Julian Dorey Podcast - #361 - NXIVM Cult Victim on Hollywood Elite, 17,000 “Slaves” & being a “Good Girl” | Sarah Edmondson

Episode Date: December 2, 2025

SPONSORS: 1) TRUE CLASSIC: Upgrade your wardrobe and save on @trueclassic at https://trueclassic.com/JULIAN! #trueclassicpod 2) EXPRESS VPN: Secure your online data TODAY by visiting http://ExpressVPN.com/JULIANDOREY PATREON https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey ****TIMESTAMPS in description below**** Sarah Edmondson is a Canadian actress and podcaster. Edmondson is a former member of NXIVM, a now-defunct s3x cult and pyramid scheme founded by Keith Raniere. PRE-ORDER SARAH's BOOK: https://www.sarahedmondson.com/book SARAH's LINKS: IG: https://www.instagram.com/sarahedmondson/?hl=en X: https://x.com/sarahjedmondson YT: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=a+little+bit+culty FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY INSTAGRAM (Podcast): https://www.instagram.com/juliandoreypodcast/ INSTAGRAM (Personal): https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://twitter.com/julianddorey JULIAN YT CHANNELS - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP ****TIMESTAMPS**** 0:00 - Intro 1:28 – Many People Can Fall Into Cults…NXIVM, Scientology, HBO’s The Vow 12:54 – Good Until It Got Dark, Keith, DOS, Sarah’s Acting Background 23:34 – Returning to Vancouver, Sarma, Being Ripe for a Cult 33:02 – What The Bleep, Shifting Consciousness, Situational Vulnerability 44:57 – Open-Minded but Angst, L5D, Micro-dosing, Curriculum, Meeting Mark 54:47 – Rose McGowan, Weinstein, Hollywood Cults, Epstein Parallels 01:04:42 – Sarah Avoiding LA, NXIVM Structure, Tacoma WA, Suzanne 01:15:14 – Suzanne’s Manipulation, Holiday Inn Trainings, Nancy & Gaslighting 01:26:15 – Gaslit Expression, Day 3 Switch, Coaching Pyramid, Actors at the Top 01:36:44 – Nancy’s Hypnotism, Keith’s Manipulation, Spiritual Wives, A-List Trainings 01:54:45 – Vanguard Week, Christ Imagery, Festival of Flowers, Moral Weaponizing 02:04:54 – Dark Turn, Harem Building, Fawn Response, Sarah’s Close Calls 02:15:18 – Acting in NXIVM, MLM vs Pyramid, Dalai Lama Endorsement, Tourette Claims 02:24:54 – Tourette Cases, Pseudoscience, Bronfmans, Wild Wild Country, Baskin Robbins Heiress 02:35:50 – Reaching Proctor, Giving Up Acting, Mexican President’s Son, Belonging 02:45:30 – Orange Level, Meeting Nippy, Keith’s Lip Kissing, Dating in NXIVM 02:55:16 – The Final Quarter, Suspicions Rising 03:04:29 – Real Improvement or Cult Illusion?, 20k Members, Commitment Patterns 03:08:37 – New episode coming... CREDITS: - Host, Editor & Producer: Julian Dorey - COO, Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ - In-Studio Producer: Joey Deef - https://www.instagram.com/joeydeef/ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 361 - Sarah Edmondson Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

One of the most textbook sociopaths he will ever come across. Keith Ranieri, who created Nexium, the guy was psycho. All these different things that we've studied, Scientology, yoga disciplines, the Mormon Church. Keith took that from that and that from that. You know, brilliant in the sociopathic way. And we're going to call this guy Keith Rennary, who created this. We're going to thank him before every class.

Thank you, Vanguard. Wait, we're calling him Vanguard. Oh, it just means leader of a philosophical movement. Like, holy fuck, we're going to call. And we were told he was a judo champ, chess player, concert pianist. Oh, and he's celibate. Oh, right. He was just this renaissance man.

Do you think it was deliberate that he wore longer hair and a beard and what I'm getting at is... Jesus vibes? Mm-hmm. Yeah. I thought it was his assistance, but his spiritual wives. They cleaned him up. This is my opinion. The original women that he had from his inner circle. They both died when I was there.

And I believe that they were poisoned. And he poisoned them. Okay. I think I need to tell you this because I'm going to go into Nexium land for a minute. So one of the principles in Nexium was that... Hey, guys. If you're not following me on Spotify, please, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge huge help. Thank you.

think an example for a lot of people out there. You and I were just talking off camera about how we are all susceptible to things that, you know, we may not even realize we're becoming a part of. And I can't even imagine what it's like to kind of like come outside of that and be like, whoa. But, you know, not to bury the lead here, you were involved in what is now known as the nexium cult for many years. We'll go through the whole story today and whatever you want to. But, you know, For people who aren't familiar with the nexium coal and what that was later, thanks to you and some other brave people revealed to be, what was it in simple terms? Sure. I can give like the overall cliff notes and then we could go down some rabbit holes, as I'm sure we will.

So I was involved in what would probably be best described as a personal and professional development program. People might be familiar with things like Tony Robbins or Landmark and I'm not champion either of those things to be totally. honest because I, well, we can get into why later, but there's a lot of coaching, executive training that's, you know, around that everyone's sort of accessible to. And as aware of, now, in 2005, when I joined, this was at the height of, like, the human potential movement. And also before cults were particularly, you know, there weren't as many documentaries on HBO and Netflix as there are now. This is very different era. So it's sort of a stage of want to set. But yeah, I joined in 2005, what was ostensibly a coaching program to be more

successful, to be more your best self. And I joined as somebody who was really looking for more meaning and more purpose and a whole bunch of other things because I know you're going to ask me questions about my psychology and my parents, you know, my parents and my, you know, my, not my kids, my childhood and whatnot, what set me up for that, which I'm happy to get into. But yeah, I joined because I wanted to be a better version of myself. I was an actress. I was living in a basement suite. I had bigger aspirations than where I was, and this looked like a tool set to help me achieve that. So basically it was a community, what was supposed to be. It was supposed to be a community of like-minded humanitarians working on

themselves. It's basically a therapy-based program. So it was seminars and workshops that were designed to look at your belief system, upgrade the software so that you could be more joyful, integrated, optimal. And that's what it was supposed to be. Well, as you know, I've had some people in here who were involved with Scientology. Yes. And we've done some podcasts on that. I listened. Did you listen to Jenna Miscavage one? I listened to Jenna, yeah. Unbelievable. Right? And, you know, she's born into it and everything. But I bring that up because there are so many parallels that I see between Scientology and what nexium was from a marketing perspective. like you were just saying, be a higher version of yourself,

accomplish goals that you're having trouble getting even focused on right now, join a community that's going to keep you accountable for this. You know, we'll get into it, like the ESP stuff and all that, very similar in a lot of ways to some of the auditing psychology that Scientology has. So, quick question, were you aware back in 2005 or 06 what Scientology was at the time, too? Great question. I'd heard of it. I didn't really know much about it.

it as it became more prominent, like I was still an axiom when the Scientology, Tom Cruise jumping on the couch incident happened. You remember that? And that was the first time that I was like, what is this? And I remember asking some of my upper, upper ranks, people above me, like, what is Scientology? And I had some people who had taken nexium and had also done Scientology. And they said it was very similar, like you just said in its goal, sorry, similar in its goal in terms of, you know, let's be happier and work through our limitations. But in terms of how they achieve, that, I was told it was very different. So our approach was kind of like talk therapy, but getting to the root cause of an issue.

So if I was your coach and you said to me, hey, like, you know, every time I start a podcast, I get really nervous, then I would be like, okay, what's the stimulus? Like, when does that nervousness set in? And then we figure out what the stimulus was and how that made you feel and like what part of your childhood belief system, when that was created and what you made that mean, that would then, you would then, like, put onto the podcast, it would make you feel nervous. And it would be like an unwinding of that belief system to the point that whatever the trigger was would no longer stimulate you anymore. Apparently Scientology had a whole other different approach.

I didn't know that much about it, but I do remember thinking, hey, you know, who am I to judge? Tom Cruise is happy and people think he's in a cult. People think we're in a cult. So, you know, who cares? People are doing their own thing. I didn't have a lot of judgment on it. I thought, you know, good for him. He's happy.

And then I saw going clear, but that was after I left. Right. And that was one of the first movies that I saw that I was like, holy shit. First of all, I wasn't, I don't, I'm jumping to the end. I'll tell you everything you want in between, but that moment of, I literally have it in my note section, all the things that I saw in going clear that were almost word for word. Some of the words are word for suppressive. We, you know, we use that word, slightly different meaning, but same vernacular, same system of

control, you know, shunning people who leave, they call it disconnection. I mean, I could pull up my notes and we could look at it. and dissect it. If you wanted, that's fascinating. But yeah, we've done five or six episodes on Scientology. And every person we interview is like, oh, I didn't know you did that too. We had we also had that. Like, that's crazy. So similar. So similar. But they were way more successful. At Scientology? Yeah. Well, they were, I mean, they've been around, they were around a lot longer and just bigger in size as well. Yeah. Global. You know what? When I, when I read about Scientology or interview people, I feel like Elvron Hubbard was some, like kind of like a

sci-fi-writing nerd who wanted to create this club and, you know, like, made a little club is like, you're going to be in the military and you're going to wear this hat and you have a clipboard and then it just got like out of control. Like it is, it was almost like, like they're cosplaying the military or like, like, but it's huge and they have real funds and real buildings and why isn't like the IRS is up everybody else's butts? Why aren't they? Oh, it's crazy. Why aren't they dealing with that? Don't even get me started on that. It's like that chaps my ass more than anything else in the cult space. Yeah, all you got to do is, like, go to Clearwater

and look at all the empty buildings that they own and be like, something's a little wrong here. And I did that. I actually drove through recently for, I don't know if you know, Mike Rinder, who's one of the ex-aithology passed, yeah. So it was at his memorial, and I had to drive through that creepy area,

and it is creepy. Very. Yeah, and if you stop, they will come and, like, walk to your car and, you know, tell you to get the fuck out, because they own the sidewalks. They own the city.

Yeah. It's crazy how how something like that still exists at the level it does in the open internet era blows my mind. It also blows my mind that something like nexium took even until 2017, 2018 to actually have the whistle blown on it because, you know, you mentioned all Ron Hubbard. Guy was a fucking psycho. He died in 85 or 86, right? So he died pre-internet era and all that. I guess in hindsight, like it could make sense something like that. could have some subsistence after that.

But like Keith Rinearie, who ran, who created nexium, you know, this guy was alive the whole time and in charge of it and openly allowing things to be, that was the other thing. Like everything was allowed to be videoed, right? Like you guys had a record of all this stuff. And people have not seen the vow on HBO, HBO Max, which you are in, obviously, where you guys, a bunch of you tell the story from. from what it was like inside there and you're getting literal videos of step by step

or every time you're talking about something, there's evidence of it right there that can be shown to people. It's very sinister to watch because it's like this, I don't know, it's like you're watching a dystopian 1984 reality and you guys were happy while you were in it. Yeah. It's very, very, I mean, was that pretty cathartic, I guess, like making that show?

Well, there's some, points i want to address what you just said hold on uh well first of all i'll answer your last question i didn't we didn't know we were making an hb o documentary when we were filming it right we at first we were filming it because we knew that they were going to come after us which they did and this was more of a protection like let's film our our unwinding like holy fuck we're in a cult situation we weren't like we're going to sell this HBO which by the way i didn't i'm the subject and i'm not a producer i'm just filmed in it um but we didn't know what it was going to be we didn't know that it was going to come out after Tiger King and like blow our lives up and everyone was going to watch it

because it was COVID. Like that was, you know, not in the cards as far as we knew. But the filming of it, all the stuff that they filmed behind the scenes, I don't know if you know this, but it was filmed because Keith wanted a library of all his genius so that when he died one day, we could like refer to it. In fact, when he did forums and he would like speak in front of a crowd, I never did this because I just thought it was a dumb exercise and I maybe was lazy or whatever.

But there would be like eight people sitting in the front with clipboards and stopwatches. And they'd be like eight o'clock and they had columns and it'd be like joke, metaphor, quote. And so it'd be like, you know, Keith makes a joke about global warming and farts at eight, you know, whatever. And so that you could cross-reference and then eventually there'd be like, you know,

did Keith ever talk about global warming? And you could say in this forum on this date and then you'd pull up the library. So that's why he did it. And the footage that you see in The Vow is everything that Mark had access to, which was a lot because he was, you know, hired as the filmmaker. But there was Mark Vecente, who was the guy who brought me in and also the guy who brought me out. And we can talk about it later. But all of that was like just what he had.

There was like so much more. I'm sure. I had heard since leaving that the people that remained the loyalists were taking that footage to make a documentary to show how wrong we are and, you know, how much I loved it. I'm like, I never said I didn't love it. Like, I'm very clear that I had a great time until I didn't. Right. You know, until it got dark. Yeah.

You know, people like, Sarah, you know, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, I'm very honest about that. Like, it wasn't bad from the beginning. The guys at True Classic started with a simple mission to actually make me look good. Just kidding. They wanted to bring premium comfortable clothing to the masses because looking and feeling great shouldn't come with a designer price tag. And clearly, people agree with over 25 million shirts sold to 5 million customers and more than two

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Come on now. That's trueclassic.com slash Julian. Link in my description below. They, the way it strikes me is it's a slow descent. Yes. Right? They give you some sort of payoff. They give you some sense of community.

They give you things that appear to be happiness. You met your husband, who's still your husband today. Yeah. In the cult. And so there were, there were, there are all these friendships and happy memories tied with it. But then eventually they, they basically use that baselining against you to then normalize things that are obviously completely fucking insane. But they do it slowly starting with just language patterns or expectations on your job and then eventually work their way to using those same manipulation tactics to pull you into DOS, which we will talk about later. Yes.

Which is certifiably insane. I mean, it's just so tragic to watch it play out on camera. I'm glad that, that, you know, Mark was able to get access to all these things, but it underlies the point that, you know, you're talking about a man in Keith Ranieri who is one of the most textbook sociopaths he will ever come across and his own sociopathic behavior, as so often happens, is really what did him in because he wanted evidence of everything that he was doing and he thinks it looks great and makes him seem like a god, but it made him seem like a fucking psycho to everyone on the outside.

That was his undoing and also creating, we call it DOS. You can call it DOS if you want, but I don't know actually what his intentions were because I never talked to him about it because when I was invited into that, it was supposed to be not related to NXAM at all, which of course is total bullshit. But when he created DOS and that we went through that experience, I remember thinking, people think we're in a cult. Like I knew that people thought we were a cult, but I also thought they didn't understand because they weren't in the curriculum.

And if they went through it, they would really get it. And, but when that, when they started to ask, I'm like, this is not good, I hate to use the word, but I can laugh now. Not good branding. This is not good branding to brand women with your initials. Like, that's not a good idea. If people think we're at a cult already, let's not do that. Like, that's not really smart, you know. So anyway, I'm, this is very serious, obviously. But I'm like eight years out. Sometimes I can talk about it very openly and fine. Other times I'm like, yeah, I don't want to talk about that right now. So we'll just. We'll just. I can imagine it's a mix of emotions, you know, there's part of it. You have to be like, holy shit. And in other things, it's, you know, it's something you can't, you can't erase that hard drive. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So where, you were an actress before any of this happened, right?

So you had, you had gotten on some TV shows and movies in Hollywood. So you already had. I had some credits. Yeah, you had some credits and some sort of success, but you were looking for more. What did, was that something you wanted to do as a little girl? like becoming an actress yeah i always want to be i wanted to be an actor but i also had my my parents were very like politically and socially active and i was very much instilled and with some altruistic like change the world and make the world better and we used to march for peace and like my dad was a

hippie and like that's that was sort of ingrained in me like if there was something wrong in the world we write letters to the mayor you know what i mean like it takes it takes some action yeah we're going to do something about it so i kind of had the idea that i would be an actor and then use my voice to have an impact. And that was what, it wasn't like, I want to be a famous actress to be famous. It was like, I could be famous to have a voice. Did you like the idea of pretending to be other people on camera?

Yeah, I love that. So you love the actual activity too. Yes, oh, I did, yeah. And it changed over time. Like, when I was applying for theater school, it was either theater school or psychology because my parents were in that world. My mom's a family therapist, my dad's a counselor.

I loved, like, I was a camp counselor. been kind of like, you know, cruise director with my little clipboard. There are certain, you know, roles that people fall into. So that was a route I was going to take or route, as you Americans say. Yeah, they both work. Yeah, it did what both work. Okay. So that was something I'd consider it.

I was going to go into therapy and then become like a drama therapy therapist. And I ended up going into theater school. That was a real shitty experience. It was just a program where it was like under. transition. So I was a theater major, like Bachelor of Fine Arts. So I call my Bachelor of Fuck All, but my BFA at a school where I'm a class of 16, which means you're supposed to come out with theater experience. And just the way it worked out, like, they did Romeo and Juliet. You'd think, yeah, I want to be Juliet. It's my middle name. I was Gregory. Okay. You know who Gregory is?

It made you play a dude. It made me play a dude. Yeah, with like three lines. Very transitive. Yeah. It's super ahead of the times. This is 9098, like way ahead. So I played a dude. My point is I got out of theater school. I was getting out of theater school and I was like, I did not get the experience that I needed. Meanwhile, I had a boyfriend at the time who had gotten into film and television. And he had an agent and he was on a TV show. And I was in Montreal and there was like the film industry that was booming, booming. And I basically went right into film and TV at a time when I guess like all my other friends were like struggling theater people.

And I was like, film and TV is where it's at. And I got a bunch of great credits. So I was like guest stars on a number of shows, and I was like, this is, this is what I want to do. And I loved it. Yeah. How did you, so you were able to just connect through his agent and get some opportunities and then kind of build that into some bigger stuff? Yeah.

Yeah, I got, I basically got with his agent and she sent me out for auditions. And I, it's, it being an Anglo-Saxon, I don't know, I guess I was, sorry, that's not that worded, angle phone, Anglophone, like an English-speaking person in a French city where the film industry is like just starting out. There wasn't many. I was a small, I was a big fish in a small pond versus going back to Vancouver, which is where I'm from, after theater school was over, I was now a way bigger pond.

And that was, that's when things were hard for me. And I was like getting little roles and doing beer commercials. And even when I was doing theater and during film and television, I mean, I wasn't, I was like, you know, on a vampire TV, like teen stuff, like the equivalent of Nickelodeon. It was called YTV up in Canada. So I was doing those things and it was fun,

but I was like, this isn't necessarily that meaningful to me. You're not changing the world. Not changing the world. No, not with this vampire teen soap stuff. Yeah. So then there was a big chunk of time. There was like a writer's strike. I believe it was like 2001 when I moved back to Vancouver.

All this stuff happened where I was like, this is not what I thought it was going to be. And that's when I, that was like made me ripe and ready for cult recruitment. So it just wasn't like, you know, it wasn't as fulfilling. And I also had a lot of friends who were quite successful in. film and television at the time and I saw their success. And I also saw them not even, like even when they were successful and they had lead roles and shows, which is sort of the goal, like at a lead in a show, they weren't necessarily happy. So that was something that was sort of in my awareness. What do you think was driving them not being happy? That they, it still wasn't

enough or they were working too much? I think, I mean, honestly, I think the film industry is kind of vacuous you know it's what vacuous like it's just not super it doesn't have a lot of depth i mean every now and then a show will come around that that you know has impact but most of the time it's it doesn't it i don't know like film and film and television i'd love and i'd almost after this whole story i'd almost like to get back to it because i want something simple you know what i mean but it's it's it's not as theater's exhilarated and it's exciting and it's live and you're on stage i see see Joey nodding in the corner. Yeah.

