Uncover - Season 1 Handover

Episode Date: November 1, 2018

Uncover hosts Josh Bloch and Ian Hanomansing discuss the making of Season 1 and reveal what's in store for Season 2.

There is a political firestorm burning in America. We're going to walk down to the Capitol. Possible Capitol injuries. The Flamethrowers tells the story of the radio broadcasters who started that fire and kept it burning. Here is Rush Limbaugh. Broadcasters who clawed their way from the fringes of American politics. I've had enough of all of it. I've had enough of it! The Flamethrowers.

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With the free Audible app, you can listen anytime, anywhere, whether you're at home, in the car, or out on a jog. The first 30 days of the Audible membership are free, including a free book. Go to www.audible.ca slash cbc to learn more. Hi, everyone. Josh Bloch here from Uncover Escaping NXIVM.

I'm joined today by Ian Hannemansing, someone I'm a huge fan of. I've been listening to him and watching him since I was, I think, 12 years old. He's also one of the co-hosts of the upcoming second season of Uncover, the investigative series from CBC Podcasts. The second season is being released on November 12th. Hello, Ian. Well, you know, hello, but as much as I'm a fan of your podcast,

you really have to say you've been listening to me since you were 12? Well, I was just saying the other day that somehow I've managed to catch up to you in age. I don't know what it is that you eat or your exercise regimen, but I feel like now I'm just a middle-aged guy with Ian Hanneman Singh. Excellent. Well, now you've made up for that introduction. So I have lots of questions for you about NXIVM. There are questions that some of the podcast listeners have and questions that I have, and I'll just throw a combination of those to you. One of the things I'm curious about when you do a project like that, you're dealing with somebody who is a

friend of yours for a long time, and the podcast gets so much attention, she gets so much attention. How has the experience been for you and your relationship with her? How has the experience been for you and your relationship with her? That's a good question. You know, on the one hand, it really amplified the feelings that we always have when we cover a story around getting a story right. I mean, we always want to get a story right. But in this case, I know the person whose story I'm telling, and I really felt that obligation more acutely. the person whose story I'm telling. And I really felt that obligation more acutely. And the other side of it was I was kind of aware that people might perceive my journalism as being biased or influenced by the fact that I know her. And so I felt also more acutely the need to

be balanced in the storytelling and to make sure that we were seeing it through a critical lens. You know, Sarah's told me that she also struggles with it because she has put herself out there and opened herself up to scrutiny. Ranieri's lawyer was fascinating in the podcast. You know, I expected to hear that the lawyer wouldn't talk, that he would threaten to sue you, you know, to the Stone Age if you dared to make any allegations. He was very chatty. You know, take me behind the scenes of that or even inside your head as you were doing the interview with him.

Yeah, I mean, we also were surprised and grateful. We had spent, you know, over the course of the investigation, we had tried very, very hard to speak to anyone inside NXIVM or anyone that would be able to give us another perspective on the story we were trying to tell. So we were, first of all, really happy that he agreed to an interview and came forward. It was really useful and helpful for us to get an understanding of the perspective from people who support NXIVM. And, yeah, I was also really surprised at how charming he was on a certain level. He wasn't a bulldog. Going into it, I thought,

oh, this is going to be a kind of antagonistic interview and he is going to jump down my throat if I suggest anything that he doesn't agree with. And that was not what happened. I actually found it to be a really engaging conversation, even if I didn't agree with everything that he doesn't agree with. And that was not what happened. I actually found it to be a really engaging conversation, even if I didn't agree with everything that he was saying. And we've discussed a lot about why he agreed to do this interview. And I don't know exactly.

I mean, people have speculated online. Was it about there had been so much media coverage mostly from a different perspective about NXIVM? And perhaps there was an effort there to shed light on another way of seeing the story. But, you know, I don't know exactly. This is going to sound like an odd path to take to an anecdote, but bear with me. I was at the Just for Laughs festival, the comedy festival here in Toronto a few weeks ago, sitting next to a guy and we started chatting about escaping NXIVM, and we'd both been listening to the podcast. And then the guy said to me, you know, I was a member of a cult.

And then he talked about his involvement for years in Scientology, which he used the word cult to describe that. And I know that I'm not the, you know, I know that people have drawn parallels between NXIVM and groups like Scientology. So for the leader of NXIVM, Keith Raniere, was he influenced at all by either Scientology or other, depending on your perspective, cult-like organizations?

