Escaping the NXIVM Cult - Sarah Edmondson & Nippy Ames - Mormon Stories 1507

hello everyone and welcome to another edition of mormon stories podcast i'm your host dr john dulin it is november 13th 2021 and we are so excited uh this weekend for thrive thrive beyond mormonism this amazing conference we are a few tickets away from being sold out at 1400 people it'll be the second largest post-mormon event in the history of the world uh and given that it's kind of during a time of covet we're super happy about that um we are uh even more excited if you can believe it or not to have with us in studio today um sarah edmondson and nippy ames how are you guys doing good great welcome guys thanks for having us thank you for having us so i'm sure most of you know who these amazing people are um but uh for those of you who don't once upon a time there was a um uh we could just call it kind of a sex cult started in upstate new york by uh a man named keith ranieri and the cult was called nexium and uh sarah and nippy are survivors of that cult and you can see all about their story on a currently released multi-series nine-hour epic documentary on hbo called the vow margie and i just finished the vow this week you can also hear about sarah's story specifically in her book called scarred which i have begun to read but i have a long way to go but i'm super excited to read this book make sure and buy and read this book and also you can follow sarah and nippy on an amazing podcast that they're in their second season of called a little bit culty and so we when we learned about serenity and all the amazing things they did and do and have done and honestly they along with just a few other people are uh responsible for bringing down keith renery and uh his cult and he is now in federal prison for like 120 150 years we'll talk about that they were key uh figures in bringing this cult down a lot like leah remini and mike rinder were for scientology and others so these are in my world these guys are heroes and we brought them to thrive this weekend to help keynote now this this episode's gonna air after thrives over um because we've already sold out we don't need more promo and we want to be able to take breaks but i am so super excited to have you guys in studio all the way from vancouver canada so sarah nippy thanks for joining us thank you for having us we're excited anything you guys want to fix or correct or add to the introduction oh you did a great job okay yeah all right well um we're also really thrilled to have in studio uh my my beloved co-host uh cara burrell cara it's good to have you so good to be here you had a great tour around temple score yesterday with uh sarah nippy and some other people so and anthony and anthony yeah so i'm really excited to get into this so thanks for coming out guys thank you yeah so i uh i one of the so so first of all we have a couple hours uh because this weekend's gonna be really full so this is unlike many mormon stories episodes this is not gonna be a 15 hour or even an eight hour interview we're gonna spend a couple hours uh with sarah nippy today we're really honored to have that much time um and uh i thought a lot about it like we don't want you know we don't want to try and recreate this amazing book or recreate uh this epic nine hour series on the vow or even their podcast we want you to go watch all of that and so all of that's going to be in our show notes so i thought about um what what could we do to make the most of our time today and what i thought would be really interesting would be to have them tell enough of their story in a emotional personal way for you guys to just learn how epic and gripping it is because in some ways he takes keith renery takes colts to a level we haven't seen before um in in many ways and in some ways it's kind of the same old same old uh kind of cult forming uh sex conforming but if any of you remember my interviews with like chris shelton or lloyd evans with scientology scientology or the jehovah's witnesses what so many of my listeners have valued is kind of seeing a little bit about the parallels between any any high demand religion and or cult and kind of the history of of joseph smith and mormonism and so what i did what i did to begin is i kind of pulled together my best description of uh keith renery and nexium and i want my listeners to begin by kind of just listening to this description and i'm not trying to poison the well but i just want to know if this sounds familiar because i read this to serenity right before and i just checked to see if if this sounded familiar to them they endorsed it and and you listeners you just tell me if this sounds familiar so here goes my summary of keith renery uh founder of nexium man from upstate new york gets involved in fraud in the early part of his life everything falls apart and his early efforts are exposed as fraudulent mostly commercial even though those early efforts fall apart he realizes that he has the power to influence people and gains a small following and a reputation of being special kind of having special powers so he reinvents himself as more of a spiritual leader writes a bunch of new stuff and creates an organization that's mostly focused around self-improvement and living your best life and being truly happy um he claims to be special and his followers start viewing him as special and having special powers and and that he has the keys to happiness so he acquires these followers and he sends them out all throughout the world to spread teachings and um he uses he relies a lot on the help of volunteers um these people in the inner circle some early people uh start to defect and when they defect they are harassed um and uh defamed in you know the media and in their social circles over time the founder starts to implement multiple levels um in his organization kind of multiple levels of advancement and he even creates a secret society within the organization that's unbeknownst to the rest of the members of the group in this group throughout the time he is practicing you can call it ethical non-monogamy you can call it polyamory you can call polygamy whatever you want but the leader has lots of female sexual partners um throughout the history of this organization um and he even is involved with underage women uh some as young as 14 years old so he has a pension for younger women and um he even uses women to recruit for additional female sexual partners um over time more he gets more and more powerful more and more popular and more and more people start defecting and they start to whistle blow at some point this reaches the press some very few but courageous whistleblowers are willing to go public even at the expense of being punished um and defamed and even uh yeah just punished in very significant ways and those defectors are attacked and smeared miraculously eventually law enforcement gets involved and eventually this leader is put in prison um and even though he's put in prison and his movement is kind of put on hold many of the women that he had sexual relations with continue to support and testify on his behalf believe in him and offend him and to this day he continues to have followers who believe in him even though his movement ended with him being imprisoned now tell me guys is that an accurate description of kind of at least yeah is it am i cherry-picking i mean those are the broad strokes yeah yeah it's probably a little more abusive and worse than than that at certain yeah in terms of the emotional manipulation well i don't i i usually don't take that long to kind of preamble but but it's it's really stark to me is including in upstate new york so welcome to mormon stories podcast guys i'm so excited to hear your story thank you so if it's all right let's begin with just a little bit of your backgrounds before you ever join nexium just to kind of because because one of the big questions is how do people get caught up in these high-demand religions or cults and and one of the things that i was struck by in the vow is it's not always poor uneducated um kind of low iq people you know what i mean sometimes it's the best and the brightest so uh let's start let's start with you sarah that's a bit about your background sure some of this may be uh repetitive in my in my talk tomorrow thrive but that's okay because this comes out after yeah okay so i'm from canada i'm the child of two kind of left-wing politically socially active ex-hippie therapists and i born and raised there i was always very um i was very much encouraged to make a difference in the world you know leave the world a better bless you leave the world a better place type of thing and at the same time you know not to be like you know dime store psychology says but uh you know i struggled with fitting in in in school i was you know a bit of a dork and um went to summer camp and like found a little bit of more security there but i was always kind of trying to find my my place in the world and uh in my 20s i was an aspiring actress sort of the stereotypical cliche of living in a basement suite and auditioning and looking for meaning and purpose and community and i met a filmmaker whose work i really admired and he said well if you liked my film you may like this workshop that i just took and i didn't research i didn't ask anyone if they liked the course i just trusted him and liked him so i jumped into a training that happened to be happening in vancouver first canadian one ever a couple weeks later and that first training was really it was a mixture of like kind of bizarre rituals but also helpful tools for life and i overall felt i felt uncomfortable after the first day so i googled it for the first time and there was a lot of really nasty things that were said about the organization so i called mark the director who'd recruited me and he said do you believe everything you read online just because it's there doesn't mean it's true why don't you trust your own experience wait till day three and i did and i overrode my gut instinct to get the f out because i couldn't get my money back also it was part of it and i trusted mark and this is mark from what the bleep do you know is that right which is a movie that i like thought was really interesting it was kind of a was it a precursor to the scene yes it was before the secret but it was the first of of many films that were sort of bridging the the gap between personal spiritual development and media and making those things more accessible to people and i saw that film and i loved it so when he this person i really liked and respected said you should do this i was like of course which is how i now know how these things work this whole leverage trust i am can i ask you a question yeah so there are so many people leaving organized religion right now and they're leaving mormonism and so many of us think well now you know i i value science i value education i value logic and critical thinking and so i'm going to be secular i'm going to leave a religion that maybe is based on magical thinking and superstition and i'm going to be these progressive kind of parents where i'm gonna raise my kids to be free thinkers and and to love truth and to do good in the world and that's gonna and i'm gonna save them from this high demand magical thinking-based organization that's kind of abusive and that almost sounds like your parents and what i've noticed for many of the people that convert to mormonism is they were raised by secular parents who were free thinkers and wise and thoughtful so i'm i i don't know if you've thought a lot about this i'm sure you have but like why wasn't what was it that your parents or your upbringing couldn't give you that made you curious that that didn't leave you feeling whole like you needed something else does that make sense yes i have to say i totally don't blame my parents for any of this um they did a great job raising me i think partly it was that they split up when i was quite young divorced yeah when i was two so i think for me i was always looking for wholeness and togetherness anyway you know and feeling like this i had anxiety from a really young age um but also you're right they you know my dad really rebelled from an extreme anglican um upbringing his dad was a minister and so he was very much like against all of that so he and my mom really wanted me to find my own way and figure out what was right for me and not force any religion down my throat but i did crave structure and a path i didn't have like a way to get to where i wanted to get to so it wasn't i didn't think i was joining a religion i thought i was joining a community of people who are interested in personal and professional development and it was a structure and it was measurable which i really liked and that was i think almost in in direct contrast to me being an actor which is super not measurable you can do all the things you can look great you can be fit you can be a good actor and still not get the part you know as it were so i found a structure in nexium that said if you do x y and z then you get promoted you go up this ladder that promised future enlightenment measurable growth and all those things so i think it was a combination of you know having a crappy career as an actor which is not fulfilling it's a hard career it's a really hard career even if you're great even if you're great honestly every i want to quit like every year i'm still doing i'm like i should quit this is ridiculous but i still do it um you know and then my parents who gave me sort of a smorgasbord of different religious things to try for myself but without a lot of structure and then my own internal needing to fit in and belong and i i thought that i had found my tribe in that one of the most powerful parts of of the vow is episode eight where mark says nobody joins a cult right yeah they join a good they join a good thing they don't join a cult yeah they join a good thing and it's just that the good things got got stuff going on behind the scenes that nobody can see and maybe people aren't trained to be able to sniff out kind of the the warning signs of an unhealthy or a high demand organization is that fair to say abuses yeah yeah right i know now like if i if i knew what i know now about cults and high demand groups i probably wouldn't have even gone to the training in the first place because i would have felt the pressure that i had been given 48 hours to get the 20 discount right high pressure high pressure but i'm like no you know what when is if it's right it'll be there when i'm ready or if i missed that red flag as soon as i got there day one when they asked us to call him vanguard somebody had never met before no putting on sashes and all these things that were very weird and did trigger red flags in me but again i had mark in my ear saying just wait till day three wait till day three by day three i had had enough shifts and now i know you can indoctrinate someone into a new belief system in three days yeah because i've been to like landmark forum and other things it's basically all just warmed over secular buddhism yep and anyone can get get you to have a shift if if they captivate you for a long enough time you're open and you're willing which is yeah you go there willing and and also for people who like are going there on their own accord not dragged by their spouse or like their boss or something they want to get their money's worth yeah you know they want to get something out of it there's that um there's that uh some cost fallacy where the more time you spend in the car dealership the more you're likely to buy a car because you're like well i've spent this time i may as well get something out of it so that's why the three-day thing it kind of encourages that sunk class fallacy and also there's the term the demand expectation that you if you you're expecting and you want to and you haven't so it's like those two things combined really encourage people to have shifts yeah so it wasn't so much you had any defective upbringing no divorce happens i i come from a doris family um so it's not your parents but i i do sometimes feel like frauds emerge to fool people but we also humans have this incessant longing to fill the empty holes to improve to find meaning and purpose and joy and sometimes we create these charlatans as much as they rise up to fool us right a good metaphor is a magic show you go to a magic show yeah wanting to see magic right yeah right so um because otherwise life can be meaningless and drab and pain and you know there's a trick to it but you also are like i want to see this i like the payoff i like the emotional payoff that it tells me so yeah i don't know if that makes that much sense but it kind of feels like there's a pro you want to see this work yeah we want magic in the world somehow so nippy let's let's back up and do you tell us a little bit about your story prior to who joined next team first actually i did okay um and i think my story is is what i think makes our stories together in tandem good is because mine's drastically different um in a lot of ways i had so i went to boarding school in connecticut and i had a girlfriend that i went um to boarding school who was actually from the albany new york area uh we dated we broke up i still kind of had a thing for her for a while never really got over her and you know i knew her family since i was 15 years old um and i run into her in new york city can i can i ask you a question about boarding school i've only got the stereotypes in my mind of like uh good is it good will huh no of uh of the robin williams dead poet society it's like wealthy parents who don't really and please forgive the stereotype i do this sometimes on mormon stories but i like to be honest about like impressions it's like rich parents that are so self-involved that they don't really want to raise their kids and they want to give their kids elite education so they ship them off and that way they get a great education and the parents can kind of like do whatever they really want to be not at all like that my parents were very involved in my life very involved with my education my dad flew up from atlanta to go to every one of my football games oh wow so that's that's my biggest time yeah so well they came from money yeah yeah oh i know i okay as well yeah as well um but you felt loved and supported yeah there was none of that in fact when i went to boarding school i felt because i'm one of i'm one of five four boys and a little girl so i was very we were very on top of each other when i got there it was hard being away at first but i also felt like i can spread my wings and i the boarding school that i went to is called hotchkiss and to me it was amazing it was an amazing experience um did you have a religious upbringing at all not at all secular totally sucked out you know my accent of christmas we talked about it my dad grew up a little kind of mormon but not really which is a fun little interesting mormon connection um he's born in ogden utah yeah far from here um and i don't even know what my mom was raised so there was no real religious background at all um so i run into my old girlfriend after college um in new york city and she i think had just taken a training or was going to take the training that she was telling me about and i didn't really know much about it she said her mom gave it to her as a gift because i think she was getting divorced or had some you know was in a vulnerable place in her life and it could help her i was like good for you she gets out of the training and she tells me about it and i was like cool and you're what age i'm 26 27 post college yeah had you started a career yet yeah i was auditioning in new york i was working here and there but like similar like to grind you know you know there's no real way to gauge where you are but acting but yeah i was doing the hustle doing the hustle yeah doing print work commercial work and stuff like that so and you had been like a quarterback at brown university so i went to kind of cool yeah ivy league quarterback yes no small deal it was fun yeah um silver lining and so um it's about a year and a half and every time she comes to new york she mentions it to me and i'm like cool not for me not for me and i even said to her i'm not doing your cult wow like flat out wow um and i had a situation where i just finished a a independent film she calls me on the phone and every time i did like a job that i got paid for a little bit i would go somewhere see a friend from college like you know somewhere warm and kind of reward myself or whatever and she's like well instead of doing that why don't you invest in your growth and i kind of was