He knows. Quite literally. Yeah. Film and television is like, it's a lot of waiting around and you're in your trailer and it's kind of anticlimactic and it's a whole different skill set. And I think that when you're working 12 to 14 hour days on a show, even if you're the lead, it's a lot. It's not necessarily that glamorous or fun or unless you're working with incredible people

and it's like an indie shoot or something, then I miss it. Now I'm talking about it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no idea. It's funny how in the moment, you're like, God, this sucks.

And later you're like, damn, of them, we really, we had the life. Yeah. There's pros and cons. There's pros and cons. There's nothing like walking into your own trailer and, like, you know, like, oh, it's in my home for the next month or something. And then at the end of it, you're like, I need to get back to my space. Yeah, no, I will say, like, because they film a lot of stuff in Hoboken now, so we should

trail us all the time. I'll pass those things. I'm like, I don't think I'd want to spend, like, six hours every day in that thing waiting around. You know, even like when J-Lo was here, it's a regular fucking, I'm sure hers has like a couple nice things in there. Oh, yeah. You're still cramped in this little tube for a little bit, waiting around and going, all right, when's my scene? I don't know about that.

Especially if you're like just a day player. Do you know what a day player is? It's like Joey knows. It's just basically you're there for the day and you're a principal role and you've got a couple scenes or whatever. And you're not famous enough to get a trailer. So you basically have a room that's a bench that you could lie down on and like a little tiny toilet. But it's like a jail cell, right? So you don't want to stay in there.

So you end up like going to hang up by craft services. And, you know, it's... Yeah, I feel like I'd be hanging out with the crew. Just like shooting the shit or something. Totally. I'd go stir crazy in those places. Later I learned I'd bring my laptop and, like, get worked on. I'm not good at, like, just doing one thing.

So I'll use this time to, you know, return emails. So you go back to Vancouver at some point when the writer strike is going on. Were you still with the same guy or... The same? No, we broke up. He was, like, my first serious, like, we lived together, boyfriend, and we thought we were going to get married. And we thought we were going to get married. We should probably, like, not. We should probably take a little break. And then we'll get married. And then we both started dating other people. And we didn't, yeah, we didn't get married. No. And he's a great guy. We're still in touch. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just laughing at Sarmo's saying she's still in touch. She's still in touch with some interesting people. That's a little bit of a different story. No. This guy's scary. You weren't like 12, right?

No. I was 20, like 21, 22. I love how she said that was such a fucking straight face, too. She's like, yeah, I was 13, he was 21. I'm like, come again? Hold on. She's like, yeah, we're friends on Instagram. I'm like, I don't know if I would admit that.

She's great, though. Yeah, she's great. Thank you for hooking that one. Yeah, of course. She was a very, very fascinating conversation. And by the way, what you were saying about how that manipulation works, I can tell you both Joe and I were completely sold on that talking with her as far as like, oh, yeah, that marriage she was in and what that guy did to her makes all, especially considering

like her strengths and her flaws, like makes all the sense in the world, how that would have happened. She, I don't know if she told you how she, I guess she had seen the vow and one of the cult experts connected us and we just instantly got each other. Yes. We were instantly understood. And I feel like that's something that survivor is, even though she's. She wasn't in a traditional cult, a cult of one, same dynamics, same manipulation, same dangling of the, you know, the future faking and all the shit that Mr. Fox did.

Like, it's all this textbook patterns. And I get it. I don't judge her for it. I embrace her. And that's why we're good friends. Yeah. And I know that's great for her to have someone like you too who can relate and be a friend to her. Because when, when you hear like someone, for example, the phone calls that that you had recorded once you've,

once it was like, oh, wait a minute, you know, and I hear your tone of voice while you're still kind of like fighting with this, like, is this what I think it is or isn't it, you know? And then I go listen to her tone of voice when she was like on the run or going through it with Mr. Fox or con man husband and all that. It's the same octave.

Yeah. It's the same kind of like- A little different pitch. Yeah, it's, it is, but it's like, what comes across is like, oh, oh, these aren't, these aren't stupid. people or anything. These are people who are so deep in something that they can kind of see the light on the other side, but, you know, someone's got to give them a flashlight to get all the way

there. You know what I mean? It's a very, it's as like a viewer, it's a terrifying thing to feel. Because like, I know you. I know both of you now. I know how you talk. I know how you are. And I can only imagine like what that must have been like at the peak of it. Yeah, well, I could say now that my voice is a little bit more in my body versus like totally. disassociated but actually a lot of those conversations in the vow and please don't get me wrong the vow i'm so grateful for because it really did us a service whereas a lot of documentaries don't are a total disservice to the victims like Netflix and bad vegan with sarma which i know i've already covered the vow really showed you know what was beautiful about it at the beginning and what what pulled us in

and we can talk about that i'm just making out to circle back but just to say a lot of those phone calls they didn't there was no subtitle underneath about the timeline i was actually for some of them not all them fully out like i knew i was out but i they didn't know i was out so i was recording them lying to me right so i was like so what's happening what i mean don't be that real slow so keith is not having sex with anybody because i was told he was don't get me wrong i was terrified like my PTSD was through the roof i was not in a good place but i was i was i wasn't questioning they think I was questioning but I was out and I was getting proof of their lies so that's not that's not explicit in the vow but doesn't really matter like that's the only thing though that

kind of wasn't explained clearly well it's it's got to be scary though talking to people that you know are in that we're doing this thing that you know they were trying to appear as a friend to you when they were the farthest thing from it it's the ultimate break of trust huge betrayal huge betrayal And that wound's taken a long time to heal. Does it ever really heal? I don't know. I mean, I think it does. And then a new thing happens.

And I'm like, oh, yes, it wasn't healed. Yeah. And then I have to revisit and, you know, call my therapist or go for a long walk by the beach or have a hot bath or do the things that I know that I need to do to calm my nervous system because that's usually what flares up. Yeah, I'm going to stick a bookmark and some of that as it relates to your husband as well. Yes. want to go through like how that all happened and like we'll eventually get to where you guys are now but I would imagine that's you know you guys are like a resource to each other and it's also very cool by the way that you guys seem to have a great marriage and stayed together even through

all this stuff because that's not usually something that you see happen yeah most time especially if you meet in a cult without the cult framework it's sort of like what we're doing here right but luckily we had some value shared values outside of it and we also had a kid yeah so that that helped us to, I don't know how much you want to get into that now in the healing process. We can bookmark it. Yeah, we'll bookmark that. Come back for sure because there's a lot of ways we can go here. But I want to start with how you initially got pulled in by Mark Vesente, who he was.

And obviously, like he, as you said, he's the guy who ended up pulling you out as well. He has a really pretty amazing character arc that happened here. That was covered very well in the vow and everything. and certainly someone I feel for as well. But how did you know, Mark, in the first place? So I had seen, so back to my relationship history, I was with the guy that had acted with, and I moved back to Vancouver,

and then I started dating a guy who was a filmmaker, and we're also still in touch. Great guy. It's a through line. He and I, yeah, he was a filmmaker. I was an actor, you know, kind of classic pairing. And he had made a film that got, to a festival that was on a cruise.

So it was the spiritual cinema circle festival at sea. This festival no longer exists. Is that a carnival cruise? I think it was a Royal Caribbean. I don't remember. Yeah. It was fine. It was my first time on a cruise.

And my axe, who is David in my book because he doesn't like his real name to be used, which is totally fine, got invited to be, like, his film got chosen. And we were really excited because the Mark Vesente was the director. of what the bleep. So I had seen what the bleep do we know? You're 28? I'm what? You're 28? How old are you? You told you I'm 208? I don't know. Sorry, how old are you? 32. 32. Okay, so you're born, what were you born? 93. Okay, so what the bleep came out in like 2003, so you'd been 10. Right. So this, my point is, is that this was before your time. Yeah. Yeah, that was my point.

You probably missed what the bleep. What the bleep was like the hugest dock of the time. And it was before, you've heard of the secret. Yeah, that's, that's, That's like the book, The Secret, the Manifestation thing. Yeah, where you, like, you know, visualized. Before The Secret came What the Bleep. Oh, it was the same kind of subject matter. Same kind of subject matter. The Secret has some nexium vibes to it.

Oh, yeah. Oh, 100%. And a lot of... I see where this is going. Yeah, a lot of through lines to, like, other culty characters that I've, like, interviewed on our podcast, it's all full circle. But what the bleep was like, quantum physics meets spirituality. It's like there is a physics to how we can manifest things.

And, like, if you're looking at this water and you're projecting, love onto it and then you look at the molecules it looks different if you're projecting evil onto it and they show the science behind it and it was all very like woo-woo science but it was at the time groundbreaking and it was basically like you can create your own reality so that movie was amazing for me at the time i was i had started my spiritual journeys this is before an axiom so i was reading books like celestine prophecy also before your time artist's way this is not your audience the artist way i know that one yeah julie cameron yeah yeah I feel like we've talked about that before, right?

Maybe. It's a great book. It's a really good book. And I still recommend the book to this day because it's basically a 12-week program for people to tap into their creativity and you do things like take yourself on artist's dates and you journal in the morning. And that's a great way to open up your creative source. But these books kind of set me up for success with the cult because I was already in this

mindset of, remember this is early 2000s. So like setting intentions and manifesting and creating the life that I want. I went to this film festival, setting the intention, I'm gonna go find my purpose. This is, acting is not necessarily my full purpose. And I was going to meet a bunch of spiritual filmmakers, including Mark Vecente from What the Bleep. Oh, that's interesting.

So you were already, and you're really young at this point, too. You're not in acting that long. You already felt like it was some sort of a let down from what your expectations had been, I guess, kind of, due to some of the stuff we talked about earlier, the difference between theater and actually filming TV. Yeah. Going online without ExpressVPN is like leaving your laptop unattended in a coffee shop while you go to take a shit.

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Link in my description below. Get no frills delivered. Shop the same in-store prices online and enjoy unlimited delivery with PC Express Pass. Get your first year for $2.50 a month. Learn more at PCExpress. C.A. None of that stuff was filling my cup. And so I thought there was more to it. And really what I wanted to do is make films like with the bleep. Like when I saw that, I was like,

this movie shifted consciousness. Shifted consciousness. Yeah, that's what I thought. I mean, but people were saying. Yeah. What did you mean by that? Like, people had their consciousness about the, about reality and how they viewed reality and themselves in reality was shifting. Like shifting consciousness of the world through media. That's what I thought this movie did. And that's what I thought I wanted to do. Is it because of the way they made it or the message that was within it more? Was it just made beautifully that you're like, holy shit, like that was odd? I think it was both.

I think it was the message. And listen, both Mark and I will to this day also say, like, neither of us are fully on board with everything that's in the film. But at the time, at the time it was groundbreaking. And the time it was like, yes. And, you know, so when I got to the boat, I thought, like, maybe I'd, you know, see him in a panel or, like, you know, I'd cross paths with him, but our very first night at the film festival, they did a science seating. And it was like me and my boyfriend and Mark and his girlfriend. And I was like, you know, meant to be.

And we had an incredible, incredible conversation that night and just like changed the trajectory of my life from right there. Before I ask you about that conversation, because you mentioned there that this was like you were on your spiritual journey. You're trying to figure some things out about the world, find your purpose, stuff like that. did you have any type of growing up real religious background or not even religious background like some sort of like dogmar yeah thought about where it all came from yeah i so my dad was his parents were anglican and so and he kind of rebelled they were like they were aristocratic his grandparents were british lord and lady like friends of angie thatcher kind of thing yeah wow technically my dad is a lord and i am honorable yes the honorable sarah edmondson is what you can

call this i'm not going to call you that but that's great Good for you. Thank you. You should don't keep to call you that. I tried. Well, in next year I got to senior proctor. So it was the honorable senior proctor, Sarah Juliette, Shapiro Edmondson. So it was pretty impressive.

Yeah. I don't hold any of those titles anymore. Sarah Juliet, Sapiro Edmondson. Yeah. It's a long name. It sounds like a law firm. Especially with the Shapiro. Yeah.

So that's my mother's side. I have known probably about six lawyers off the top of my name. lawyers off the top of my head with the last name, Shapiro. I don't have it. Well, I do have some Shapiro lawyers in my family. Oh, that's funny. So Edmonds is my dad's side. Shapiro is my mom's side.

And my mom is, like, reform, non-practicing Jewish. Like, we celebrated Hanukkah. We celebrated Christmas. Oh, you got best of both worlds. Good for you. And my parents separated when I was two. Oh, they did? Yeah.

So that's another part of my psychology since because I know you like to discuss this. Yeah, it's kind of important. It's good important. It's good to know that they, and they were civil and now they're really good friends. But my whole life, I was like, I just want to get my parents back together. Not now, but like when I was young, I was like, let's just get my, like, if I had a wish, like a birthday wish or a candle, whatever, it was like, if I could just have my parents back together. And so I think that comes into play later when I'm going to get into the cult and, like, just wanting family and I was only child. My dad remarried and I ended up having a brother later.

So I totally have a half brother that's like my brother. But being it, I have all the trappings of an only child in terms of. of like being alone and wanting a sibling and wanting a best friend and wanting to fit in. I understand that. You're right? Yeah, are you also in the CHO? Yeah, okay.

So you get that. And then also was a nerd. Were you a nerd? No. You don't seem like you were a nerd. I wasn't, I mean, I did very well in school. But you were cool. I'm not smart.

No, I don't think I was any of the above. I think I was always just a little different than the others, whatever that was. But did it bother you? Sometimes. Yeah. eras it did other eras i think is i got older by college i embraced it in a lot of ways but it's kind of like sometimes you're the loneliest person in a crowded room you know what i mean yeah yeah

totally got that yeah still that way really still yeah yeah yeah i think i didn't find you 15 years ago yeah yeah yeah well scooped you up yeah i don't i don't think i don't think any as i was telling you off camera i think everyone is susceptible to coles and things like that, but also, I think in learning, like, it's something I've been fascinated with for a while, such that we look at things that are so obviously now, like a cult, like Scientology or Nexium or something like that, but I look at a lot of other things without naming names and go, that's a fucking cult, right? Like, I'm very, I keep a very hyper awareness of that because, like I said, I don't think,

I think the right circumstances at the wrong time in your life, you're going to be. start to believe something that, you know, 10 years later, you might be like, what the fuck? But at the time, sounds like the smartest thing ever. Yeah. Well, it's called in the cult space, they call it situational vulnerability. Oh, that's a great. I'm going to use that. Feel free.

Yeah. Because everyone goes through it, whether it's, you know, crossroads with career or a relationship or being in a new city, you're not vulnerable. You don't have a weakness as a person. You're just vulnerable because of the situation you're in. Maybe combined with some emotional stuff. Like, I certainly had emotional vulnerabilities, too. I just, I hate to use.

that word because it has a negative, like, oh, you're being vulnerable. Like, it's your vulnerability. It's your, like, it's your wound, you know, which is kind of true, but it's like the wound combined with the person coming in who wants to take advantage of it. So it's like a two-way. Yeah, how's that negative, though, to talk about that. Um, I think it's just a mis-like a way, the way that it gets used. Oh, like, like, the call, oh, you're just weak and vulnerable. Like, it's- Everybody has that. Yeah. I know that. I know that. I just feel like people who, who use it in a way of like, I don't she was you know she had low self-esteem like it is if that's the only reason it sounds like you

probably and i don't doubt it you know for what you've been involved with you've been judged so much also publicly yeah that you're you're very you have a high bar to recognize in that very quickly but i'll tell you like fuck the people that are doing they they don't they don't know and everyone everyone's vulnerable like in certain ways and and i think when people try to act like they're invulnerable that they're the most vulnerable people in the room yeah usually the most insecure broken people in the room no yep and also the people that i think are the most vulnerable or the people who think they aren't vulnerable to it because it's a blind spot and i think that could never happen to me exactly and that's where if i was trying to

you know take advantage of somebody i would find those people because they have their they're they're they don't they're not even willing to learn what the red flags are because they think they'd spot them that's right and you're right it is when you look at something like the vow or Scientology, it's so obvious. But it doesn't look like that at the beginning. It looks really good. You kind of have to be like. Yeah. Wait, what? You know, like literally. It's not, and I've seen it, like I said, with some of the Scientology people, including people who have come in here who weren't in Scientology, but have devoted decades, like Tony Ortega or Mark Bunker to investigating it. They're like, yo, we get how people get into this. They, like, they'll be

the first to tell you like there are some brilliant people yeah who are brilliant when they get pulled into it and it's just like that term so what was it situational situational vulnerability situational vulnerability and then it just slippery slope just keeps going and they start to accept things they wouldn't have accepted so yeah i get it but you were saying a few minutes ago before we got on that tangent that you wanted you had always dreamed to getting your parents back together yes because you know they separate when you were two you said yeah two and a half so you never so you never knew them together no in your life at all yeah so how would you try would you like try to like set up dinner dates for them when you were like eight like how would it was more of it was more of

wishing it was more of like fantasizing and and asking them you know and just hoping it wasn't like you know parent trap type of situation it was just a longing a yearning that i had uh i think this came under the under i was talking about feeling uh there was a tangent but i know it'll come back to me i don't remember what it was well you were saying you ended up having a half brother and but you always felt like an only child how much younger was your brother than you i was nine when he was born okay so there's a little gap there yeah but like were you closer with one of your parents than the other i mean i probably spent more time with my mom like i think that just the way the like division worked um and yeah my relationship with my mom and my dad are

very, are very different. So, yeah, I don't have a, I don't necessarily have a, like, closer to. I probably talk to my mother more than I talk to my dad. We're a little more enmeshed as the term. Right, right, right, right. I'm her only child, so it's, you know, we're close. For sure. Did she ever remarried to? No. She didn't. No. I would love for her to get remarried. I'm always on the lookout. If you know of any single, I'll let you know if we have one coming through. In the 70s in Canada, ideally. That's right. Mituakaku's not single, is he? I don't think so.

Yeah, we'll find out. She's a wonderful woman. She's very warm. Oh, no, we were talking about religion. Oh, I remember the tangent. Yeah, spirituality. Yeah, spirituality. So I think in many ways I loved that.

So I was going back and forth. I had two homes. I had Hanukkah and Christmas. People would, with people ask, I said, I was half and half. I said I'm half Christian, half Jewish. That's what I thought I was. There you go. But I didn't, like, spent a lot of time.

I didn't go to church. I, like, very rarely went to synagogue. I had a bat mitzvah, so technically I was like, you know, fully Jewish, but I wasn't like, I didn't keep kosher or anything like that. I think the good side of it is that I was very open to, like, I wasn't like in a specific dog, I'm not like, this is how to live life. But I think the downside of it is that I was wanting rules on how to live life in a way. You know, I felt a little bit like what is, I had a lot of existential, existential angst as a teenager.

And so when I finally got into Nexiam, it was like, here's the rulebook. You felt a little unsupervised. Yeah. God, you and Sarma were the same on that one. I know, yeah. I mean, I was supervised more so, although I did do acid at a very young age. Oh, you did she? Yeah, but this is, again, the 90s when it was, like I did that.

Is that the Christian side or the Jewish side? That was the confused side. Yeah, that's a good answer. But I was, I am and I've always been little. So even when I did anything, like even drinking and drugs later, I always like, I'll do a quarter of what everybody else is doing. So I never like went crazy with it. You took a bite. Yeah, I did like a half tab of acid.

Do you remember any of it then? Yeah, I do. Yeah. What was that like? It was great. I did a lot of mushrooms too in high school. That was really fun. And I still do mushrooms.

Mushrooms is the thing I still do. The microdosing stuff? Yeah, yeah. I did that yesterday. Oh, nice. It was lovely. Nice. You take good walk like down fifth average.

No, I went on the Highline. Highline's a great spot. I'm sure that would be awesome, microdosing. High line. High on the high line. Hi, Mom. Yeah, you're getting deep excited over here. But that's, like, been such a big part of my healing.

Like, microdosing is really good for me. It just, like, totally removes my anxiety, and I just feel present, and I'm in the moment. I'm not thinking about, like, all the things that caused me anxiety. Did you have a lot of anxiety growing up? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. What do you think initially caused that?

