NXIVM: Episode 2: Nancy Salzman, Lauren Salzman, and NeuroLinguistic Programming

In which we familiarize ourselves with the history of NLP before jumping in to the exceedingly odd relationship of Nancy and Lauren Salzman

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

So, if Keith wasn't truly in charge, who was? It is a question with many layers, and over the coming episodes we're going to peel them back. Today we're going to begin with the bottom rung of power and slowly spiral upwards into the funding, the institutional legitimacy, the controlled opposition, the transnational intelligence, and those that walked away with everything valuable they could strip mine from Nexium's burning carcass. But today I want to focus on Nancy Salzman. If Keith is the face, ready to narcissistically take credit for everything, and eventually receive the lion's share of the blame, Nancy is the supervisor doing the grunt work, day in and day out, making sure everything runs smoothly and providing the actual talent necessary to make it work on the ground level. Her daughter Lauren is her accomplice, a victim turned victimizer, born into a world of deep psychological manipulation, and able to move through it with the ease and clarity of somebody who has never known anything different. Together, they are the carnies setting up the house of mirrors that the bottom rung of the uninitiated would get lost in as money moved, behavioral tech was acquired, and international corruption worked freely. Welcome to the Dust Light Archives.

SPEAKER_02 1:38

Completely dissociated from my body. Nancy Stoltzman, the co-founder of the Capitol Region-based technical connections, has been released from prison.

SPEAKER_01 3:46

NLP made Nancy's career, but that version of it destroyed her and destroyed the lives of others. Oh, what even is NLP?

SPEAKER_00 3:56

All right, guys. Hope you're doing well today. That little segment uh I just played is from a new podcast that is still currently airing. It's a uh limited series podcast called Mind Games, and it is about neurolinguistic programming in specific, but Nancy Salzman has done several interviews in it. And although I seriously question the lack of skepticism and the uh lack of journalistic integrity in this series, I thought that it might be a good opening to kind of let you know what we're going to get into. Oh, and I want to say real quick, by the way, uh last week we did not have an episode, and uh I appreciate anybody who is expecting one, bearing with me. I did have a few people reach out. Turns out um having a full-time job and doing this as a hobby, recording about an hour of new content a week, doing the research, doing the editing, is uh it's a lot. It's a little bit more than I thought it would be, and I just couldn't keep up. I needed a week in order to kind of catch up and make sure I was putting out the best product that I could. You know, I'd really like these episodes to be evergreen, so it's important to me more so if I if I have to choose, I would like to release an episode every week. I plan to, but if it comes between quality and it between, you know, speed, I would much rather kind of try to err on the side of quality. But alright, so let's get into Nancy and let's get into neurolinguistic programming. You know, I mentioned before kind of the specific structure that I had for this podcast series, and the way it was gonna be a little bit different than the Columbine one was sort of that I wanted to approach Nexium from each different vantage point and kind of tell the stories of these different people and then integrate it into the Nexium story. And I I really think uh once once we have done this for a few episodes, you're really gonna hopefully see my vision, and the sum is going to be greater than the parts, because I do think that this this story it gets very much flattened into just kind of a dumb sex cult story. And as I was going through, you know, doing the research on this, it was like every single one of the actors in it, the main actors, it felt like I couldn't just tell the story of their time in the cult, that they actually had something about them or relevant to their situation that actually I spoke to something larger thematically, I guess. And a lot of this too requires kind of breaking down context because I I believe the story that you're typically told about Nexium is just wrong and leaving a lot out, and I believe I can prove that, and you know, that has been one aspect of this too that has been kind of crazy is the work on this Nexium series has been so much harder than the Columbine series because so much research has gone into Columbine that the act of putting something together on it from a parapolitical standpoint was largely digging through other people's research and kind of categorizing between like you know stuff that had weight and stuff that didn't. It was really more about sorting the lies from the truth. Whereas with this, like I I really do believe I have a pretty well-researched thesis on this cult that I do believe I can substantiate pretty well, but that nobody else has done. Uh and so this has required a lot of like real just gumshoe research on my end because almost everything I could pull from was all telling the same story. Alright, but I feel like I'm rambling a little bit, so let's just get into it. So, in order to understand Nancy, you have to understand neurolinguistic programming because it really is central to her story. And so I wanted to take a little bit of time and kind of lead you from birth of neurolinguistic programming to where she enters into the story. And