Marc Elliot | How Media Influences and Shapes Truth

Srini Rao: Marc, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join

Marc Elliott: us. That's good. Serena, thank you so much for having me. It is a pleasure to finally meet you. Yeah,

Srini Rao: likewise. It is my pleasure to have you here. I found out about you because you wrote me. And as I was mentioning to you before here, we did an entire series on cults when sort of the NXIVM narrative was just dominant in the news.

But you have another side of this story, which I was really interested in hearing about. But before we get into all of that, I want to start by asking you what social group were you a part of in high school? And what impact did that end up having on your life and the choices you've made?

Marc Elliott: God, in high school, I was one of those people that tried to have a bunch of different friends groups.

But I think I, I always wanted to be in the cool group. I think a lot of us wanted to be in the cool group, but I struggled to be that cool. But I was also really academic. And obviously living with as I'm sure you saw I lived with Tourette's for 20 years and in high school, my Tourette's was very severe.

And with that. I did I was just such a people pleaser because I was trying to get everyone to accept me because the Tourette's and I didn't want to make people feel uncomfortable. So I did my best to try to be in different groups. So that's my answer to that question.

How would, what was the second part of it? How did that affect your life? Obviously, if you for my interview, so you know that every question leads to more questions. I think. What in some ways it actually was, it wasn't a negative thing because I think I was so concerned as so many of us are in high school that you're just trying to be light and I didn't really have an opportunity to really own myself and just know wait a minute, who are who does Mark want to be and then figure that out and then from there then try to find groups of people that it's just so funny.

I wasn't, that question was like from left field. So I haven't thought about my high school friends groups. Just to be very clear, I had dear friends and I'm still very close with some of them to this day, I actually just saw a dear friend this morning with his kids. But I think in high school, it was an experience where I was trying to be friends with everyone.

And how that affected me later in life is that you realize that not everyone is going to like you and that's a hard lesson to learn. And it's not something that we're really taught. In, at least in the main school, in the main school public, the public school system.

Because when you start trying to, when particularly in the case in my life as I got older, when you want to make a stand for something, if you want to stand for a principal, you want to do something. That's unconventional. People are not going to like you and you are not going to be friends with everyone.

And so I think that I have struggled with that my whole life. Yeah. Give us an idea of what Tourette's is actually because I had a really good friend who was an absolutely brilliant guy, MIT engineer. I met him right out of undergrad, but I remember I didn't know what it was for the longest time.

Srini Rao: I was like, there's a neat guy tweets a lot. I'm like, what's up with these whistles? The thing that really struck me is after a certain point, he stopped being self conscious about it. But I can only imagine particularly as a young kid, what that does to your sense of self esteem. And especially when it's not something you can control, like talking about sort of the experience of being diagnosed for people who don't know much about it the neurological aspects of it, can you give us just an

Marc Elliott: overview?

Absolutely. With Tourette's, the way that I always talk about Tourette's is that people, when you're, when I was diagnosed with it I was told this is a neurological, genetic, incurable disorder that has no no cure. And really what it is just these very uncomfortable feelings inside of my body.

The way it's, I find it the closest analogy is to that of having an itch on the inside of your skin. It doesn't feel like an itch, it's not the same type of sensation, but there's this involuntary feeling that just comes. And the only way as a child that you know how then to get rid of that feeling is to then tick, which is in a sense, scratching that itch.

Does that make sense? Yeah, it does.

Srini Rao: Because like I know that in pop culture, particularly in like funny movies and stuff, they portray it as this uncontrollable impulse to shout and yell profane things. I remember my friend and I used to joke about this. He's dude, he's you know how awesome it would be to go to Tourette's convention?

He's you could swear

Marc Elliott: all you want and no one would say anything to you. Yeah, the first time I went to a Tourette's convention was, it was actually quite eye opening because growing up with Tourette's, you don't know a lot of people with it. And then you go to a convention. Funny enough, I went, when I went to my first one, I thought I was going to be seeing all these people cussing.

And really I was one of the few people. And I was like, wait a minute doesn't everyone have Tourette's here? Of course, only a subset of people with Tourette's curse. I just wanted to qualify that obviously there is this itch and scratch dynamic, but the difference for someone with Tourette's is that it's very difficult to not quote unquote scratch the itch.

It's like having 10 or 15, or in some cases it feels like 50 itches in one spot. And until you decide to do that you just feel just this immense discomfort. And of course, as a kid, I didn't have this type of self awareness as much about, Oh, there's an itch and then there's a scratch. It was just all one thing.

And there's this ticking going on because I just was so uncomfortable. How does that affect

Srini Rao: your ability to participate in something like a classroom and also just socially, because I can imagine it would be disruptive to the class

Marc Elliott: too. It's, oh, it's very difficult. And it's, for each person with Tourette's, it's a very different situation because people's tics are different.