I think the divorce. Yeah. Yeah. I felt a lot of unease. I think we think about, like, a toddler, and I've seen my, now that I've two kids, like, seeing my kids at that age, like, your parents are everything to you. Your parents are just, like, your whole world. And I just can imagine the split and being, like, so, like, what's, like, everyone's got

different types of trauma. I think that was my initial trauma is having that split with my parents and trying to just make everything better again and trying to, I thought if they got back together, then things would be better. but you know they're not they were 26 when they got together they were so young like that was yeah but you don't understand any of that when you're nine or 10 you know i don't even know what that is did you ever i mean it sounds crazy but i'm sure there's a lot of people out there that can look back in the late like in their childhood was there a party that was like oh maybe it's my fault that

they're not together totally 100% yeah hear that all the time yeah absolutely in fact a lot of the work that i did in nexium like a lot was and i don't we can get to this but like we did this process It was called an EM, an exploration of meaning. So you'd bring a stimulus response, like I mentioned earlier. And a lot of those, the memories that were holding the meaning or the reaction in place came from my childhood. And thinking like, you know, if I had been different or, yeah, you just like at that age you think that you're the cause

because you're kind of, that's your little world. And, you know, if I could just be different or better. I think it made me into a good girl. Like I was very much other than the acid, but like I was a straight A student. I was like I was a, you know, I followed the roles. So you get on this cruise with Martin end up sitting next to Mark who makes this movie, this documentary that blows your mind. And he's already in nexium at that time, right?

Yeah, he'd already taken a 16 day training. And he, so he wasn't a coach yet or anything. What does that mean 16 day training? So the, so keep in mind, this was like executive success programs. we weren't even using the term nexium at that time that came later but we is that's the next name was the umbrella so i took he took executive success programs ESP call it there's a five day training and there's that's the first five days of a 16 day training and the idea was that was level one similar to the bridge in scientology right makes sense yeah if people could do the five day or

they could do the 16 day most people started with a five day and then finish the last 11 this what i did five day and then i did the last 11 later okay so he had just done the 16 day which is the foundation for the rest of the curriculum. And he thought it was great. He met me and David and was like, well, if you liked my film, you probably like this thing I just did. And we spent seven days together with him and his girlfriend and on the cruise. And I don't know if you, have you ever done a cruise? I was on a cruise that caught on fire one time. Oh, Jesus. Yeah, I've done a couple cruises from my grandparents. Interesting times. So you know that you like you are at sea and then you dock and you explore some land and then you go back to sea, right?

So when we were at sea, we were watching films and doing film festival things in the big screening room. And then when we were in land, we were exploring, like we were going to the Bahamas and I think St. Bart's, you know, which was exotic places. Exotic. It was exotic. The water was beautiful. We were, you know, with 300 like-minded filmmakers.

And it was like the time of my life. I was like, this is peak living. Yeah, you really can get close to people on those things. something that that seriously. Yeah, you are very close. Especially when you're in these exotic places or going somewhere cool. And if you're on it for a week or two weeks or I was on one for three weeks one time, like it becomes your world a little bit.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I felt there was another couple that were also there, who I'm still in touch with. They live in England. And so the six of us were kind of a little gang. And we didn't really talk to, like we were just like a little family. And we were talking about big things. And Mark didn't even tell me that much about it.

It was like, I knew there was a guy named Keith and he was a smart man and he was a chess player and a piano player and really smart and using his brain to create this humanitarian club is how it was pitched. I know it sounds funny now. It's funny now. It's funny. It's also funny that we were told he was celibate. Oh, you were told he was celibate. Get the fuck out of here. Yeah, we were told he was a celibate, renunciate.

You want renunciate is? No. He's somebody who's like so self-evalvaled, they don't need material items. Like he does, that's why he didn't have a car. He was a renunciate. He's a celibate, like a monk. A monk is a renunciate. If someone has to sell themselves as a celibate, they're fucking more than anybody.

Oh, I know. Right. Now we know. Yeah. Now we know. I mean, there's certain things I look back at and I'm like, no, don't believe that. No, that actually became into play around the time that we joined because they hadn't had that as part of the image. There was sort of like more, it was more, I've learned this later, that he was more open about his polyamorous lifestyle.

Yeah, I'd just say the least. Yeah, and then when people like myself and Mark came in, they were like, we need to change this. And they, they, like, purposely lied because they didn't think that we'd be able to, like, understand why that would be ethical, you know? So they decided to not disclose that to us. It was a whole strategy.

Yeah. So, yeah, he's a celibate doesn't need sex, so, you know. But Mark, I mean, obviously, you respected him as a filmmaker. And, you know, you had these, you kind of saw things you were looking for. through the art he made and everything, but would you say it was a pretty magnetic guy, too? Like you were drawn to him, not necessarily romantically. Yeah, no, no, I mean, I definitely looked up to him

and, you know, he put him on a bit of a pedestal and he, if anything, like we actually joked about it later in nexium, he was a little bit, even though we connected and obviously like I followed his lead, he was also a little bit standoffish in that kind of Hollywood filmmaker kind of too cool way. And that was one of the things that Nexium did with him has made him more warm and more approachable.

So even though he was, you know, I was drawn to him and his girlfriend, I was like, you know, we're best buds now, like BFS forever. I was also like, you know, the power differential was still there. Like he was the filmmaker and I'm an actress and, you know, I don't know, it was a bit of both. So that makes sense? It wasn't like super clear as to like, we're on the same playing field, I guess. Yeah, there's some, listen, I was never in it.

in it but I've talked to enough people there's some interesting dynamics yeah that have always been in play in that in that industry in particularly in the whole pecking order and stuff and we see it where it goes like really dark you know with like the Harvey Weinstein stuff but just in general on it day to day it's like um me you're you're you yeah you know what I mean oh the film industry is I mean in some ways it kind of has to be I don't know if you could have a set where like everyone's the same like there has to be somebody calling the shots but like if If someone's an asshole, it's going to affect everything and that trickles down and whatnot. But there has to be, like, you know, there has to be a president.

There has to be an AD. There has to be a director. There has to be someone. That's life. Yeah, it is life. But the way you treat people doesn't have to be reflective of you needing to be above them. Exactly. You know what I mean?

Like I, this will remain nameless, obviously, but I was talking with a friend of mine who, let's just say, is, like, directly connected in that industry. And, you know, you're asking them the question. Like, all right, who's great, who sucks, that kind of thing. And again, without name and names, it was so fascinating to hear people who were, you know, these megastars or whatever that are effectively like on the same levels and how opposite some of them are. Yeah. Like, and they all present kind of the same thing publicly. You wouldn't really be able to know.

But you're like, this person's amazing. Here's why. Here's how they treat people. Here's what they do. This person sucks. Here's why. And then you hear some of the stories. You're like, that's not real.

And they're like, 100%. They do that. And you're like, come on, man. But I guess, I don't know. Maybe some people get so big that, and, you know, their life is on camera. I'm talking about actors in particularly that they start to think they're like that thing, which also sounds like someone else I'm thinking of right now. But you know what I mean?

It's similar. It's similar. And also, like, you never really know what's going on in people's lives. Like one of the very first experiences I had on set around that time when I first started acting in the late 90s is I was Rose McGowan's Body Double. Oh, wow. Yeah. So we're the same height.

and weight. Can you pull up Rose McGowan real fast? I could see like... We're the same height weight. Her, she's more well-endowed than I am. But we're the same height and weight. And so I was her body double and I was her stand in. That's her now. But like look at her back then. Yeah, yeah. The fifth one right there, Dee. See her with the hair? Fifth and seventh. Let's see that one. Yeah. And then go two over. Perfect. Yeah. I can see why. Same kind of cut out. And she was lovely. And it was a very... film that she was in with Alan Alda and the highlight of my career is at one scene she wasn't ready and I got to read lines off camera with Alana Alda which was amazing.

That's pretty cool. Yeah, but she on set, I just will never forget this, is that she had the reputation of being a bit of a diva. Like we were, you know, shooting far away in the suburbs and she wanted a particular kind of latte and wanted to get the particular latte and everyone's like, oh my god, that's such a diva. And I remember her being like a little, like she was great with me, really taught me so much, like really took me under her wing, it was so kind. But she had this, you know, reputation on set.

And then I found out years later, after reading her book, which is amazing, by the way. And she was one of the first me-tours against Harvey Weinstein, right? And her depiction of how that happened is fucking horrific. And I have so much respect for her. But when I did the math, I was like, oh, that must have happened just before I met her. Wow. You know? And so that, you know, she was fucking raped by Harvey Weinstein in a hotel room when she's going up for a meeting that her agent set up.

in the it's just i mean that's a whole other tangent but my point is you never know what's going on for people for sure quick question on that though yeah do you not see some patterns in that too oh yeah no 100 it's very we don't put it in the same category as like the actual literal cults and stuff we see but how's he that much different no he's not and this is where i like our podcast a little bit culty when we've talked about stuff like this all the time because it's the same power dynamic 100% and he i mean we like the cult of hollywood is a whole other separate story like how these people have power and all these enablers in our in our space they call them flying monkeys flying monkeys from the wizard of us yeah so the the witch has the flying monkeys to do the dirty work

so the narcissist and the power position doesn't always do the all the things to set it up so they just sort of receive the benefits sure so wine scene also had like he had you know assistance bringing Rose down from the downstairs table where she's been waiting patiently to have lunch. Oh, he's just finishing a meeting why don't you come up to the foyer. She's with somebody. She's not like, I'm going to go to the hotel room

and get a job. She's like being led by an assistant who knows what's going to happen. Who knows what's going to happen? Very Epstein-like too. Yeah, yeah. And I know you probably know so much about that now. I saw your list of titles.

I was like, could we just talk about Epstein and aliens? Yeah, no, listen, we've done probably five, six episodes before. on Hepstein and you know that that is a case I've looked at since basically like the inception of it really blowing up and it it's one that you never get any less sick or desensitized to it yeah study in that one I'm sure and it just gets worse it gets worse and so Jilline Maxwell would also be an example of a flying monkey but also you know a co-conspirator and an enabler and all the things in a legal sense and actual physical sense so and Keith had those

too. Keith had a few Gillens around him. Well, let me ask you not specifically about the Keith ones. Let's stay with this other example for a minute because I'd love to know now you being outside it what your example was.

Because as you, I think we said this off camera, so I want to say this on camera too. You worked on the business side of Nexium and when they tried to pull you deep into the other side of it, that's when you went, no, holy shit. So one of the things that happened And when you and some other people bravely went and whistle blue this whole thing is you were falsely

titled in various publications as like, oh, an ex recruiter for sex, whatever, you know, comes clean about nexium when in reality you never did that. But what I want to ask you about is not even getting to the nexium ones who did, but like stay with Epstein for a second. Naki Len, some of the girls that he got to when they were six. 17, who he abused, and then who, informing that relationship of abuse, kept on, who then later, you know, in their young 20s, went in recruited girls for him. How do you, what do you make of that and how do you view that? It's so complicated.

Yes. For especially 16-year-olds who don't know much else, like I joined when I was 26, 2027. So I feel like I had a little bit more, a little bit more life experience. And I think that's ultimately what kept me out of the, you know, Keith's clutches. I kept him at bay in a way that I think, like, I wasn't looking for a father figure in the same way that some of the other women were. And that we can go into that as well. So I think when you join something like that at 16, you don't necessarily know how wrong that is. Like, it's just what becomes normal.

So I don't think it's, obviously, I don't think it's right. And, you know, people need to be held accountable. but I totally have, I don't know, I don't have the word for it. I understand how it happens. Yes. And I actually spoke to one of those women when I first got out. And I don't even know her name to keep, I can't, because this is seven years ago. But one of those women reached out to me and was trying to figure out how to, like, what should she do now?

Like, should she bust through it like I did and, like, just come out with it and, like, write a book and, you know, and bust through the shame? or should she like go into hiding because she wasn't sure and actually i've lost touch with her i don't know what she decided to do i think she went the other way and decided just to like rebuild her life and and not expose it because she was so ashamed so ashamed and i i think that's what keeps people quiet is that if they do wake up from something like this like i did then and and there were sex involved and they did bad things like why would you want to even talk about it right so i i have a lot of empathy i guess that's the word of empathy for that journey And like, nobody wanted, look, I didn't want this.

I didn't sign up for this. And I didn't sign up for Keith's initials on my body. They didn't sign up to be, you know, pimps for Jeffrey Epstein. They signed up for security and safety and whatever it was. They thought they were getting at the beginning. And that's the thing. It's always bait and switch, right? There's always like, I'm going to dangle this carrot, you know, for some of the actors

that join next time, or even Rose, here's your career. That's right. I'm going to give you your career and you're getting everything you want, but it also comes with this, but that it comes later. I think it also becomes a thing. I mean, it's easy to also like on a personal level just make fun of the shit out of like a Harvey Weinstein because he's such an ugly guy. And then we got all the other graphic details we never want from court and all that. But like the fact of the matter was he was a very powerful dude in filmmaking was responsible for financing a lot of great movies, you know, and was someone who had built an enormous career.

And what's so clear is that a huge part of it is he got off on that. And, like, he wanted, he loved using that bully pulpit to, I don't know if it's, like, so deep-rooted psychologically, like, get back at the girls that made fun of him when he was in sixth grade and was like, I don't know. I don't know. But, like, one can assume. Whatever it is, you know, he acted upon that in the worst of ways and then made people. no matter how successful they were or talented they were like a Rose McGowan or you've heard plenty of the other names as well who went on to have amazing careers like he made them feel like no matter how big they got they were still so far beneath him that you can never say anything I mean even that story what was it Brad Pitt was on to this because he was dating Gwyneth Paltrow and he years ago told Harvey he'd beat the shit out of him or something like that and then but here's the thing I don't know No, that was many years ago, right, Thief? Brad Pitt's later in one of my favorite movies of all time

and Glorious Bastards in 2009, which is financed by Harvey Weinstein, which shows you, like, all right, what's the dissonance there? Honestly, like, even though I'm saying this as I want to maybe act again, so maybe I shouldn't say it, but like, I just find Hollywood just gross. I find it just so disgusting and the fact that Harvey Weinstein was doing this for so many years and people knew and turned their own their cheek because everyone wants to work. But like, what are we working towards?

Like, you know what I mean? Like, ironically, I never did the LA thing. I probably would have had I not joined X-M that kind of like derailed me from it, but like- God, you might have been better off too. Maybe, I don't know. I don't know. Which is crazy.

Honestly, like, there were times when, when I actually went down in 97 with my girlfriend, Victoria, and we like literally handed off our resumes at Miramax. Like we dropped it on the counter thinking that was gonna me like our big thing went to sky bar some guy invites us up to his hotel room because he's doing a movie Leonardo DiCaprio and like they need an actor for their waitress and I was smart enough to go no that's that's not true right like but I would I also knew that if like Leonardo decaprio was there and you know I don't know what I'd be able like I knew that I wasn't strong enough

in myself to navigate Hollywood so I avoided it and that was the age of 19 so I at least I had some self-awareness that that I was like you know I didn't I didn't want to do that so yeah I joined a call instead yeah I think also with with that was good I was like you just tossed that one in I think also though like you're saying it's like Hollywood no matter how big they get literally maybe unless you're Leonardo DiCaprio yeah like they all have to try out for roles yeah Right. So you have to get selected by a group of people. It's not like what the internet era has become, which is just like, guy like me can be in his parents' house and like if enough people click it, we're in business, right? They still to this day have to go through middlemen and checks and balances. So a part of, you know, maybe the quote unquote quote of silence in there and the underbelly that is the negative part of it literally forms out of people, as you said, trying to just protect their career. But it's like. For what? For what? Yeah.

Like, what are we doing this for? Yeah. Have you watched the studio with Seth Rogen? I haven't. I heard good things. It's great. It's really good. Does it kind of show this dynamic?

Yeah, just, well, all of it. And it just also makes me, like, it's so good, but it's also very anxiety-inducing, because it's just so stressful. Like, just the whole world is, is, the world of Hollywood is just so, even just, like, how one gets a job is so random. You know, like, oh, you look a little bit like my ex-wife. ex-wife therefore you're not going to get the job so you know why do how do you get work which is actually one of the reasons why i love nexium so much is because the acting was so nebulous there was no path to success that was specific like oh i do this workshop and then i sleep on this cast

casting couch and then i'm going to get the job or vice which by the way i've never done but i know people who've done that you know um the stright path in nexium the martial arts system of ranking which we we haven't talked about, we can, was like, oh, if I do this and then this and then this, I can get this, and then I'm growing. It's a clear, you have an out one, you have a goal set, you have a, you have steps that you see you can take, whereas in Hollywood, it's thrown darts at the board like a monkey. It's like, yeah, let's see where it lands. Exactly.

I understand that. So. Can we pause actually right there? Because I have to use the bathroom. Of course. We'll be right back. Okay. All right, everybody.

We are back. So we were just talking about the, how they were clear goal. like laid out in the program for for nexium and so you'd also mention you're spending this whole week on the cruise with mark vicente he's like kind of telling you how he just did these 16 days which is like the initial training or whatever with with nexium and obviously like you're drawn to him through his filmmaking success so you're like oh maybe this is interesting for me too so how soon after that cruise, did you, like, act on that and go to, I guess, like, Albany and do this thing? So, ironically, there was a school at the time in Tacoma, Washington, which is not far from Vancouver.

And some of those... Anexium school. Yeah. And some of those people had planned to come up to Vancouver and do the first Canadian intensive. And that was, like, I want to say, a month or two, like very soon after the cruise. So Mark told me about it. And I think that had this other woman whose name Suzanne wasn't also on the... cruise. She was there to recruit, and she's the one who, like, got me to fill out the paperwork.

She was, like, as soon as I said, oh, yeah, I want to do that. She was, like, chasing me around the cruise, getting me to get the 48-hour discount, which, by the way, it was my first red flag that I didn't understand when I was like. Forty-eight-hour discount. Yeah, there was a 40- so it was like. Billy Mays here for Nexium. Buy now. And you think of four. Yeah, it was 26. It was like $2,700. But if you sign up now, it was like $2,700. And like, oh, that's like, that's like, it was $2, $2,600. It was like, It's a lot of money. It was a lot of money.

Fuck that. I don't know what I was thinking. And then my rent at the time was $400. Oh, come on. Totally could not afford it. Yeah, where'd you get the money? My credit card. Oh, yeah.

Magic plastic. Yeah, yeah. Right. So I actually put down the $500 deposit to secure the 48-hour discount, which, again, this is my first. People say, like, what was your first red flag? It was like, right then when they were pressuring me,

and it wasn't even Mark, it was Suzanne, to get the discount. And I should have been like, well, if it's so great, It'll be there when I'm ready and when I can afford it. Who was Suzanne again? Was that his girlfriend? No. Suzanne was this happened to be this other person from Nexium who was specifically on the boat to recruit. Got it.

And so she signed me up. That later became, I've never talked about this publicly, I don't think, a thing because she's the one who got me to sign up. But I signed up really because I mark. And later, I didn't know this at the time, but it's like with MLMs, there's like, who do you bring in? Suzanne tried to claim me as her own. And I was like, no, I don't, I don't even like you.

I'm here because I'm Mark. And so they, I'm Team Mark. They had to move me in the lineage and it was a whole thing. Oh, wow. Yeah. And I later had similar situations where I was like, a red flag, by the way. A huge red flag. Like, I belong to somebody, you know, like, I'm, you're my sponsor.

Well, that's where they start. Yeah. You see where that ends up. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Master Slave. Makes sense.

Mm-hmm. Little clues. Little clues. So Suzanne got me to sign up and then I put my deposit down and actually very soon afterwards. Well, first of all, I was excited at first to, like, do this training. And then I got home and the, you know, the euphoria of the crews sort of wore off. And I was like, wait, I'm spending how much on a training that, you know, I can't afford this. And I called what turned out to be like the person above Mark, who is his field trainer, which is basically the person

in charge of sales. And I was like, I can't, I can't do this. Like, I'm waiting, you know, I've got to be available for my agent to call and I'm like an actor and, you know, all these. And she gave me, she basically gas lit me, which I didn't know at the time, and also double bound me, which basically she said, yeah, I'll explain that. She's like, wait, you're how old and you don't have the money? I'm like, I'm about to turn 27. She's like, and you can't afford to spend a few thousand dollars on your success and your growth. Like, when's that going to change? You know.