There was a couple people that have made that connection, but one person who knew Keith actually way back just after he graduated from college and he was in the process of trying to develop some kind of company. He wanted to make a lot of money and was this very charismatic figure at the time and had all sorts of people around him engaged in these conversations about the kind of company they wanted to make. And this woman that we interviewed said they talked about Scientology and Keith talked about

Scientology as a really incredible moneymaker. He said, that's where the money is. It's in creating a religion. They decided not to go that route. The first company he created was a multi-level marketing company that had nothing to do really with what NXIVM was or with what Scientology is, but it seems like it was on his radar. One man we talked to, Rick Ross, who had analyzed some of the NXIVM curriculum and has claimed that there are many elements within the curriculum that are borrowed from Scientology. Now, other experts will say, look, all these kinds of groups tend to operate in the same way. And if you study three or four or five of them, you start to see the same patterns occurring again and again and again. them, you start to see the same patterns occurring again and again and again. But sure, it does,

you know, people have pointed to the fact that there does seem to even be terminology like suppressives that was used in NXIVM and has been used in Scientology as well. So is this going to be your life's work now? How do you move on to your next thing? I don't know. Well, I mean, the trial is coming up in, well, right now it's slated for March. It may be pushed a little bit later. There's a lot of information that they're trying to analyze and to work through. So I will be doing some kind of coverage and providing updates when that trial is happening. And speaking of the next projects, I want to ask you – Look at that.

Look at that professional segue. I saw it coming, but I'm still very impressed by it. I appreciate it coming, but I'm still very impressed by it. I appreciate it. I want to ask you about season two, and I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about the story that you are looking into in season two of Uncover. Yeah, so the title of season two is Uncover, Bomb on Board, and it's a podcast that I'm working away on with some of the same team members that worked with you. And the co-host is Johanna Wagstaff, who is a meteorologist and science reporter from Vancouver, where I was based for a long time. And this is a co-production with The National. And this is a story about a plane crash back in, long before you were born, Josh, on July 8th, 1965. It was CP Flight 21, and it was headed from Vancouver to Prince George.

It exploded in midair. People on the ground, even though this happened in a remote area of British Columbia, actually heard the explosion, looked up, saw the tail section of this plane fall to the ground. All 52 people on board this plane were killed. And when you look at the newspaper coverage of this the next day, literally, as you would expect, front-page stories, coast to coast. And even at that point, so it must have just been a couple of hours after the crash these stories were written,

already people were talking about how it seemed likely that it had been a bomb on this plane that led to the crash. And yet 53 years later, this remains unsolved. It's amazing. I think I'm probably not alone in this that I had never heard of this case. So that is certainly one of the things that drew me to this story. It's really strange that it got such widespread news coverage at the time, and yet it seemed to recede from the memories of the people who were alive at the time. And it's never really been part of the history, the folklore of the area. I mean, some of these stories of plane crashes are stories that people remember and talk about. I mean, Swiss Air was only 20

years ago, but I feel that it will be remembered for a long time. So how did this one get forgotten, especially when you consider that it was not just a plane crash, but that it was a bomb? I mean, to think that at any time, but especially in 1965, that someone would have done this, someone would have planted that bomb and that that remained undetected, how that hasn't continued as a story is strange. And yet you talk to the family members of the people who were on board, they certainly remember, and it's not hard to get them to speak about what happened. And then other people who have connections in unusual ways. There's a guy named Ken Leyland, and he was a teenager when this crash happened,

and his dad was a senior investigator for Transport Canada, which at the time did the role that now is done by the Transportation Safety Board. So Ken was at the dinner table in Vancouver when his dad got the call that a plane has crashed and you need to head to 100 Mile House. And here's an excerpt of my conversation with Ken Leland, the son of the Transport Canada investigator. When did you first hear from your dad that he and the RCMP were pretty sure who did it? The night before the reunion. That was the first time? Mm-hmm. And what did your dad tell you? I asked him point blank. I said, do you know who did it? And he said,

Do you know who did it? And he said, we have a very good idea who the responsible person was. They knew who was responsible. This, Josh, is the first time that Ken has publicly told this story and revealed that information. And so we've been doing a pretty extensive investigation. We have talked to a modern day air crash investigator, an explosives expert, a criminologist who used to be a police officer with an interest in coal cases to try to move this case forward and try to get the answer to this 53-year-old mystery who put that bomb on the plane. Well, I'm very excited to listen to this series,

season two of Uncover. Thank you so much, Ian. Well, thank you. And as I say, I come to this, honestly, I am very proud to be part of this series. And once I started listening to your podcast, it was, you know, my biggest challenge was not to listen to multiple episodes in a single day. So it was a fantastic piece of work.

And I do look forward very much to your coverage of the trial. I appreciate it. Okay. Thank you very much, John. Thanks so much, Ian. All right. Good luck. Bye.

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