it really wasn't called neurolinguistic programming at the time, but if you're looking for a starting point, I would say the psychologist Milton Erickson is probably not a bad place to start. You know, he was born in 1901, and he kind of came up with a lot of the foundations for neurolinguistic programming when he supposedly claims to have cured his polio twice through the art of suggestion. He believed he could bypass the conscious mind and directly hack into the unconscious mind, which is the real basis of neurolingucming. And he developed tricks like mirroring the mid-pause handshake, which is like a uh like when you're shaking somebody's hand, you pause in the middle just to throw them off a little bit. And it and the idea behind it being that you could kind of activate something subconscious in that moment where they are thrown off guard and kind of thrown off of autopilot. He developed the idea of speaking in long, grammatically confusing sentences that also would overload the conscious brain. And he claimed he could hypnotize a person in minutes or even seconds. And but and he's kind of where I'm choosing to start the story because I do think it makes the most sense. Obviously, with these things, you could keep going back and back because, you know, cause and effect being what it is means that you will forever be able to find progenitors of whatever the current thing is. You know, I think you could go back to even like a lot of like occult or mystery school stuff is pulling from this. Uh certain kind of stage magicians, you know, in the 170 or 1800s would be using some of these techniques. But he was the guy who really kind of brought it into the modern mainstream and wrote a lot of it down and kind of created a real institution around it. And Milton Erickson caught the attention of a man named Gregory Bateson in the OSS, who in specific he was working in the morale operations branch where he was doing black propaganda operations to break the morale of enemy populations in places like Burma and Thailand. And I think that's interesting because immediately we kind of see the merger of the private and the public when it comes to this kind of behavior modification tech, which will be a running theme. And so Gregory Bateson he sees what Milton Erickson is doing and he sees he reads some of his writings. He and he is an OSS man who is living at Eselin, which I really don't have enough time to get into Essalin, but if you know, you know. And he's organizing these things called Macy conferences, which were like these weird cybernetic conferences, which were like these weird conferences that were largely about cybernetics. And through that, he meets Richard Bandler and John Grinder. And this is sort of the moment that neurolinguistic programming with the name and as a product fully emerges. He hooks them up with Milton Erickson, who teaches them what he has learned, and then they kind of go on to both uh do a lot of like business seminars and make a lot of money off of teaching this to other people on the one hand, and then on the other hand, also doing stuff for the military. In fact, the one guy, John Grinder in specific, he was a captain in the Green Berets, and he was stationed in Europe in the 1960s, and I mean, according to his own biography, he claims he worked in US intelligence before leaving to study linguistics under Noam Chomsky, which ew, yeah, that uh I feel like that really takes on a different flavor over the last few months. And in fact, in that Mind Games uh podcast that I played at the beginning, they have this hilarious part where they're quoting him or quoting somebody talking about him, who goes like, yeah, he went from being a Green Beret to basically being the head of the Communist Party over the course of like a year. And uh gonna go ahead and say that if that doesn't seem incredibly sus to you, I would get my sus radar checked. Um, but John Grinder is the government side of things in this duo, and I would argue even the less interesting out of the two of them. Richard Bandler, who, by the way, just to kind of situate you guys in this and to have to explain why I'm talking about this, Nancy Salzman will be a direct protege of these two, and I mean like very direct, like she is a student of Richard Bandler's for years. She helps run his courses, she has plenty of stories of like going out drinking with him and things like that. So it and Richard Bandler and John Grinder in specific, they grew up in the Bay Area in California, which also is just kind of odd when you consider what was going on in the 60s in that area. But by the time they run into Nancy Salzman in like the late 70s, early 80s, they are all part of this kind of small Albany scene that's very incestuous and very connected together. And she definitely learned from both of them, but Richard Bandler would be the larger influence, I believe, the one she spent more time around and learned more from. And Richard Bandler is a fucking lunatic. I really don't know how else to describe him. He reportedly is very talented in what he does, which I I don't doubt. There are a lot of people who claim that he has talents that practically border on the magical as far as his ability to reach into a person's subconscious and to control their behavior. He also was known for being extremely reckless, for carrying a gun with him everywhere he went, and for being severely addicted to cocaine. And and he definitely wasn't shy about letting any of this be known. He was a severe alcoholic as well. He was definitely known to regularly be drinking out of a flask or drinking very heavily at a