destroy each other and steal from each other or rejoice in another's demise. Success, ethics, and integrity are co-inspirational. I pledge to share and enroll people in ESP and its mission for myself to help make the

world a better place to live. Man, the parallels to Trump are so heavy. I can see how offering people a way to empower themselves out of perceived victimhood could be enticing, but then tacking on, and I'm going to make you super rich. Not just that, but the best thing, if you're an ethical person, you look at it all the fucked up shit in the world and you're like, oh my god, what could I do? He's saying the best thing you can do for the world is to make a shitload of money. Yeah.

Wow, it's so broken. It's sad. Poor women. It's the way of, not to compare Keith Ranieri to the fucking Hitler, because they're not very similar people, but it's the same thing. If you can tell a group of young people how special they are and make them feel special, they'll do almost anything for you. But on the other hand, I certainly have been in that position numerous times.

In high school, having a mentor who was a senior at the time, who seemed so politically smart and led all the protests on campus, and then looking back, I'm like, I don't know. Yeah. He was just getting off on having a lot of people look up to him. Yeah. It's easy then, because you're in a very small pond. You don't need to know that much about the world, and Keith didn't need to know that much.

He just needed to be better at talking than these people. Yeah. Yeah. Of course, make them pay thousands of dollars to attend his classes, because there is a sunk cost fallacy going on here, the five-day intensive ESP course cost $2,700. There was a three-day intensive for $1,200, and a 16-day course, which one assumes had to run at least $7,000 or $8,000. So you're paying this guy a lot of money.

You're going to be more inclined to believe he's not full of shit. Right. Yeah, you got to protect yourself. Exactly. Say what you will about improv, but it's cheaper than that. Yes. Yes. Do improv.

It's cheaper than ESP classes. The healthiest cult you could join is improv. Yeah. Maybe CrossFit is a notch above it. Well, but people poop themselves a lot doing CrossFit. True. Yeah, that's a real factor. But they look great, baby.

Oh, if you know someone who got super into CrossFit, they look excellent. They do look great. Yeah. A cornerstone of the intensive classes was working to shed parasitic behaviors, which we already quoted a little bit. Examples of such behavior included complaining about pain, expressing hunger, and statements like, I know I promised, but I had no idea how hard or painful this was going to be. Oh, God.

Oh, yeah. Keith Ranieri, probable child molester, also gave new definitions of the words good and bad. Quote, when we were little children, we learned bad when someone yelled no, or that's bad. Stop. We learned good when we were rewarded in some way. This sort of learning is inconsistent and limiting, because in order to have a full understanding of each concept, we would have to examine every example of good and every

example of bad. This practice session affords you the opportunity to reevaluate your definitions of these vital concepts to form a solid foundation for the future. Which is... Sounds like someone who's going to do something bad to you. Sounds like someone who's going to do something bad and tell you it's good. Yeah. Yeah.

And there's probably no creepier thing than saying it's parasitic to tell someone that you don't want to do something because it's painful. Yeah. Yeah. Oh. Yeah. Yeah. There are some lectures about how Nexium was a cult.

Keith does in his training manuals define the word cult. Quote, this is a label that conveys no meaning, but devalues the group. It is designed to keep people away from the group without saying what is wrong with it. Example, that's a cult. Classic example. Classic example. That's a cult. They also call anyone who doubts Nexium or anyone who breaks faith and tells other people

of the classes a suppressive, which is straight out of Scientology. Straight, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I could go on about executive success program training all day, but we have so much more ground to cover. I do want to point out just how careful Keith was to stay just on this side of not making legally fraudulent claims about his services, so I'm going to play a selection from a video

Keith made called, What Executive Success Programs Does, where he claims his seminars have supernatural healing powers in the weaselest way possible. And we will be posting links to all these videos on the site if you guys want to see Keith Ranieri's creepy face, but you'll get a lot out of hearing his creepy voice. And I will say within the thousands of people who've gone through, we've had some incredibly, you might call it strange or wonderful happenings, and you could easily hold that up and say, you know, we change this condition, or we, there's one person who in one of our intensives for whatever reason, how, who knows, grew like three quarters of an inch there, had

some sort of release, I think, in their spine or their posture, who knows what. Now that could have happened on the playground. That doesn't necessarily happen from us. We've certainly, that would be at best a case study, an inadvertent case study. We certainly haven't done a double blind study. Can we? No. That's an interesting control.

But do you have something like that? And, oh, should we hold that up as a poster child and whatever? No, because I'm sure there are many activities. You know, public school has probably had more than we have of those sort of things. So when people get really good results from us, yes, we do take testimonials at times or whatever, but we look at those results ideally as an effect of really the answer to the question, do you have more joy in your life? We would have been very satisfied with our results with you if you kept your full blown

Tourette's and all of that sort of thing, but came out saying, you know something, life's better for me. So that guy is claiming that Keith cured his Tourette's. His Tourette's. Yeah. But no, but that's not what we're saying the course does. We're just saying this guy took the course and we're not saying it'll make you taller, but it did happen to this one guy.

Yeah. Again, it's a Trump tactic, but I didn't get it when I just heard the written version of him, but hearing that, he does know how to speak. He's very good at speaking. Bringing it back, like he was literally spouting bullshit. You said it best, like supernatural capacity of the course, like you know, you didn't make someone grow. Yeah.

That's nonsense. But to bring it back to like this question of, did we bring more joy into your life? That's laser focused at manipulating people. Yeah. And Keith Ranieri, whatever else you can say about him is a genius at manipulating people. And this brings us to the end of the part one of our two part series on Keith Ranieri. This wound up being like an 8,000 word thing that I wrote for this. So we have a lot more to cover.

When we come back on Thursday, we're going to talk about the first news articles that started to uncover the terrible story of Keith Ranieri back in the early 2000s. And yes, we will get to more detail about the branding and all of that horrible shit. And we will also have some really weird videos of Keith Ranieri and Alex and Mack. So get ready for that on Thursday. Until then, Anna, do you want to plug your plugables? Yeah. You can find me on Instagram.

I make a webcomic. It's Bad Comics with an X by Anna with two Ns. I make comics about depression, anxiety, and cheese, because I'm lactose intolerant. And you can find me on Twitter at Bad Comics by Anna. Her comics are actually good. Thank you. We've got to throw that in for legal reasons. Oh, okay.

Yeah, we can't be false advertising here. And by Doritos. By Cool Ranch is the coolest of the ranches. Yeah. I'm Robert Evans. You can find me on Twitter at I write okay, two letters. You can find my book on the internet at a brief history of vice. It's on Amazon.

And you can find Behind the Bastards online at BehindtheBastards.com or on Twitter at Bastards Pod. So check us out. We'll have, you know, some video clips and pictures of this creep on there. And come back Thursday for the stirring conclusion to the story of Keith Ranieri, a real piece of shit. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests.

It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based

on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space?

Well, I ought to know. Because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.