like she got me you know she knew my values and like just a little back story like when we dated i had books on john kennedy troy aikman all the people that i looked up to i even had dale carnegie's how to win friends and influence people i had i was interested in that so she knew that about self-improvement yeah she knew that about me well i wanted to be the best at what i was doing in any endeavor and she knew that about me and she's like what if this could help you with that and the money i was going to use i was going to use kind of like for fun and i decided to invest in my growth yeah as they put it right and i went there and for the first two days my arms were folded i was this guy i was like all right vanguard sashes bowing come on seriously and about day three i had a module called blame and responsibility that was really really powerful for me and it was just really the questions they were asking i didn't feel like i was being forced anything so the way to get someone whose arms is folded is you just don't force them yeah right because i was kind of expecting that yeah right yep um let them let them come to you with the energy yeah and of course they did and i'm sure they've seen people with their arms folded before and the back story one of the things that got me in is because i've known her family for so long she told me that her parents did it and i really respected her father her father's a brain surgeon in the area he played football in hockey at yale so i kind of felt like here's a guy who has my profile somewhat similarly you know and older than me advocating it yeah you know had a testimonial supporting it and i thought how bad could it be so i went in kind of what we're talking about with the confirmation bias of you know in day three i was kind of okay this is good stuff and so i'm involved for probably about a year year and a half coaching i don't want to move to albany albany at the time was the only place you could take the training and there was a group of people from from new york city who would go up and try and bring it to new york and i was part of that group missionaries right and we we started running classes in new york and after about a year and a half of doing that i kind of looked around took inventory and go this is this isn't working it doesn't have the right people it doesn't have people with credibility for lack of a better way of putting it i felt like there's a lot of losers in there and i you know i know that's not a very nice thing to say but that's how movements start they felt like losers you get who you can get yeah and i just didn't there wasn't it wasn't my tribe at all so i respectfully and i wasn't you know it wasn't confrontational i was like look i'm i'm out and for about two three years i would keep in touch with lauren salzman who is the daughter of the president of company and nancy yeah nancy salsman and my old girlfriend who was in and out of it at the time um and i just was like good for you glad you guys are out there it's good to know that's out there and i went back to pursue my career i got cast in something in la and what i do is i just kept inventory on goals that i have and i decided like every now and then if there's a training i'll take one but i'm not the guy that's going to spearhead this brigade it was my joke it's not my it's not my thing so i took a training again probably in early 2006 and the organization was considerably different it had matured yeah yeah it was three it had entrepreneurs it had filmmakers it had grown to mexico city monterey it was growing and i was kind of eating my humble pie a little bit i was wrong this thing was catching on and i was still living in l.a at the time i go back to la in about august or september of 2006 mark vicente who i kind of hit it off in a training with earlier in the year comes out to la and says listen we have a film project we're working on um keith thought of you for this role well that didn't have the lead it didn't have ooh to me i was like okay great you know because i was still yeah i had my myopia on my what i wanted to achieve right um and i was like okay so he's like well you'd have to come back to new york i was like great you guys gonna move me there and sure enough about three weeks later they pay for my move they move my car they put me up all the things that look like are precursors to a film that's going to happen start to happen yeah and i didn't have any reason to think that it wasn't and by this time the bronfmans were involved those errors to the secrets sarah and claire bronfman were involved yeah i moved to new york right billionaires yeah yeah and i moved to new york they have a room for me there um and then upstate new york and um in october of 2006 i get on a helicopter in albany new york we fly down the hudson with mark and claire bronfman we land we go to bergdorf goodman i get fitted for suits i get fitted for all these things which is wardrobe for and i don't have any reason to think this isn't happening then mark has another project that keith wants them to put them on all these obstacles start to appear and it's about may 2007 i'm pissed off because that's six months of my life where you know where i had inertia in another area of my life i gave up because this felt like it was in alignment with it and it's not happening yeah and i'm pissed yeah you know i'm in upstate new york spinning my wheels in a place that you know it's a one-horse town yeah doesn't have like there's there's not an economy there's not other places it's not other places for me to exhaust you know things that i want to pursue so now i start doing the back to new york thing because i still think the project's going to happen and cut two about fall of early 2008-2009 sarah wants to start a city in new york city and have an actual center there like a center and i said okay so i'm going to move back to new york this can be an arena where i pursue one of the career paths of teaching the class because i still like the curriculum and i can audition again and i can be involved with so my indoctrination was different than a long it was a longer thing i always felt like because i was in a tribe of actors directors and the personal growth aspect i had two things that kind of filled my cup if that makes sense um i'd set my boundaries with the organization early on differently than most people also i wasn't targeted so it was kind of like okay we have you know what i look like now is maybe a guy who can give us a little credibility yeah selling this and i was the only kind of alpha male around there so you need that yeah you need that but you also need money and power and influence yeah and you need foot soldiers yep so yeah you kind of i bet you could probably target people well and super loyal people that are loyal beyond everything so you can probably put certain people in buckets of like which were they did they bring the money did they were they super loyal followers did they have power and influence to persuade others or were they women who were targets of sex like those are yeah but let me let me go ahead now let's pause your story for just a second and let's tell a bit of keith renery's story because here's where i want to start trying to just make sure and highlight a few of the parallels so let's go back and and you guys if you want to tag team or whatever tell us how keith starts long before nexium how does he begin his life career what do we know do we know anything about his childhood yes we know a little bit there's actually a book called don't call it a cult by sarah berman don't call it a cult put that in the show notes if somebody wants like a really good overview from a journalistic perspective it's i think it's the best book out there not written from a survivor's point of view but just like this happened and then this happened investigative journalism yeah investigative journalism yeah she she's one of the people that i went to um one of the big interviews i did after the new york times and with vice and she was a former journalist advice and she writes a lot of great art advices can be great yeah thank you so what we know about his upbringing and i'm i'm trying to be careful what i say because i'm it's not my total area of expertise but one we know is that his his dad was a madman i would say what they call admin on um like a mat like in advertising wasn't really there a lot and his mother got sick and just from like what i know and would have studied from other sociopaths he didn't have good attachment with his parents like he didn't have the proper bonding particularly his mom particularly his mom had a lot of resentment which i think fueled later his resentment for women and didn't have like a good father figure in his life who was like really there for him and from what we've heard from different people is that he realized that he was smart like he was he he passed some like iq test i want to say when he was like nine or ten or eleven like early on that eight okay yeah so early and he was like had this i'm special thing but he's also really a nerd like he was a big fat nerd not fat but like you know i mean like he was yeah he was nerdy and he realized that and this is from interviews with people that were in his classmates he learned that he could like kind of he learned his skills for manipulation at a really young age he also started became sexually hit puberty and was sexually active early and apparently he realized that he could like have more more than one girlfriend and like he figured out what to tell them you know you're the only one you're so special blah blah blah and like was you know doing the woman thing at a very young age we know that um and then we he went to rpi apparently which is like polytechnic institute that's a fancy rensselaer it's a fancy school it's like rice it's not harvard but it's super respected yeah super respected and we were told that he had like three double majors or something but since we found out that he like graduated 2.6 gpa i got so sick of people calling him a scientist i almost wanted to blow yeah i'll just say that frustrated i mean there's so many things about like that we never looked into his credentials and like what what he actually graduated with but because he barely graduated from college barely graduated with an undergrad like yeah i don't think that makes you a scientist no and i'm going to give the cliff notes here but basically he started collecting collecting his the beginning of what would be his harem in you know in college his first partner karen enter reiner um at age of 17 and then shortly after pam k fritz who was like from a wealthy family in washington and a ton of money and like he was starting to like collect and grift right and also um what do you mean being a grifter like like parasiting off of the the women that he was with um and using their money okay which cut two years later he said was one of the worst traits of a female the women were grifters like fleas on dogs that would jump from dog to dog but was really talking about himself we didn't know that at the time it's called projection um anyway started collecting these people and then his first he did like amway and he sold encyclopedias door-to-door and he's like looking for a way to make money and i think that he started cbi i want to say in the 80s consumers byline international this is before costco and sam's club but basically it was one of the first pyramid schemes but he it wasn't sold as that obviously it was sold as a buyer's club where you pay a membership and you have access to all these goods at a discount yeah and this company apparently did like do you remember what they said 50 million in two years or something yeah like in the company itself everything okay yeah okay the company itself did really really well and um then they got brought to arkansas and he had a bunch of you do you tell this part can you remember the d well it we're not sure it did really really well it's what we were told it it made a lot of money but it didn't pay out its employees very well and i think 22 district attorneys from 22 different states ended up filing a lawsuit against them and then i think the one in arkansas was the one that kind of broke the camel's back from what i understand and i don't know was it an mlm or yeah it was a financial scheme yeah you bring people in and you get them to buy the membership and you get a percentage of that and things like that so it folded and basically the the i don't remember the details but they basically said you just can't do an mlm ever again he paid a fine but didn't admit guilt and agreed to never open up a sales company in the state of new york mlm yeah and i just you know again like like when you think about joseph smith troubled troubled youth you know there are always early rumors of sexual impropriety and then he did this treasure digging thing because he was desperate for money you know wasn't super well educated but but had charisma and knew how to influence people so he does this treasure digging thing and he does it for four or five years takes advantage of people a fraudulent scheme where he's manipulating and deceiving people and he ends up in front of a judge and the judge says if you keep doing this you're gonna live in prison and so so he has to so that all implodes and then he has to figure out how to reinvent himself yeah like it's so it's so it's all in upstate new york it's a playbook yeah and you look at the profiles of you know cult leaders jonestown david koresh they all have a similar kind of their upbringings are all very tumultuous upbringing intellectuals upbringing and then they all find a skill that gives them some sort of attention and then they and they need money they need money there's also sexual impropriety involved and they're willing to do things that most people aren't willing to do yeah and i still cheat and around that time he had so now at this point he had a little collection of women and he this he was taking classes at an ashram in upstate new york and saw how the leader was adored and everyone was just you know reviewing this person and he's like i'm going to do that and joseph smith had people like lumen walters who would come into town and he would he would learn from other people right right what what what his opportunities might be right yeah or to create a book or you know so he decided to reinvent himself and with these women they did a take-home test like we were told that he was the smartest man in the world as iq was 240 but we found out later that the test was he had six weeks to complete it it was take home and he had all these other people helping him with the test i'm a psychologist that's not how iq tests work no no acute test works they're like six hours and um and a licensed psychologist administers it yeah and it's very standardized which is why after a year once the um guinness book of world records yeah it was in the guinness broker world records and then a year later they came and evaluated the process of the iq test and then that guinness pulled it that's not how i keep this work but from that point on he was touted as one of the top three problem solvers in the world because and a mega mensah and omega mensah because of the test he did with a bunch of other smart women by the way so this so then they could decide to create esp but they were looking for someone to like teach it to give it validity and then they found nancy selzman who taught neuro-linguistic programming and ericksonian hypnosis and was a psychologist apparently um up in the area and together they joined and started esp executive success programs which became an axiom and those early you know in joseph smith it's either oliver cowdery or sydney rigdon you always have to find people with more knowledge more credibility to kind of partner with early on and then you also need someone to bankroll it so in joseph smith's case it was martin harris in in in keith renee's case it was who who are the early bank rollers like financially said pam k fritz tom k ford was an early bankroller and then nancy salsman gave it credibility and she could be a teacher because she spoke in front of large groups like kana she was working at con edison as a good goals teacher and you know and and and then things really got cranking for him when he got the billionaires with sarah and claire bronfman and the i think one of the things that's pretty interesting about it is the company started in july of 98 and by 2001 nancy was coaching someone very influential in entertainment religion and energy energy was it kind of just uh yeah yeah so she had so she was in the ear of some pretty influential people yeah and that reminds me a lot of scientology if you can get john travolta and you can get nicole kidman and if you can get leah remini and you get enough powerful influential people we called it and then the momentum yeah starts to to grow we call it big fish yeah i i had a big fish list of people that i was like slowly trying to bring in yeah vips yeah that's how they grow yeah because they build more value yeah that's what we were taught well they just you know they give you it's marketing right so it's you know by the time i i returned in 2006 i was impressed with how they'd overcome yeah something that i didn't think they could yeah right so yeah and i'm always just stunned by how many setbacks these cult leaders have along the way but they just they little down part of their yeah double down part of their superpower is never quitting and then learning from each mistake and never having any embarrassment it's just like i don't care what they throw at me i'm coming back like you said double down coming back stronger you to me the thing that what you just said the the lack of embarrassment that keep pressing on to me was so audacious bold that that was to me it's like if i got caught or if i got if i hit this kind of snag like when i whenever i like when i was a kid and i got caught doing something or like i should have done i'd be embarrassed i'd stop i'd self-reflect a little bit i'd pivot and i'd go yeah how did i start over fire alarms yeah like i would like things yeah i learned my lesson i would go oh yeah that's probably not wasn't a good idea to do that right well that's that's your humble pie this person would go and this is one of the things the psychology of the narcissist that i've learned is like they feel entitled to everything there's nothing that they don't feel entitled to yeah your wife your money your whatever and that's what they're after and that whatever that thing is no matter no amount of shame or whatever is going to stop them from that pursuit and it's it's impressive in a sense of it's amazing that you can just plow through that not you know but if you understand the psychology it's scary in a lot of sense one of the things that keith did and we learned this after as we put it all together is that he loved to tell us what he was doing about but not not knowing it was him right like this while he was doing it so it's a sociopathic like they get great joy out of talking about some thing that's happened in the world but they're doing it to us as well like an example you have a couple yeah like an example was he taught us this thing called the shifter strategy where like you a business or anything can create a problem in the world on purpose and then benefit from the clean up of that problem it's called a shifter strategy and he's telling you to be aware of that be aware of that like you know like like like like a lawyer can be like oh you really this and then they like keep milk bilking you for money right and the main thing they did to us is creating a problem that think we were thinking that we were broken and we needed this curriculum for the rest of our lives to be okay as a as an example but it was based on deceit we weren't we didn't we didn't need it like maybe a five-day training to improve our lives a little bit we need to keep taking classes for the rest of our lives as an example but let me tell you let me tell you this one thing that i think is really interesting because he taught us about sociopaths he called them so he calls them suppressives like in scientology and he did a lot of thought experiments to help us like using metaphors to help us understand concepts and this i'm going to paraphrase it but it was something like this if you really want to understand the psychology of a sociopath think about this imagine so john you imagine this cara imagine being in prison okay imagine you're in prison as you guys okay and to get out you'd have to like kill your guards okay you'd have to like strangle kill find a knife