Some people Have much more vocal tics, some people say words, some people say bad words, some are motor tics, some are jumping up and down it's this whole gamut and then of course the major, one of the major variables to that is the type of support system that the child has or the person with Tourette's.

And so many people don't have that kind of support. Tourette's is something that is just, it's very, it can be very disruptive. And so it's very hard for people to understand it. And rightfully it's hard to understand. It's very different types of behavior.

Particularly when you're dealing with a classroom of if you've got 25 kids in a class, that's hard enough in itself. Now, all of a sudden you have another kid who's barking or ticking or doing so. Luckily for me, I had an amazing family that really tried to instill what it means to become an advocate for myself.

And so as I got more confidence with the Tourette's, I started to make announcements. At the beginning of of my classes at the beginning of the year. And of course, before that my family and I, we met with the teachers. I tried to explain to them. And so literally every year at the beginning of every class, I would get up and go to the chalkboard and say, my name's Mark, I have Tourette's.

This is what's going on for me. And thank you for being understanding. And that's how I tried to control. That's how I tried to control the situation as much as I could. But it's, it was a nightmare in some of the classes imagine you're sitting there and it's 25 kids in the class and you have this feeling and the sensation just to take out the word boring or this sucks.

It's funny one time or a couple of times and then it just becomes a nightmare. So I did whatever I could to try to make it is comfortable for other people. And then obviously it's comfortable for me. And. Again, I'm very grateful that I just had a lot of support. When I met my friend the MIT engineer guy who, who had Tourette's, I remember the one thing that always struck me about that situation was he thought that Tourette's would make his dating life incredibly difficult.

Srini Rao: He was. Always self conscious about it and thought, yeah, this is you're going to be the undoing of my dating life. Granted, he's like the nicest guy in the world and absolutely fucking brilliant and funny as hell. And we he ended up becoming one of my best friends when we were younger and like everything turned out fine.

He's worked at a hedge fund, made millions, like he's awesome. But that always stayed with me that there was this sort of sense of, oh, this is really like this huge disadvantage for me. When it comes to dating and relationships and it definitely did a number on his self esteem from what I remember and yeah I think with friends and enough dating experiences It just got you got past it But for you, when it came to things like that, like your social life in high school And that's why I started with that question How did it affect that for you?

Were you know self conscious about it when it came to dating? You know when you're hanging out with friends like what was that experience like?

Marc Elliott: It was incredibly self conscious. I think the if you ask a lot of guys in middle school and high school that just, that, that time for all and also for women there's just so much pressure and judgments and people are just uncomfortable and we're all going through puberty.

So there's that going on. And then of course, on top of that, I have I'm ticking, barking like a dog, shaking my head, but for some, for whatever reason I didn't allow that to stop me from trying to pursue women and trying to date. And of course I had to find people who were open who recognized that that there was.

An experience of me that was completely separate from the Tourette's syndrome. But of course it created some pretty funny, uncomfortable situations many times when I was with girls, whether I was hooking up or I'm just hanging out with them, I would be ticking other girls names. I would tick things like sometimes I would tick like you're fat, even though she wasn't fat, because a lot of times my ticks were I was saying the riskiest thing that I could say.

That's uncomfortable. That is not, I don't know how to describe it. It sucked. But luckily I was, I did the best that I could to try to have a normal life, to experience things to, despite this hindrance that I had. And I found wonderful girls and out there that still we're willing to date.

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Srini Rao: You had mentioned that people have this two varying degrees. As I said, my friend was an MIT engineer. I was like, you don't seem dysfunctional to me. For God's sakes, you went to MIT and killed it. So how bad can this be? There are two things I wonder about. One is what are the degrees of severity and how do they disrupt people's lives?

And then What is it that accounts for the types of tics? Is there any explanation

Marc Elliott: for that? I don't think there's any specific exploration, explanation for that. And in fact the medical community in general really doesn't understand Tourette's. It's this huge spectrum of tics for people.

I'm sure people who. Just blink their eyes a lot. Do you know anyone like that? Like they just have this a nervous tick. And then there's do you take it to the extreme to the old school movie, Deuce Bigalow, Male Gigolo where a woman is barking and cursing and profanity.

So there's this huge range of people that tick in order to be classified as somebody with Tourette's syndrome. You need to be exhibiting both motor and vocal ticks for for very extreme cases. This completely breaks my heart. For some people, the only solution that they have is something called deep brain stimulation.

Have you ever heard of that? It's a brain surgery that they have used on many different types of things now. I think it's mostly used for Parkinson's disease, but they've started with Tourette's as well, where they crack open the skull. They will drill holes into somebody's brain, place two electric rods into their brain, and then connect it to a pacemaker in their heart.

And this is the last sort of, just their last hope of trying to figure out how to help their Tourette's. Now this is for extreme cases, but that's on one end of the spectrum. And then for, I would say probably the general for most people with Tourette's that it's pretty bad.