bar. He there are so many stories about him that are just completely batshit insane that if one, if there weren't so many of them and they weren't pretty well substantiated, and two, if I didn't know where his story leads, I would almost have a hard time believing. Like, there's a uh an example, so kind of like a good example of his character and who he is is so if if you take the kind of Milton Erickson sort of nascent version of neurolinguistic programming, what Richard Bandler and John Grinder really did is they said, okay, he's talking about doing these things over the course of years, let's up the timetable, and let's do these things within a course of weeks or a course of even minutes sometimes. And because of that, he would just he would do wild shit. Like there was a time he had a student who I believe was wanted to quit smoking, and Richard Bandler asked him, Well, what would make you stop? Like, what would get you to actually stop? And he was like, Well, I can't imagine anything other than my life being directly in danger. At which point Richard Bandler pulled out a loaded gun and put it to his head and said, Are you gonna stop smoking? And the guy, even in that moment, he's like, Well, I don't really believe that you're gonna pull this trigger in front of a classroom full of people, so like I don't really believe my life is in danger. And Richard Bandler looks at him and goes and is like, I you have no idea how crazy I am, and I absolutely will pull this trigger. I don't even have to kill you, I can just wound you first, and ends up creeping the guy out to the point where the guy backs off, and not sure if he quits smoking or not, but I mean these are the sort of like therapy methods that Richard Bandler was known for using. And before he ever meets Nancy Salzman, he's actually like involved in a murder, and this murder itself is so strange. Like, so the police get called to this house where they're told a woman is dead. Her name is Corrine Christensen, and she is the girlfriend of Richard Bandler's cocaine dealer. She is the only person in the house at the time, and she is one of his students, by the way, as well. She's she's also one of Bandler's students. And on the table is a yellow piece of paper where in big letters in red pen is written, don't kill us all, for some reason. And a gun laying on the table and her with a bullet in her head. And police immediately suspect that it was one of the two men she was with, either Richard Vandler or the cocaine dealer, and they go to talk to them, and the two of them both blame each other, essentially, or blame her and say that she killed herself, depending on the specific moment in the specific story. Things start to look even worse when at the nearby Capitol appear, a weighted bundle is found that contains a bunch of Bandler's bloody clothes that are soaked in lemon soap. And, you know, lemon soap is one thing you can use to try to get rid of any sort of DNA evidence. And Bandler goes to trial for this. And in Richard Bandler, he he gets off. The jury manages to incredibly find him innocent, and this does nothing at all to curb his insane behavior. If anything, it kind of just validates it and allows him to ramp it up. Like he was known for joking about it in his lectures, where I don't he would just he would say weird stuff like that uh ghosts followed him around, but they're more scared of him than he is of them. Or he claimed that he didn't remember what happened that night because he used neurolinguistic programming to give himself amnesia, so maybe he killed her and maybe he didn't. He would regularly start lectures with a joke about how neurolinguistic programming works, and the only time it didn't work, his only client who wasn't his success. uh killed themselves in front of him. I mean this guy is this guy is like a textbook psychopath. Like he is a nutcase. And I mean he would tell people he he told more than one person at different points that if they didn't change their behavior he could dial a phone number and have them killed. He claimed that he could change people's heart rates or stop their heart through speech. He claimed he could create Manchurian candidates or turn a young girl into a professional sniper within minutes. And that last claim it's almost certainly a cocaine fueled exaggeration to some degree, but it does have a little bit of a basis in truth because he did do work for the military where he pretty drastically increased the accuracy of shooters in clinical tests. And so after all of this is when Nancy becomes his student after his murder trial in the period where he's making the sort of claims I'm describing. And Nancy she grew up in New Jersey. Her father was a dentist her mother was a homemaker and she was a registered nurse before really getting into this whole Albany psychology scene. And she's doing a lot of like weird work for the state a lot of it is classified. There is some of it that we know one really odd one is at one point she was working in a nuclear facility using neurolinguistic programming tactics in order to make the people working with nuclear energy less stressed out and more safety oriented. She was definitely doing stuff in prisons, although what that is is not entirely clear. I know I mentioned last week I have this theory that this is where she met Keith sometime in the late 80s. And to be clear Nancy Salzman herself is very all over the place as far as establishing when they met. But she has definitely said in interviews that Keith was trying to get her attention for 10 years before that, which definitely implies at the very least an awareness of