and kill your guards and then you could be free like just how does that feel awful right you probably don't want to kill someone now you find out that they're actually just robots and all you need to do is like pull their head off and pull out some wires and press a button better yeah better right just dismantle the robots and then you'll be free yeah so he said for our sociopath that's what it feels like anyone in the way of you getting anywhere is just a robot that you have to dismantle you don't see them as humans they're just destroy destroy remove so that is telling you to watch out for those types of people yeah watch out for those two people not we'd never suspect it was him but that's totally him he doesn't see people as people he sees them as as dismantle dismentable without a word no he just uses them he just uses them to get out of my way and that's what he does he uses people for power uses people for money uses people for sex he uses people to advance himself all those things yeah so yeah and i this is something gerardo uh really brought to my attention um i whenever we do mormon stories podcast interview of like people raised mormon this is gonna maybe sound a little bit weird we always ask them about sexual shame and what they were taught about things like masturbation and sexual exploration in their teenage years and how they were made to feel awful about it and with almost out any exception every mormon youth goes through a spin cycle of serious sexual shame and the reason why we talk about that is because i've come to believe that shame is core to the business model of a high demand religion because on the one hand they need to tell you're amazing you're a child of god you have unlimited potential and we can help you be super happy and you're awful and terrible and loathsome and you need us to be able so it's this two-handed you're amazing we love you and you're terrible and you need me to not be terrible and it sounds like just like mormonism would it be fair to say that that was also never enough terrible always need to do better and you need me to get and be better is that fair underneath at all that's what the whole life issue thing yeah we always had this thing that we were working on called our life issue which is like the thing plan yeah and then first to identify your life issue then you had to come up with a plan to evolve your life issue which had to be evaluated and passed by other people what are some examples of life issues um like mine was that internally i feel like i'm worthless i called it uh dismissible runt was my name from my like the little version of myself and everything you do is designed to cover that up yeah and how like to be liked i mean according to them i'm doing it right now like here i am seeking attention by writing a book and being a whistleblower just to cover up the feeling that i'm nothing right so that so i would have to write a plan to say this is this is what i'm going to do now so to overcome what they call like a like me disease that i want to be liked more than i want to grow so anytime i was going to like not be at a training and maybe go to my best friend's wedding in california they'd be like see you're doing it again they could always use how does that relate to your life how's that yeah that would be a gas-lining term how does that relate to your life issue what are you choosing versus your growth so they'd leverage my supposed commitment to my growth to get to do what they wanted me to do they would leverage your vulnerability yeah and then use your vulnerability against you to have power over you is that fair to say yeah and certain people were susceptible to it at different times sometimes i would just be like i don't nippy was less obedient but i wanted to be liked yeah i wanted to be like and and i was more obedient care sometimes i was like yeah you and i always be like nippy don't do that because i i was more of a good girl but it reminds me of the confession confessions in the catholic church or auditing in scientology they got to find out enough about you to where they know where your weak spots are because if they can manipulate the weak spots and make you feel guilt and shame make you feel like you continually are making mistakes and you need them to feel better that's one of the main ways they have power and control over you is that fair to say yeah no and and i don't say that that i didn't have the buy-in my buy-in was different so i don't say that as a self-preservation comment i just say my buy-in was like when the life issue thing was worked it just used them it just didn't work what was your life i don't even remember oh really it was like something about results yeah yeah it was something about i identify myself through my results and my achievement like hustling for love through performance yeah yeah no i feel good about myself when i'm achieving yeah that's it and i don't i don't give myself self-love or something like that so how does that relate to me trying to grow the organization i want results within the organization and i want to feel good and there you weren't going to talk me out of being successful but that was also very confusing like yeah it was a success program but then when you had the success they'd be like well you're just being attached it seems like it could be a way to kind of get you to chill out in the into back off and neuter me yeah but here's the other thing it's if that's something that i do to feel good how am i ever going to feel good and you're never going to enjoy your results if you have an attachment to your results is kind of word salary it's like that's a good part of buddhism right the red porsche example so the red porsche is like if i want to buy the red porsche and i'm pursuing the red porsche and i have an attachment to the red porsche when i get it yeah am i going to enjoy it yeah it's it's the happiness trap right yeah so so there's good fair enough there's some truth in that with the happiness trap that nothing from the outside world will cause you to be happy right so they didn't know i didn't offer a road map out of that it was intellectual and basically they should stay in the philippines you stay in the so you feel shitty about yourself so that you can try to pay more take more classes to get out of that but really so that was what was confusing it was like and also also by the way just to jump ahead i think why we were able to get out when we did because we didn't even though we were very devoted we didn't fully buy in we never moved permanently to albany i never gave up those things which was always held against me like the higher ranks would say do you see that your attachment to materialism is stopping you from being the more the highest version of yourself and i'm like yeah i guess i'm going to keep my attachment materials in my head but i was like yeah i'm going to work on that and like i like my apartment consistency you know the inconsistencies are also to what you're relating to in the organization you have someone who's not nearly as successful at you giving you advice on success and i was just kinda like you know it's the old adage like why are you gonna take financial advice from someone who doesn't have money and is it borrowing money from you it just it always felt like the person quote-unquote coaching me doesn't have the acumen that they're trying to coach me in and those were always things that when i would get feedback or something i'd always have it yeah but you don't really know i i i learned to follow the things and take the things that i like and then pretend to follow the other yes we both kind of also because we had buy-in that we thought it was a good organization yeah when you would come in and take a five day i thought you potentially identifying your life issue would be a good thing for you down the road yeah like if you did a five-day job i bet you'd actually really like it like the bare bones of the five-day curriculum was quite awesome because it's warmed over secularism that's the same with landmark foreign psychology 101. yeah like how to communicate how to build your self-esteem how to have a better relationship with money how to have a better relationship with yourself how to love yourself like it was so good and it created that processed food what you crit but it created also that um what's it called that yana talks about like that elevated ah there's a lot of emotion yeah but yeah elevated emotions which mormons call the holy ghost or the spirit yeah and i had all that you can manufacture that you manufacture people to feel elevation emotion and then you can manipulate them tony robbins is great at it yeah i wish i had just done the five day but then i was like i need to finish the five day because there's the 16 day and of course once you've done the first level then there's level twos and don't forget level two a b c and d and stories traps and patterns and because and then this whole there's there was always more curriculum that you had to take as i'm trying to analyze this just as a observer like it humans biologically however we evolved to never feel satisfied because if you just sit on the savannah satisfied you're eaten by the lion so we have an unfillable hole in our hearts and souls because we're always supposed to be striving improving protecting building because that's what it takes to have kids on the savannah and protect them and to build a society where you don't get eaten by a pack of lions or wolves particularly in america and but everywhere this is the human condition there's the human condition but there's in america it's nurtured and it's fostered in other countries you have governments that subtly try to neuter you and create an equality we're all equal and stuff like that i don't think you can kill that spirit we're hardwired to thrive remember that even the couch potato wants a better recliner they want more snacks like you even someone who's lazy wants more and my point is our need to self-improve is insatiable yes and you can never arrive that's what the happiness trap is you seek happiness then you're always disappointed and there's always suffering in the world and so if you can come up with some sort of curriculum or doctrine or theology that is probably self-contradictory it's not there's going to be some enough good there to make people feel like okay well this is going to help me but then you use their weaknesses and even sometimes contradictory doctrine just to keep people on a shame cycle of perceived self-improvement but for the leaders the goal is not the actualization of the of the followers it's the maintenance and growth of their power and influence and i think that's the formula for how all these things work and keeping people i would even add to that in a state of shame yeah and and low self-esteem so that they're dependent compliant compliant and also isolated yeah from anything on the outside that would help them recognize well this is not really good for you isolated is huge you got to create that bubble yeah yeah and mormonism has that bubble right now in spain yeah and to your point like you know i can remember being like 17 18 years old and winning a football game or something like that winning a championship and oh i'll be happy then i was happy yeah the next day i wanted to i wanted to go do it again yeah yeah and take tom brady what what's your favorite ring the next one yeah do you know what i mean it's it's and it's the second sarah and i were sitting and i woke up at like five in the morning and both my kids were here and sarah was in the bed and i was just kind of sitting there going because i think i still have aspects of what's the next thing what's the next thing and i took inventory on my life i haven't told you this and i was like it was dark quiet and i was with my family i was like this is everything i was like i'm actually it didn't feel like it this is the distinction i'm making is it didn't feel like i was doing well in life if that makes sense but we have a successful podcast i've got two beautiful children a beautiful wife and i just booked an acting job that in a tv show um and i'm like why is it so hard for me to go this is awesome all the time yeah all the time like why why do i why do i get up and think i need to add to this every day like why do i get up and feel like why is that my objective why isn't it my objective enjoy this more yeah and it's it to me it's my life issue or whatever but that that is a struggle i think we all kind of can relate to no matter and you hear it even with people who are winning seven super bowls or winning an oscar like you you recognize it's a human condition yeah and i just sat there i was like this is this is great this is this is practice i'm winning yeah and that's what jesus and the buddha try to tell us is focus on the present moment right eckhart tolle don't focus on the past don't focus on the future live in the present moment and so we're like oh wow that's really wise but the whole never goes away okay so we're gonna have to skip different parts of the story but let's jump to kind of uh the the events that lead up to you guys getting married because it almost felt like a nexium wedding um and i'm just wondering kind of and just briefly describe what your roles with nexium were leading up to your marriage and kind of how you met sure this is all in painful detail in my book but yeah yeah i went up the ladder here's the book oh thanks scarred by by sarah edmondson so that's what we want you to buy but just to get you to buy it i call it scared thanks deb yeah i i purposely i say painful because there is this ladder of promotions like getting your next sash and the stripes on it was like in karate like in martial arts you'd get promoted to the next motivating to have levels why do they have levels why do they always do levels well there's why we were told there was levels and then why i think he had levels but i mean what we were told and what i liked at the beginning is that it was very measurable if you did x y and z you'd get to the next level and i liked that and i went up i went up pretty quick because i was motivated i was a hustler i like to work hard and he if anyone thought that was weird be like well how is it different than martial arts this is the first time there is a quantifiable growth structure yeah yeah quantifiable structure to your to your enlightenment and i say up until now and nancy would say like as a therapist there's no way to measure happiness there's no way to measure your success but now we have a measurable way a measurable system of like that's amazing right so i really liked it at first and the straight path measured your ability to teach and the curriculum like your mastery of the skills it measured your ability to bring in people because you can't be successful unless you can bring people along with your ideas because it wasn't about recruitment it was about building that skill set like you can't you can't do anything on your own were you going to say i was just going to say i'm going to guess it's not about actual self-development it's about acquiring the skills and abilities necessary to help the organization be successful ding ding ding ding yeah although you think you're yourself developing the whole time but what you're really doing is growing the organization yes i got rewarded because i was a good recruiter i was i've always been good at sales and always been good at sharing whatever it is that i'm passionate about but the third thing was your own emotional maturity which wasn't evaluated by you as evaluated by other people you were less emotionally mature than you yeah and ethical yeah so i went up the strike path pretty fast but then i decided like there's different career paths within the organization you could do sales you could become a teacher you could be what's called an em practitioner an exploration of meeting practitioner which is basically like a therapist trying to help people with their emotional stuff and i decided not to go that route because the path seemed really long really not measurable they kept changing the goal post and the money wasn't as good and i wanted to make money and i wanted to bring nexium to vancouver and open the center so i became a center owner in 2009 and i was in charge of a bunch of people with sales nippy was what were you doing at what point well he wants to know what led up to our marriage well so i was running the new york city center with about three or four other people um and i would teach the classes in new york sometimes some of the trainings and i found my niche particularly with the goals program so people will come to a class and they take goals classes or whatever and i ended up actually when we started dating moving to vancouver helping with vancouver and l.a and then eventually head of the men's organization we did have an axiom wedding it was i mean there were other people there my family and friends but it was lots of people from the community and it was a big celebration do we need to pause for this no no and it's usually super important usually high demand religions or organizations need to grab things like births weddings coming of age ceremonies and deaths because those are like pivotal moments in life and you want to connect those really emotional experiences with the organization and that's why religions are always like christening of the baby kid coming into maturity oh now you're an adult oh you're getting married oh someone passed away there's always a ritual for that does that make sense it does but i i never felt those two aspects of our lives integrated well and i didn't want them to we weren't actually encouraged to get married we were discouraged to get married yeah well that's because keith wanted yeah yeah what he wanted yeah okay so um so this is great so you guys get married and there's a lot of next thing people at your wedding what did that mean to have your wedding half half filled with nexium people did it almost feel like you were like getting married into the organization a little bit or not or um if anything it was like we thought it would be a great opportunity for my family members to see how amazing and cool and vibrant our community was every every event we ever had was always an opportunity to bring in more people yeah so every member of a missionary kind of thing or you know i i thought it would just put them at ease yeah like they're like look we're so happy and i mean i found out later from family members who weren't part of nexum that they were really put off because we were so happy yeah we were and and not many of us were drinking yeah so they were like what why are they like was drinking discouraged drinking was discouraging no well no you didn't not drink me but like other drinking was to anything that anything you would partake from the outside would be a dependency so drugs and alcohol were discouraged and that was also another inconsistency because nancy was super dependent on coffee to perform to be on stage that's the only thing i saw her consume yeah she only drank coffee but it was it was confusing because um and back to earlier what you said about like sex being shameful what was really looked down upon as you didn't want to be satiative was the word if you were satiating in anything it's okay to have a drink like it would be okay to have a drink every now and then but if you're satiating in alcohol when you should be working on your goals that was problematic or if you're having i subscribe to that i mean i just for me i i got that yeah that was one thing i was aligned with yeah that made that made sense but also you would do your own thing on the weekends and i know i would go smoke a dub and have a beer and watch the ball game like i didn't have because i knew i wasn't doing anything bad i was more obedient well if you look at stephen hassan's bite model high demand organizations they need to control your behavior by some sort of rigid rules that make you always feel like you need to do better and you need to follow the rules and that also sets you apart from other people so that the people who are members of the in-group feel somehow different or differentiated and maybe even superior than the people outside of the group who don't engage in the same behaviors and then of course they have to control that's the bee and bite and they have to control control the information that the members of the group receive right because if you get information you can have thoughts that lead you out of the organization so they control the information so they can control your thoughts and then they use emotion to manipulate you and that's kind of