They look to try things like biofeedback, neuro biofeedback cognitive behavioral therapy. And then of course there's tons of options. Pharmaceutically but there's with that comes a lot of side effects as well. So it's a huge range of what people do and the treatments that people try to do to alleviate their tics.

Srini Rao: I think this might be an inaccurate memory, but if I remember correctly, like if my

,

friend and I got stoned or drunk, his Tourette's would actually subside a little bit. Which was funny. He's great, this is an excuse to go out and get shit face. Granted, we were in our 20s, so every weekend was an excuse to get shit face.

But in those most severe cases that you're talking about, what is the impact on their ability to just

Marc Elliott: live day to day? Oh, I think it's debilitating on all levels. For someone who has it that severe they are looking for anything. To bring any sense of relief, any sense of normalcy to their life just this past week somebody who saw the documentary that I'm sure we'll talk about in a little bit, but about once a documentary came out called my Tourette's, which we documented the work of how Nexium help people with Tourette's.

And they saw it and they sent me an email. I talked to him on the phone. This is someone who had. Deep brain stimulation, and it didn't work, Sreeni, it didn't work. So imagine you get electrodes put in your brain, it didn't work, and now you're, and he reached out just pleading and begging for help after seeing the movie.

I can't luckily my Tourette's was not that bad. I had issues and a lot of prejudice and hate and different things like that, but not to the point where I I needed to have brain surgery. Speaking

Srini Rao: of NXIVM as I mentioned to you, we did this entire series on cults when the NXIVM documentary came out.

And part of the reason I wanted to talk to you is you have a different side of the story. But let's start with what it is that prompted you to start looking for a solution. After you've been told this is something you're going to be living with your entire

Marc Elliott: life. Funny thing is the way that I was introduced to NXIVM wasn't even through what most people know as NXIVM.

It was called a company, the company was called Executive Success Programs, which was the courses on emotional intelligence which was one of the companies under NXIVM. Like most people don't understand that NXIVM is just a parent company like a Viacom but then under Viacom, there's all these different types of companies.

And ESP executive success programs for short. I was at the time I was an inspirational speaker all around the nation. I was speaking at high schools, middle schools, colleges, using my experience of living with Tourette's to convey just a really simple and basic message about, look, you don't know that much about other people.

And while I was on the circuit, I ended up finding, meeting another speaker who happened to actually be a coach in ESP at the time. And when you were just my whole life, I've always been someone who's wanted to work on myself. I've wanted to, I've wanted to grow. I never had done it. I never had like actually paid to go to a course to do one, but in my conversations with him, he really.

started to ask me questions about myself that no one had ever asked me and started to get me to think about things in a little bit different way. And it became clear that he was thinking that way and was just very introspective in a way that I hadn't experienced someone. It was because of these classes.

So I eventually went to go take them. And really the one of the other, one of the main reasons I took it was because he noticed that I had a lot of judging, I judge myself a lot. And he helped me understand that through different conversations that judging yourself is not a natural thing.

Like when you think about a child, like a baby doesn't come into this world judging themselves. That's something that you develop, obviously, as you get older through your indoctrination and society and all these things. And with the Tourette's, I had severe judgment and a lot of self punishment and self hate.

And I wanted to change that. And from my conversations, I believe it seemed like these classes could help me do that. So that's really why I went, it wasn't anything to do with Tourette's syndrome. I was living with a neurological disorder called Tourette's. It wasn't. Oh, hey, let's go take a class and see it on, on emotions and that's going to help me beat Tourette's.

It just wasn't even on my mind in, in, in any way. So how in the world does that turn

Srini Rao: into curing Tourette's?

Marc Elliott: Yeah. How do you go from there? I want to just make, be very clear too is that I was not sure NXIVM did not cure me of Tourette's. We did not cure other people with Tourette's.

It's not it's not something that we have ever said publicly. Even though people who are very against NXIVM have made these claims what the tools in ESP did is that Keith Ranieri, who is the creator of NXIVM and then the core the courses executive success programs is that he created a methodology and that methodology was called rational inquiry.

And it was a series of. Philosophical discussions and questions to help somebody learn about themselves. And as I was going through those explorations having conversations about honesty, about having conversations about victimhood, about having conversations about responsibility, as I just started to just think and just learn about myself in a way that I hadn't before.

It started to open up a lot of questions and thoughts about.

Yeah, it just started to open up things in general. I don't know how else to say it than that. And in that process. I had started to question things so much. And also one of the big parts of the first, it's a 16 day course, but in the first five days, I started to learn a lot about the nature of fear and how fear controls a lot of how our decision making is run.

And I also had, was living with a very severe case of OCD at the time. And so one of the things that started to really change. It's after I took the course I had these really funny things with OCD where I didn't like anyone to touch my face. Do you know anyone with severe OCD? Not severe,

Srini Rao: but no, actually I don't think of it.