him and I don't want to spoil it right now but the next episode is going to be on Pamela Kaffritz and the Kaffritz family and I do believe I have found if not a smoking gun that they knew each other 10 years early earlier than they claimed something damn close to that. And it's interesting to me too hearing Nancy kind of talk about her time at Nexium because she I think is largely full of shit and I feel like it's pretty obvious when you listen to her because she's too willing to talk she is in the HBO documentary The Vow a lot she has been in different podcasts talking about her time at Nexium and she just first of all I think you know I might have mentioned it a little bit last week in the Keith episode but she claims that Keith tricked her and basically had her in his thrall and I don't buy this at all because this woman is very highly trained in techniques that can mess with people's sense of reality or subvert their will and Keith has none of that training. She also has a daughter Lauren and Lauren does not give interviews like her mom does. I find Lauren to be a very f fascinating character and I wish that there was more there to kind of grab onto with her because she grew up while her mom was active in this entire Albany psychology scene. And so she was around these people from a very young age and I definitely would be very interested in what that does to a person and I wish that she spoke about it. Certainly was she spoke about it frankly but I would even take you know her lying about it to at least try to parse kind of what the truth is because I suspect that if Nancy taught herself this or had it taught to her by others that Lauren like grew up in this she knows nothing different and appears to be based on her actions what I would say is a very cold operator. And honestly I think that she knows to just kind of keep her mouth shut is probably probably speaks to that she did supposedly have a sexual relationship with Keith. Lauren also ran DOS the Dominus obsequious aurorum the the uh women's group that would eventually brand several women and she was the sort of ground level person and administrator that made all of this happen. Nancy will claim that she had no idea that Lauren and Keith were ever sleeping together. She will claim that she never had any idea about DOS and frankly all of that is just completely absurd because they were all living in very close proximity to each other. I do believe Nancy is no moron and it really helps her kind of avoid any sense of culpability to frame things that way. It also implicitly kind of pushes the idea that Keith is this master manipulator who tricked her that he was even sleeping with her own daughter and she had no idea. If I had to guess I would be more inclined to think that the sexual relationship between Keith and Lauren is lies somewhere between the entire inner circle of the group just having a very incestuous very questionable set of boundaries and possibly that Nancy knowingly kind of served her daughter up to Keith as a way of maintaining control and manipulating him. Because another aspect about Nancy too is like I think she did that a lot. I think she did that with one thing I have struggled to figure out is what I see of Keith as a person as far as his sort of his his total lack of charisma, his gumpiness all of that and the fact that there is footage of a lot of women like fawning over him and pretty established that he did have a lot of women he was having a sexual relationship with and you know I think part of it is being at the head of a powerful organization or appearing to be at the head of a powerful organization you know is attractive and can bring you some of that energy but I also think an understated aspect of this is the fact that Nancy was really instrumental in how people saw Keith and she went a long way towards creating this environment. You know Keith really very rarely came out ever and spoke without being introduced by Nancy ahead of time and Nancy would talk him up. She was always comfortable playing the number two to him getting everybody kind of psychologically primed and then bringing him out while everybody is in a state of mind that is going to be the most charitable to him possible. She would definitely do this thing where like somebody new would enter the organization and she would be like oh wow well like if you think you could learn a lot from me you really could learn a lot from Keith and you know Keith is the guy who started all of this and then you know make you wait weeks to ever actually meet him to kind of build up anticipation. So to me the idea that maybe she possibly consciously surfed her daughter up doesn't strike me as entirely crazy because I do believe there's fairly substantial evidence that she was doing that with women that weren't her daughter. Because the thing is too like I Nancy also was the person in charge of like all of the exploration of meanings. There, you know, things that were similar to like Scientology audits where people would actually talk about what was going on in their lives and confess things and get very emotional and deep. So this was the woman holding all of the blackmail too and she would have been doing explorations of meanings with Keith. She would have been doing them with Lauren so like I mean just for a million reasons like yeah I really I don't I don't believe her when she says that and I think her role as being the person who had most of the blackmail or gathered most of the blackmail is very important because there were a lot of powerful people in this group there were a lot of powerful people taking the executive