the bite model and so i'm not surprised to hear kind of behavioral and there's probably a lot more kind of rigid behavioral what were some of the bees i mean one of the first things that they had us do from day one again there's like good in this and then the bad of it like what was good but and how it helped us but then how they use it to manipulate but they had us doing something called a persistency from day one where you choose something to do um every day in terms of the bite model um they had us doing something from the beginning called a persistency where he chose to do something every day for a minimum of like five minutes or whatever you could manage and you'd grow grow that amount until you were could make it up to like a half an hour or an hour but learning learning a new skill or learning a new language or something you've been wanting to do but haven't been able to do like sorting your tax receipts or like for me it was i was doing it to learn spanish and like build you know building new things by the end i had like six or seven persistencies happening at the same time and we were encouraged to do that because you're trying to like be the best version of yourself so in terms of controlling our behavior i would say there's a lot of things like that and your average devoted obedient nexium member like myself would have many persistencies you'd be pretty clean you know not doing a lot of drugs or alcohol exercising very regularly all the women were teeny tiny very very thin um almost like disor encouraging disordered eating yes for the women yes in case immediate purview yes yeah i mean we found out later that the women were had to be thin for him yeah but i was i was thin and i wasn't with him but i was encouraged to be like i i think i had a little bit even of an eating disorder because i was so focused on being fit you know and being in shape um what else i mean just just work just constantly working on yourself and like writing your life issue and doing your persistencies and and having a goal being in goals lab and and going to class and getting your next stripe it was a good go go go go people who were really all in were just like there was never any down time so in terms of you controlling your behavior and then you know keeping you super busy super busy all the time the first time i i took a step back and took a break i was like it was we didn't have the space to think breaks didn't feel good yeah we were trained that that why would you take a vacation from your life it was sort of the idea like you like it's it's not okay education the definition of vacation is vacating your time emptying out your time and what's confusing about that is what's wrong with self-improvement yeah right but the problem is that a couple things tell me if this was your experience they keep you super busy and in a way that being super busy is a way for you to drown out and mute out your own internal voice and in terms of gaining wisdom you're basically learning their way of life which is molded to turn you into an instrument and a missionary to meet their needs instead of really fine-tuning yourself to know what you want and need and then to to create your own individual self-empowerment so it's confusing because there's lots of self-improvement but it's for the benefit of the organization not to to self-develop for your own personal intrinsic benefit right and also i created boundaries yeah nippy was better at that um and i think you probably weren't as much in the inner circle i was i didn't care to be in the inner circle yeah it was i wanted him to be it wasn't it wasn't appealing to me yeah there was nothing there was no one in the inner circle that i was going i want to be like no none of them yeah and i took tacitly a little bit of for it um but i didn't care yeah and i was willing to fight so i kind of and i think we suppose i had my boundaries like you gave me some crap like why don't you want i was like because that's not what i want to do like you know this this is where i begin and that starts and and and i i didn't like pressure like so they were strategic in who they sent after me i think sometimes and particularly with like there's a couple trainings that they were running during thanksgiving and they were like well you know keith's running this i was like good for keith i'm going home to see my family like that's how this works they'd run them over new year's i'd leave and go watch the rose bowl because i wanted to watch the rose bowl i wanted to see usc versus texas you know what i mean like in the model he was called defiant yeah they call it defiant but i didn't you that's where i was impenetrable and i think that ultimately saved us that doesn't mean i wasn't all in in certain aspects but i had my boundaries i'd leave a training early because the gym was closing so it was it was important for your family that nippy had some emotional detachment but as i'm thinking about the self-interest of the organization they want to be able to they want to have their inner circle where they're really having the power and the influence and getting what they need but they want to have this outer ring who's not in the know about what's going on in the inner circle where these people are like hey i'm independent i do what i want this isn't a cult and there's nothing weird going on and so they kind of need nippies yes right as kind of fronts yes to kind of say we're not a cult look at nippy we're not a cult he's an independent look at his face but here's another thing too like here's another thing like i would sit with people and they'd be like it's a cause like yeah it's a little bit of a cult but you know it's if you want if it's a cult where you want to go do your goals and peace out you can do that yeah we used to say it it's a cult of having successful people right now but we didn't understand you didn't know what a cult really was they needed you guys to be making the cover yeah even like people at the end of a five day who come in but one of the reasons i did it was because nippy said it was a cult he was like totally like transparent exactly and then they'd be like you know thank you because it's not and you know i can live and i was like but i thought that was true yeah yeah that was a big part because you could come and go yeah and that's what that's what was compelling is like when i said it there wasn't an emotional inconsistency that i was fronting that's actually what i believe because i actually embodied you don't have to do that yeah yep exactly really quick sarah what was your it seems like you were a recruiter kind of like a missionary you were basically a missionary but for nexium and keith and so what were you recruiting people to do and be well i would meet somebody and pretty much anyone i met ever anybody i would be constantly looking to see are they the kind of people that i would want to work with do i want them in our team team humanity we called it saving the world yeah and we were like we were trained to go to events and look for the bright lights to look for the people who really sparkle and like have a big network and really shine and and you know not trained to look for the broken people who need it which happens sometimes but i was trained to be like who are these people what's their mission are they aligned with us and what are they looking for in their lives and can we provide it and that's why steve young and donnie marie osmond confronting your organization you want john travolta and kelly preston you know and nicole kidman fronting your organization how do we or people with money so hard workers you know how do you get those people right hard workers hard workers worker bees yeah and nancy said this all the time in public she said you know i say this in my book if we had more sarah edmondsons this company would be so successful and i felt really good about that right so i was looking for people like myself like people who worked hard and had a big network and wanted to grow and enthusiastic and on you know social butterflies really but i didn't realize you know at the time that um well there's a lot of things i didn't realize at the time but in terms of recruitment i felt really good about that that i was good at it and i was touted as that and i was the poster child for it you know and because of that that's why i grew up the ranks you know really fast because i was recruiting so many people yeah and that's we'll come back to that but i mean so many people that i meet who served mormon missions part of their deep regret is that they were tools of the organization to recruit others when they didn't know what what they were really recruiting people into and just to say what what i believed as recruiting into people into even if it was just to take a five day i believed i was gonna be inviting them to something where they'd get all the tools that they needed to improve their life yeah and i felt really good about that what i didn't realize is it was ultimately a funnel because the five day in itself was pretty benign but if you get hooked and you want to continue into the 16 day and then move to albany that's where the bad stuff happens right yep and by the way like we even had i think i mentioned this when you were on our podcast but we were even taught that people are going to call us a cult and the answer inoculated yeah and and the answer to that was a cult has there's bad things happening and if if there's bad things like what are the bad things and if we're murdering people or if we're stealing money from people then people would say we're thieves or murderers but but they're not they're just saying it's a cult what's the bad thing i couldn't see the bad thing yeah and you think about why are mormon missionaries 18 and 19 years old right it's because they know so little right you think you'd you'd think you'd want missionaries who knew the most but no if you're doing shady secret things inside you want missionaries who know the least right who aren't on the inner circle because they're gonna be the best salespeople right yep yeah yeah and i think that's why i kind of remained was remained untouched until the last few months they kind of didn't they didn't give me too much of a hard time because i was just a good recruiter i was bringing in so many people i was filling the pipeline i'll never figure that out i figured it out no i know i'll never figure out how they thought i'd be cool with oh yeah that yeah okay so what was going on let's just jump there what was the inner circle what was going on and this is like i think where does comes out yeah and the cauterizer now that you go and then i'll add in where i think so what was keith really doing behind the scenes sure so you have to keep in mind there's like what we saw and then what keith was doing what he was always doing with women he was always from the beginning he just hit it right he decided to keep it from the people that he was growing because they weren't integrated enough they weren't evolved enough to understand why having many women in his bed or his circle or whatever was actually totally okay so when i joined i was told that he was a celibate monk he was a renunciate he took no money from the company he didn't he was driven everywhere he doesn't have a driver's license of a car because he doesn't believe in material possessions yeah that's how he got around that's who he got around the legal ramifications and i assume that the women around him because there were women around him i and there were some some of them were my close friends not close friends but good friends and i thought that they were there to help him that he was so busy using his scientific mind to solve the world's problems that he needed someone to go cook for him and choose out his clothes and drive him around that made sense yeah he had assistance i didn't realize that there were all women that he was sleeping with when we counted from the women that we knew like verified because they're out and we speak to them most of them that there was something like 40 to 60 women and at any given time i would say that there was probably 12 in albany 15 maybe that he could call in a night and who had their phones on waiting for that off chance that keith would say okay booty call booty call yeah what do you call and joseph got up to 40 it looks like oh i'm sure yeah yeah it seems to be a number and uh i think 40 is the number 40. 40 is a good number for your average perspective [Laughter] so yeah so that's what he was doing and you know i really do think that he thought i'm going to create this this really helpful gold program stolen from scientology and landmark and nlp and homogenized buddhism yeah and you know all these different things repackage it so people are hooked teach you that you shouldn't be dependent on anything in the outside world except for this right and and then keep them and then and listen what's interesting it ramped up right like what got me hooked in the end with dos which is the secret society let me explain this now yeah okay again this is very complicated to explain the details are in the book because it's to it's too complex but ultimately he brought he created a secret society called women a secret society of women called dos and in the name of female empowerment after years of this training called sop society of protector for men and jeunesse which was a training for women and all of that training had a bunch of indoctrination that set us up to be ripe to say yeah that's a good next step so that's how the best normalized abuse normalized abuse but normalized also like the reasons why i would even choose to say yes so at that point we believed that um you know that men and women were um you know we had our different primitive wiring and men were wired this way women were wired this way and women were gendered gendered you know women generally are more this or that emotional and men are generally can like override their emotions to go kill the tiger and men need to learn that more and women need to understand character and discipline and more because really we're just princesses and then we start to divert like we're princesses we're entitled we're grifting fleas off the backs of dogs jumping from one host to the other because really we don't want to work because we're entitled princesses and we gossip and all these negative things to the point where like i thought i was building a sisterhood but i actually really had a quite a disdain i was so bummed out by the misogyny oh yeah the the vow shows yeah and you have to understand like people watching like wasn't that so misogynistic it wasn't presented as misogyny it was presented as let's look at the misogyny in society so we can evolve it right right that's how it was presented it's that word thing like yeah well it's also but the thing is in here and this isn't uh a support for it i'm giving context as to how you can go okay i relate i subvert my emotions to do stuff and and i kind of dismiss a lot of the things that are going on with me emotionally and if you statistically and you have statistics to support it right you know a lot of men or most men are in suicide there's a lot of things that go on there i wanted to get in touch with that so it's under the guise of looking at these things while slipping in all these that's the work i showed up for yeah yeah like we're gonna we're gonna undermine all these things in society by practicing them here in the organization yes and by the end i remember i'll just tell you something then and i don't know if i've ever spoken about this publicly we were going through something and after talking with one of my jeunesse female wise women leaders the answer was i needed to be more subservient i needed to come home and like change my state and be a little bit mrs like leave it to beaver this is cleaver right and be happy wife and not dump my emotions on my husband and that would change the whole dynamic and so like that was something that i was taught yeah they're trying to undermine emotional intimacy between partners because if you guys are too strong and connected then then they don't have as much power over each of you or that's interesting to consider that would be the effect yeah i mean truthfully when we got out nippy and i had to like learn a bunch of stuff about how to communicate and when you don't talk about your vulnerable things with your spouse you're not developing emotional intimacy i'd say the biggest thing that was starting to have a chasm was you're you were always on your phone with the dos thing yeah because they keep you super busy because and you had to be responsive well and that that to me i i understand you're doing an exercise but and i didn't challenge it so and just slowly i had to be more four to five to six months we weren't connected we weren't connected at all and also we never even like we got married we never even had a honeymoon because there was no time yeah high demand religions don't encourage strong healthy emotional intimacy in marriages because they want you married to the organization not to each other yeah and if there was ever ever something that i wanted to express like i would you know i'd like to like you said even connect more but you know and like have a and the response would be and that's no harm like this is what he was trained to say he'd be like why do you think you need that not like oh let's talk about that it was always like why do i need that what's missing in me that i'm looking for more connection yeah right yeah like that's it's it's it was this con we were gaslighting yeah that was so neaty sarah no truth like maybe would say you're you're needy i still say it something like i can't provide that for you like you've got to figure that out within yourself like our therapist now has helped us so much be like well that's not actually not how a good relationship works like you support it and truthfully i even when i had the impulse to kind of address it with her i didn't feel like that would be helping her yeah no it's true so what was in her lifeline where she should be able to be self-sufficient yeah we women need to be more self-sufficient and more self-reliant like men yeah so talk about just this caveat i'm not that self-sufficient she needs to help me with a lot of stuff so it's just that's that's a relationship yeah that's how it works so give our listeners and viewers nobody has any this idea of slaves and yeah and then ultimately the branding nobody nobody this is where it gets more intense than probably what most people ever experienced in mormonism and i say this in my speech tomorrow as well like i always i'm hesitant to talk too much about it because i don't want to alienate your your listenership because it's so extreme and so violent but ultimately what it ended up being is that he wanted people the women in his circle were head started to defect and this how around the time that his um you know once they realized it was abusive once they realized it was abusive they were leaving and saying stuff and saying stuff and being whistleblowers and so i think he started to create this curriculum which set us up for an invitation to what was called a secret society for women that and in mormonism think about the mormon temple ceremony in the endowment the supers in the masonic lodge the super secret ceremony inner group so that you could actually control people and recruit more anyway i'm just making the connections no they weren't branding people but they were doing initiatories in like simple yeah they're renaming people they're giving them new underwear they're making them make these covenants and oaths and it's all super secret same thing and then they're threatening people with with severe penalties if they ever divulge the secrets right and it's all grooming behavior right we were totally great even the curriculum i just mentioned to get us to even say yes to this and i was invited by my best friend who's can i add one more thing before you once i just said maid of honor we were talking earlier about how these people pivot and they refine it yeah keith wake had had a series of women all ages all groups leaving going to law enforcement those sorts of things right so i think he figured out that's my only problem that i need to address you need to lock down how do i yeah how do i ensure loyalty just in loyalty and even when they leave how do i ensure they don't say anything yeah yeah so even just to hear about this thing from my best friend who said that she was going to invite me to something that would take my my career to the you know my everything to the next level which should have been a red flag like