Marc Elliott: God, or do you know of have you heard of like people have these like idiosyncrasies where they they want things in a certain way or touching and, or number counting. And after that first course, I was on a beach and I ended up taking the sand on the beach and I realized that if I keep living with these rules, which are really rooted based out of fear that somehow if I touch my face, I'm not okay.

I'm going to be in a prison, like a type of mental prison for the rest of my life. And so I took the sand off the beach and I started rubbing it all over my face, like a scene out of survivor or what's the movie with Tom Hanks passed away. Yeah. It was a scene like that.

And that funny enough, I didn't know that was me in a sense starting to overcome my Tourette's, but it was the beginning of me completely. Loosening this foundation and this fear that I was living with all the time.

Srini Rao: So obviously the press around NXIVM has been largely negative. And for the most part, all I know is the darker side of the story.

You have a very positive side of the story and we'll bring back a few clips from my conversation with Sarah. I don't doubt that there were positive outcomes, but what the hell happened? How did it go so off the rails to get to? This guy ending up in prison.

Marc Elliott: There's it's an incredible question, Sreeni.

And I one in a very simple thing is that it was clear that this was for next thing was around for 20 years, what people don't get is that 17, 000 people, over 17, 000 people took these courses from around the world that were billionaires, entrepreneurs. Doctors, attorneys, all the way down to handymen to babysitters, moms, dads different religions, different ethnicities, all walks of life for 20 years.

The reason that it was able to have such far reaching it was able to reach to so many aspects of different types of people and around the world is because when people took it. They loved it. They were having incredible realizations and shifts in their life and relationships and their business just the relationship with themselves.

So I think that's the first thing that people should know is that this is something that people loved, absolutely loved. And then unfortunately at the time we didn't know about it because it was obviously a secret society. But there was a secret society that was created that was not a part of NXIVM.

It wasn't a company under it was a secret society that that these women had created with Keith. And of course whatever one because of the nature of how it was and I encourage any listener to go listen to the dossier project, it's actually a group of women who were in DOS who were actually still very positive.

And have a very different experience than what people like Sarah Edmondson are saying about it now. And so when you hear that DOS was something that clearly was different. It was not for everyone. And it was on the, I guess you would say the cutting edge of self empowerment for women.

And because of the nature of it, it could be completely, it can be. It could be taken completely out of context. And it's something that's very easily turned into something very salacious. And so it was just low hanging fruit for people to attack a NXIVM and somehow take something that wasn't even a part of NXIVM.

And then if label something, as soon as you label something as sex cult, now, all of a sudden people think what a group of a hundred. women were doing in their private life, which had nothing to do with sex. You call that a sex cult and then you say NXIVM is a sex cult. It's very difficult to undo that narrative.

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Yeah. Speaking of that narrative, let me bring back a clip from Sarah and my conversation with her. Take a listen.

Marc Elliott: When does something go from a devotion to dysfunction and there could be a bunch of people who are following you and think you're awesome. Doesn't make you a cult leader. A, because you're not lying, B, you're not making them dependent on you, C, they can leave at any time, D, they can ask you questions, E, you're accountable to people.

Cults don't have any of that. There are good intentioned, intentioned coaches, people, leaders, all that stuff. Leadership can exist without. Deception without culty behavior. But I guess I would encourage people to a research properly if there's any allegations against a leader or a coach or a group or an organization where there's smoke, there is fire is one thing.

And also how that organization or coach or whatever, let's just say coach for the purpose of the conversation, how that coach deals with those allegations. Do they look into it or do they say that person's just crazy? What do you make of how do you're presenting a different side of this story, so how does somebody like Sarah's story become the predominant narrative if there is another side to this story?

Srini Rao: Like why is that the dominant narrative about Keith

Marc Elliott: Ranieri? Sure. I think there's a couple basic things to that. First off Sarah's

,

story is a very salacious story. And it's also she's claiming to be a victim when she came out with her story, it was the height of the me too movement, so there's a certain energy that was going on in the country about just any time any time a woman is claiming abuse or that she was abused it was just a very. hypersensitive time that, of course, there can be no questioning around that and that clearly there must be an issue.

Now, I just want to make, be very clear, I don't support sexual assault or abuse of women in any way. And I never have and I never will. But what I do believe in is due process. And I believe in that if we want to be in a civilized, in a more ethical society, it's important to question people.

So I think that unfortunately, that's not a very popular position to take some time. Now, with the case of Sarah here she did something in her private life where she Choose to do something that She got a brand. And for whatever reason she then decided to change her experience about what had happened. And she then claimed that she was a victim of something and then found herself on the front page of the New York Times pulling down her pants, showing a brand.

That's going to get you international attention. Now, without really talking about Sarah's experience, I'll just say two things that if. For someone that wants to think about this critically, Sarah Edmondson has no charge. There are no criminal charges of that, that originate from Sarah, am I saying that correctly?