success programs and doing these explorations of meanings and I do think one thing this group functioned as was as a way to gather blackmail. You know the same way Scientology does it the same way the Catholic Church has done it with confessions. You know this is an old trick. And her daughter Lauren was definitely directly involved with a lot of the uh deepest darkest aspects of Nexium. In fact if you were going to kind of rank the darkest kind of rungs of this thing I think at the most shadowy strange end you have the Rainbow Cultural gardens which we will be getting into later she to my knowledge was not terribly involved in that but basically everything a rung above that was not only was she involved in it but she was like in charge of it. There was a girl named Daniela who was a Mexican immigrant and we will get more into her story when we head back to the Mexican side of things because I do think her family the Padilla family and their relationship with the Salinas's it is Salinas by the way I had somebody point that out to me after the prologue I was I was calling them the Salinas family and I guess it is pronounced the Salinas family but there's I think a bigger story going on there but for the sake of right now when we're talking about the Salzmans the thing that you need to know is there was a girl named Daniela Padilla and she spent about two years trapped in a room in a house and Lauren was basically her jailer. Because the door wasn't actually locked I think there was a lot of reasons that she couldn't leave that we will get into later on in another episode but technically she was just in a room with the windows blocked and an unlocked door and Lauren was the person giving her a lot of her meals keeping an eye on her writing updates as far as her and her behavior making her just do this constant almost compulsive writing where she was just day in and day out writing apologies for like her actions which you know started out supposedly with her flirting with another man that was not Keith but then kind of spiraled out into a million other things where you know once she's in captivity all of these little things that Lauren sees or points out become new infractions that she then needs to apologize and write letters for and Laura was involved in that Lauren was really if I had to pinpoint one person as the orchestrator of DOS she would probably be the one she has I don't know I debate this some people will say they can see her initials LS in the branding I think KR for Keith Rainier and AM for Alison Mack are very clear. The LS one wouldn't surprise me but I don't necessarily see it a hundred percent to a way where I feel comfortable saying that but I don't think that that speaks to her culpability because like I said I really think the Salzmans were smart enough to understand that they needed to kind of stay in the background but she was the person who like would pull a lot of the women into this program and she would do it in ways that I think speak to her being a very high level manipulator. There's a story in Sarah Edmondson's book Scarred about her and Lauren where Lauren basically says there's this new group for women's empowerment and I would like you to be in it but it's top secret and I need collateral before I can tell you anything about it. And Sarah Edmondson's excited she's like awed into this at this point and she wants to be a part of it. So she says okay what collateral and Lauren says I want you to videotape yourself saying the worst thing that you've ever done and then give it to me and Sarah Edmondson supposedly does this and when Lauren gets it Lauren goes back to her and she says it's not good enough. You need something better and Sarah Edmondson according to her story says I don't have anything better and she goes okay then make something up and so Sarah then makes something up and after a little while Lauren comes back and Lauren goes okay so we've got this group DOS and I want you to be a part of it and it's a women's only sorority and Sarah Edmondson goes okay cool and she goes but I need more collateral I want you to send me a picture and it's just going to be for for me just so we know we're all bonded. We're all tied together I want you to send a me a picture of you naked and Sarah sends her a this picture and then I know in Sarah Edmondson's case Sarah claims to have never slept with Keith I don't have any reason to believe that she did and in this case I believe the naked picture then turns into her saying well I need more collateral and Sarah Edmonds is it it basically like it and if Sarah were to question any of this then she would be breaking the rules and Lauren would be like well okay then I guess I'm going to have to release your collateral and so then she has Sarah start telling her secrets about people close to her that she would release if they were to ever be betrayed. So you can kind of imagine like how this stuff goes from one tier to another with kind of darker and darker collateral to the point where when you're now being held down and branded it's really not much of a choice anymore. I know there were other women who got to the point where they sent the naked picture and then Lauren would be like what I want you to do next is I want you to seduce Keith and then so now they would be forced to sleep with Keith Rainier. And if they were to not do it then the naked pictures and the secrets and all of that would be released. Uh and this is just yeah it's like high level manipulator shit. I mean it's it's creepy and it's cold and it's one of the main things that leads me to believe that Nancy and Lauren really