okay wait the tools i've been doing for 12 years don't work now i need to do something else yeah but i trusted her like literally she was on my will the godmother for our children this is lauren laurence which is the daughter of nancy who is keith's right hand yes and truthfully i respected her and held her on a pedestal probably more than i did keith which was unusual for the company like most people were like oh my god keith is so great and i'm like lauren is who i wanted to be like yeah you know in terms of my role model in the company so she's inviting me to this thing it sounds crazy to even hear about it though the secret thing i have to provide collateral which also sounds crazy but for months actually no years would people have been putting down collateral for other things i'm committing to do x xyz and if i don't i'm going to give 500 to xyz so like people had things on the line that they were using to what they called keep their word so i was given collateral to keep my word of secrecy that even if i said no to this thing i would never talk about it so that was the first step but the problem is once they had collateral from you they then had collateral from you which is another way of saying blackmail so when i heard about the thing and the way that lauren presented it made it sound like really cool a group of women who are taking themselves to the next level and holding themselves account accountable and using all the tools that we learned but like going extreme with it and at this point i you know i had a i had a three-year-old i was kind of like uh you know i had lots of problems that i wasn't even willing to voice to myself with the company so i was kind of having some struggles do you do cough go i was stupid i was voicing the problems nippy was voicing my point is is that and lauren just as a sidebar like she'd come teach our first five day and i loved it because she i felt that there were things in our first five day like rules and rituals calling keith vanguard sashes i'm like oh god people are gonna think this is so weird she made it cool she was like yeah you know like a judge wears a robes and we wear a sash and like and these are different colored sashes that represent advancement in the organization like like like tenderfoot and star and life and eagle scout it's just like that yeah and martial like general colonel major captain lieutenant military guys all of those things we would talk about in the five day yeah you know the military does this and martial laws do this and we do this totally cool yeah and we call the job improvement yeah and call the doctor doctor once they've earned it and we call vanguard vanguard because he's earned it you know no big deal so she was really cool like that and the way that she presented was like i'm going to mentor you and i'm going to be your mentor and except we're going to call it master slave but like i'm not really you're not really my slave like you you live in vancouver and i'm like but like slave for what like what are you going to have me do we have you you're taking a lifetime valve obedience to me but i'm only going to be doing things that are good for your growth in the mormon temple it's called the law of obedience literally you bow your head and say yes in the mormon temple the law of obedience okay so i would i was making a vow i had to make a vow of obedience to lauren who'd be my master but really it's just like a coach yeah right we'll just call it slaves we'll just call it yeah cute little name and tomato tomato yeah and you're going to have to at some point find a necklace that would symbolize like your commitment kind of like a slave collar but you get to choose the necklace i don't like marks on your temple garments yeah yes okay you get to choose the uh fabric yeah i'm surprised they didn't rename you because part of the sign of a cult or i demand religion is you get a new name well i was i was senior proctor edmondson okay i did get a new name when i earned the rank of green sash i was senior proctor edmonson okay okay yeah all right so i did get a new name nippy was proctor ames oh that's how people referred to you when you were teaching oh okay so you did get a name i did get a new name all right yep and when you were in the construct of the center you call people by their proctor name or prefer nancy was prefect oh and the highest rank was senior counselor senior counselor boone counselor k frank each other brothers and sisters no all right i did go on a trip with my girlfriend once and call her my sister wife though because i enjoyed splitting the child character because those those mormons are weird yeah no sorry about that that's why i love that um glass houses yeah yeah oh gosh absolutely totally guilty of that um those mormons are weird i actually had no idea how weird until i interviewed you anyways love you so much mormon yeah i love you love you love you mean it um anyway so yeah we i said yes to her i said okay and after after a couple of days of humming and hawing and feeling kind of anxious about it and once i said yes she's like okay now you need to give me more collateral to seal the deal and give our listeners a sense of what was used as clouds yes just to hear about it i had to sign a confession about all these things that i'd done in my 20s that i wouldn't really want people to know yeah you know dirt basically good dirt dirt and the first time i wrote it she took a picture sent to someone and said it's not dirty enough and i had to add to it and even said things that weren't true just just to make it worse it still incriminates you because if you're lying about your own history you're still living blah blah blah to be a full member of dos i had to give her a nude photo so they could threaten to expose that on the internet if you ever defend and that's out there somewhere yeah yeah yeah yeah this character i'm just making faces over here okay yeah it's shocking some of this is new to kara yeah and also lauren was like you know lauren's my really good friend we've seen each other naked changing going to yoga or whatever like it's a big deal yeah but she was like i did this you did this i'll take she took a picture for me i was like you know i found out later that other women gave like close-up vaginal shots yeah and like little sexy videos and like masturbation videos and way worse than me yeah just to get in i don't know how i got let off so easily but you weren't on the inner inner circle but you know i'll say that i think lauren had your back a little bit a little bit no i i think lauren wanted you in but also want to spare me from keith well she also knew that she you had your boundaries so to keep you in she had to be a little bit lenient yeah she couldn't let me off easy like i'm super curious did sarah did you say to nippy lauren's asking for naked photos i wasn't allowed to know about it see that's why they have to get between the couple i should have to split the couple yeah because they needed to groom sarah without nippy independent right high testosterone alpha male nippy we don't want him you know messing around so we got to split the couple right before i even um had to beat his ass first yeah but but truthfully he part of my commitment was obedience and total secrecy she even said you cannot tell nippy from your own spouse yeah you'll never be able to tell nippy you can tell him that you're maybe partnering with some of the upper ranked greens like the high levels that we were and doing some extracurricular stuff for your growth but i couldn't say what it was i couldn't say what we're doing yeah and i was like okay and truthfully like because of our normal banter but also the wedge that was within us like nippy didn't never thought that i was like he loves me in a lot of different ways i think and respected me but also i'm not a tough person you know i'm not a strong i'm not a strong like the first time when he saw me give birth was the first time he was like respect you know but up until then he's like you know sarah does yoga like she doesn't work out she stretches she stretches but like i was like i'm going to be strong and i'm going to like do something really tough and he's not going to know about it you're blaming me for this victims but there was a part of me that was like i'm going to do this and he's not going to know and i'm going to be a better wife and i'm going to like and i was kind of and there was an excitement to it and it's like a secret thing they're choosing you you're special i was special and i was a small group of women and anyway so you gave the collateral gave the collateral and it turned on a dime pretty quick it turned to as soon as i was in i then i found out i had to give new collateral every month for the rest of my life to fortify my commitment this one of the second or third things that she asked me for which was one of the things that was i put on the shelf that eventually made the shelf collapse that i woke up she asked me for the deed to our home that she would hold just to make sure that i never strayed from the path i'm gonna add a caveat yeah in the trial it came out in the transcripts that keith asked lauren um does sarah know that if she has to do sex well favors for me she knows this is part of it and lauren lied to keith and said yes sorry just to clarify that keith said does sarah know that if you command her to have sex with another man that she has to do that and lauren's lies lauren said yes she never she never said that to me and this is kind of shaping up as like a sexual pyramid scheme yes kind of that's exactly what it was so think of keith like he's pissed he didn't get sarah right yeah so this is the whole psychology it's like you know i feel entitled to that yeah i'm the vanguard and you know grayback after i made fun of him that is not on purpose but i did an imitation of him i feel like you know he had it out and and we didn't know that he had tried with me in the past but i didn't i missed the cues partly because i always found him kind of vanguard's gonna he's not a sexy hot no he's like it was he's super short like you're short how short it is or something he's like five seven like how does a guy like you you just physically you wouldn't look at the guy inside he's really good at manipulating women and giving them what they want and speaking to them in the way that they want to feel loved and special and truthfully towards the end of my time there i did feel closer to him but for many years i kept him at arm's length and like distant i felt uncomfortable around him so i never got close to him but also another way that i found out later that he got women in his full that he wouldn't be like hey you wanna he'd be like i'm starting a new business and it'd be from somebody else one of his women around him would say keith is starting this new thing and thinks that you might be good for it you should come meet with him and then you'd meet and you'd talk about the next steps and you go do the next steps and then you get closer to him and then he'd say i think that maybe i could mentor you and you seem like really rigid around relationships and basically he'd then propose the romantic or the sexual part i was invited to five different businesses with him separate from the other stuff we were doing and i never they never made any sense to me so i never i never bit yeah you know what i mean so i never got to the next step he was he was fishing but you were biting yeah i also i had an old girlfriend that i brought to an event and she worked you know in commodities previously and the woman pam k fritz who was is kind of like right-hand woman his pen approached my old girlfriend my girlfriend at the time it says keith heard you're in commodities and he's interested in working with people who are interested in commodities yeah yeah yeah and i remember thinking yeah yeah there's no one else besides my girlfriend she's tall blonde beautiful you know what you want to do is you want to i mean i think a lot of times sexual intimacy can follow emotional intimacy and so what he wants is he doesn't want you and nippy having emotional intimacy he wants to find a way to make you feel like he needs your skills he respects who you are then he can start working with you develop the emotional intimacy and then the sexual intimacy can come after the emotional intimacy is developed that's that's pretty much what all the women we spoke to said who who were in his harem and got out and what's also interesting is we spoke to someone who left in like 2008 or nine who said when she read about das like when we were public about dos and she's like that's what our lives were like she was a hair remember and she left to pursue her doctorate and like snuck away quietly she said you know we were available at all times of the night we had to answer our phone we couldn't turn our phones off we had to be super super thin because being fat affected his energy or some bs um we had to um you know it wasn't called dos i didn't use master slave but basically had a bunch of women slaves that were attending to his every need so he just formalized what he'd always done and then put in the collateral blackmail aspect so people would be loyal and never leave of course it didn't work because look here i am and i mean really they they invited the wrong person like i really don't know what they were thinking i just don't know how they thought it was gonna get by me so talk about talk about the cauterizing um because the other i have a question about that that that involves you nippy so so that's the part we haven't gotten to yet that was like the yeah final collateral i'm hesitant to like get too into this part of it because i still find it super triggering to talk about it and and i'm al also okay to just answer read the book watch the vow but ultimately whatever you're comfortable nothing that you're not gonna thank you i was i was invited to what was supposed to be this the ceremony to officially bring me into dos a couple months after i had given the collateral and i flew to albany i was also there for another jeunesse training so everyone was going to be in town anyway and i was supposed to get this tattoo that was part of like you know my commitment right i don't have any tattoos for a reason i i know that my trends and ideas change like i almost got a wonder woman tattoo and when i was like early 20s and i'm not in that stage anymore so i'm like glad i don't have a wonder woman tattoo but lauren was i had em'd me lauren em me through my fear is it like tell us what yeah is expiration of meaning so if you have a reaction towards something you can always get an em so that meaning doesn't mean that to you anymore and so she changed my meaning of like something that's sort of like you know i don't want to get a stamp you know no this is a this is a symbol for your growth and this is for you on your body it's a it's a physical reminder of what what you're committed to yeah and i could get behind that and also like i'd taken a vow of obedience right and i collateral on the line so everything that we chose to do from that point wasn't really choice it was coercion because there was a gun to my head of the blackmail so that's how i explain it when people were like why don't you just leave when you just say no because i was being blackmailed from that point on and it was subtle blackmail it's not like we're going to release this if you don't do it it'd be more like do you remember your commitment yeah you promised your vow yeah you made a vow you made a commitment it's honor it's integrity yeah of course of course you don't always know what you're getting into when you make the vow and that's in the mormon temple ceremony you're not told what you're covenanting to before you go to the temple you make the covenants while everyone's looking at you and it's too late by the time you're there to make your covenants there's no informed consent beforehand yeah and there's no realistic way to get out and so you're you're ramrodded into a covenant before you understand what covenant you're actually making and before you have time to really think through the implications of the covenant you're making yes is that right yeah 100 and she's even reading what sounded like mormon scripture to me as i lay down on this and these these details are like really specifically laid out and actually the first chapter of my book i start there and then i go backwards um and showing up with my sisters who i knew from nexium but i've never wasn't that close with and then i had to get naked with them lie on a massage table and the tattoo wasn't a tattoo but actually a brand so no informed consent um and no explanation of what i was committing to and then she started reading the scripture which i was supposed to recite and she had me say and this came out in the trial later where keith taught the leaders have them say master would you brand me it would be an honor so that's just so it looks consensual they have a recording of this this is one of the ways they were able to get him on sex trafficking right because um a lot of the women once they were in were then tasked with the with the assignment to seduce keith of course to help them with their own control and relationship issues not for his gratification so um yeah he wasn't enjoying it no he wasn't enjoying it um it's the the whole night as crazy as a couple of hours when we first saw the first person who lay down on the table it looked like she was being electrocuted she was flipping around and crying and her skin was being seared open by a cauterizing iron um and a symbol right in the bikini line like right next like right on the pelvis like an inch away from someone's pubic line essentially um and i was trying to figure out like could i get out of there and i was gaslighting myself like you said that you were gonna do this and now you're backing out and this is you know keith said this is what what women do they back out and they they have no integrity they have no honor you have to do it and you're under the collateral's on the line and also i even pulled lauren aside at one point and she said your green sash has the highest rank in the room other than her you know these women are looking up to you and i and also another sidebar is that lauren was the person that controlled any promotion in the company so it's like the such any situation where someone's like with a higher rank and if they don't do the thing it's like their career is at stake that was my career i know that if i didn't show toughness and push through and make this thing happen that i wouldn't get to get to the next level which i don't care about now obviously but in that world that was everything um so i lay down on the table and i breathe deeply and i what i now know from trauma therapy is that i disassociated i left my body and i lay really i saw that the women who the more still you were the easier it would be and lauren even testified in court that i did really well because i lay still i did my deep breathing from yoga and i peaced out and i got through it but it was horrific pain there's no anesthetic that was the point go through something painful be a strong ass and um be part of this boot camp where these women could do anything and build the character that we needed to build as men had so i was proud of myself and i felt good about it and i was in a total state of trauma and elation that had gone through it and lauren was there afterwards whispering in my ear and hugging me and cooing and we were all laughing and smiling and trying to make light of this awkward situation being in a room with six sweaty naked women that we didn't know that well it was weird i mean it was a totally crazy weird event and i can't believe i'm still talking about it but like that's what happened and it wasn't until about six weeks later that i figured out that the symbol was not a symbol for the elements as i'd been taught but it was it was keith's initials and a cryptic monogram and and maybe we don't know this for sure alice and max is that what you're talking about we don't know that we we we think that but we don't know that for sure she's an actress this is small world smallville yes she was one of the top women in dos we don't know that for sure it's never been verified but at the time i was like oh my god i have allison max initials and keith turner initials on my body and and that was ultimately what woke me up but it was a series of things that happened up until then you know asking for the deet to my home doing the branding um you know as soon as i committed i was being asked to recruit other people for this and you know it it all happened very