Yeah. Like Sarah, I guess

you would say. Yeah. There are no, like Sarah Edmondson is not the victim of any crime. In the trial, yet Sarah Edmondson is somehow the face of being a victim of NXIVM, even though no crime happened to her. So that's one thing I think for people to think about. And the other thing is that Sarah's story is inconsistent.

Where on the front page of the New York Times, she was told that she was getting a brand, excuse me she said that she was told that she was going to get a tattoo. Where if you look in the court if you were actually at the trial and you look at the transcripts, it's very clear that Lauren Salzman who enrolled her told her she was going to get a brand.

So there's just many things about her story that are inconsistent. And that's why those are things that I look for when I'm evaluating what happened and the evidence. But I think the most important thing is we live in a time where it's super fashionable. And easy to be a victim.

And that's not, I'm not judging someone for that. I'm just saying it's, and I know that firsthand. I lived with this medical condition where I was a victim my whole life and I get how easy it is to want to blame and not take responsibility for your life. But I just think it's important for people to realize Sarah Edmondson is somehow the voice of NXIVM yet nothing.

Nothing bad happened to her. The only thing that she's claiming is she was, she somehow regrets her decision of choices she made.

Srini Rao: What about all the other women? You're talking about due process here. Obviously I don't imagine anybody goes to a trial without any semblance of due

Marc Elliott: process. Yeah, so I think there's just a couple things to zoom out at one is that what I have been fighting for the last couple of years is the injustices of due process that took place within the trial.

So I think that's I'm not out there what I shared with you about Sarah is what I say about Sarah I'm not trying to talk about all the details that she's claiming or not claiming because I just wasn't there, I'm just talking, so there's that, but with respect to the trial ones after it took place and I looked at the evidence and I looked at the transcripts, you start to see that there was many issues in which the prosecution was trying to It was a trial of prejudice and hate like one very specific example is they decided to bring in evidence of abortion history of some of the people that Keith Ranieri was in a relationship that he was in a relationship with.

Now whether or not that's even true or not true, I have no idea, but that has nothing to do with the fact of any of the crimes that he was even charged with. You're only doing that to completely prejudice the jury and bring up a lot of emotions. The other thing that I've been fighting for the last couple years is with a group of friends is that in right before the trial, 50 days before the trial, after a two year investigation from the EDNY and the FBI they accidentally found child pornography on an external hard drive.

In one of the apartments that Keith had frequented, it wasn't even his home. So it wasn't on a camera, it wasn't on a media card, it wasn't on a computer. They found a random external hard drive and that child pornography was actually in the words of the lead prosecutor, Moira Kempensa, it was the heart of the racketeering charges.

And it completely changed the course of the rest of the trial because all the co defendants pled guilty right after the child pornography was found, the judge was unwilling to sever the case with the co defendants who Keith Renier is already a hated person and now they're going to have to go to trial with someone with possession of child pornography and sexual exploitation of a minor.

So that was right before the trial. And before the child pornography, it was a case of entirely. Consenting adults, and this changed it now to now minors are involved. And over the last three years, we've been able to find incredible digital forensic experts. And now six have come out, three former FBI showing that the digital evidence of child pornography was tampered with while in the possession of the FBI.

So You know, this is something that should horrify anyone just the fact that there's this type of evidence out there. But this is what I had been, I just want to make clear this is really what I've been fighting for with respect to due process. It sounds to me like

Srini Rao: this is more than just a story about a sex cult, but it's a story about how we consume and process information in the modern

Marc Elliott: age.

I think even just with you saying sex cult, like that's a perfect example. Yeah. Just just to break that down a little bit when you said about, look, there's all these other women. So again, just to to help for the listener to, to think about this in their mind, you have 17, 000 people who've taken a course, 17, 000 people.

Doss had about a hundred women again, that was not a company under NXIVM. It was a secret society. Nobody knew about it. In the trial itself and correct, I might be wrong. I might be off by one, but out of 17, 000 people, Sreeni, there are three current women claiming to be victims of a crime.

And yet somehow NXIVM is now a sex trafficking organization. In people's minds. The other thing that most people don't realize is that Keith Ranieri was charged with sex trafficking, forced labor. People think of this as a sex cold, all this stuff. Are you aware that there's not a single charge of him having sex with anyone in the trial?

There's not a single charge of rape. There's not a single charge of assault and battery. There's not a charge of any violence. There's not even, there's not even evidence that he spit on someone. There's not a single charge of weapons. There's not a single charge of drugs. And yet somehow Keith Raniere was charged to 120 years in prison with no violence, no weapons, and no drugs.

Whether whether he's guilty or innocent, whether he's a boy a good guy or a bad guy, these are things that should be alarming to people that should at the very least. What I hope is raised doubt in people's mind about, wait a minute what is really going on here?