That's kind of genius. Yeah. Yeah, and it's true. Like, I was like, yeah, I want to change that. I want to make more money. I'm like, well, this is, I'll pay double. Yeah, priceless. And other things like, you know, with the agent thing, she's like, so you're just going to

wait for your agent to call you? Or when do you want to be the master of your own ship? But that was the exact word she used, master of your own ship. And I was like, I want to be the master of my own ship. So I ended up going. And that's like, so I tried to get out of it. Also it was non-refundable deposit. And that's where sunk cost fallacy starts to play in.

I have paid me. keep money after bed yeah i'm like it's i put my money now might as well try it and then the the first training was a few weeks later it's only nine of us it was my my boyfriend myself and seven other people and um yeah how much you i don't know how much you want to know about yeah what happens at the training what's it like where you said it was out locally by you it was in a holiday inn in a in a suburb of called verneby near vancouver like the most unimpressive holiday inn you've ever seen this back when they were having the commercials like i slept in a holiday and express last night. I don't remember, but possibly, but I remember walking in and there was like a really

cheap sort of continental breakfast from the equivalent of like a Panera, like Panera sandwiches and like some eggs. And I was just like, where am I? And the facilitators were wearing terrible like power suits. And I was just like, I'm not. And like I actually didn't. I was imagining like a Tony Robbins like a hundred, two thousand people. I don't know what I was picturing. It was not picturing nine people in a small training room of the holiday. And it was very underwhelming. Humble beginnings. Humble beginnings, yeah.

But the coaches were nice. And, you know, Mark had said, like, it's going to be weird. It's going to be weird at first. Like, ride it out. Trust me, just wait until day three. And then, like, it's going to be fine. And there was so many red flags. Like what?

Besides the continental breakfast and Holiday Inn. my favorite I didn't make this up but I saw a meme once I said I saw the red flags I just thought I was going to a carnival have you heard that before so like these are the things I saw

they and this is quite brilliant I think that Keith knew I think Keith knew I don't know what specifically he studied every time I interview somebody now on our podcast but other cults I'm like oh for sure he studied that like you know Scientology and various yoga disciplines and

religion in general and like the Mormon church and like all these different things that we've studied since. I was like, oh, Keith took that from that and that from that. And one of the things he was very good at was just normalizing weird shit. And that's from the beginning, Nancy, who's seen from the vow in her power suit and her terrible eyebrows and her perm and the video. Yeah, she was given red flags. I know. She was given red flags. She just seemed like a bitch. Sorry. I mean, A little bit. You said it, not me. And I still, but I still have this like, because, like, there was a time in the middle

there where I called her like my bonus mom. Oh. You know, like, we got close. And then now, like, so I felt that way at the beginning. And then we got close and I had her on a pedestal. And now, like, she never even, like, called me when I left. You know what I mean? So, like, I have a lot of feelings towards her and we can get into that.

But my first instinct was like, who's this woman? And she wasn't even there. It was her on a video. Right. So, yeah, because she's, so it's her in a video being like, hi, I'm Nancy Salzman. Welcome to you. I know.

I've taken me there. Don't do that. Right? And I've seen that video so many times since, so I know it so well. And her whole thing is like, you know, we're here to grow. And wouldn't you agree that all successful people know their areas of limitations? She is like when you watch her speak, like not even on the video ones, but when you would just see her speaking like in the videos on on the Val where it's just all you guys like in the room and she's just talking with you.

she's like a like a kind of bad actress in a dystopian movie like where they're like we're here to take care of you today you're gonna enjoy this like she literally talked like that that was one of mine where i'm like and if anyone ever said like i find nancy to be too expressive and it weirds me out which people said including mark in his first five day they would say well that's because you have issues with expression because she's so expressive that anyone who doesn't like her level expression aren't good at expressing themselves. So it's like your own projected lack of expression comes to the surface when you see Nancy expressing. It's always, it was go back to you. If you're like, I don't like this. It feels inauthentic. That's because you don't express authentically,

Julian. So it was always, you know, so anyway, I'm watching Nancy. She's saying all successful people know their limitations. Can we agree? Yeah, we agree. Oh, she's saying that on the video to no one listening in particular. Can we agree? Wait, five seconds. Yes. Yes. Yes, we all agree. All successful people know their limitations. We're here to grow. You paid good money. Wouldn't you agree that when you hit up against limitations, it's uncomfortable?

Yes. So you're setting people up to say, if I'm feeling uncomfortable, it's because I'm hitting up against a limitation, not because this is weird. I want to get the fuck out. So they're setting up that you are going to go through this class and feel uncomfortable. And the facilitators all back this up. And I was trained to do it later.

you're going to have the urge to leave you're going to have the urge to eat to smoke to flirt all the things we do when we're uncomfortable i don't know if you've done any therapy but this is true when you're in therapy it really fucking hurts and it's uncomfortable and it's vulnerable so mixing truth right mixing true things like therapy and self-reflection is uncomfortable with the fact that we're now seeing things that are problematic, but now I can't say, oh, this is uncomfortable because it's my internal system saying I should leave. I'm already agreeing that if I see something that's uncomfortable is because there's something for me to look at. For example, first red flag, the sashes. Yeah. Martial arts. My kids are in jiu-jitsu. They've done taekwondo. Like, there's a series, there's a reason why there's a, you start as a white, and you work your way up to a yellow, and then you go to orange, and then you're great. There's, like, a whole system that's really wonderful.

If nexium was what it was supposed to be, it would have been great. A martial art system of personal growth. Like... The sash just for people out there, something we would wear, like, around here? It was, yeah, it was like this two-inch thick, like went all the way down near waist, yellow. I mean, it starts white, yellow, orange sash. And you'd have to do certain things to get to the next level. So I had to work...

And you thought it was, like, weird at the beginning, but you're like, whatever. Yeah, I'm like, okay. And then they'd say, like, if you feel weird about wearing, about, like, wearing a piece of fabric around your neck, then probably means that you have some issues either with authority or measurement or ranking and there's something to look at. And which is kind of true. Like I already told you about my measurement stuff. And also what I didn't mention is that like I was the kind of girl who like just wanted to be good at everything. And if swim classes, you know, you start at silver and then you go to maroon or whatever the fuck, I don't remember what they were.

I was never good at that. So I'm like, oh, this is true. I'm not, I'm, I quit when things get hard. and so this is the reason I don't I don't want to wear a white sash I want to wear the green sash I want to be the best actually so I was already like uncomfortable but also kind of hooked in all of their messaging whether it be the sashes or the prepping you for when you get uncomfortable you're going to be tempted to do X Y and Z it's basically taking logical thoughts that they know you're going to have turn like catching it before it's even thrown turning it back on you and saying yo that's actually your problem yeah that you're thinking so it's making you uncomfortable with having a normal thought to make that thought seem completely unnormal or that idea seem not normal. Yeah, exactly. So fucked up. So fucked up. And, you know, brilliant in the sociopathic way.

Yes. Or like, it's textbook sociopath. Textbook. And we're going to call this guy Keith Rennary who created this, who's not in the room. By the way, we're going to thank him before every class. Thank you. Vanguard. Wait, we're calling him Vanguard.

Oh, it just means leader of a philosophical movement. It's not a big deal. right blanks are fine yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah Vanguard okay found out that he came up with that from a video game years later by the way didn't know that the time yeah so I before I could even because we were encouraged to express our concerns but before I could even raise my hand but I feel comfortable at this somebody else does and it's like and we've already learned the term suppressive which is like if you have a negative thought about somebody's

success for example that's suppressive like I want to to lower you. Like we're pot, let's say we're podcasters and I feel jealous of your podcasting success and I want you to fail. That's a suppressive thought. I don't feel that way, by the way. I want you to succeed, which is humanitarian and tribute to you. And that's a positive thing. But if I had any negative feelings toward you, that be suppressive. But they're calling normal feelings that aren't like suppressive, suppressive so that you don't have, so you feel bad about them and don't have them. Yeah. So I'm about to say I don't feel comfortable calling this guy I've never met vanguard and paying tribute to him and never met him, somebody else says at first. I'm like,

well, you may have some suppressive tendencies. I'm like, shit, I better not say that. So I'm just, I'm a good girl. I want to get the gold star. I want to go up the path, you know, I mean, not at the beginning. The first few days, I was like, this is so fucking weird. Also, my parents are therapists. So, like, I've already, I had a bit of a know-it-all thing. Like, I already know all this. This is really for my boyfriend who needs to work on himself. I had a little bit of that going on. But at the same time, I wanted to do this curriculum so I could work with Mark. I had a lot of things going on at the same time. But my first, my first day was very, very uncomfortable. And that's actually when I went home and Googled and saw some stuff.

It wasn't nearly, of course, what it is now. But there was like a Forbes article about Nexium being. Oh, that was like the initial thing. That was the initial bad one. Like 03 or something like that. Yeah. But the accusations about what they were doing wasn't very clear. It's like they wear sashes and they go for long walks in the neighborhood at night and it wasn't like you know sex trafficking and coercion and like all the things we know now it was people just thought it was weird right so that so that was something that like when i called mark after day one like what the fuck did you get me into and he was like well you know we're we're doing these things in the world and people are going to push back what's so funny it's all the part of the plane yeah yeah it's very

joker vibes totally yeah 100 percent and I'm just like, ugh. And he's like, just wait till day three. You can't get your money back. Wait till the three. He's like, I... You can't get your money back. Yeah. There it is again. Okay, my money back. And one of the things he did with me that I later learned to do, and this is in all sales. It's called feel felt found. Do you know this? Feel felt found. Yeah. Like, give me a limitation as to why you can't take this program. Like, pretend I'm trying to recruit you. Tell me one thing. You can't. What would stop you?

If I invited you to do next year, what would you say you can't, like, why wouldn't you do it? It sounds a little retarded. Okay. I know how you feel, Julian. I felt the same way. When I heard about nexium, I thought it was so retarded and so dumb. We're going to get shit for using that word, but it's okay. I mean, this is the appropriate use of that word in this context. Okay. I know how you feel. I felt the same way. But what I found was when I took the curriculum, when I took, Marka, shit. When I took the curriculum, it was like, even though it looked retarded on the inside, it was actually really helpful in my life. That's feel found. Okay. Yeah. So I'm trying to give an example that'd be more helpful. No, I see it. You see it.

You get it. You get it. Yeah. Like I get you. Listen, I don't accept what you just said, but I accept what you just said, here's why I think it's wrong respectfully. Bingo. Okay. Yeah.

If I said like I don't want to get into YouTube because it's too expensive, you can say, I get it. I felt that way too. But what I found was... It is. You're right. Keep that thought. I thought, so anything, I forgot that what were we talking about? Feel felt found.

Oh, yeah. So he feel, he felt founded me. And he's like, yeah, like, I got, I felt that way too. It's so weird. And by day three, I think that you're going to have some big chefs and you'll enjoy it. And he was right. By day three. What happened?

I mean, imagine doing, sorry, this is a bit personal, but have you ever done any therapy or any, like, yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, you know, you usually do like an hour of therapy. I was basically doing 10 hours of therapy for five days. So by day three, 30 hours in, I was unraveling stuff that I wanted to work on. I was there for very specific goals. I got some clarity on, you know, things I was struggling with,

specifically my self-esteem, my relationship to money, my relationship to my boyfriend at the time. How did you get clarity on those things? So the way that the five-day is set up is like a group setting. So there's usually four or five people in a group. Remember, there's only nine people in this group. So it was like two groups. or three...

It's intimate, though. It's very intimate. And there'd be a coach leading a discussion, and you'd be talking about concepts like the first class. I used to have this whole thing memorized, but I've had to kind of block it out. But honesty and disclosure and what is honesty

and what is integrity? And you're basically redefining keywords. Like we all use good, bad value, self-esteem. And in those discussions, the idea was that you... This is what we thought we were doing. You'd be, like, looking at your foundational belief system about certain topics and in those discussions you'd have the awareness of like what was inconsistent um for example money like a lot of people have money issues like and usually it's because one

parent teaches you know you have to be have money to be successful maybe another parent teaches money is the root of all evil right that is what would cause in nexium terms a disintegration in your belief system that's interesting and this is kind of you know this could be solved with therapy, basic cognitive behavioral therapy or, you know, talk therapy or somatic different modalities that exist, like legit therapies. Put their role playing it within their whole thing to make you feel like you're finding something and maybe you actually are, by the way. I think I was.

And what I've since learned is that this is not something that Keith created. He stole from legitimate modalities and packaged it in such a way that I'm going through really, really fast therapy and having huge awarenesses and aha. about my life and how I communicate and how I feel about myself and why I've you know for example and acting why I had suppressive thoughts about people who were more successful than me like that's something if that was true needed to be like evolved because that's not good for me to feel that way you want to be happy for people right right so um and just a lot of things about just my life in general I was a lot of anxiety as I said I was addicted to

sleeping pills I forgot to mention that oh you were yeah couldn't already yeah yeah yeah What kind of pills? Are those little blue ones? They steal them from my mother. Zopaclone, I think they're called. Topiclone? I don't know what they're called here. Not clonopin.

Are they blue and oval shaped? I mean, I don't fucking know. I never took one. Zopaclone? Zopaclone. Clonopin's in that family, or did I make that up, thief? They sound similar. I dated a girl who's into clonipin.

What was that? Sorry. Pompins are more like a Xanax. Yeah. Beaches help me sleep. They help you sleep, though. Yeah, I never had a prescription. I just took them from my mother.

but that sounds healthy yeah it's great so that was one of the first things that would be an easy thing to not gaslight you on by the way oh yeah well it's like oh my god sarah you're you're abusing drugs that aren't yours and they're not lying no very true it's it's it's real and then it was the thing that i use as my testimony because all good cults have some testimonials on the aftermath because now after my five day and i've worked through a bunch of stuff i'm sleeping better because i'm not anxious all the time so now i'm like i'm sarah edmondson and i'm an actresses and I got off sleeping pills thanks to this program. And that's, I mean, cut to 12 years later,

I became the poster child for Nexium because I went from like living in a basement suite to owning my own condo in Olympic Village, which is like this beautiful part of Vancouver that like, you know, I was living the dream. And I'm jumping like many years and we can talk about everything in between, but like that's how it worked.

Somebody like me would have a big shift and they'd propel me to like grow and then they'd use me as bait for other people when this was sold to you though on the cruise and you initially put the down payment in before you even go to this event this is where I'm like a little hazy on how this all works is it sold as well obviously it's sold as a self-improvement thing check there we know that but then is it also sold as this can be a career for no not there okay so it's not there no no no Now when you're at this event and you start going through these days and having these enlightening openings, so they start kind of tossing out that card a little bit.

Like, hey, by the way, if you join us all the way, whatever that is after this, I'm not sure how that works, you know, you could actually become a part of the organization. You can become a coach. And the five days, I think the last module is called mission. Like what's the mission of this organization? Have you heard that Margaret Meade quote of there's no, oh, I'm going to screw it up. There's no doubt that a thought, I used to say this all the time, you can look it up. Margaret Mead, there's no doubt that a group, a group of thoughtful citizens can change the world.

Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has or something like that. Like, that we are going to, basically the message is we are going to change the world. There it is. Yeah, the most popular Margaret Mead quote about citizens. Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. And Nancy would say that as she was crying. Oh, she would make herself crying.

in the video and then one eye yeah i don't remember but i got emotional i mean i cry at like long distance phone ads yeah but you're a real person yeah i'm not yes you no she's a robot long distance right you know talking about like i'm that's me um so i'm like yeah i think being an actress was was was a good call in a lot of ways i'm gonna go back too you can pull it i you know what that was actually something that was never great at to be honest yeah i i i'm i was good at doing it in real life like it way i can see someone getting married i don't know and i'm like in tears but to pull it up is harder for me but i you know it could be done did you do like method acting or anything i dabbled with it you dabbled yeah strasberg or strasberg or daniel de louis uh probably more

strasberg yeah yeah that's some real shit yeah it's some real shit i dabbled um it's more in that's in indie films not so much in my hallmark era but that's i did both hallmark yeah hallmark like saving Hallmark pays. Hallmark pays. I'm so grateful for my homemark career. And that's what I did after next time, but I'll tell you that later. Okay. Where was it?

So you do this day. They have the mission at the end. Salzburgers cry. Salzman's crying at the end. Strasberg is crying. Yeah. You know I asked one eye because I want to know if there was some Vicks involved or something like that. You know what?

She was really good at turning it on and turning it off. And that she, I mean, she was the ultimate actress and I've seen her and I've seen her and action. Like, she could, and you can see it in the Vow season two. I know you didn't get to, but she- I haven't seen season two now. Definitely check that out. There's some waterworks in there that people are like, oh, but she's crying. I'm like, she's definitely crying. I just don't know what she's crying about. Like, is she remorseful or is she sad for herself because she's going to jail? She was a registered, before doing this, a registered nurse who had a specialty in hypnotism or something like that. Yeah, I mean, here's the thing. It's always what I was told. And then I don't actually

know for sure. What we were told is that she trained with Bandler and Grindler, who are the fathers of NLP, neuro-linguistic programming, and that she trained with them in Ericksonian hypnosis, which are like standard kind of therapeutic models, but they're tools that are a bit like pseudosciencey and, you know, even in the therapy world, people are not in agreement about whether they're legitimate or not. But I think both of those things can be used in the right hands can be very useful and can help people, but if they're in the wrong hands, could be quite detrimental. in the wrong hands here she's she's on the mission day getting emotional yes and my boyfriend at the time had actually signed up for the whole 16 day i had signed up for the five day so oh you had the

option yes and he was like i'm going to do the whole thing and i was like i'm going to see how it goes and so he was going to continue and i was like well i better continue because i had a bit of foam out like what's if i had such a good time in my five day and like what the last 11 day is going to be like i'd better do it too and because technically i had enrolled first and then i had enrolled him not only at the end of our five day we had a white sash right so everyone would get a little red stripe for completing the five days but i got two red stripes because i had already enrolled somebody enrolled is the next team term for recruited which is also synonymous with building humanity oh so i was a nice term yeah so i was building humanity by bringing in my boyfriend

and i'd already was the whole time in my five is like oh my mom will love this and my friend nicky would really i like was writing a list of all my friends that i thought would get this is by day five So keep in mind, first three days really skeptical, you know, bit wary. By day three, I was like, this is great. By day five. I'm like, I'm going to bring this to Canada. Breakthrough, kind of. Yeah.