were largely in charge of most of this area is frankly I don't see Heath doing anything that deep or that clever but they did and to be clear like I mean there was a lot of coercion with the DOS branding. In a lot of cases there was this doctor named Danielle Roberts who did the branding as other women would hold down the woman being branded I think there's too high of a focus on the DOS thing in specific but it it is really ugly and I think it is an effective way of drawing your attention from all of the maybe less salacious maybe more boring but more criminal stuff going on. The last thing I would say too is so Nancy's house gets raided and they find several hundred thousand dollars in a shoebox she seems to know she was going to get raided before she does and she either hides or destroys a lot of the collateral that she has. And at this point Keith takes off to Mexico and Lauren is one of the women that is with him when he ends up getting arrested in Mexico. Which is interesting because that will also be something we'll have to cover later in our Mexico episode but I do really believe that it was more of a planned handoff than it was a typical arrest and so the people that were with him when it happened I think hold some sort of special interest for me. And then one thing I kind of feel like as we go on and as we look at all of these different people is that you can really see who had the power based on who got in trouble and how much they got in trouble. So you if you have Keith at the bottom is kind of the designated Patsy with no larger structure there to save him no important family or a real collateral of his own because Nancy was keeping track of all of that with his name on nothing. I don't know if that's something I've really mentioned up to this point, but Keith's name was basically on nothing to do with Nexium and they play that as the idea that he was basically doing like a like a mob boss and making sure that he couldn't be held to blame for a lot of the stuff going on. I think the proof is in the pudding with that and obviously the fact that he got 120 years in prison which is exponentially more than anybody else got tells a different story. The Salzmans and Alice and Mac would be in the next group of people I think as far as people who had a little bit of power but not enough to totally get out of the blast radius when this thing blew up at least not totally cleanly Lauren actually does. Lauren gets five years probation so that that's it she spends no time in prison or anything. She's also the first person to flip I don't know if that was a plan between her and her mom if that happened organically or if that was her understanding the situation she was in having grown up around a bunch of psychopaths and people without any loyalty and knowing damn well when it was time to cut somebody loose but she she was the first person to flip. She testified against Keith After that, several other people followed. Nancy got 42 months. She spent 19 of those in prison and the rest on house arrest. And she is back counseling people right now. She is, like I said, kind of trying to do a rehabilitation tour. Her line is that there was executive success programs, and then there was Nexium, and there was DOS, and these three things are separate. She really only ran executive success programs, which was a legitimate business that should have never been associated with the other two, and that she literally had no idea DOS existed. And if you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you. But I will say she they are caught in this kind of civil litigation purgatory, and that is the one other aspect to this that I think kind of shows that on a power scale there they also rank pretty low, is that they have been the subject of a lot of lawsuits, and it's kind of to the point where it's like even if she's working again, she is forever going to be having to give a lot of the money she makes to fight civil suits against her and to pay off litigants who have won. But yeah, that's that's their story. I am excited for the Kaffritz family next week. I will let you know, kind of at this point, we're gonna do the Kafritz family, we're gonna do the Bromfmans, we're gonna do Mark Vicente, and we're going to do the Salinas family in Mexico. And I hope it's been entertaining so far. I hope you've enjoyed it, but I will let you know we are hitting the gas hard going forward, and uh the rest of these episodes I have planned are oh, we're also doing the Oxenbergs too. Uh I can't believe I forgot about them. Yeah, the Oxenbergs. Uh Yugoslavian royalty, as I've mentioned before. But each of these episodes going forward, now that we kind of have the groundwork laid out, is just going to get more and more increasingly insane, I think. But with receipts. So that should be fun. Thank you. Uh I know I'm thinking about setting up a Patreon pretty soon to try to hopefully, you know, this has been a lot of work and I've enjoyed doing it, but I do have a full-time job, and if I can manage to get any of this supported at all, even if it was just a little bit, that'd be incredible to me. Uh, I'm still working on that. I'm hoping to, you know, get figure out something to give people that might be willing to donate to that. So keep an eye out on that. That'll probably really be something that I will get deeper into once this Nexium series is finished. And my sources for this week were Don't Call It a Cult by Sarah Berman, Scarred by Sarah Edmondson, the documentary, The Vow, the podcast, Mind Games, the Program by Tony Natalie. And I think that's it. All right, see you guys next week.