And more importantly is whether he's whether you like him or not guilty or innocent, really what the thrust of what we've been trying to do these last three years is that the government, particularly agents in the FBI, prosecutors, these people should not be committing crimes to convict people.

No one should be okay with that. It should be there's no. There's no no matter what somebody thinks Keith Raniere did the government committing crimes is the worst kind of crimes of them all. But unfortunately, because of the narrative, because of the prejudice, most people don't want to talk about this.

And unfortunately, the media has been almost completely silenced on the evidence.

Srini Rao: One thing that I wonder about all this, obviously 17, 000 people have been through these programs And this is the reason I was more interested in that series than specifically talking about NXIVM was because I saw this sort of pattern in Personal development workshops and personal development companies where it starts out with one workshop and before you know it like landmark, the landmark forum is a perfect example of this people would always ask me about the landmark forum and you'd be shocked how many of my guests were landmark people and every time somebody asked me, I'm like, go do the first two courses and get the fuck out of there.

Don't go anywhere near that place. Because the information is life changing and the organization is a shit show. Yeah. And I saw it with my own eyes that there were these people who would go there and they would just become absolute landmark junkies. And it was all they would talk about, it was all they would think about, and it just got to the point where it was annoying, like you didn't want to be around them.

And I'm saying this as somebody who actually found the information to be really valuable, but the way that they exploit people. To be very manipulative. And I want to bring back a clip from Rick Allen Ross who you jokingly called your hero which I think will make a nice jump off point for this next part of our conversation.

Take a listen. The

Marc Elliott: seminar selling company doesn't want you to wake up and they're doing everything possible to make you feel that if

Srini Rao: things aren't working out,

Marc Elliott: it's your problem, there's never anything wrong with their seminar training. It's always, you aren't really absorbing the training properly, you're uncoachable.

It's your problem. Same thing with multi

Srini Rao: level marketing companies. If you're not making money, it's because you're a loser. It's not because their business plan

is flawed. For example, market

Marc Elliott: saturation. They have too many distributors in a given area, which they never consider because they're just trying to get, make as much money as they can from everybody.

But the bottom line is they always blame you. They make you feel that you are responsible for whatever shortcomings

Srini Rao: there are. With that in mind what is going on here where we get this sort of vicious cycle where people go to these things? You mentioned that people's lives have changed and I saw it too.

There were people who came out of Landmark and their lives change. Then there are people who just go back to Landmark over and over again and they don't do

Marc Elliott: anything. I think. I'm not sure what Rick Ross is saying in this. I hear what he's saying, but he's he's just giving very general sweeping, these are just, yeah, these are just sort of vast generalizations, negative generalizations about an organization.

I think the problem is that anyone can be a critic like that. Anyone can just say anything like that. And maybe there's, maybe that happens in companies. I'm sure it does. So what? I think part of the issue is, so I think, yeah, so what, in the sense of if somebody is enjoying something in their life and they like it, why is that a problem?

For when you use the word these people are being exploited. If they're taking a course and they're deriving benefit out of it, whether they're seeing that manifest in better business results. That's up to them. But if it brings them joy for some people becoming a nun brings them joy.

I don't see the same value out of that, but I don't have to make vast generalizations about how they're not getting anything out of life. The reality is people have different desires and different wants. What I can tell you specifically about Nexium is that from what Rick Ross is saying is just categorically untrue.

I lived with one of the most severe cases of Tourette's and now I don't have Tourette's. So I'm not sure what he's talking about, that people don't get good results. We had anonymous surveys in Nexium where and I'm going to be a little off on this, but again, this is an anonymous survey that people do and that they take at the end of the course.

Thanks. It was like 95 percent of people that took the first five day said it was incredible. So you know, people, the reason that people went and took the courses because they were paying for them, went to them, took time out of their life because it received a benefit. Whether it's Nexium, whether it's Landmark, whether it's somebody who's offering boot camps at a gym.

What's the problem if people enjoy it? Yeah I,

Srini Rao: look, I'm with you on that. I've done my fair share of these types of workshops and each one of them has had their own benefits. The thing that I wonder about is when we get into these situations where it starts to isolate them from other people in their lives, where You know, they, they do this because we were talking about my own experience with the seduction community.

And I remember for three years, I realized wait, my whole life is this thing. I don't have a life outside of this thing. And I've passed up on opportunities to go on trips with friends. I've done a lot of things that I missed out on a lot of experiences. But my, just to cut you off there is, I guess my question is, what's the problem with that though?

Marc Elliott: So what? So what if you, what if the fact that you, at that moment in your life, that's what you wanted to do? Yeah. Okay that's fair.

,

What about the situations where people spend money they can't afford to spend? Because I know that happens too.

Again, that is in terms of

the fundamental thing that I just feel is, I believe in people Making their own decisions in life and learning to fail. If I believe that there's a course that somehow telling people they have to do something in order to be okay, and they need to figure out how to pay for it, even if they don't have the money, that doesn't sound like that's a good thing.