Yeah. And then I did. You brought it to Canada. It hadn't really been in Canada. Well, this was the first one in Canada thanks to the people in Tacoma. Like, I didn't bring it to Canada, but I opened the first center in Canada and, like, made it thrive there because of all my friends in the film industry and blah, blah. Let's take a, let's get to the 30,000 foot view in the air to provide full content. for people this has been great so the people who aren't familiar with this listening right now

of which there are many you know you're you're given a great outline of you and your background and how you ended up at this moment to potentially even go to this thing and do this and get into this and people obviously know it all went south but we keep talking about the nancy's and particularly we keep talking about keith reneery and obviously people already have an idea that this guy's a complete sociopath and was the head of this thing and you know did all this stuff but let's talk about like who he was where he came from his full background to get a picture into it because like i was saying earlier when you watch him on video in the documented stuff of course now he looks crazy and all that and that's what i think but you know

this isn't a guy who's like he's not a he's not a 12 out of 10 you know what i mean he's not this unbelievable good looking guy or anything like that. But he has this odd magnetic, no pun intended, but maybe hypnotic kind of charm to him and a way of making it feel like everything is about you and really it's all about him. You know, so who, where did it come from? Who was he? So there's a lot of like lore around Keith Rennary and there's like what we were told and then there's what it actually was. So do I'm going to start with what we thought he was and then

go to... That's good. Let's start with what he thought he was and then we'll get to his actual life story. Okay. So when I was introduced to the vanguard, he was the creator of this philosophical movement, Nexium, which taught programs like executive training. He was using his 240 IQ after being a double grad at polytechnical whatever the fuck institute, RPI in upstate New York. And he was using his brilliant brain to create a modality that would help people to evolve all their limitations and find joy and then if we reach the world leaders then then we'd have peace essentially that was that was the mission like if we could reach the right people we wouldn't bomb each other because we would be integrated and happy and ethical and we have no need to like you know

take each other's shovel from the sandpit of the almost like a religion says yeah exactly but we weren't a religion because we wanted to which was also his downfall because then he would have been protected like Scientology right so he didn't want to have a religion he wanted something that you know, Jews and Christians and Muslims could come together. We could all agree upon and have the same understanding of what good and bad is and have dialogue and it was going to be the thing that brought world peace. I mean, the most bullshit altruistic mission that ever existed, but assuming that it was true, it would have been great. It wasn't true, obviously. We were told he was a judo champ, chess player, concert pianist, so many things. He was just this Renaissance man.

Basically, he's a savant. Yeah, he's a savant. Yeah. And anytime people felt weird around him, which I always did, it was like, well, it's because he's, you know, he's Keith, he's a vanguard, he's, you know, he's, he can trigger people's insecurities. I actually thought that the reason I didn't want to spend time with him is because I wasn't smart enough or depthy enough.

And that was something that I would get feedback on. Like, I'm too materialistic and he's so depthy that sometimes if you connect with him, like it's, it, I didn't feel secure enough. So that was what I thought about my mind. myself. And also that we'd been told that we can't, we shouldn't bring anything to him for, you know, advice if we could ask somebody else because his time is so precious is worth millions of dollars per hour. So we, if he, it was like, I think it was like $25,000 an hour is his coaching time. Like, that's what he's worth. So I'm not going to ask him about, you know,

whatever I was struggling with if I could ask my coach. But I think intuitively, I just didn't like him. You know, I didn't, I felt uncomfortable around him. And I think... Even at the beginning. I respected him, but I didn't want to, like, pursue him to spend time with him. Like, a lot of people would be, like, I want to get his time and, like, talk to him about whatever it is they were working on. And I just didn't do that for whatever reason. But I think it's that.

I think it's just, like, somewhere intuitively, I was like, that's not... It's going to keep him over there. Safe to say, though, at the time outside of little details in, like, that O3 Forbes article that you had Googled, it's not like the guy had a Wikipedia page... No. with all of his escapades and life story and whatever. You didn't have all that. But now that we do know...

What do we do know about him? Yes. Can you go through that? So what we know now, and I'm going to butcher this, because this is what I've been told, I didn't know him in this time. But what I've been told from other people who've been, you know, that were close to him during this time is that he was not very smart. He was on probation or whatever at RPI.

and with 2.6 or something, like a low GPA, and was using his, okay, let me back up for a second. He had a low GPA, but was like high on the charts of like certain IQ testing and had been since he was little. And that went to it. This is what we were told by somebody who knew him his whole life, that he got some testing when he was little and that went to his head that he was like better than everybody else

and had been kind of manipulating people around him and especially women since he was like 12. Who's another Brooklyn guy too, right? Was it Brooklyn? I think he was Albany. I think he grew up in Albany. Can we Google that? Yeah.

Where he was, where he was born and grew up? Could have sworn, I mean, I think he would know better than me, but born in Brooklyn. Born in Brooklyn, but was he raised in Albany? That's important. What do we got? He moved to Suffren when he was five. Okay. So, yeah, so he's raised in upstate New York.

Safran's in Upstate? Oh, I assume so. It gets like right over the border. Okay. I never even heard of that. Yeah. Got it. And we'd heard that he, that his father, we knew someone who knew his father who said that at the age of 12, he was like telling multiple women that like they were the one and they were despite.

Like he was manipulating multiple women at the same time from a very young age. And this continued into his 20s and he had multiple businesses. One of them was called CBI, Consumers Byline International. Didn't he start at like Amway or something? He did some Amway Twainting is where he started. And CBI was definitely, he was an MLM as well. And this was before Costco and Sam's Club were really big. And that took off and apparently, like, when I was in it and we were told what happened is that this CBI was such a threat to things like Costco and Sam's Club that they went after him to shut it down because, you know, his threat.

So it's a similar business? It was like wholesale food and wholesale vitamins, products, different things. But in a pyramid scheme, like a pyramid and, and he, he, I'm going to butcher the details of this, but he, I basically, they paid a bunch of fees and he was told he could never, he could never start a pyramid, you know, an MLM ever again, which he didn't. That's why he's not on any of the paperwork of all the ESP, that's why he's the philosophical founder. He's not the president. Nancy's the president. So basically he did it again. Interesante.

But had Nancy be the president. Now, what, let's start with this. What do we know about prior to nexium his personal, actual partner relationships? From what we know, he was, I guess, the term would be polyamorous. Like he had multiple partners and some of the women knew about the other women and they, like, live together and other women didn't. and he would like bring people in and not tell them or like I guess he was trying like see what works do we tell them in advance and see what sticks or not tell them and then like connect the you know create the trauma bond and then they're and then introduce the other women so yeah he

went through so he cycled through quite a few and by the time i joined some of those like o g women that he'd known since he was like 19 were still with him and i thought they were like his executive board and his assistants and things like that, but they were his, his spiritual wives. And for those of people who are listening who can't, this is so much information is that ESP was pitched as a personal development training program of like Tony Robbins world, right? And that's a, that's a, there's a, there's a lot of stuff like that at the time. And there's still is. There's PSI. There's S. Erhardt Semeter Training, which turned into the landmark forum and Life Spring. And I mean, all these things.

think are super problematic because they're large group they're called large group awareness training as you were familiar with that term i don't think so no so anytime you're doing therapy in a large group so large group awareness training is what they call it is it's just really problematic because they're not you're doing transformational deep inner work in a group which like most times like i'm not a trained therapist you know what i mean like i was digging into people's psyche with tools that were given to me. I mean, I was good at it, and I think, not to pump my own tires,

but I think I was good because my parents were therapists, and I was able to help people, like, navigate troubling waters. But if you go to something like Tony Robbins and you're with thousands of people in an arena and you're having, like, a emotional breakthrough, no one's there to help you unless you're one-on-one with Tony Robbins on stage. So it can be very dangerous. For sure.

So he also, though, in addition to have, living polyamorously and all that we now know he also from a younger man's age i should say like you know even dating back to his early 20s but throughout his adulthood he was also a pedophile and he was he was essentially sometimes that i think there was one i don't know if you knew any of these girls personally but there was even one where he like sponsored some mexican girls to like come to America and then made them his sex slaves or something like that, and they were all underage when he did eventually the game of age after they'd already been abused. But like, meaning there were many patterns of this that just weren't known when you were coming into Nexium.

Yeah. Even when we were there, there was a whole curriculum that he taught us about like slander and like, kind of complicated to explain, but he was like, what are they going to say? We got this training from day one. People are going to say we're in a cult. Why do they say it's a cult? Because it cuts you off at the knees. They're not saying you are doing X bad thing. A cult just is sort of a smear. And if someone says you're in a cult, you say, what's bad about what I'm doing? And even people who said I was in a cult, like, okay, I know it's weird. I feel, felt found. I thought it was weird too. What are we doing this bad? I'm in a success program. I'm working through my limitations. I'm happier, like, go fuck yourself, right? So I lost my

trying to thought um help me find the thread he was saying oh yeah called yeah called so what's the worst thing you could say to someone he's a pedophile of course they're going to call him a pedophile so when if there was any news about that and there was the times union up in albany was always saying you know he did this he did that i was like well of course they're going to say that because he's teaching ethics and he's pushing back on all the unethical things that are happening in the world of course they're going to do a smear campaign against them so we just thought that was funny he's getting out in front of it he got he totally got out in front of it. So, yeah. So you never saw anything that looked suspicious. Here's what I saw. My very first red flag was with one of my girlfriends that I had brought in,

friends that's a girl. Okay. So one of my friends that I brought you. Yeah, you got to say that. Yeah. My, my, my. Was she born a girl too? All right. That's my, my son who's six. I was like, mom, don't say girlfriend because you're not a lesbian. I'm like, You're six-year-old son saying that. He's the cutest fucking kid. He's so funny. Yeah, sorry, Ace. Okay, he's like, okay, yeah, my girlfriend, my friend that's a girl, I brought in, and I mean, one of the red flags was that she wanted to move to Albany.

And she had a very successful career as an actor, and I'm like, why am I moving to Albany? Like, I was in, I was in it to win it, but I wasn't moving to Albany. You were out in Vancouver. I was out in the world in Vancouver. I was like, at this point, we're, like, doing trainings down in L.A. we're doing trainings at like a list actors homes we were it was very glamorous you're doing trainings at a list actors homes any names there oh man you don't have to i don't want to say it's out there i just feel like i don't want to drag anyone through it but these aren't people that then

publicly joined the one person that has been public about it was gerard butler and he that was somebody who was like okay at the time to say it there's other people that have come out since but never wanted to be associated maybe like took a five day there was one very famous actress who who did a five day at her home and nancy went and trained it i'm like i should go because i'm an actor i wasn't allowed to go was really mad very famous actress um anyway that was all like it was blowing up like we thought this is you know this is happening we're doing this meanwhile my friend's moving albany and i remember thinking like why like she and her career is way more successful than i was she was the lead on a show and i remember getting the hit that they were this is

actually in my book. This is a moment where I'm like, are they, are they like sleeping together? The way that she talked about him. Like, I have to be, Keith. Yeah. She was like, I have to be available for Keith. Like, you might call me. And I'm like, for what? Like, oh, we're doing some projects. Like, she was a bit cagey about it. And I dismissed it for so many different reasons. A, like you said, he's not 12 out of 10. B, as facilitators, as coaches, we weren't supposed to have relationships. Like, if I had brought you in as a recruit, I wasn't supposed to date you because that would have been wildly inappropriate, right? And so, and same thing with him.

Like, he's the head of this and it's personal and it's wearing each other's, you know, like that would have been. And then what was the other reason? Yeah, just like, ew. So I had the feeling and then I dismissed it. Oh, and he's celibate. Oh, right. He doesn't fuck.

Doesn't fuck, yeah. Now, what did you, how often were you going out to Albany yourself? Like you weren't living there. No. At the beginning, a couple of times. year. So for sure, I did my first five-day in Vancouver and then I finished my 11 day out in Albany a few months later and I rolled right from there into V-week. V-week. Vanguard week. Yeah, Red Like 10-day celebration for Vanguard's birthday at a summer camp at a YMCA in upstate New York.

At a YMCA? Silver Bay. It was beautiful. YMCA retreat center. Silver Bay, if you look it up, gorgeous. If you see that in the Vow and there's like big drone shots of like, Yeah, that's a YMCA? Yeah, it's a YMCA. What the fuck? YMCA is a weird. I know. There it is.

Look at that. Come on. That's the way. That's a YMCA. It's a Silver Bay. That don't look like the Brooklyn YMCA beef. Uh, dope. Yeah.

It's a little higher class. That's given some Buckingham Palace bullshit. I mean, keep in mind, it was still pretty rustic. It looks pretty there. Oh, yeah. Look, it's got the YMCA logo. Do you see that? Yeah.

Did we miss that? X out. No, no, X out. It was just their X out of the thing. I'll see it. See it right there? Oh, there is, yeah, the YMCA. No shit.

God, all I ever think about is like musty old men going into a locker room for a steamer. My boys play basketball at the YMCA. Yeah, I'm sorry to hear that. No, no, it's a whole thing. I would think you'd have PTSD. Yeah, I know. But it doesn't look like that. But yeah.

No. You're like, yeah, this is this is class. enough around here for me. Jesus Christ. But Silver Bay in August was beautiful, and we had some way of great times there. And I went to Vanguard Week 12 years in a row. Vanguard, a 10-day celebration for his birthday. That's why I miss, I've never been to Burning Man because it can be.

Yeah, I don't think that's for you. No, it's 100% not for me. I don't like dust, first of all. Yeah. I like to dress up, but I don't like dust and dirt and wind, so no. I don't know. I don't have a, what's it called, any motivation or desire to go to Burning Man. It just sounds like, you know.

Dirty. It sounds like, what's that one where they fuck the owl out in the woods? Out in, out in San Francisco. Nixon had the famous quote. Didn't Alex Jones, like, catch it one year? Yeah, Bohemian Grove. Oh, I don't even know that one. Yeah, you know what?

Don't worry about it, but yeah, that's when I hear, maybe it's the bees, but when I hear Burning Man, like, kind of gives me a little bit of Bohemian Grove vibes. I don't know if I'd want to go out there. No, I think I missed my window for that. Do you think it was deliberate that he wore longer hair and a beard and, I mean, what I'm getting at is. Jesus vibes? Yeah, I think that was deliberate. And then there was a time about five years in when they cleaned him up and they cut his hair. I mean, you pull up some pictures.

there's like early early vanguard and then there's late vanguard late vanguard he had eras he did he he started wearing like little like lacos shirts and nice jeans and like cute sneakers they cleaned him up he had a he had like a whole who's they i mean i thought it was his assistants but his spiritual wives oh yeah from the actual okay yeah see there that's late vanguard so early vanguard is the that's how we with the long hair is what he looked like when i met him right schlubby and then over there on the left yeah that was his cleaned up professorial vibe Right. Nice, some nice crew necks, some V-necks.

Yeah, he was, that's the thing. He was still trying to give off a soft look. He wasn't trying to look like a hardo. Oh, look at his hand there. Look at what? He's got his hand on the chin like he's listening to. I noticed when he would, when he'd be speaking with people, he would turn his head like that. Look at you.

Yeah. Oh God, you're creeping me out a little bit. Yeah. Actually, my husband, who was also an actor for Nancy's birthday, Nancy used to have this festival. of flowers. She just the way of Vanguard week and then there's a weekend for Nancy, Festival of Flowers. Festival of Flowers. Everyone would give her flowers or whole house will be full of flowers. Super fucking creepy. Yeah. And she, uh, people would do skits for her. And one of the skits, um, they asked, because my husband Nippy was really good at doing impressions of everybody in X-Im,

which was like really funny. People like, do David, do David. And he'd like walk around. Like, oh my God, it's so funny. He had an impression of Vanguard. And they got, um, I can get it for you if you want it's fucking hilarious they because we have it on on um vimeo and they got him to to he like didn't impress this is when we were still in it and it was so funny because he nailed all his his his his mannerisms and his like his little glasses thing and his and the way that he taught like basically presenting as a as this deep philosophical caring empathetic person so he was like he he wanted he was mirroring the mannerisms of somebody who was like a guru and caring and And he was acting, you know, and Nippy nailed it.

And I obviously was the back, so I didn't see him. But apparently Keith looked remarkably uncomfortable because I think he. Mask off. Yeah, mask off. How tall was Keith? You might want to look that up, but I want to say 5, 7 or 8. That's always. Yeah, I know.

I know, I'm a scavenge too. They always are trying to take. Matt Cox, my buddy, who's like 5-5 and was a prolific mortgage fraudster. Yeah. Yeah. Like, he's always like, never trust us. We're always trying to take over the world. Napoleon complex. I'm like, dude, five foot five. Oh, there you go. Shorter than I thought. And like, I'm five four. I'll tell you, one of the things that really freaked me out and you just kind of mentioned it is when he would do the arm cross. I can't even do it. But like the way he would do the arm cross thing. So like kind of grab and almost like his shoulders. It's hard to describe, but people will know it when they go look at the tape on the belt. And like almost grab it in like a philosophical way and lean his shoulders.

back and tilt his head, there's a lot of video of Jeffrey Epstein doing the same exact thing. Oh, really? And it's such a, I can't do it and I can't describe it correctly. I could do the head thing, but like the, that one's easy. But like the way they would just kind of like move their shoulders and move their arms or whatever, there's like a, there's almost like this soft underbelly thing to it and you feel really weird watching it. Maybe it's just because I've seen so much tape of Epstein doing that over the years when, you're looking through this case, but it was the same exact kind of thing.

And I was like, oh. So it was interesting is that he taught us about sociopathy. Suppressive, it's a full suppressive, not suppressive tendencies, but someone that was a full suppressive was what I now know as a sociopath. And it was something we taught a class on this. Yeah, it was called the fall. And it was if someone's taken the fall, they've learned, okay, I think I need to tell you this because this is in line with your podcast.

Give me a second. I'm going to go into nexium land for my. minute okay oh method acting and I just have to I just have to retain a bunch of information I haven't talked about in a while um hold a second backing up so one of the principles in nexium was that we defined self-esteem as a range of options that somebody has in a given context so you might have high self-esteem around money because you feel good about making money but maybe you're bad with relationships you're you have low self-esteem in that area so somebody with high self-esteem in all areas of their life feels like

if they you know if they don't if someone doesn't want to go out with them they still feel fine it's like you know there's more fish in the sea right so there's lots of options so options are based on ethics and if you're a good person and you're ethical you're going to play by the rules of the world which is like no lying stealing cheating right and those are your options and you have a morality and you know that if you do something bad on if this is like a line lying stealing and cheating are bad things you wouldn't do that because you're a moral ethical conscious person right So these are your options. Sociopaths realize that they can do a bad thing and they don't feel bad about it.

So they have all these options that we don't have. I'm assuming you're not a sociopath. No, I feel awful about leaving a piece of trash on the ground. Same. So a sociopath has all of these options in positive and then negative in terms of like lying, stealing, and cheating. And therefore they're very, they have, you know, when someone has options and they have high self-esteem, they're like a high self-esteem person. You want to be around them. they have, you know, they present a certain way.

And so when someone's taken the fall and they become a full suppressive, they operate in the world here. But we're not suspecting that they're over here on this side because we don't project that onto them. So when you meet somebody like Keith or whoever, any one of these people that you've talked about, we assume that they are who they say there are because we wouldn't lie. And they know that. But he's teaching it like the wolf and the hen house.

Yeah. So you'd never suspect that he had taken the fall and that he was a full suppressive and he was a sociopath. And we even did a whole class is about, like, how sociopaths have different ways of playing out, like, they can, you know, slash your tires and feel good about it, or they can slowly poison your dog over time. And they prefer that because it's more enjoyable to watch you suffer. Like, those are kind of things that we learn about. And that's, like, almost beyond sociopathy right there, right? That's, I mean, it is, but. Yeah, it's next level. And there's a whole other thing if you want to really deep dive is, I believe there's women around him that

died, like the original women that he had from his inner circle, they died of a very aggressive cancer when we were there. The two purple sashes, by the way. So I got to green sash. There's one blue and two purple sashes. That's the high up as it went. They both died of cancer when I was there. And I believe that they were poisoned and he poisoned them. This is my opinion, allegedly. Like, no one driven. I unfortunately would totally buy it when you look at his track record. Whatever you want to call it, resume. Yeah. And these women, Like, I knew them. They were fit. They were exercise. They had infrared saunas. They drank kombucha and green juice. These were fit women who all of a cancer. Barbara Jeske had a brain

tumor. And Pam K. Fritz, his Jeline, had a, I want to say, liver. I forget. We can probably look it up. It's been a while since I've talked about that. But I was at both of their funerals and both of the women had very aggressive um downfalls very very quickly and one of the women that i've talked to was there in pam's hospital room when she was dying and he was like putting stuff in her iv bag yeah so like there's and i don't know why the fbi i didn't touch i guess they had enough stuff to get him in jail without trying to prove that but like there's a lot of evidence that points to he just was getting the woman saw that happening And felt uncomfortable with it, but, like, he's the vanguard, so.