very quickly and then i was out very quickly so it wasn't about it was a matter of months that i was in dos part of the perverse um logic or strategy of putting members through super brutal inhumane experiences is ironically when you put them through something brutal uh they end up feeling proud of themselves that they went through something super hard like a mormon mission like pioneers crossing the plains you put them to enough adversity they're proud of themselves that they went through it and then they're ironically even though it's the organization causing the pain they feel more bonded to the organization because they they overcame the pain and did something very difficult and the elevation emotion can follow the pain that the organization inflicted on you and it sounded like it worked for a lot of them and it worked for you maybe temporarily but not but but with you they picked the wrong person yeah i said in one of my first public interviews they effed with the wrong person like i really don't know what they were thinking because i i did i was not so isol i didn't live in albany i had a community and friends and family outside of it and and also at the same time don't forget mark vicente was waking up because his wife bonnie had left and he was my other than nippy he was i called him my bonus husband in the company like we were really really close he was my business partner and he was questioning and he helped me question and he knew certain things that i didn't we'd all been so siloed we all had separate information right yep so once we finally talked for the first time he made me sign an nda before i could even talk to him as he was leaving yeah and those conversations are what woke us up and then members talking to each other yeah yeah not being allowed to share information was really because any concern i ever had if i went down line was not it's not appropriate leadership and if i went up line i was always gaslit so you guys may or may not want to talk about this but this is one of the big questions you know like just the audacity of having women be branded just blows my mind even married women and by the way joseph smith had at least 10 polygamous wives that were married to other men at the time that's called polyandry where the woman has multiple husbands but we think joseph used that as a cover um because oh she's married you know what i mean anyway how the audacity of the branding in and of itself is mind-boggling but he had to have known that at some point nippy's gonna see this and how is he in the world how did he ever imagine that nippy number one were you gonna hide this from nippy and then secondly like did you even did you wonder cause nippy didn't know you didn't know she was doing this before she did it which is also mind-boggling but then how did keith and lauren imagine that conversation was gonna go when nippy found out well we were trained so in my i have no idea in my group honestly he's just delusional but in my group of women myself and a woman named jimena from mexico were the first married women to get branded other than that all the other women were single yeah and um and and or with keith so the first group of people were all his lovers yeah and then the second tier was some single people and some married people so we were we were experiments and lauren was like just try to keep it from him as long as you can so when he does see it she was telling you to keep it from nippy for as long as you can yes and i did i kept it for about six weeks because we were into separate cities six weeks when i was out of town he was out of town and then we were in separate beds because i was trying to troy we're trying to get troy trying to wean troy at this point so as we were like kept right it was like a bed musical beds where was her two-year-old and like i'd walk if i was wearing underwear you couldn't see it so i was still like i got out of the shower the towel around me he wouldn't see it and in sex it's dark yeah right well truthfully there wasn't a lot of that because we were in separate cities and i was weaning a baby so okay you know that was so and or dark but either way he didn't see it and um and she said just keep it so he will never associate this with albany and if he does see it the i was supposed to say something like that a group of us got together we did this thing to experience pain and that we would grow and it's just a little commitment to my growth like basically a modified version of what we did not telling him everything never got to that point and i think they weren't ever going to reveal that it was his initials yeah like that and that's really like cut to it's still yeah yeah here's let me if she had come back with a mark on her elbow i would have been up there with the baseball bat you're not gonna mark my wife with anything yeah to teach her character growth whatever that you think you're teaching my wife yeah and it's not your job to do that yeah that that's where this ends and you know a lot of people are like how did you let this happen no we happened to keith renery we happened to him that that's where the line was going to get dry look what do you mean by that meaning we ended up we ended it it wasn't like it happened him we happened to have brought to him we you know this is where it stops this is where the abuse stops and one way or the other it was going to be the end of keith renery sure whether it was going to be legally or was it going to be me going in there and doing doing something about it that's what i had decided i tacitly decided that i didn't tell mark i didn't tell sarah and there was a point where because i found out over the phone i was going to go take matters into my own hand and there was a point where i was like going to drive up there because i knew where he was and wait can you talk about when you found out and how you so if you're comfortable yeah i was in my car on 37th and 6th avenue i get a call from mark because she's still in vancouver i'm in new york um my friend eduardo is sitting shotgun to me who incidentally is still loyal and still defending him to keith to keith yeah and i get on the phone mark he tells me because she was afraid to tell me um and i didn't i was like what it was i said hold on a second let's just mark told you mark told me i was like i asked him to tell hold on a second after you guys were starting to defect yes this is the unraveling and on my whole house i said he used to tell us i don't want to break my vow of secrecy i was that afraid but i knew if mark told him at first i'm like hold on a second hold on a second what wait when when did this happen like what when was this going and i'm starting to do the math on all the abuses i'd heard about and i'm like okay well this is over because mark had also resigned two weeks earlier how did it feel to you like i imagine if this had happened to margie i'd be mad at keith but there would be a part of me that would feel like she betrayed me by doing it without telling me and then by hiding it for me i understood it really i i i understood how it happened in the indoctrination i also know my wife like um there was one moment when we were all out where i was kind of pissed you know it was like you know we're five days out of her when we're in toronto and i was like you know we had a fight i didn't think we were going to make it well it was a fight like how did you let this happen but you have to understand there was that i was i had problems with the organization for a long time and the reason i was staying is because i thought i was turning my back on my principles yeah the the principles of why i was staying all the things that i was doing was why i hadn't left in the first place there's enough things in the organization before that that i didn't like and i didn't want to you know i was done i didn't like this didn't work so there's two things that went on i was pissed that happened physical pain to my wife also i wasn't able to protect her um pissed i didn't see it right yeah i put it on all this time and relieved i could leave now yeah right whoa all the things that you don't have the you don't have the moral hold on me anymore yeah he did now now i can now like everything i was feeling and everything that was going on with me was justified i was right my instincts were right and nippy was back if that makes sense does that make sense and uh and i was i love uh i wanted to go i wanted to go of course even the score in a primitive way just like he says we're primitive i was like you're about to see how primitive i can be right um and so i got talked off the cliff obviously homeboy next to me eduardo just can i just say can i say one quick thing just like you know the metaphor of like put a bunch of frogs in the water and then they turn it up like yes you weren't always engaged yes you weren't always in you know yes you brought it to him later but you guys were subtly groomed down a soft path as the water got turned up more absolutely and at some point the water got to boiling and you guys were the lucky ones or the courageous ones or the smart ones or whatever where you got out whatever you want to call it he took yeah he took you guys way far down the path yeah and you're and i don't say that to shame you we all i don't know we are all of our listeners it it's happened to all of us i don't feel that way at all to millions of people all over the world every day you know what i mean for a handful of months but once i see that this is a process that goes on everywhere yeah with with all belief systems no matter how you think you're not susceptible to it or vulnerable to it you are you just don't know how yet yep and it's to a certain degree so once i've once you know that all happened then you know cooler heads prevailed i went in and you know it's it's in the vowel where i go and i'd shake some limbs you know i yell and do my official complaint to human resources and then you know i just got my wife and kid as far as i could out of there and then i tried to make a scene i tried to you know flip some tables and i told all my friends that i could that you know this is bad i was loud about it as much as i could consistent with what they were going to say my personality was and we were we got out of harm's harm's way physically and then the drama starts so really quick this is a really important part of high demand religions and organizations what do they do how do they treat defectors how do they treat apostates right attack our character yeah what attack our character first thing first but we had learned as we were waking up that you i mean we knew that people had left over the years if you left on good terms you wouldn't be you you wouldn't be attacked but you'd be labeled as oh it's too bad the so-and-so never worked through their issues and i guess they're going to bump up against that in their life and they weren't strong enough to continue they're blamed yeah blame reversal of being weak yeah left because they're weak or broken we're acting out of fear you know acting out of fear not love and but we also knew that anyone who left on bad terms would be sued so we were trying to leave on good terms whilst also bringing as many people as we could and trying to share so we were kind of living a double life for a couple weeks which was the most scary time of my life because on one hand i was like lauren you know nippy now knows about the brand and i would and and nippy this was our strategy like he's really upset and like i got to save my marriage i think i'm going to take a step back and i love you and everything's good but like i got to pull back and you're kind of you're trying to take care of her feelings yes don't be heard lauren yeah i love you my marriage is falling apart but don't be mad yeah because i wanted them to think that i was choosing my marriage out of like weakness because that would give like i'd rather that they thought i was weak then i was being a ballsy defector and destroying the company yeah so i was like yeah you want to show your cards they don't show my cards yeah so we were doing a double stand double star double life for a little while and also trying to tell everyone we knew there was a training happening shortly where people were flying from around the world to do the next round of branding and we just wanted that to stop so we stopped that we stopped all except for one group uh who went did it anyway and they went did it anyway after i went in and made a scene yeah yeah because they were like determined to keep going but anyway let's see that's that that's what keith learned from day one you can have a catastrophe it can have it all unravel and blow up and then you just dust yourself up and you keep going against the really successful ones know to never quit yes and that's how it always ends with joseph smith by by 1844 joseph smith has himself declared king of the world right king of the world i'm not joking and he's got this a legion a navu legion larger than than like any standing domestic us army and he's parading his legion around from town to town having had himself crowned king of the world while he was running for president of the united states that's that's where joseph smith got as things were so it's just the hubris just you double down you double down there's this exponential curve of hubris genghis khan yeah i think i mentioned this in my interview when you were on our podcast that i read something i think it was under under the banner of heaven when i was educating myself that's a good yeah it's such a good book um show notes on it all over it that there was a theory that when you lie to the level that keith reiner was lying joe smith was lying um and living um like this double life of like i'm this person but really i'm a polyamorous douchebag you know like you know there's there's there's a that that like fuels this sort of like fuel the theory was that it fuels libido as well the the line yeah the lying the adrenaline the adrenaline and the like the excitement of that was fueling the libido and that sort of like is a self-perpetuating cycle i just think that's interesting i think that's true i think you could do a whole doctorate on that but anyway just to wrap up a lie to get my libido up is everything yep jesus complicated things a little more for me we brought a lot of people with us and a lot of people left because especially in vancouver many of them never met keith and nancy can i just say here's one thing yeah how many people before you had tried quietly went away and i'm thinking about in mormonism how many mormons realize that they're gonna face they're gonna reap the whirlwind if they speak up and speak out and so they either stand quietly or they just try and fade away quietly but they but they feel too afraid to lift their voices and i i don't that a lot of this is privilege but i really do have mad respect for people that choose the path of speaking publicly knowing that it's going to come at a deep personal cost what was it about you guys that either gave you the privilege to be able to do that or gave you the courage to do that when so many people who follow high demand religions just stay quiet and and fear reaping the whirlwind couple things first of all i don't know how many people because i'm not in touch with all of them but i know that many people have come to me since saying i left not even knowing what you know now but just things were weird and i didn't want to cause i think they felt it they want to cause a scene and but i'm talking about raising your voice no no not many people did but the people that did in 2009 a bunch of people left nine women left they faced letting go but they made the mistake of trying to solve things internally first and trying to resolve things with keith and talk it out they didn't know they were look what they were dealing with they didn't like that he they figured out that he was sleeping with people they didn't realize he was a sociopath he didn't realize what he was willing to do and by the time they tashed it all out he gasled them so much they looked crazy yeah and they were like i mean i know i felt super wacky whacked out like an almost nervous breakdown when i was leaving these women were not in a good place so i didn't trust them when they were like keith is uh and won't be like okay and they didn't have the resources to go do your thing right yeah so they left right and then this is now 2009. how we do the math eight years later when we're waking up and we're going oh that's what they were dealing with you know and then so we knew we weren't going to try to resolve it internally yeah no i was we were we were out and we went through stages of like first we've got to get out that's the other thing seek safety everything that we had heard previously about keith's wake that had been denied immediately became true to me yeah it wasn't a smear campaign like true and then then some it was it wasn't blasphemy it was true and that happened very quickly and so and to answer your question we first we need to like get out and be safe and then we realized we had tons of friends that were literally slaves and i for me specifically because i had been a recruiter for so long some of those women were there because of me and we're way further deep because of me because i told them that this was a good thing so i i knew i couldn't be quiet i knew that i had to go loudly and and destroy it i didn't yeah it was it was that was pretty quick also listen are you saying because you felt responsible for having recruited so many people there's that you needed to be a whistleblower yeah absolutely to get them out i think you say that in the valley it's like we get we we got them in we can get them out we can do that what allows abuse to exist it's cowardice yeah and yeah right i mean look at look at i mean you can call it the american indoctrination or whatever like i've the reason i got involved with the organization is because i had a problem with that existing in the world so i would be nothing to myself right if i didn't do something about it first thing was get get my family out of there and then what's the fight yeah what does it look like unfortunately you know it didn't look like previous people who left fortunately you know and here's one thing i was betting on you know large on i was pretty confident as a guy whose wife got branded with another man's initials those optics didn't look good for them and when the cards were on the table they were the ones that were going to be incriminating looking more so than a guy having a problem with what happened to his wife and reacting to it i was pretty confident that our culture would support that over oh no she chose it and your reaction is the problem to another man's initials in her pubic area and character and growth thing apply none of the optics look good for them and and that bet turned out to be way more true than i anticipated right we didn't know we what we whistled blue on was like ten percent of what ended up being true superficial way more like what came out in the trials what was worse than what you just described pedophilia rape like his his wake and his the things that we exposed were like so many more people yeah financial drain all the stuff i mean how much did the bronfens lose to his commodities experience 65 million dollars were were lost the bronfman's gave to him like ma i'm not so sure it was lost i think it's somewhere to be honest probably in a crypto account somewhere so yeah it was the right thing for us to do 100 and you know like not everybody wanted us to go like my family was so happy to have me back and awake and all those things and then i was like i have to do this and they were like are you sure i was like yeah you know and we didn't know we didn't know it was going to happen we didn't know it was going to be so obvious once it was all in in try like all came out in court and people were testifying it was a blowout it was a blowout it wasn't even it wasn't even a close fight but we didn't know that at the time right and we they also had ammo they had a big litigation machine and we didn't know you know how and what it was going to look like and then when when claire bronfman gets on a jet a month later to fly out and try and have my wife arrested the arrogance the i it just enraged me you should get a lawyer to like you know so then we go to the new york times and you know i wasn't even really want to go to new york times but we went to the new york times and then this is history everything they dragged us into a fight that they lost i mean they could have handled it internally yeah they could they could have called like no nancy