Like I completely agree with you. That's not a good business model to have. There's not, I completely agree with that one. That's not what happened. I didn't see that in Nexium at all. But if someone has a business model like that, yeah, I agree with you. That's a crappy business model.

And for the person that's doing that at some point I believe that they're going to learn from their mistakes. They're going to learn there's going to be a certain point where they don't have money and then they're going to learn from that and be like, I can't keep doing this.

But I don't think we want to live in a society where we micromanage adults, the decisions of other adults. I think that's one of the biggest struggles that we have as a society is that people don't we don't learn how to grow up and how to take responsibility. And the way that you do that is through learning and failing and sometimes making not a great decision and learning from it.

But that's life, right? Absolutely. So

Srini Rao: as in our conversation, my sense is, correct me if I'm wrong, is that basically it's a group of outliers that have created the dominant narrative around NXIVM. And there's another side of the story, but that side of the story, as you mentioned to me has been impossible to get

Marc Elliott: coverage for.

Exactly. Again you have 17, 000 people. You have. Three, it was current students that were claiming being victims of a crime. You then have maybe about another 50 to 80 people who have claimed to be a victim. And there's a civil lawsuit, there's people suing Claire Boffman who has enormous pockets.

And so these people are now claiming to be a victim. But it was the narrative was just so strong and the exaggerations kept building on exaggeration. Where to the point that I've seen articles where people believe children were sex trafficked. That's not even a charge in the case, but just because of the nature of the salaciousness of it and how much I think anytime in society, no matter how much somebody we don't like someone, it's so dangerous when you make an individual or a group of people and you make them a monster.

I experienced that with the Tourette's people didn't understand what was going on and you just you think the worst. And it's, I understand it's a natural thing, but it starts to limit your ability to be more rational and critically think about, wait what's really going on here?

And just the last thing I'll say in that one of the reasons that you hadn't heard more stories of people becoming who had very positive experiences and different experiences is that the government made it a RICO case. So here they, they took a completely nonviolent, wonderful community of people and turned it into a RICO organization, which is like a mob family.

So anyone that was wanted to come and speak out had the fear of basically being indicted. Of course, that's not you can't understand that from the headlines. Yeah. This

Srini Rao: to me sounds more than anything. Like a story about our modern media environment and information and the way that it's consumed the way it spreads.

And so I have to ask you what role do you think tools like social media have played in the narrative that it's created? Because I think that to me is the bigger lesson here is like understanding the role that our modern media landscape plays in creating narratives. I know this from my experience of being on a reality TV show the girl that they matched me with was portrayed as a villain.

And I get people like, you're not fighting back, you're not defending yourself. And it's yeah, that's because I understand how the media works. And I'm the one who's going to be villainized if I fight back and I'll look like a jackass and I'm a public figure. I have to think about how I'm perceived.

Marc Elliott: Yeah. Yeah. There's so much that I could say to that. I think the simplest thing is social media is a wonderful thing. It's a wonderful tool. I think we just don't realize the power that we have in our at the fingertip at just the, at the click, we don't understand the power that we have over people's lives.

And I had mentioned, I heard the other podcast with Craig, I forgot his last name. I can't even remember off the top of my head, right? No, you have so many guests, I know but he he talked about he walks around with thinking about what if I'm wrong? And I don't think with nowadays with the leverage of how just from the click of my phone, I can completely, I have complete control over someone else's reputation.

That is an extraordinary amount of power to have over somebody's life. And we don't, I don't think we walk around. Realizing we have that kind of power. And so we just write something, we share a story. We we just want to get our feelings off our chest, whatever it might be. And just thinking that because I can say whatever I want to say.

Yes, that is true. The question is it a good thing just to say whatever you want to say? And with respect to this case, it was like wildfire of somebody hears that women were branded. Of course immediately that's going to catch like wildfire and people then believe it's true where here you have a case where no one was branded against their will.

That sounds like women were branded like cattle. Women chose to get a brand. It was a consensual thing. They used a cauterizing pen and it was like getting a tattoo. But that nuance is lost and of that's the pros and cons of social media. Yeah. What do you think the responsibility

Srini Rao: of people who produce media is when it comes to a story like this?

And what has been the impact on your relationships with people as a byproduct of being on the other side

Marc Elliott: of this story? I think people in the media should be more like investigative journalists. I think that one of the difficulties is that so much media is portraying itself as if they are arbiters of truth like that they're just telling the truth and not recognizing what they're sharing is subjective.

It's slanted, it's their opinion. It's filled with bias. It's filled with prejudice where if you really had someone that said, okay, wait a minute. When, if somebody if there's someone that's screaming help. Someone's screaming help imagine if yes, of course, you obviously want to immediately attend to the fact to make sure that they're okay.