So she didn't. Yeah. And there's other things. There's other, like, stories I could tell you that point to that. But those were the older women that were had been with him and they were his age. And he was getting, like, I would have been barely too old. Like, they were talking women and they're, like, like, you know, 20, 30 years younger than him that were coming in. And he was expanding his harem.

And I think the older women were like, hey. His harem? Yeah. His harem and women. His circle is virtual wise. So he had to get rid of the old guard to make room for the new guard. Sorry, this is so dark. No, no, it's, I fully, I fully expected it because I know what that is.

And you have a really good way of being able to delve into the stuff. And like I said, before we got on camera, when it gets the stuff that you don't feel comfortable talking about, no problem at all. I just appreciate you sharing any of it. But it's strange. Like when I go to do one like this once in a while, where it's going to be like really, heavy stuff and I know it's common like I I wake up a certain type of way in the morning and I'm like yeah I don't know I like kind of I'm ready for it but I'm not ready for it if that makes sense yeah I feel the same way every time I'm like why am I still talking about this because it's like

I mean sometimes it's cathartic sometimes it's like ravages my nervous system but I think it helps a fuck ton of people you can't see yeah because it allows people to see where you could fall into traps or where things in your life could be ziggin, you want it to zag and, you know, you pick the... Honestly, every time I think I want to quit, and especially with our podcast and it gets draining and sometimes it's really rewarding and other times it's hard. Every time we want to quit, we get an email or a DM of like, I just got out of X thing because of the vow or because of your podcast. I'm like, okay, well, let's just keep... You're saving lives. That's a great, that's a great thing. Well, I get to help people, which is ironically what I wanted to do in Xium.

Like I was helped and I felt changed and then I wanted to do the same, which is why I was such a good recruiter. Because I was like, I really believed it in, which we kind of skipped that part. We're going to come back to that. We're going to come back to that. I'm just staying on Keith because we're kind of going through his psychology right now. So it's you believe, and I would totally buy that. You believe that he may have even poisoned people around him and basically had them killed. That would make sense to me that he would do that.

but you know you mentioned he was building a herm here and we're going to get to where that got really really dark and quite literal but you know the organization is filled with hundreds of people and it's men and women yeah do you think obviously we know now he was constantly trying to get access to young vulnerable women and stuff like that to take control of them and you know live out his sick sadistic twisted fantasies do you think that he just let men in there for cover? Kind of, yeah. I think so.

Like with my husband who's like, you know, former quarterback, Ivy League, went to Brown, like, model, like handsome man. And he wasn't targeted the same way. I think he was there so that it would give credibility to, for other people to look like, well, he's here. You know what I mean? Obviously, Keith's not trying to get him into his harem, but it's like he gets to have a, you know, a loyal soldier on the outside.

I think it was maybe, correct me, wrong here. Maybe it was Mark Viscente who was saying in the vow, Mark Vesente, that he was like the only male friend. Keith had, like, he was the only one from the organization that really hung around Keith and Keith seemed to enjoy running or hanging around him. And my takeaway was, well, that's because Mark's capturing him and is like allowing, putting him on film to build his legacy and he sees, you know, the cameraman as, as the creator of that. Is that a fair takeaway yeah and i think that you know in the same way that like i didn't take to keith i more took to to nancy and and her daughter lauren who's the person i really looked up to which comes in later

you know mark really did put keith on a pedestal and you know i don't know if sarmer talks about this in part two but we all have our our patterns there's fight or flight and there's also fawn fawn i don't think she said that term because she hadn't read the book yet i just gave it to her and we're reading it together right now. And it's something that we both did, which is like there's fight or flight, right? Which way everyone knows about. Survival, freeze, which often happens in like a Harvey Weinstein situation

where women just like freeze and dissociate and they like, they tend to get through it because they know they can't fight back. And then there's Fawn, which is to be agreeable, to be even sometimes even flirty, which can happen in one of those situations. And that certainly happened with me where I'm like, uh-oh, I better just be appease this to, smooth it out until I can get out right I've never had a situation like we talked about earlier

but I've had similar like could have gone that way for sure you know you're dangerously dangerously dangerously yeah dangerously close and appeasing and being a people pleaser which I actually remember Nadine was talking about on your podcast is like macalo yes how you know women are conditioned to be agreeable and to otherwise you're a bitch right and you and I didn't have the term fond in my vocabulary, but I knew that I, I knew I was a people pleaser. I knew it was an accommodator. I'm being a caretaker and over mother, like a nurturer. I was like, that's just sort of like, oh, you need, you're not feeling while I have a vitamin C in my bag. Let me take care of that for you. Like, that feels really good for me. And that sort of feeds into the whole, like, we're just,

we're going to get along and I'm going to be appreciated by you. And that's my value. Does that make sense? Yeah. Where do you think that came from you wanted to take care of people? Does that have anything to do with your way younger brother? My mom got really, so after my parents divorced, my mom got really sick, and she had a rheumatoid arthritis. Oh, wow. And I, I, this chunk of my life is very, I don't have a lot of memories, but I have very strong memory of, like, rubbing cream into her feet so she could walk at a young age. And I just don't think I had a really, this early normal childhood in that way, maybe, like, reverse parenting in terms of, like, caretaking, like, didn't have the full, like, I just felt, I think I felt better being somebody who could take care of others. And I think my parents were going through stuff, and I kind of grew up quickly.

in that way. Yeah. I was talking with Sarma about like her love languages and where some of that like could have come in, but it's kind of coming in with you too. Like clearly, clearly your affirmation, you're probably quality time as well because you wanted to feel part of things around people. And then at least on an active level, how you show love is service. Is it in the same direction coming back to you too? Do you value when people show that to you? Yeah, I do. I mean, truthfully, I love them all. I also like gifts. Yeah, no, there's people who are dominant in four sometimes. Yeah, but have all five in some degree.

Yeah, and affirmation is important to me as well. And that's something that I have to like, yeah, I have to like tell them that being like, I need you to tell me now, you know, that I look good or like that I'm, that you love me because that's not, that was not his love language at all. And that was something we've, you know, we've grown. That's a whole separate, that's a separate podcast. Yeah. No, that's, that's interesting too.

Like you guys, you guys have a lot of things stacked against you. We really did. And especially this is a total tangent, but especially next time we weren't allowed to have needs. Like anything beyond Maslow's like food, water, shelter is what was called a desire. So if I had a like a need to, like if I want, if I felt like, like, we were, I mean I started a long distance and I felt like upset that he wouldn't text me to say good night. If I were to say, can you like communicate with me? Because I want to like, you know, know that we're together and you love me or whatever. That the response would be I would have to go get an EM because what do. why do I need him to be anything different for me to be okay? Whoa. Yeah. So we learn to not have needs. Like, I need to self-soothe. I need to love myself.

I don't need anything from the outside world. So by the end of Nexia, I really do a lot of unwinding to be like, I need to connect with you right now because I would like to talk to you. Like it was really hard. Yeah. And, you know. It's like you have to deprogram yourself. 100%.

Like you're literally, you're a real human in every way. You recognize things. You feel things. but you've had this virus software put in you and it's not just as simple as like dragging it to the trash box to the trash box and hitting empty box you got to like call over a coder and type in a lot of shit and like you know 100%. I remember one of my first therapist therapy sessions with a with a guy who was just like a regular therapist, not a cult counselor which came later. I was explaining this to him about the needs thing and well like exactly what I just said to you

you know these are the needs and then there's the needs to to anything else is considered a in nexamous term desire or a non-integrated fixation can I say something yeah yeah I've just been thinking this all day I can't not say this yeah another huge red flag yeah yeah he's like 20 20 now is how they use big five dollar words for everything like what it wouldn't be like they wouldn't say like let's just make you feel better about yourself they'd say let's have a modality to spiritual connection with an understanding of the fifth dimension to get to a place of self-esteem where you feel good oh yeah you know what i mean it's called loaded language yes yeah yeah whenever i see someone who can make 15 words where one would suffice i'm like mm chill be you know what i mean

yeah loaded language is when people start fucking with your language you know that there's a problem right right you want to change how you talk change what words mean major major red flag so when you go when you back to your timeline though here when you went out to Albany to do your last 11 days and then you know now now at this point that's where they shifted over today you can join this as a career and be a coach and all that so you go out west you're doing classes out there you mention you're doing some classes in L.A. sometimes and down in Seattle and Tacoma so I was going every weekend almost I was driving three and a half hours five hours sometimes with the border from Vancouver to Seattle to coma and doing like a day of training and then coming back

What are you doing during the week preparing for that pretty much? I mean, at the beginning, at that point, I was still acting and auditioning and, you know, whatever else I was doing. Oh, so you are still trying to do that. I was still acting. For the first couple years, I was still acting. In fact, the tools, the tech, which is also Scientology word, by the way, the technology, rational inquiry, which is Keith Renary's model of helping people, you know, here's the big boards again, evolve your belief system so that you're more integrated, blah, blah, blah. blah, blah, be happier. The tech was something, oh my God, see, this is, I was worried this might happen.

I feel like my blood sugar is crashing and I'm losing my trance out. I might have to eat a power bar in a second. We can take a break whenever you want. Thank you. But what were just, what was I doing? Oh, yeah. I was using the tech technology to be a better actor. I had a lot of audition nerves.

I would go into an audition and like dissociate. I was so nervous. Dissociate. Can you describe what that would be like? I would go out of my body and not be, like, in, in, then audition and acting, you're supposed to be present and connect with the other person and do whatever the dialogue says and go along the ride and sometimes feel it. Yeah. And if I dissociate it, I'll come back and I'd be like, I don't even know, I don't even know what I did.

Like, I was so nervous that I would check out. So I used the tools to work through my, that pattern, again, EM. What so, what, why, what am I making this mean that I'm so scared? And I got better at auditioning. I started booking more work. I did a film that ended up at TIF, which is an actor that's like a huge thing. Joey's like, yeah, Tiff is the Toronto Film Festival. He's tracking. Yeah. I knew that one too, by the way.

Yeah, yeah, you're like, you're like, I know. This can me four and a half gold stars. Come on. Yeah. Ironically, I played a sociopath in that, in that movie. And that was like one of my favorite film roles all the time. Oh, my God. That's like Robert Downey Jr.

And fucking Tropic Thunder. I'm the dude that's playing the dude. You were living that very, sorry. I know, it's why I'm a little close to home. Yeah, that's fine. So I was really living my best life. The first couple of years in Axiom, I was using the tools, I was getting better as an actor, I was going to TIF, I was flying to L.A., doing these fancy trainings with the Whistler Film Festival.

I was bringing in all my friends that I thought that they would enjoy it. Some of them were moving to Albany. I was like, that's dumb, but okay, you do you. And things are great. Are you getting, when you bring people in, are you getting paid on that? Not at first. So one of the ways I was able to do so much curriculum is that they had this thing called three and it's free, where if you brought in three people, I know, it's so cringe.

So I had brought in my boyfriend, I brought in my mother, brought my friend Nikki. You brought in your mom. Yeah, I brought in my mom because she was, you know, I was like, you got to do this with me, mom. And she was very reluctant. And she was like, I'm not saying the mission statement. I don't want to wear a sash. And like she was, she was on to him. But I just thought she didn't get it.

The psychologist was on to him. Oh, yeah, yeah. She knew your mom, you were right. You were right. Okay. Good for you. Yeah. she loves to know that

so I got my so basically three minutes free I got my money back and instead of taking my money back I said use that to finish the 11 day so I was like I was started to make some money and then because I was telling so many people they're like you could become a salesperson so after I had enrolled a certain amount you could earn 20% of your sales and put that towards more curriculum

so that's how they kind of kept me going I was I didn't have the money to pay for it but I was just bringing people in and that was covering the cost were you thinking so this is where it gets above my pay grade legally but there is i believe please correct me in the comments on this if i'm wrong and maybe d if you can help out on google here i believe there is a technical difference legally between pyramid scheme and multi-level marketing am i wrong about that i literally just had an episode on this okay with a woman named bridget reed Okay, please explain.

Who did a book called Little Bosses Everywhere. And if you want to dig in MLMs, she'd be a great person to have, by the way. That's interesting. She's awesome. And she looks at the whole history of it. And so this is not my field, but this is what I've gathered, is that there's a lot of people who are very powerful in high places, in politics and in the world, who are high up in certain things like Amway, who are friends with people who are politicians, who have basically. basically loopholes to make it so that MLMs are legal, but they're the, they are pyramid schemes. So like the FDC says don't do it because they're very, nobody makes money except for the

people that start them. Right. Like 99% of the people that join don't make money, just the people at the top, right? But no, they're the same thing. MLMs, direct sales, pyramid scheme is all the same thing. So did they ever use, obviously they didn't use the term pyramid scheme, but did Was there ever any level of admission inferred or explicit where they said it's multi-level marketing? Yeah, it's not multi-level marketing because MLMs are unethical and Keith is ethical.

Therefore, it is not an MLM. I know. I know it's so embarrassing. It's not embarrassing. Listen, hindsight's always 20. But there were people who were like doing Mary Kay or doing like other things or even Amway. And they had to, if they were going to join XEM, they couldn't do those other things. They couldn't go past two stripe.

remember the stripes on the vasash two stripe coach if they were going to do that other thing so this was like because that's dirty that's yeah that's yeah we don't do that here we're we're clean that's right that's created by keith smartest most ethical noble man in the world celibate renunciate monk celibate renunciate monk well he wasn't bald so he couldn't been a monk yeah that's true and they don't have facial hair right they don't fuck with facial hair right they don't fuck with facial like yeah i don't there was a monk in an airport next to me wearing like a $40,000 watch and easy slides. When I was in Dallas, I was real confused by that.

Yeah, you're like, what's... I was like, hold on a minute. Yeah, what's your about here? I don't know much here, but I know that something there. And he had like the iPhones, the new iPhone 17. Something's not right. Side. I didn't put that tweet out at the time, but I was thinking it.

Well, this is related. Part of the whole thing, like in the heyday before shit went south, was that the Dalai Lama came and endorsed us, right? Oh, yeah. Now, what, hold on, this, I forgot about this. What the fuck? So, was it, is the Dalai Lama the one that was hanging out with like a 10 year old boy, though, too? I mean, where he, like, put his tongue in his mouth, that thing?

Yeah. Remember that? Yeah. Yeah. And if you said anything about it, you were like not cognitive, you weren't, like, being sensitive to other people's culture or some bullshit. Yeah. And he was like, it was framed. Sensitive to other people's culture?

Yeah. There's like, God, I'm going to butcher this. If you want to look it up, Joey, it's. I'm now I'm assigning Joey's stuff to do. It was a thing that happened where it was some Tibetan phrase of like, I'm gonna butcher it, something about like their tongue. It's a phrase that translates to, I don't know. You got it? You got it? Thiefs on it.

Affectual behavior, you said? Yeah, suck my tongue. Yeah, suck my tongue is the term in Tibet, which is a cultural thing. And he did it and was caught on camera, but, like, it was the most egregious abuse of power by a spiritual leader because he's, and then they're making it normal. Like, it was just something we do in our culture. It doesn't fucking matter. You're a 10-year, you're going to 10-year, like a little kid up here in doing this behavior with him was caught on camera. Anyway, it was a whole scandal.

This came late. That was later. Yeah, but still. Interesting that he was coming to, he came to America? He came to America. and he was going to do this endorsement and then he heard about the, you know, the... Forbes article?

I think, yeah, but basically the rumors and the rumblings and seen some articles and decided it wasn't a good idea to endorse him. Then Keith and Nancy went on the Bronfman private jet and flew to Darmacalla and convinced the dilemma. This isn't the vow. It's all taped.

And you can see Keith getting into rapport and doing this like... Thinking man's kind of thing. Yeah, and like it's just this really terrible thing. thing and that he's being persecuted and, you know, Dalai Lama knows what that's what that's like and, like, basically meets him at that level. Turns it on him. Oh, my God.

It's like if you want to see NLP in action, it's that scene and he meets him and Dalai Lama's like, oh, I get that. And he ends up coming. We also heard that there was a $1 million donation from the Bronfmans to the Dalai Lama. So it was kind of a paid endorsement. But all of these things were happening at the time, like in the heyday when things were good. And, you know, I was. recruiting and I started to make money and I was acting and I was traveling and the Dalian Lama's

endorsing and around this time we think that we're also curing Tourette's, right? Which at the issue you probably didn't see because that season two of the vow. You thought you were curing Tourette's. We thought we were curing Tourette's because somebody came in to Nexium with full-blown Tourette's and Oh, I heard about this. Yeah, and then was able to, he's here in New York. If you want to interview. I want to interview that girl from, what's that show? Bailey Unlimited. or whatever on PLC? Yeah, the girl, she's, that's interesting. Yeah.

You've seen those videos? I have. And there's, I think there's some videos of Mark who had Tourette's, and he would sit in the front of Nexiem and be like, Nancy, be training, and he'd be like, bitch, bitch. Yeah, seriously. And you said it at first. There's one of the funniest videos ever is Andrew Cuomo trying to interview that girl. And she's like, I'm not trying to make fun at the Ritz, but like, she's like, she's going, she's given like a normal answer.

And she's like, she's like, Jamie's a bitch or something like that. And he's so brave. And he's trying not to laugh. And it's like, it's a human thing. Because like clearly she has something wrong with her. Like there's people who accuse that girl of like faking. She ain't faking. No, no, it's a real thing.

Listen, if she's faking, Daniel, Day Lewis is the worst actor I've ever seen in my life. You know, so like you, on one hand, you feel bad about it. It's a, some of it can get a little bit funny, though, not to be cruel. It just, it just is. It's like you see people and you're like, oh, my God. I imagine going into like a, it's like when you go onto a plane and like someone yells things that are illegal.

It's like the same kind of vibes, but it's funnier. Oh, yeah. No, and I wasn't around during those trainings, but like people talked about it for years afterwards. It's like the things that Mark said to Nancy that he got away with because he had turrets. And so his threats went away. And so they tried to duplicate what happened with him on other people. And they had a study and there's actually a film about it.

And it seemed to be working. And I'm not an expert. I can't really say what happened there. But I have my theories. They're adding pseudoscience to the mix with things like that effectively. Yeah. And I think for Mark, he just got, was able to like do whatever he needed to do to calm his nervous system to not, you know, he used to do this thing where he'd be like, he'd like bite the era

whatever he did he was able to not do it and so that was the proof right like we've just cured Tourette's so we have to you know make a study now we gotta take a quick tangent on something he said because it's a big part

of the story because any organization like this obviously there's sadistic things that Keith was trying to serve himself sexually and from a power dynamic and stuff but of course part of that also is he's trying to make a lot of money and be rich and cloaking it in this like

oh we're making everyone better but to do that you got to get money flown in there and you got to get connections you got to take advantage of people or you got to get people to believe or whatever and so he did that obviously with all the people who joined but he was also able to make a relationship with one of the richest families in america the bronfmans who are of seagram's fortune yeah who was But didn't he make a relationship with like a bunch of them? And then one of the daughters, like, ended up being integral and heavily involved. What is the full story there? So they were involved before I joined.

So I don't know how they got in. But I think it's just like anyone else, like I got in, like some referral. I think it's, I think I actually don't know how they got in to be totally, I can't remember. But it was, but they came in at the same time. Sarah Bronfman and Claire Bronfman came in at the same time. How do you convince a billionaire that they need help? Yeah. I mean, I only have the stories because, again, they came before me, but I had heard, like, Claire was a professional show jumper, right? Like, that was, that's what she was like.

Equestrian? Yeah. Yeah. This is me. Oh, wait, like the toy horse thing? No, like on a, like, on a horse jumping over things. Like, and she was wanting to go to the Olympics and she, you know, she had a, she had horses and she had a horse farm and she, you know, she, I think she believed that he could help her. And I mean, that's what that's what the story was. Any, anyone who, like, moved to Albany and, like, decide to devote their life to the mission was also offered help by Keith. Like, like I said, my friend, and the actor. Like, we all had our hopes, you know, and dreams dangled to us. And that was how people came up. Can I take a tangent on that story? Please.