never even called me lauren never even called me not for me i wasn't in a place to like be gaslit and be you know talked off a list that was a hard thing for me like because i was closer to some of those people and to like lose all these friendships in in a heartbeat it was really hard i'm still a struggle with that i don't why so also is my community they took a swipe at our character and my family and things like there's some good people in there you know yeah but see that i think that's like if i had to reduce the grip mormonism has on people to one thing it would be community i really do think and it's so it's so powerful that that's you're kind of getting teary-eyed a little bit and that's that's what made it hard for you yeah to raise your voice i walked away from a lot of people that i cared about a lot and i knew there was going to be collateral damage but it had to be done and what'd you lose i mean honestly i lost all of them except for a handful and i have a very small circle now and i'm okay with that but it's i've always been the kind of person to seek closure and i still don't have closure with a lot of them only recently i had closure closure with lauren when she got sentenced and she wrote me an apology letter which kind of ended that for me and i still would like to see her and talk to her at some point down the road when she when we're allowed we're currently we're not allowed to maybe it feels differently you know you know with lauren it's it's different but i i really believe when people take a run at your character they take a run at your thing i think you can wish them well but i think it's dangerous to let them back in your life yeah i really do maybe it's different with lauren because i think lauren has kind of had the same experience that we've had and she can understand it and we can have that conversation it seems that way from what i've seen lauren is the only one i kind of hold that out for the rest i just even how they're talking and how they take you know sarah sarah doesn't sarah's the target a lot of them because i think sarah demonstrated the character they none of them have and that's hard for them to to really um get their heads around they don't want to see the fact that sarah was right she did a hard thing she went through a hard thing and none of them had the had the balls to do it and they have to see that every day yeah see sarah winning in ways that they're losing and they're not willing to take that in yeah jump back to the community thing for just one second um it is such a powerful binding force and when i watched wild wild country which is a documentary i i hope everyone will watch on that i mentioned it very good oh yeah yeah and carrick you can add that to the show notes if you want um the guy and this was true in holy hell which was another documentary on netflix yeah what you hear these people saying is it was the happiest time of my life yeah and you know it was terrible and horrible and awful it was a cult and i'm glad i got out and i don't know that i've ever been happier so there's something about and you feel like at the time did you feel like these were your true family this was your true family chosen family i never felt that way yeah nippy didn't as much i did i did what did you feel about you felt what about this community that they were what that they were that were all on the same path and that we really understood each other and we were sharing our lives in a vulnerable way and that we had a connection that nobody else would understand and that bond was what i mean it was gl it was glue it it also the belt thought the bond felt like it was what felt like it was the bond felt like it was glue for everything and and truthfully even more so my community in vancouver a lot of the people in new york weren't i didn't relate to as much but basically i brought all my friends yeah that i had were friends before even and we made this little thing that we did together and it was and i didn't it's like we showed up three times a week like church you know we were consistent there were a lot of people in it truthfully that i wasn't that close with i'm gonna and i didn't really see that until you brought it'd be akin to me going back to atlanta and bringing all my childhoods that's that's why i need to do this same thing i was i had my buddies in it yeah um but the people who were different than me a lot of people in albany i actually didn't like sure so but i kept them at a distance but the community that i did like the part that i built in vancouver i was very attached to there's this thing called dunbar's number that no human can have more like 150 deep meaningful connections so you don't need more than 150 total but the point that i'm trying to make is we're we're there's a saying a lone monkey is a dead monkey we are tribal yes we have evolved to be tribal so what we're all seeking is this deep rich powerful meaningful tight-knit community and that's what you were seeking and that's what you ironically obtained but the chemicals in your brain feel so amazing when you're in it that it's like this and joseph smith was seeking for zion he called it zion someday we're going to be in the zionic state where where there's no poor among us and everybody loves each other and we're all and that's what these cults generate ironically and when you're in it the chemicals in your brain are so amazing it's like meth or heroin i'm sure of it same chemical processes but you also believe that these people are your homies they're my real family and they'll be they'll be with me to the bitter end and then as soon as you step out i can tell you what happened to me when i get excommunicated what what happens to those relationships when you step out of that community that you thought was heaven on earth right what happened to those relationships well i mean because i was a defector anyone who was still a believer wouldn't speak to me and they shunned me yeah they would they cut communication word spread very quickly that i was telling people about the brand and that i was not to be trusted and i was suppressive and there's all sorts of rumors one of them was that i didn't get promoted to the executive because they couldn't tell people like they couldn't tell the community at large that i'd been branded left to us and i loved dos so they made up a bunch of rumors like i was part of the executive i wanted to be on the executive board and i didn't get promoted and i was having a tantrum like women do when they don't get what they want like all these terrible things or that nippy was upset and i was going to choose him over the company because i was so dependent and you know blah blah blah it's always blame reversal when you defect you did something wrong you're the bad person you're defective stay away they're dangerous high-demand religions and cults have to demonize the defectors defectors are by far always the most dangerous force yeah yeah and even people who are out now i still had some people that were talking to me that i had enough i'd say there's about five to ten people that buddies that i had that were like playing both sides they come to me they go here and then ultimately their process was like i believe nippy and one of them was like listen claire came to me bronfman came to me he's like okay what dirt do you have on them so this is what i knew that like you know they're willing to do anything yeah and there's even people that have since left and it took them a while like much longer after we left who don't who who don't support keith anymore like they don't think keith is good but they still won't speak to us because they think what we did was bad because they didn't like the way we handled it they didn't like how we handled it they thought we could have handled it internally you don't get to tell me how i defend my family yeah so there's you know we we still get calls people apology you know say hey sorry we didn't believe you i'm sorry i never reached out but i was told that yeah i was told sorry about that that's our family motto um and we still get those calls and i'm sure we'll continue to but there's other people who'll never call us because well they weren't our friends anyway yeah yeah i don't care that we're our friends but it felt like they were they yeah i mean they were some of them were allies they were allies yeah you know under a false premise luckily we when we left we left with enough people that we had a little community so there's enough p yeah that were helping us take it down writing letters to the credit card company like right one of the things that we did we found out later was a big demise of the company is that we encourage people who are on because with monthly payments towards the like you know the monthly commitment it's like 300 bucks a month um to call their credit card company and say that they didn't want to do it anymore and that the company was fraudulent which it was and so when you have enough what's called a paper what's that called a chargeback when you when you say to visa i don't this is fraud charge it back when you have enough chargebacks the same company they freeze your accounts yeah so that was going to get them in the pocketbook yeah in the pocketbook and they weren't able to get access to their funds and people were defecting and we part of our strategy to give them lots of fires to put out we were putting up we were giving them fires everywhere and they couldn't handle it and yeah it's it's uh we won it's one thing to create a cult or high demand religion before the printing press which was probably the best time you know pre-1500s to create a cult or high-demand religion and then joseph smith made the mistake of creating a high-demand religion after the printing press because so much got written down and like mark he wanted everything recorded which by the way is what partly what blew me away about the bow is how many audio recordings and video recordings existed so that there was evidence for everything you're talking about this is demise the was to joe smith what the internet was exactly and i was going to say that it's even worse to try and create a cult in the internet age where everybody's got a cell phone and you know it shows all these texts you guys are sharing you know skyping each other communicating across country and then harnessing social media and and everything yeah it's it's a it's a hard time to start a cult these days and i mean in a lot of ways that laid out what the fbi and the doj was going to just do you just handed us a case yeah and we did we did like we catherine had had all the screenshots everything that was proving all these things and we gave it to the doj saying this is sex trafficking this is you know and obviously they did way more investigation than that but they had a great starting point yeah yeah i mean when we learned sarah didn't even have to testify at the trial that's how that's how much that's how egregious his behaviors were it's just the hubris the hubris like they could have thrown our situation away yeah and put him away yeah you know but but it's still mind-blowing and i remember part of the suspense of the vow is just like are the cops gonna pick this up because there's there's such emphasis in the united states on protection of religious freedom and scientology and and you know joe's witnesses and probably keith and even mormonism that so many high-demand religions hide behind religious freedom where like politicians and and law enforcement they tend to want to stay and sometimes even the media like if it weren't for the branding i don't know that this story would have even i was gonna say that a while back we were talking about the branding you know obviously i wish it hadn't happened to me but it's kind of what needed to happen in order to take him down because up until then all of the abuses and like when the women left in 2009 it's really hard to prove now i have the mark on my body and i can say that this happened whether i chose it or not whether i asked for it or not it didn't matter keith was putting his initials on women's bodies like pimps do to their women and like farmers due to cattle not okay there's no place this is ever okay ever ever and they were going well it's just like a sorority that's what they're saying yes right now there's still people who are loyal to it they're saying these are just like a sorority and women are committing no it's not like a sorority because the sorority is for women this is a men's a man's sex trafficking ring where he's putting his initials in their bodies not just like a sorority yeah yeah and i want to be really careful how i talk about this sarah and i want i hope you can feel what i'm saying here because i i live in a world where mormonism is kind of like a nice cult yeah because we've we've had 150 years to mature so we've stopped doing a lot of the stuff that the frankly the government forced us to stop doing and we changed our image to become like donnie osmond steve young like quarterbacks and entertainers and we're ibm salesmen white you know clean cut young mormon missionaries what's wrong with that you know in some ways mormonism has become the all-american religion right right and we're not branding people we're not like uh david miskovic who's like literally incarcerating people against their will and his wife disappeared 10 years ago and where is she but nobody knows mormonism isn't that and so you know we'll have these situations where like lgbt people we're not branding people but then we've got thousands and thousands and thousands of lgbtq mormons that have ended their lives awful daily weekly and the government's like oh well you know we've done the sex cult thing oh yeah we don't really want to cover that and oh yeah we've done the like fraudulent drill financials you know none of those news stories bite oh there's no branding and so like but but they're but branding is horrific and there are emotional and psychological and intellectual brands that are as bad or sometimes they're even worse i think you would agree that the the physical brands were not the worst things this is what i've said for the physical brands are the physical manifestation of the emotional abuse exactly and that's the entry point into the emotional abuse and the emotional abuses are very hard to quantify because there's kind of a plausible deniability of it yeah there's not a there's not a modality there's not a physical manifestation thing and and are you going to take that on to prove it are you an expert in that are legal experts which are like i can only take on what i can prove am i going to prove feelings am i going to prove emotions those are very difficult things to take on and there's not an incentive right now in our culture to solve those problems yet not only that there's a disincentive because as soon as you start getting into that territory it's like religious freedom you wait this is first amendment you can't impinge on our first amendment rights that's like that's bad and so religions they're tax exempt they amass all this wealth and power right and there's all this psychological emotional abuse misogyny racism sexism homophobia and there's destroyed families there's all this collateral damage in the wake but because it's a religion uh stay away just stay away you have to go in on and i think i think it was my grinder mike grinder who said on our podcast that that he was like keith really screwed himself by not making himself a religion because he would have been protected you know i'm so glad that he did it that's so dark yeah yeah i'm really glad that that he didn't because he was able to be prosecuted and um i don't there's got to be a way around that i don't know what it is i'm not a you know i'm not a little this is it yeah we started to talk about it getting the right people you have to have language shining light you know on these abuses and the fact that that's happening and no one's willing to do anything about it that's horrific that's egregious and and just like you know gerardo was talking about in a family i'll just say a family member saying hey gerardo who is an active devout believing mormon hey gerardo check out this weird nexium cult that's going on as an orthodox mormon that believes in joseph smith and somehow doesn't draw the connection okay it's like we you know it's it's we're all in our silos and we need to break out of our silos which is why i work with try and work with lee and mike and jt and lady c the jobs witnesses and chris shelton and lloyd evans and you guys we have to work together to cross promote awareness for sure right sure okay yeah one last comment one of the things and i said this in one of our podcasts it's like when you're in one of these groups it's very easy to spot another one right because when we were in these things we we were we were in esp you're like that's a that's a cult that we'd be looking at that wasn't close to you while you were scientology scientology but i didn't really understand why i understood it but but also like i remember going clear came out and i didn't watch it because someone told me that it was really really biased to get scientology and hey if tom cruise wants to jump on a couch and be happy why is that why is that my problem like that's his business hold that thought hold the hell outside right exactly so um this has been so amazing so powerful i'm in love with today and you guys in this interview um so you guys became whistleblowers i mean i one one really quick thing it was mind-boggling to watch the vow and to see that so much of the the the behaviors that you guys had to engage in to try and become whistleblowers in an effective way to take down you were able to film all that so like you had a camera crew following you as you're strategizing as you're brainstorming and then as you're like taking him down and that's that's a weird element because usually you don't have like an hbo backed film crew sort of chronicling your takedown of a high of a global high demand cult right and keep in mind that hbo came got involved later so new york times was your first new york times was a big first press and then we did a lot of other press meanwhile we were documenting for ourselves just like with private camera people who know how to work with the camera so you hired you hired the camera crews originally hoping that someone would pick it up it wasn't even that we were documenting it to mostly for self-preservation yeah at the beginning remember the first time mark sent anthony to come and film us it was like we just got to get like just documents so mark knew we wasn't there we were hiring like someone from the community come over film us we got to give it we got to tell people what's happening right now like get it on tape and then jahan who's one of the filmmakers who had taken our training was like we got to do something with this and then it became more formal and that like you know there was a production company involved later they sold january of 18 they took what footage they had collected for the last six months and sold the concept and that's when things cranked up yeah that's what things talked about so then it was like for a while it was just we were filming ourselves that's even cooler yeah i was filming with my cell phone you know we were that's an act of faith like i come from a religious standpoint yeah you guys had a lot of faith you know what we did and we've talked about this a lot in our podcast is that we came from such a dark place and all of a sudden there was so much support and light and good people that just popped out of the woodwork and held our hands and made it i think that's because we put a lot of good will into the world with what we were doing previously under a dark regime that this is karma coming back so yeah i don't speak in those terms very often so for me i really when it happens to you it kind of it's kind of undeniable yeah and i have to say mark and bonnie are so lovable yeah uh and they come through in in the vow and there's i'm sure there's just so many people that have been an important part of this takedown but i'm just at that point of the vow when he escapes to mexico and then you guys are all wondering what's going to happen is he going to flee it reminds me of wild wild country you know when the when go ahead oh well we were actually watching wild wild country and there was this part where he was like being taken on a bus and like they call it diesel therapy where they like they drag the leader out and give them a hard time that was literally happening to keith at the same time as we were watching wildwell country we were like our lives