But once they stop screaming, can we whether I'm a journalist, I'm a documentarian, whatever it is, say, okay, let's just take for a moment. Let's take out all the prejudice. Let's take out the emotion and let's just start looking at facts. And from there, let's start really trying to figure out what is the truth and more like the scientific method.

Unfortunately, that's not the process what happens even just there was another documentary that came out called seduced. It was on stars and I act and I actually a year ago, I filed a defamation lawsuit against them for how they betrayed me where they took. And they manipulated raw footage and spliced it with other footage to make it appear that I support sexual assault against women.

They basically compared me to an ISIS terrorist. And sadly just this past week, I lost the judge completely dismissed dismissed it. And in her motion, she wrote. Even if the documentary manipulated footage, that's not grounds for defamation. To me, that was breath, it was breathtaking.

So I think in general, media must become more like scientists. And we need to recognize it's we all have so much power over each other's lives. It's not do you just want to make it about clicks and about money and what will be the most salacious? Or do we want to really recognize that media has an incredible opportunity to bring out truth and actually to help a lot of people not necessarily destroy destroy their life.

Yeah. This is actually why I wanted to have this conversation because I think it's, Your story is less about NXIVM and it's more about the role that media plays in shaping truth and

culture.

Yeah, it's I think once the truth comes out about the injustice, I think people will look back at the NXIVM thing and go, wow, we really had it wrong. And why were we not willing to question more? It's again, because of the nature of... The Me Too movement and the fact that this was about abuse against women.

It's a very sensitive and delicate issue for people where it's even it just to question a woman's experience even me on this podcast, I'm afraid to talk about questioning Sarah because of what people the backlash, but it's important to question and it doesn't mean I'm against women.

It doesn't mean I'm against abuse or anything like that. It means Wait a minute, someone is accusing somebody of a crime. We need to question, we need to evaluate that. And look it's happening more and more throughout the last, throughout the decades, we've seen how many wrongful convictions there are, how many false allegations there are.

One that I, that's been seared into my mind from years ago was the Duke LaCrosse case. Do you remember that? And it's like Groundhog's Day. We forget that happens. And something I think a lot about, or have you seen Sreeni, have you seen like after somebody's wrongfully convicted or excuse me, there is someone who was wrongfully convicted, they're exonerated and they walk out of the courtroom stairs and the news is there and everyone's happy and cheerful, which we all should be.

It's a beautiful thing to see. We forget that person walking down those stairs 10 years ago or 20 years ago. They were the monster on the TV. That was the person that everyone was saying, this is a monster. And now 20 years later, we're all crying, watching our TV, and then we turn off the TV and then we go back to looking at the next monster.

I'm not saying there aren't people who do very bad things out there, but the thing is, why do we need to demonize people? Why don't we just. work together as adults as people who want to be better, who want to be more humanitarian and try to evaluate the truth. And then once you find the truth, we can hold people accountable.

But it's, I don't think the media understands. They're not playing that type of role right now.

Srini Rao: Two final questions for you. What has been the impact on your relationships with other people as a byproduct of being on this other side? You had mentioned, I think before we hit record, that Sarah at one point was a very good friend of yours.

Marc Elliott: Yeah, I've my relationships with I've had many, it's been a long five years since this all started. I've lost many dear friends of mine people who both were in the community and people who had never even taken the courses. I think it's hard for people to without diving deeper and looking at the evidence and knowing what I know about what has happened and transpired.

I think it's hard for them to understand why I'm fighting to expose the injustice and stand by my friends to help exonerate them. And also to to fight against the FBI, but I think for the people that, that really know me and were my closest just people that knew my heart, that knew who I am as much as they could at the core, even if they don't totally get why I'm doing what I'm doing, they still have stood by me.

And it's like the old cliche. It's once, once you're in that type of adversity, you really try, you really find out who your true friends are. So it's been painful and but I also, yeah, it's been painful, but that's part of, that's part of the journey.

I have one

Srini Rao: last question for you, which is how we finish all of our interviews. What do you think it is that makes somebody something unmistakable? I think

Marc Elliott: it's the I think I've said it before on here. I think it's somebody is someone's courage and strength to do, to stand for something even when it's not popular.

And whether that might be a stance out in public or it might be an unpopular thought in your head to to do something that's unconventional, that is scary, takes courage and it takes strength. And that's something that unfortunately it was one of the things we taught in the courses about how to develop that.

And it's not something a lot in life we teach in schools. We can teach a lot of subjects, but we don't teach people how to find courage to make the unpopular decision sometimes. And I think that would help people a lot. I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us to share your story, your wisdom your insights and really get us to think this was such a fascinating conversation and I'm really glad you reached out where can people find out more about you your work and everything else you're up to?

So people can go check out in my website at MarcElliott. com. And also if people are interested in looking at the injustices that I was talking about they can check out makejusticeblind. com. And again, if people are interested in a very different side of DOS to also check out the dossier project.

Srini Rao: And for everybody listening, we wrap the show. With that.