So my husband actually came in before me, and his ex-girlfriend was the one that brought him in. So his childhood sweetheart girlfriend brought him in kind of dangling, like, maybe we're gonna get back together and that's how he came into nexium to like oh she was already in she was already in she was already in and he came in to like check it out and like be close to her and her dad was like a brain surgeon from yale and like you know he's like well you know this is legit and checked it out to like also maybe you know whatever was going to happen there so he did it with her that ended up not happening and he moved to l.A to be an actor after taking some training he would he had like taken the training thought this is sort of like you know it's helpful for him put some tools in his

life and then it was like, you know, but this isn't really going anywhere. The Forbes article came out and he's like, peace out, move to L.A. Then cut two years later, Mark Fissente gets involved. He's doing this film about global warming that Keith's helping him write. And Keith suggests my husband for one of the lead roles. So they fly out to New York, to, sorry, to L.A., and they invite Nippie to come to Albany and be the lead role in this movie that's going to be made. Has he been away from the organization for years, okay? And the reason I'm, this has a, this has an important point

to what you just said. So as an actor, Joey, you'll appreciate this. He gets flown in, they pay for his move. They pay for him to relocate. They come to Albany. He gets flown in a private helicopter from Albany down the river to Bergdorf Goodman to get suited

for like good for costume fitting to get suits made because he's going to be an actor in this movie. And if you're an actor and you go to get a costume fitting and a private helicopter, it's on. right right like that's what i'm saying the dangling of the dreams that's how they got him back

this movie never was made ever like i never got past script rewrites he waited in albany for years i mean i'm glad he did because we ended up getting together but the point is is that for claire whatever she whatever keith dangled for her was enough for her to say you know i'm going to give you and you can look it up to claire brothman clare broughman millions of dollars and he gambled i want i don't I don't want to say $58 million. That's the number that comes to my mind. I could be wrong about that. But millions of dollars.

He gouged her money and then gambled it away. Keith did. Yeah, because he thought he had like, had figured out the system and was like, but doing things on margin or I don't even fucking know. How much money? Yeah, Claire Brompton provided significant funding to Nexium organization, eventually contributing about $150 million to the group and its leader, Keith Reneery. She served as the operations director and her father, Edgar Bronfman, to the group. but the relationship fractured when he learned a large low-interest loan she made to Reneerie and was informed the group was a cult so he realized that she was just he was his daughter was being

used to funnel one interesting yeah so she and sarah were um sarah actually ran the new york city center sarah was her sister so sarah also became a green sash and ran the new york city center was actually right near where I'm staying with Sarma in the city, which is super trippy because we spend a lot of time there. Yeah. Don't go walking on mushrooms near that. Yeah, no, stayed away from that area. So, yeah, the Bronfen sisters were, I mean, almost every cult has an heiress.

You know, I'm not sure if you've studied Osho, Baguan, Rajshish. A little. A little. But can you provide some background for people who aren't familiar with that documentary? Yeah, wild, wild country. Baguan Osho was an Indian guru who was like, you know, the Keith Renary of the 80s. And had people move from miles around to join this community, which on the outside, just like Nexam looked great until it wasn't.

But anyway, we interviewed a woman named Aaron Robbins. She was the heir to the Basque and Robbins fortune. And she gave all her money to him. You know, it is one of the things. things that makes it so believable that I mean not just believable we know it happens but the reason it makes a lot of sense that things like that would happen is because we're talking about the kids who are inheriting all this stuff that do no fault of their own but it's it's not money they earned you know it's a family fortune they grow up in opulence they struggle to have a purpose they don't

feel like they've earned any significance so they view I'm just looking at the best I can here I would imagine they view the money that they've been in that they inherit as a tool for them to buy that influence that they can then say they're doing something good with it. So they are perhaps crazy as it sounds, maybe even more susceptible to organizations that either border on cults or like this are full-blown cults because those are the prime type of parasitic endeavors that are going to look for a target. like that to make them feel like they're important because that's all they ever wanted. Yeah. And Keith actually gave that to Claire. I think he made her the CFO or not CEO, but basically gave her a lot of power. And I think that's something that she really needed and enjoyed because she was like kind of a like a, I don't know, she didn't have a lot of friends. You know, she was kind of a, you know, a horse. She was like, her friends were horses. Yeah. You know, and she were, I know, I feel,

Actually, I feel really sad for her, and a lot of people in Xeme didn't like her, and we didn't actually get along, but I, you know, nobody signed up for this. Like, she didn't sign up for that. I didn't, like, you know, Keith's the real bad guy here. She got roped in. Yeah, I definitely have empathy for that. And she ended up going down, too. She's actually fresh out. Yeah, she did, she did like five years or six years or something like that.

Yeah, she just got out of prison. So. And it's still a believer, by the way, as far as I know. She still believes in Keith. Yeah. That's why she got such a high prison sentence because she refused to renounce him. Whoa. Yeah.

And the judge said that. Like you've not, like, Alison Mack was like, I made a mistake. I screwed S, by the way, for the audience, Smallville actress, Alison Mack was one of the famous or, you know, famous-ish actresses that was sort of like the one of the people that helped Keith with the building of the harem later and Doss, which we'll get to. But she was like, I made a mistake. This is the biggest mistake. I regret this. I believe something I shouldn't have. And, you know, Keith is a bad person.

She refused to do that. And as far as I know, is still a believer. Loving after prison. Yeah, even after prison. I got to look at it more and see her individually. But, you know, it's wrong that she'd ever be a believer in that guy or in any of this. but there's a part of me that that has empathy for the brainwashing you know like clearly clearly if at this point that is the case and she still like kind of believes she was successfully 1,000 percent brainwashed oh yeah

yeah she I mean just like I said everyone's dangling the thing she first it was to get help with her show jumping but then like you said she wanted to make an impact she wanted to use her money to do good in the world and she really thought that this was the thing yeah now when when you came in and you started doing we were talking about you would go teach on the weekends down in Tacoma or Seattle or LA wherever it might be and then you'd go out to Vanguard week like you know for 10 days in Albany maybe go out there once or twice a year total over like I guess when did you get in 06 did you say they're in 05 oh I didn't become a proctor which is the orange sash which is the level that you couldn't get paid for being like a facility it's like basically when

your career paths start yes took me four years to get there. Okay. So let's go there. Once you finally get to Proctor, how did that, how did that conversation come up that you were going to do this? And when you agreed to do that, did you have to spend more time in Albany? And did you have to give up acting for the most part? Yeah, around that time is probably when I started to prioritize ESP or NXEM for overacting. And that was something that happened slowly over time. They had you do it like a values hierarchy. You know, what are the most important things? to you, which was actually really helpful for me. Oh, thanks. It was actually really helpful for me as somebody who was trouble making decisions and anxiety around that. If it was like, I'm going to do this movie or take this training, if acting, which is what started,

was the highest value, then I would do that. But slowly over time, nexium and my personal growth became the highest value. So if it was going to a training to learn how to do XYZ technique, you know, becoming an EMP was one of the things I was trying to do, which is the exploration of meaning practitioner, all the acronyms, same as Scientology. I would like, I miss like two of my best friends' weddings for bullshit trainings.

That's one of the biggest regrets of my whole time there is missing, missing those because it was like, well, you know, these are friends that aren't, you know, they don't share values with you. So why would you do that over your growth, you know? And so that's how those kind of decisions were made. They pit you against your personal life. and make them seem like yeah but you so you valued i don't want to twist your words i want to make sure i'm repeating what you said there so correct me from what you valued being told what to do

if it made sense and actually meant progression for you i guess yeah my personal values hierarchy shifted over time and that wasn't something i was super conscious of i think subconsciously i realized that if i wanted to keep going and i did i was fully on board with the strike path and getting to the next level that if I wanted to go to the next level, it had to be my highest priority. Yeah. The people who were like choosing, you know, their family, you know, their grandfather's birthday over V-week, you know, well, they weren't really committed. So I wanted to be committed. And this is where I think my desire to be special and my desire to be a part of things and belong and, like, get the gold stars of the ranking really motivated me and blinded me to

what was actually important. Yeah, you used the same phrase a little bit ago that you used when you were describing growing up and getting good grades. You're like, I wanted to be a good girl. Good girl, yeah. Yeah, I was so right for the strike path and all the things that it was supposed to be. And, you know, the special thing is something that I think a lot of women struggle with is it, you know, it's a part of that, like the love language thing as well. It's to feel acknowledged and to, yeah, affirmed.

Would they tell you good job or you're doing great? make you feel yeah is that something your parents didn't do much grown up i ironically if anything i think my mother did a lot of that like i was very like everything i did was great you know what i mean and she's very supportive like like unbelievably that makes sense yeah it can go either way it it has to be hard one way or the other either you're never told or you're told all the time because then you crave it yes in either direction either direction and no fault to her like my mom Yeah, yeah. Like I love her and she's always in the best that she could.

But I think it was more just, I think it was also like the belonging piece, like being kind of nerd, being a theater nerd. It was also a late bloomer. So like I spent all of my high school until I was like 16 being, looking like I was 11, you know, and then all of a sudden like 12th grade, I was like, oh, there she is. You know? And so that was hard. And I never really fit in. I wasn't cool. It wasn't a cool kid.

And so I think the building the community that is when I became Proctor in 2009, I basically built a community. Like I built a, I had a center where I paid, you know, six grand a month rent and 5,000 square feet. And I had three training rooms. I did. Yeah, I did. Keith didn't pay that. No, I paid it. It was your privilege to pay.

It was my privilege. That was his bullshit business model. If somebody wanted to open a center, they had to, it was all, I mean, I was the only one like Sarah, Sarah Bronfman, Eric. um emiliano salinas is the son of the former president in mexico he opened a center there so like everyone else came from money the president's son yeah he was better in the cartels yeah better the cartel yeah yeah no he was i was proud of myself but i i am but that's part of the problem though is i became more and more invested so i was investing i would there's a time where i was making really good money but i was also like paying for so many things like i was paying for the

rent i was paying to like have admin i was paying by this point i was going more like three or four times a year and probably towards the end it would be like almost every six weeks right i was going a lot by the end so it's albany for trainings and all sorts of different things when you started to make money though even though you're paying like the rent and the admin and stuff like that like what what are you clear in a month in 2009 i don't know what i was i don't know what i was clearing but i remember i was getting like 20 grand checks okay yeah so i was i have expenses so i have expenses so i I don't, I don't remember. I mean, probably clear in 10 grand, something like that.

Yeah, five or 10. It's good money back then for sure. Yeah, way better than acting too. That was the other thing. Like, you know, I can work and basically I was a producer. I was like, I was like before we even had the space, I would rent a hotel room. I would fly somebody in. I would organize the food and make it better than the breakfast that I had at my five days.

I wanted it to be, I wanted to be a little sexier. Like, I wanted to make it my way. And I think what was kind of great about the community is that like, because, I wasn't knowing what was going on in Albany, I just I just pulled what was good from it and like did that. Put on performance too. Yeah. That makes sense.

I could put on performance. And I was a green sash. And I was like the mother welcoming everybody. Yeah, I don't say that as a negative either. No, no, I know. I understand. It actually really catered to my strengths. Yes.

Because I am and I eventually learned how to present the material. In the early days when I was doing an information night, I would bring Markup because he was the director of What the Bleep and I kind of piggybacked on that. Like everyone knew what the bleep and I'm, who am I. and he would do these information nights and we kind of grew that way. And Mark and I became business partners, I forgot to mention.

So he and I... That was acceptable within... Yeah, like we decided to open up Vancouver, L.A. together. So he was more doing L.A. Oh, business partners within the organization. Yeah, within the organization. Yeah, I thought you meant outside. No, no, no.

Yeah, no, we were... Because I couldn't open the center as a proctor alone. I had to have a green oversight. So I had to have a green sash oversight, and by now Mark was the green sash. So he was sort of like overseeing me, but I was like on the ground. So it's together. It was our center.

But like, does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. So, and I was listening to one of your other episodes. I forget which about how the founder had to be on the wall. What episode was that? The founder had to be on the wall? Was it a Scientology one? Yes, Scientology.

Yeah, Elron Hubbard was on the wall. Probably Jenna maybe. Yeah, probably Jenna. And so we had pictures of Nancy and Keith on the wall, these little frames. But most of the people. I know. No, oh my God. Yeah.

And they, most people in Vancouver never met them unless they went to Vanguard Week or went to do level two training, which is all the higher level stuff. But most people just came and worked on their goals and did the, it was like a gym membership for your growth. Yeah, you know how there's the psychology in the power of like high level business or politics where it's like, no, you come to me. Yeah. Right? Where they're like, no, no, he's got to fly here. We need here and doing that. they they seem to have that with the added layer of also by the way if you come to us we might

not even come into the room yeah you might not even be there but if we do like you were special that day oh yeah there's an aura that they put around themselves a deification yeah if you will i remember the first one of the first time i was in albany and we were supposed to have a meeting that keith was i don't remember what the project was but i was pulled into some project and we were waiting to hear from Keith and it was like we had to keep our phones on into the night and I'm like I'm going to bed I'm turning my phone off and they're like Keith could call any time could be 2 a.m. You need to be available and I was like I don't let's not like and I got in shit for that because I was more attached to my comfort than my that's a no no that's a major no no yeah I mean

the people who are still involved and who believe that like Keith is good and I'm bad would say that I never like worked through my shit because of things like that still involved the kind of sitting in a fucking maximum security prison for the rest of time. FBI Planet Evidence, so it's not real. So they're still like running an underground fucking rush of nexium? Yeah, there's no center here anymore, but there's people who are walking around who very much still believe in it

and think that I'm a suppressive. I'm sorry, I'm sorry that is the case. I mean, at this point, like, you know. And in Mexico, I believe in Monterey, they're fully still doing the curriculum. I don't think they call it nexus. I think that'd be really bad. Yeah, it'd be bad for the brand.

Yeah. Call it something else. Open it up as Enlightenment you or something like that. Enlightenmente you, if it's in fucking Mexico. Yeah. Wow. So you start making money. You're a proctor.

What color sash is that again? Orange. Orange sash. All right. And now you're on the sash. I'm okay with it. I'm really into it. Now the sash means everything to me.

It means everything to you. Yeah. The orange, like what I had to, the hoops I jumped through to get to orange sash. made it mean so much to me. So in my five day when people were like, oh, this is weird, like, I know how you feel. Right. I felt the same way. But what I found was.

Now, I have a sash. No, yeah. Now, when did you meet Nippy, your husband? I met him, I think, in 2006. So I... Did you meet him at V-Week? I met him in the center in Albany. Yeah, and then we went up to V-week together.

What drew you to him? his a lot of things I'm just laughing because when I first met him he was kind of goofy he's kind of like he's like he's super smart but he's also the class clown like he's the one who's always making people laugh and when I met him he like had his pants pulled up really high and he was like doing some impression of somebody

and I just was like who's this hot guy who's like also really goofy like he just really made me laugh and he's very still makes me laugh very funny very smart he's a history major um and he was you know doing the work you don't see a lot of like alpha males who are doing internal work on themselves to be better you know what i mean like oh he was really taking the curriculum yeah yeah he was doing the curriculum um but he was also like you know i don't know there was there was just something keep in mind when i met him i was still with my ex and he was

with somebody so i when i met him i thought he was hot and like funnines all that stuff but i wasn't like we didn't date for a while after that because we were both with people and then there came a time when we were both single and we were like oh so you were both with people when you met but you were hanging out because you're in the organization yeah and wait i'm sorry were you was someone who was in there yes so okay was he was someone who was in there with him yeah and the guy that the filmmaker that i told you about that we started with and we met mark vicene yeah we did we were together for three years and then we were together for three years in xam together the guy that i started yeah and then i was going up the strike

path and he was not and that became a problem. Oh, power dynamic. Yeah. And, you know, my coach would say things like, well, you know, if he's not growing or taking it seriously, like maybe you should consider it like, do you really have a match of values and, you know, we would have a part of breaking you up. Yeah. And truthfully, it's, we were not a good fit.

Yeah, but still, there's something. No, no, it's gross. And we laugh. We can, we're both fully aware and I do believe that Keith was like instructing my coach to, you know, separate us. Did you, I'm going to come back to Nippe in a second, but you had said earlier, like, you didn't even like, you never really liked Keith that much in particularly, but he was this thing, he put together a good program. I respected him. You respected him.

I had him, I, I had his mind, if his mind really did create what I had gotten so much value out of, I respected that. And so you didn't, and you didn't have any level of attraction to him or anything like, never thought about that way. No, and definitely not at the beginning. There were times towards the end when he had been cleaned up that I saw him differently. You felt under a spell almost? A little bit. Yeah, there were times when, like, he would pay attention or, like, he would take my hand. He did this with everybody.

He would, like, take your hands and really look at you and, like, be with you. And I remember being like, oh, I'm getting, I'm, like, getting over my issue. I'm getting closer. Like, I wanted to be closer to him because I thought he was so smart and I really looked up to him. But I always felt that distance. And I noticed that other people were closer with him. I just thought that, again, like, was my limitation. So by the end, I feel like he got in there more with me, but still not fully, as we know.

You know what I mean? He would also, I just remember this. I want to bring this up because it's, you know what I'm going to say. Yeah. Yeah. He would kiss everyone on the lips, including the dudes. They don't even do that. Nippy never did that.

Nippy never kissed them on the lips. did that hurt him in the organization Nippy didn't do a lot of... Nippy, like, they would have said that he had defiance issues because... Get over and suck my tongue. Or you're gay. Yeah, no, he would be like...

This is like one of my first memories of him before we were been dating. Like, as coaches, you had to, like, clean up after a training. And I was like, you know, vacuuming and cleaning the toilets and like, I'm so good, right? And he, like, took a bag of garbage and left. I was like, what the fuck? Like, you stick around.

And like, but he's like, I'm not going to... you know like he he had way better boundaries classic toxic mouth yeah he still takes out the garbage but like he had better boundaries than most people and he was targeted in a different way and you know it affected him and that he didn't get promoted in the same way but he was like who cares he his his joke was cut my pay because he wasn't making any money so he was like who cares and was he still holding on to the whole like aspiring actor thing like through this because they had promised him this role that at some point it's gonna come to the scripts going to get rewritten and I'm going to do it. So he's like, it's like the carrot on the stick

for him. Yeah. And at a certain point, you kind of realize that it might not happen. And he started like personal training and doing like, you know, odd jobs around Albany. But like, you know, the lot of us like that were coaches could take training and, like the trainings were expensive. Like level two trainings were like six to eight grand. And, and for people like us, they needed, they needed to run the training. And so they would get somebody like Nippy to like staff the training. So he was just going into training, into training, but not paying for it, but helping to run it. You know what I mean? Yeah.

So he had stuff to do and sort of waiting for the film and they'd like have, you know, drew a script read and then like, you know, but meanwhile, I'm out in Vancouver and I'm like flying him out because I remember I'm staffing. So I'm like, oh, come to Vancouver and come to L.A. So when we started dating, it was like we would see each other quite often. How did you guys start dating? Like, because obviously the two of you get out of your relationships, but like what led to But he just put it out there one day.

He was like, I think we should get hook up, especially what it was. He was really no game. It was just like, let's, you know, we've been flirting for together, you know, flirting for years. And it was like, what's this about? And I was like, well, sure, let's check it out. That was that. That was that. But it started out very light because he was in New York and I was in Vancouver and, you know, it was kind of fun.

And, you know, I got to, you know, see him during a training. and um but i really appreciated having somebody like him who again like a real guy's guy who was also willing to like be vulnerable and talk about his emotions and you know stuff like that so it escalated pretty quickly that's interesting yeah so he he's a fascinating guy in the sense that he's in this thing he's in it because of the carrot on the stick of like being an actor that makes all the sense in the world but you have like a brilliant ivy league quarterback you know in shape like kind I'm going to do it my way, not give a fuck kind of dude, but then he's also like emotionally in touch. And at the same time, like, he's cool with the power, at least for what he's trying to do, he's cool with the power dynamics in an organization like this.