are so crazy i mean how many people do you know in their 40s that have worked with the fbi and like taking down a criminal organization and put a leader in jail for 120 years like it's a pretty that's when you asked me last night like do you want to talk about other things and like it's kind of the most interesting thing in my life i can talk about daycare and my green juice habit and stuff like that but it's not quite as interesting the good doctor and the good doctor here yeah so you're you're like are they going to get him and they nab him and when they nab him i'm just like it was like this euphoric moment it's like they got it they got it and you guys are crying and as far as i know season two is more about the trial you know what happens once there's the season two there's the scene two coming in the first quarter apparently january 2022 and there's more interviews with the inner circle apparently they interviewed nancy and lauren and more people from mexico and more of the inner circle yeah i know oh yeah the people that are still loyal but i don't know if they signed off on it yeah they interviewed what we call the loyalists also known as the flat earthers because they want to curate it they want to control the narrative and look none of their story holds up under like two or three questions and they know that and sure that's the weird parallel when i think about joseph smith is he ends up in prison lynched killed all of it comes out in the papers fast forward 180 years the most powerful global world religion and church in the united states for sure more no no church in the united states has more power and money and so and it was an almost identical founding yeah and so like people people continue to believe beliefs are so resilient and the worst thing you can do is make a martyr out of your founder because then you just give fuel to the ongoing beliefs and i was just really quickly like gerardo it turns out i didn't learn this until i was watching the vow that he had a really strong presence in mexico he was able to get like sons of like former presidents of the company to get involved and it was really starting to spread in mexico and it's already it was bigger in mexico than it was in the united states becoming a global movement right yeah and who knows if it's it may it may peter out but it could continue because so many religions without keith calling the shots yeah and it's it's it's like eight to ten people that are and i just don't i mean maybe but but like but like um founder of scientology um help me people i'm spacing elrond hill ron hubbard died and then there's david miscavige joseph smith dies then there's brigham young it can't happen it's all i'm saying there's honestly there's nobody that's loyal that i would trust could that could do there's no more competitive yeah there's no incompetent the difference now is the internet yeah yeah for sure i mean we had trouble recruiting even before this happened people would go because people google them they would google branding what i can't tell you how many people i lost that were going to do it and then i googled it so here's the biggest problem we're going to end on this because you guys are here for thrive let's thrive it's literally just like hey ex-mormons you've been conditioned to believe you can't be in happy and healthy and have a good family and raise good kids without a religion that's what the church conditioned you to think and feel and you've lost all your friends and family so thrive is literally just like hey you can find healing and joy after your religion and there are people who can help you find healing and joy and that's why we brought you guys okay here's the rub because even if nexium dies out and even if mormonism dies out guess what our children what what do you call this is a joke kind of a dark joke what do you call the children of secular people who have left high demand religions what do you call those children cara do you know the uh do you know the punchline of the joke cult members and embryo i don't know yeah fodder for the next culture right right because even even if ding ding ding you win a prize kara you win you get an a today thank you because even if even if nexium and the mormon church implodes the next keith renery or joseph smith is right around the corner and so how do we raise children that come to adulthood get to college become smart and enlightened and educated that have the tools they need so they don't feel like they need to fill their hole inside with with with some predatory cult members teachings that are always self-improvement it's not a cold it's just self-improvement and then they don't see the signs and then they get sucked right back in and it but it may not be a religion it may be essential oils it may be an mlm it may be a yoga or a guru it may be a bever a special beverage like there's a million cult opera and i know this is kind of the direction you guys hopefully want to go at some point i'd say it's more of a theoretical rhetorical question but that's what keeps me up at night now yeah us too can we talk about it anything you want to say and then we'll have you guys tell us all the things you're doing that'll be amazing yeah okay um whatever impulse you have to join these things it's normally because you're not feeling a certain way that you don't like you're supposed to feel that way yeah it's called growth you're supposed to feel that way in your 20s yeah you're supposed to maybe feel a little confused that's part of it yeah it's not a sign that you need not it's not a sign of anything and for me i had always had a schedule i was playing sports i didn't have to face that stuff until i was 24 25. right because you were performing because i was always i was always had something yeah that wasn't exposing that to me and then i was like okay i'm 24 25 i don't have skill sets go build them that's what most people in their 20s are doing you're building them yeah it's normal and then finding a community that's a healthy community without a leader like you don't need a leader yeah you know it doesn't you don't need a guru you've got your own inner guru we just did a podcast called free or inner guru someone else's that we really liked how do you how do you nurture that in kids so that they feel like they can have the tools themselves or like read a book but don't like take a workshop you know you don't have to how do you make those decisions i don't know i don't know the answer i i said something i said something in a podcast that the guy liked and extracted and maybe it's applicable find someone who's doing what you want to be doing at the highest level and figure out what they did yeah you don't have to follow you don't have to do that but it'll open up another door that go okay what i'm doing is similar to them but i like this avenue a little better yeah you know and i actually have to join a group to do that i actually did that when i was 14 years old i read a book about bill bradley who was the center of new jersey and basketball player prince senator yeah and i was like i want to go play basketball at princeton that was my goal at 14 15 years old right i played all my sports and then i pursued that and then it opened up other stuff in football and it ended up being something similar so showing people a path that's healthy and not not dogmatic and and open to question you know and transparency all the opposite things of a cause listen to your parents too i mean there's a book that we've covered in depth on mormon stories called recovering agency which is a book about identifying the tools of cults and high demand religions they're yanya what's the daniella let's take back your life take back your what's my personal bible for healing there's stephen hassan's books about uh mind control freedom of mind yeah and but we need to become more literate about how to detect a high demand religion right out of college or you know when your career is sagging so that you can see those signs early and not tamp down your inner voice that's saying danger danger will robinson right so you can detect him and stay away yeah i'm really passionate about teaching people that yeah what those red flags look like how to acknowledge that intuitive signal and not override it because you're trying to like please someone or because you trust somebody but like really listening to that instinct that we all had at some point and then we overwrote it for some other reason which was well intentioned it's not bad it's normal but the most i think the most complex part of all this is you said don't join a group or whatever the problem is we're tribal like it goes back that we need a tribe and so like as i'm like trying to develop thrive it's just like people are alone they're lonely then we just held a retreat i'm thinking oh man i don't want to become keith very we hold retreats and workshops right and all these people come and they need support we ask them what's the number one thing you miss or need you know what they say community community yeah you know so you can take the workshop and you can go to a retreat you just can't make it your life and that's what that can't be consequences to leaving yeah you can and you can come and go freely there's no shame if you leave and but communities are hard to build yeah and as soon as you start building a community then you have rules and you have leaders and then you always have to be like as i'm watching the vow i'm thinking i never want to do that i can see how that can happen oh i can see how you can get popular i can see how people can start liking you i can see how you can start wielding undue influence on your employees and i'm like every step along the way i'm like wow that's a that's a pothole yeah and you know for me pothole for me and everything for thrive like every single step along the way everything's throughout history too like the constitution had checks and balances in it they understood that to a certain degree right and so they have things that four years here and then you're out and then or eight term limits term limits all that stuff so you know balance of power is a separation of powers right so i'm part of the similar to you with your with thrive i'm part of hashtag i got out which is a mixture of experts and survivors and whistleblowers and we're trying to expose the shame and help people tell their stories so that we change the stigma and all that but even still there's a group of people and there's dynamics we all come from cults and we're laughing about like here we are like how did we do it overheard some of the meanings that have been like oop but we're but we're aware enough to go okay we gotta get this no it's not but we're human we're all human doing our thing we gotta figure it out yeah well the book is scarred by sarah edmondson it's an amazing book i have not finished it but i will uh the movie the documentary is the vow on hbo nine part series for season one season two coming in 2022. tell us about your amazing podcast and everything else you want to plug uh to our audience because these are rhetorical questions we've got to figure this out and let's do it together yeah for sure yeah that is largely what a little bit culty is we talked to the survivor that's your podcast right yeah well it's a little bit culty so we're looking we're looking at things that are just a little bit and then full-on cults and we mostly talk to whistleblowers survivors experts often they're experts that are used to be survivors so almost everyone comes from a cult or researchers on cults and we just have really wonderful conversations and we try to really come up with the red flags that are the template for people so they don't join in the first place or they can get out if they're in it or they can heal if they're already out and the precursors to things that if you're confused on it these might give you a language to where the abuses that you couldn't articulate before might be or not yeah instead of saying oh it's a little bit culty well specifically it's culti because it's insular or because there's one person at the top then no one's holding him accountable or you can't speak of what's happening inside of it or secrecy like very specific things with what makes it a little bit gulty or fully cruelty so giving people those terms i think has been really helpful and it's helpful for us like we're we're still figuring yeah we have great conversations with interesting people we're actually having the conversations that we thought we were having yeah because like nippy and i are the same people we joined nexium because we wanted to grow and want to help other people and now we get to actually help other people it's very rewarding and finding it finding an arena to do it in was you know one of the things that lured me in dsp as well i thought of law i thought of other things and it just didn't feel like those were the avenues and this presented itself and this seemed like an avenue to go in and i chose poorly but look where we are right now look at the conversations we get to have like where we are earlier i found something that i felt like was was right and then it pivoted me here and i think if you're on that journey you're gonna find it eventually you probably we can't answer the question of whether you are looking back wish it had never happened or like are so grateful for the growth that you are are at peace i'm at peace really yeah i wouldn't change anything really not alcoholic beer i wouldn't you really wouldn't after all that i mean like you can't live in that way like obviously with faced with certain decisions i wish i had made it certain like you know it would have been great and i always wondered sometimes what would have happened if i pursued acting and not nexium and can't live that way i have to you can't because then you're just stuck inside so we're still alive and we're still have a lot of our lives ahead of us my two beautiful boys who i love you know with all of my heart i love our lives now it's full of meaning it's full of purpose is what i was looking for in the beginning so can i just ask about a circle what do you think when you are getting out of the shower and you do see the branding on your hip oh i had it removed you did have it removed okay so it's not like a trigger that you have to look at and remind yourself no i had plastic surgery that was actually paid for by a philanthropist who heard about the story and this has helped some of the other women get theirs removed as well now it's just a thin i can show you later maybe not on camera but it's a white thin line smaller than a c-section okay it's almost gone because it's like yours so you don't have to have like an emotional every time i had it very very faded after two and a half years of creams and lotions and exfoliating and and i got it down to a very thin white line but i could still see kr in the mirror and i saw a plastic surgeon and she was like if you really want this off your body which i think you do then we just got to cut it out so they literally like it was this big and they cut a shape like this around it cut it out and then sealed it back up oh no it's just gone like they literally cut the skin my append appendectomy scars probably worse yeah i love that look i told you the universe greeted us and took care of us in many more ways than we could have anticipated and even thought we needed and to answer your question cara before i had it removed it fueled me to fight it wasn't a trigger of what had happened to me it was a trigger about why i need to speak up about it that's a great refresh love that reframe i told her the initials are keith richards not keith yeah it didn't work that was stones i get that reference but that's because i'm old it's richards well uh i mean it's a reframe but it's also really good mental health to say if you've been through something hard how are you gonna turn it into something where you're benefiting the lives of other people and that is why you guys uh are so inspiring to me because you've taken difficult things in pain and now you're turning around and trying to bless other people's lives turning a negative into a position to read something to you and then also what is extra special to me and i think sarah kara and gerardo and margie are gonna agree with this because they're all here in studio is that you are willing to come bless our people because sometimes you can't see it in your own organization but if somebody else from a different organization comes to you and takes the time you guys could have not come you could have probably made a lot of money doing other things you came at a discount but and you you have a lot of other things you can do with your time you came to utah to help bless our people and you blessed us with things we can't provide ourselves which is an outside perspective to view and to learn from to actually ironically see ourselves better you've done that you're not just helping your own nexium survivors you're helping us and and many other groups as well and i can't and care i i think right and uh we can't thank you enough for doing what we can't do ourselves isn't that what both groups profess to do in the first place now we can actually do it right somebody sent me this meme i want to read it to you real quick this how we'll end on this when we recover loudly oh god now it's gone hold on a second no problem take two when we recover loudly we keep others from dying quietly so this is the uh recovered loudly podcast if you wouldn't meet with me i got i just felt the holy ghost is that is that a revelation yep when we recover loudly we keep others from dying quietly if you care's doing the air snakes if you need a title for this podcast it could be called recovering loudly sarah and nippy that's your next book oh yes it's like how to because i've never heard that before yes and you can cite it and it's like you can be the next glenda doyle or better i said i wasn't going to write another book it was so stressful but um yes if if preparing for this weekend and for the speech tomorrow i was like i have learned a lot if i could like package it into something that like people could take because i'd like pulled from all these different things and i could getting out is just step one yeah it's healing and growing yeah that's the whole point is the healing and growth getting a new community educating self-love self-care right reclaiming your time and your values learning to deal with emotions finding healthy practices stay tuned for the next episode of mormon stories with sarah and nippy come back in about a year here too guys back we'll help you promote your book because uh it was born here yes it was born here all right love you guys support uh how can people give you money or support you um by buying the book is great i also narrated the audible if you want to hear me uh speaking it i'm going to listen a little bit listen to a little bit culti follow us on instagram i'm on instagram you tell my friend tell your friends tell your friends to follow us sarah edmondson anthony ames a little bit culture all on instagram we are working on setting up a foundation for survivors and not just of nexium but that's in the works so yeah all right everyone thanks so much for tuning in if you value this content please become a supporter of mormon stories of mormon stories.org you can become a monthly donor hope you enjoyed thrive this is after thrive we'll keep doing thrive as long as it's helpful but let's all be good to each other no matter what and learn the critical thinking skills and the uh coercive techniques of high demand religions and cults so that you don't leave one cult to join another that's the lesson for today sarah nippy we love you guys let's go see a jazz game all right all right and let's go do thrive okay kara it's so awesome to have you thanks for joining us thank you she's amazing to hear yeah when i have those headphones on and i was like this is the most intense thing i've ever heard come through these headphones so i hope everyone listening to the podcast feels the same way too so yeah thank you guys for sharing that was an incredible story i'm sure it was kind of summarized really densely but yeah i hope people i hope people enjoyed that as much as i did gerardo and margie off camera we love you guys and we're glad you're here and you guys make what we do possible so love you guys thanks so much all right take care everybody see you guys soon on warmer stories bye you

Channel: Mormon Stories Podcast

Views: 167,188

Keywords: lds, mormon

Id: Zze42sPtwBw

Length: 161min 53sec (9713 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 24 2021