So when you guys start dating, like obviously you're having success, that's not a problem for him. He's cool. No, he's happy with that. But like, how would you guys talk about the organization? Did you guys, I'm talking even before you're married. You got married in 2010? Yeah, good. No, no, we started getting dating.

We got married in 2013. Okay. Yeah. All right. So before you get married, when you're dating, in your conversations about nexium, did you guys ever, like, broached a topic of like, hey, some of this is weird or even say things like, are we in a cult? Whenever I said, are we in a cult, but definitely if there's anyone that I could talk to about things I had problems with is with Nibbi. and Mark Vesente actually

to a degree okay yeah for Nippy though he becomes your husband what kinds of conversations would you guys like Claire because she was she was I was a higher rank than her but she Claire Bronfman

oh right yeah but she was sort of in charge of me in terms of like we'd have these meetings that she would run and I just found her like unbearable and she just was like there was just there was certain things that would be pro like she would raise the rate on ethos which is the ongoing gym membership version of nexium like she membership yeah so we so we had like the five day training and then we had ethos which is like 300 dollars a month people would come and they take classes like a

gym membership yeah they give the steam room too yeah i wish we had a steam room i wanted to have a sauna put in but yeah that's nice goals um but it was like 182 dollars a month and then she raised it to three hundred dollars a month and it was a big jump and i like all these you know struggling actors in Vancouver. And this is actually in the book. She was like, you need to, you need to find. She had a British accent, like a pseudo-British accent because she was raised part-time in Britain. She's like, your clientele, I'm going to do a terrible accent. Forget it. I'm not going to do it. But she basically said to me that I need to basically recruit richer people is what I needed to do. You're recruiting the peasants. Yeah, exactly. Pretty much. That's a very good accent.

Oh, my God. My British accent's not. I can do a good British accent, but I can't do her British accent because it was like the subtle one that it was, you know, I can do a proper one. But anyway. She wasn't speaking like the Kings. No. Right. Yeah. So I remember being like, what the fuck?

You've never, like the reason she was lower rank is she couldn't recruit. She was terrible at recruiting because she didn't have any friends. And so I'm recruiting, but she's like giving me advice on how I should do it. And I'm like, I'm bringing more money into the company than anybody. Like, why are you handcuffing me? I always just felt like there were there were so many problems, especially in the last quarter. I look at my time in Xiam and quarters. I was like struggling to get to Proctor

and then like the golden years and then the demise you know kind of kind of thing and in that last section there were so many problems she stopped paying us I was I was called a field trainer and so I because I opened up an area

and I was in charge of all the salespeople and I was filling the trainings and just like changed the commission structure so we stopped making money we stopped anytime I had a like a problem like hey can we get paid for the work that we did so we can re- like pay for all the things like we you know I'm paying for things

out of pocket when you get reimbursed. Well, that's me being entitled, which is a nexium term for like, I'm not being grateful and I'm not paying tribute and like it's just constant gaslighting. Off it up, Siegrams. Yeah, exactly. Come on. Oh, and she was notorious for like paying people or not paying people at all. Like she, her concept of money was so, it's funny, I'm even scared to talk because she had a jail now. Can we take a bathroom break? Yes, we'll be right back. all right we're back so did you ever as you were rising up and bringing people into the organization basically as a recruiter first of all did you feel yourself like improving as they had personally as they had told you you were going to did you feel like you were actually getting the benefits

of the program or do you feel like you making money and recruiting people into it was like a fake fill in for you actually making making yourself feel like you were improving. I think it's probably both. I think that I was actually like the true part of the stripe path in terms of evolving your issues so that you could like raise your self-esteem and go to the next level. Remember I talked about options? I think there's some truth in that in that like if you feel resourceless in a situation, you feel kind of stuck and you get depressed. And I felt like and I think I also had a little bit of this before naturally and NXium kind of expanded on it. like I'm the kind of person who it's like if I can't get into a restaurant like I'm going to get

into the restaurant you know what I'm not going to take no for an answer right I'm going to call and do my thing which you know nippy loves when it's to his benefit I could totally right like yeah he's like go go to the front and get upgrade right that's right it doesn't like it when it's him right when I'm like can we just you said you were going to like can you know so I have a tendency to nag. I'm working on that because I'm, you know, I don't take no for an answer. So that's, that's what made me such a good, why are you laughing? I didn't say anything. Okay. So, why are we talking about this? We were talking about this for whether or not you felt like you had actually been improving. Yeah. No, I think it was like kind of hidden by the success. I think there's

a lot of things and we'll never know because I was at the stage in my life where, you know, I had friends who were around me say, like, you were always going to be successful at whatever you did. So, like, maybe that's true, I don't know, but I was using these tools and I was saying I was successful because of the tools. So that's what things that a lot of cults do is they take full responsibility for any success you have. Any failures you have, that's on you. Right.

Right. So I was like, I'm so successful. I'm doing so great. And it's because of this program. And that's kind of how I tended to recruit. I just lived my life. I mean, I did reach out and, like, you know, call people and things like that, but I wasn't a major hard sell person. I was like, yeah, it's what I'm doing. And if you want a piece of

it, like, come check out the next information night. I wasn't like cold calling people, you know. How many people were in nexium by like 2010? Yeah. By 2010, I don't know. But by the time I left in 2017, there's two numbers, and we don't know for sure, but it's between 17,000 and 20,000. Whoa. Oh, I didn't realize it got that big. I mean, you got, but think about 20 years. It's a thousand people a year internationally is actually pretty small in terms of like scientology or any of these other groups yeah yeah but they've been around a lot longer yeah it's a full-blown religion there's a lot more people involved yeah exactly exactly yeah very huge but i will i would say at any v week would be where any of the most dedicated anyone who's

currently active in the organization would be at v week and it was never more than 400 people in time, there was no more than 400 to 1,000 people who are currently active. Active with it. Yeah, because many people came through and took a five day and then pieced out. Of those 17 to 20,000 people, it could have been someone who just did that and then they were gone. And those people are, like, for the most part, pretty unscathed. And many of those people are really happy with what they did because they didn't, you know,

immerse themselves and do what I did. What made you an effective recruiter, you think? I've, from what I've been told, from people who knew me before, during and after, like, you know, there's something that I've talked about with people on our podcast who, like, ex-members is that I was, you know, I was walking the walk and I was, I didn't pressure people to do it. Like, a lot of people were trained to kind of do the thing that was done to me, like, well, I remember what I said with my field trainer who was like, you know, you want to be the master of your own ship. I would, I would sort of meet with people if they wanted to learn more. And I, and I'd, and I'd, you know,

be like, what's, what are you, what are your goals? Like, what are you working on? And people would tell me, and I'd say, like, you know, you're here in your life and you're trying to get here what's stopping you. And they'd tell me, you know, I procrastinate or I'm afraid to take the next steps or whatever. I'm like, well, we have a curriculum that's going to help you do that. This is how much it costs. And I would just walk them through the process. And sometimes people would be into it. Sometimes they wouldn't. And I'd be like, yeah, if it's not for you, like, you know, you've got my number. And I think the soft approach for most people is what worked. Um, I really believed in it.

And I'd had such a good experience. And to answer your earlier question, like, you know, yes, I was using the tools and I was happier. But also I was making money and, and I, I had physical proof of like, you know, I had a Honda Civic and now I have a mini Cooper. Right. You know, like there's moving up in the world. Moving up. I have a nice car. I've got a nice apartment.

I'm traveling a lot. And my life looked pretty exciting because it was. I did fly on the Bronfman jet once. That was cool. Bronfman jet. Yeah. What was that like? It was amazing.

I mean, have you ever been on a private jet? No, after the whole Epstein thing, I'm not into it. Yeah, there's an island. I don't know what's going on on the I'll fly commercial. I have no problem with it. I agree with you. I did spoil me for life after you've been on a, we flew to Alaska to do a Janice training. Janice was the women's program that came later.

Yeah, Janice. So Nancy. See, if you hit that up. A mutual friend of ours family did. What? Wait, you know someone who did Janice? Wait, hold on. Turn your mic on there, buddy. Ours off. Yeah, yeah. Turn yours on.

You want to turn mine on. Yeah, there you go. Now we can. Who did you know that did Janus? Well, I won't name them because we are on a public forum. But a mutual friend of ours, his whole family did. What? Yeah. But not Nexium?

Not Nexium. Not Nexium, but his whole family did Janus. Yeah. And then got one of my buddies involved. involved too. It was a interesting time. Here in New York? Yeah, yeah. Well, you're going to have to tell me off camera because I pretty much knew everybody that did it. Oh, yeah, we could definitely talk off camera then. Dying to know. Yeah, I'm dying to say it on air, honestly, folks, I'm dying. We'll protect identities there, but nonetheless. Oh, my God. Yeah. Yeah, a small world. Listen, it touches everybody. Yeah. Apparently. But so I wasn't. Nobody's asked me by the way.

I was trying to do that. Don't laugh. Nobody's asked me that. What made me a good recruiter? I mean, but that was your life though. You know what I mean? Like you had a job day to day and you were obviously successful at it. And it sounds like, you know, you were saying Nippy didn't hold that against you at all.

Like he was happy to see you successful with that. He was still trying to do whatever he was doing. But you're rising up to this thing and you're developing, you're bringing all the you're bringing all these people in and you know you had said earlier it was situational vulnerability for a lot of people that's where they would get them which makes all the sense in the world but you know if we're if we're really honing in on those 400 people that would go to V-week right so the people who are really committed and really in do you were there any common threads besides that in those people the people who are really committed yeah like that would that would make

them vulnerable to doing that, minus the situational vulnerability? Honestly, it's so case by case, I would say. Like, even for somebody, I don't know. I'm just trying to take a step back there for a second, minus the situational vulnerability. I think the main through line for people to go to something like V-week is people who really also loved community. You know, there was a real raw, raw kind of camaraderie. summer camp vibe, you know, like Burning Man, but for there's no costumes and no sand,

there was a real excitement about like, the idea was, I guess so cringy now, but like spending 10 days, what could humanity be like? This is what Keith wanted for his birthday, by the way. He didn't want any things because he's a renunciate, right? He wanted 10 days where people came together, kind to each other, living their most joyful lives. So we'd do yoga and we were doing, you know, having dance parties and Keith would do forums and Nancy would teach class and we'd swim down by the lake. I'd love to take off and just go like sunbathe by the lake because I didn't, I didn't know this at the time, but I actually really didn't enjoy the curriculum, especially at Vee, we could have so beautiful out. I wanted to like, you know, just be by the

water. Yeah. Um, my own little private rebellions that I wasn't aware of that I was doing. Suppressive. Yeah, it was suppressive. What, what I realized is that I was really good at the good girl mask but actually I had a lot of internal like I was breaking the rules but like I'd be like yeah I entered my data but like I didn't but because they didn't check it's not like Scientology where they're really really rigid about measuring everything they were it was like you just yeah and I would be like yeah I did that I did that and then I did do my own thing so it was like an external good girl does that make sense yes and I started to break the rules more and more especially towards the end because I was like parts of me were like well that's

that's bullshit like just it just got worse it got there were so many and to answer your other question about like being able to confide and nippy about it we were we we would complain to each other i couldn't complain up rank because i would be gaslit and i couldn't complain down because that would be bad bad leadership you know what i mean like i did do that have you heard the term toxic positivity maybe it's like huge in a lot of things like the mormon church and mllms like you know boss bay like everything's great and like living my best life and like i have I had to kind of tell that line and I didn't really realize how unhappy I was towards the end. And I could confine a nippy in that.

Were you married before Nippy too? No. You weren't. No. You were just in a relationship. I was in a relationship. I thought we were going to get married. Right.

That was the one you moved in with and, you know, like, we're not doing this. He was the same guy that I started an Xiam with. So I did three. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Now, so you guys eventually get married.

Did you have a wedding, like, with all the cult members? Yes. Yes. Was anyone besides, I mean, your mom was technically in it, but was your, was anyone not from the cult, like from your life there? Oh, yeah. My family was in it. In fact, there's a picture in here. My mom was there.

Childhood friends, stuff like that. Yep. And they thought it was very weird. They told me later. I thought it was a great wedding at the time. But everybody who wasn't in nexium was like, this is very strange. Yeah. This is a picture of my wedding.

there's um lauren so nancy's daughter nancy's daughter was the efficient yeah marrying nippy and i and she did she did the vows that were written by keith oh he wrote the have you redone the wedding since okay yeah yeah we did we renewed our vows yeah that's good you deserve a do-over thank you i did a do-over in the place that i wanted to get married which i couldn't have because it had conflicted with v week like i wanted to i wanted to get married on hornby island oh you got married during V-week at V-week? No, no, no, no. We got married, our big party

that I just showed you a picture from was September 28th, and we chose that date because it was the only weekend that was free in the Naxium calendar because we wanted Nancy to come and Lauren to come. So I had to make sure they were free.

Where I really wanted to get married was on Hornby Island, which is like where I spent my summers and this is a magical hippie island. Anyway, I renewed my vows there and rewrote new ones. Good. Fuck you, Vanguard.

That's right. Yeah. Don't call him Van Gogh. Don't give him. No, it's because we used to say, thank you, Vanguard. So I didn't say, fuck you Vanguard. Did you have to say that in your vows? Like, did you write that in?

No, he didn't say that in our vows. It didn't say Vanguard in the vows. No. What were the vows like? Like, I pledged to chain my loyalty to you and nexium, which is the code of humanity. They were kind of world-sality bullshit, but they were actually, I'm almost positive. He didn't write them because they were pretty. I mean, I remember liking them at the time.

They were, you know, about true love. upholding each other and blah blah blah do you want to pull them up and they're probably out there oh they're out there maybe let's try the sarah edmondson vows from wedding it's probably going to pull up the vow oh yeah yeah was called yeah ironically i don't know if it's out there i could get them i bet mark facente could send them to us because mark facente and bonnie his wife used them first he wrote there he wrote them for her for them and then you guys got the plagiarized version yeah we got to use them again we had to ask permission i know july Keith?

Yeah, Keith. And Mark. I asked Mark, too, if you wouldn't mind. No, it's not coming up. I will find them and I'll email out to you. Yeah, that's... Just if you're curious. I am curious, but...

They were... They were... They were nice. I mean, I remember thinking, but like, now I'm sure he, like... This is before chat, GTP, but I'm sure he, like, found them and plagiarized them. Yeah, I'll bet he did. He didn't do anything in original. Yeah.

Were you... Would you describe yourself after you got married as, like, did you feel happy in life at the time yeah everything seemed normal to you you're successful you're marrying the man you love yeah that that part was great but this is around the time when things were becoming strained in the organization i said we called it an organization we didn't call it a cult we called it an organization yeah of course it was it was the nipi was said would say the morale was low and this is 2013 i would say 2013 2014 is probably around the time that things started to go down.

This is also like people were getting sick. Like I showed you that picture. That was 2014. That was the first funeral. Oh, you had never been to a funeral of a cult member? Yeah. A lot of people, there was like eight people at a time that had cancer. I think, so the people, the two people that died, I believe it was poisoning.

Keith, Nancy had cancer. Karen had, all these women around him. Nancy Salzman? Yeah, she had cancer too, but she beat it. It's a lot of, I think that he was trying to poison a lot of. people at the time i thought there was something in the water but now i think it was something more nefarious something else is going on there yeah but the things things were there was just like it's it's the most painful part of the book actually because it's so it's so like uh it's a slog it became

it went from being like really joyful and fun and exciting and kind of glamorous to like keith started a new program called ultima where it was all there was a acting program there was um a media program there was a like a mo there was all these different classes he started he wanted all the coaches to come and learn this training but he basically like pulled my entire staff from vancouver and i was like what what are you doing like this is and so the things like that but you couldn't say that because you wouldn't be like suppressive and anti-tribute and like you know what i mean yeah he said as we outlined earlier he would set these traps ahead of time to get out in front of things so that you were gasoline into not being able to take action yes

okay yeah my the the toxic positivity mixed with the the changing of the formats so that you couldn't like we couldn't thrive you know and this was supposed to be we were going to change the world but we were we felt like we were hogtied at every level right little little tangent i'm sure you're aware of lulu lemon love me some lulu lemon they made the world a better place i'm sure you do yeah joey as well yeah and me too great company great company so that started in vancouver and the owner, Chip Wilson, who we might have on this podcast, but please continue. Okay, well, he, you could ask him,

he brought Landmark, which was another personal development program, to the training of Lulu Lemon, because he had taken that curriculum, okay? Is that like some nexium shit? Landmark? Yeah. Landmark is like nexium light.

Yeah. There's no branding and, what? Diet, diet. Yeah. There's no branding and there's no, as far as we know, like harem, But Werner Earhart, the guy who started it, not Chip, the Werner Earhart is, like, fully abusive, allegedly, in my opinion.

And you can cut this if you want. But there's like, no, no, like, we've talked to whistleblowers. We've talked to the Nancy Salzman of Landmark, and she's like, it's a cult. Is Chip cool? Chip's cool, yeah. I mean, you know, I don't know him super well, but, I mean, I'm sure he's, I'm sure. I might get you in here when he's in here, stare him down, get a good read. Sure.

But she's like, yeah, I'm here. I'm here for it. I'm in. I mean, like, listen, he started an empire. Like, he's a very successful business person, right? Yeah. I got a question that I'm curious about, because I noticed you said that with his next program, like, there was an acting program, there was a media program.

And I'm kind of noticing that pattern, too. Do you think there was a reason why he always seemed to be going after actors, people in media, filmmakers? Or was that just kind of a coincidence? Like, were a lot of other people in Nexium actors? Or was it across the board? I mean, it kind of depended, like, the center in Mexico had more of a, like, the who's who of politics, just because of who brought in who and who was friends with who. Because it was all word of mouth. We didn't advertise.

So when Mark and I got involved, Mark is from Hollywood, and I have connections through the film industry, like, just sort of how it grew. But I think that Keith really enjoyed that. Like, when Nippy left and came back, he was like, oh, when I came back, it exploded with a bunch of young people and, like, you know, or actually do it. doing things in the world, you know, and it looked a little bit more, I think Keith wanted that front-facing, like, you know, attractive women and men on the outside who were, you know, doing legitimate things. And good cover. Yeah, it's good cover. Yeah. All calls have to have that.

Yes. Yeah. Of course. Yeah. Cover's important. Yes. You can't just say, I am going to have a harem. That's right.

Okay. We'll bookmark the chip thing and come back. I have to finish that story. I'll be super quick. Yeah, yeah, finish it. The long and short of it is that when I, so this is 10 years ago, 11 years ago, I'd just given birth to my son. Nancy Salzman was coming out to Vancouver to do a training because I'd also set up a meeting

with Lulu Lemon because I'd heard, I didn't know that Landmark was bad at this point. I thought they were subpar version of what we did. So it was just like Lulu Lemon was going to not do Landmark anymore and they were looking for something else. And so I had arranged a meeting with a head of, of Lulu Lemon, like human development or whatever, to meet with Nancy and they'd agree. Human development. Yeah.

To have a meeting and they had a meeting and they totally hit it off. It was great. And the next step for this person was to fly to Albany and do a 16 day training with Keith. Yeah. So basically Keith Kaiboshed it. Like they were like, great. Can you come and do a five days? Like, no, you have to bring your whole team to Albany and do a 16 day training.

It never happened. So I was like, are you fucking kidding me? so that kind of thing like that's do you see how frustrated I would be yes right like you want to grow you brought something in the table yeah it was there to hit it right off to softball and they didn't do it and there's so many stories like that

with a lot of people a lot of people in New York were Ivy League grads from different schools and they would bring it back to their school and like there would be an opportunity and Keith would be like no they're not ethical we can't do it or some bullshit so there's a lot of shit like that happening a lot on the bone yeah okay where you want to go from here, Julian. There's a lot to cover. There's a lot. Yeah.

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