Marc Elliot | How Media Influences and Shapes Truth

Marc Elliott: What people don't get is that 17,000 people took these courses from around the world, billionaires, entrepreneurs, doctors, attorneys, all the way down to handymen, to babysitters, moms, dads, religions, different ethnicities, all walks of life for 20 years.

The reason that it was able to reach so many aspects of different types of people around the world is that when people took it, they loved it. They were having incredible realizations and shifts in their life, relationships in their business, and their relationship with themselves. So I think that the first thing that people should know is that this is something that people really enjoy.

Srini: I'm Srinivas Rao, and this is the Unmistakable Creative podcast.

Marc Elliott: Where did you get a

Srini: Window into the

Mark Elliott: Stories and insights from the most innovative and creative minds.

Srini: He has started movements, built thriving businesses, written best-selling books, and created insanely interesting art. For more, check out our 500-episode archive@unmistakablecreative.com.

Marc Elliott: Mark

Srini: Welcome to The Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Marc Elliott: It's time to join us. That's Chris Serena. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to finally meet you. Yeah.

Srini: Likewise. It is my pleasure to have you here. I found out about you because you wrote to me, and as I was mentioning to you before here, we did an entire series on cults when 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 made?

How did I make it work? Well, I think it was just putting myself out there and being willing to try different things and be open to meeting new people. I think it was also a matter of having the courage to be my true self, even when it was uncomfortable. And I think that just comes down to knowing that if people don't accept me for who I am, that's okay. So I just put myself out there and made the best of it.

Srini: How does that affect your life? Obviously, for my interview, so you know that every question leads to more questions.

Marc Elliott: I think what, in some ways, it actually was 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 liked. And I didn't really have an opportunity to really own myself and just know, "Wait a minute, who does Mark wanna be?" And then figure that out. And then from there, then try to find groups of people. It's just so funny; that question was 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 gonna agree with 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. Yeah. Cuz when you start trying to, when particularly in the case in my life

Srini: Gifts, an idea of what Tourette's actually is because I had a really good friend who was an absolutely brilliant guy, an MIT engineer. I met him right out of undergrad and I remember I didn't know what it was for the longest time and I was like, "This neat guy twitches a lot." I'm like, "What's up with these twitches?" But 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 control, being like, "Talk to me about the experience of being diagnosed for people who don't know much about it or the neurological aspects of it." Can you kinda give us just an overview?

Marc Elliott: 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 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 tic, which is in a sense, scratching that itch. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does.

Srini: Does. Because I, 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'd be like, "Dude, wouldn't it be awesome to go to a Tourette's convention?"

Marc Elliott: He's you could swear all you want in the say*ing anything to you. Yeah. The first time I went to a Tourette's convention was, it was actually quite eye-opening 'cause growing up with Tourette's, you don't really know a lot of people with it.

And then you go to a convention and funny enough, I went, when I went to my first one, I thought I was gonna be seeing all these people cussing. And really I was one of the few people and I was like, wait a minute, don't you know, 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 inches in one spot. And until you decide to do that, you just feel just this immense discomfort.

And of course, as a kid, I did

Srini: Your ability to participate in something like a classroom? And also just socially, because I can imagine it would be disruptive to the

Marc Elliott: Class too. It's oh, it's very difficult and it's for each person. Tourette's, it's a very different situation because people's ticks are different. Some people have much more vocal ticks. Some people say words, some people say bad words. Some are motor ticks, 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. 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 Tourette's, I started to make

Srini: I met my friend, the MIT engineering guy 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. He was always self-conscious about it and thought, 'Yeah, this is gonna be the undoing of my dating life.' Granted, he was like the nicest guy in the world, absolutely fucking brilliant and funny as hell. And we ended up becoming my best friends when we were younger and everything turned out fine. He's worked at a hedge fund, made millions, and he's awesome. But that always stayed with me; 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 I think, with friends and enough dating experiences, it just got past it. But for you, when it came to things like that, like your social life in high school, that's why I started with that question. How did it affect that for you? Were you self-conscious about it when it came to dating? Or when you were hanging out

Marc Elliott: It was incredibly self-conscious. I think, if you ask a lot of guys in middle school and high school, 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 ticcing, barking like a dog, shaking my head. But, 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 and recognized that, that there was an experience of mine that was completely separate from Tourette syndrome.

But of course, it created some pretty funny, uncomfortable situations. Many times when I was with girls, whether I was hooking up or just hanging out with them, I would be ticcing other girls' names. I would tic things like sometimes I would tic, "you're fat," even though she wasn't fat.

Cuz a lot of times my tics were, I was saying the riskiest thing that I could say that's uncomfortable. That

Srini: He mentioned that people have these two varying degrees. As I said, my friend was an MIT engineer. I was like, you don't seem dysfunctional to me for goodness' sake. You went to MIT and killed it. So how bad can this be? But 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

Marc Elliott: Explanation for that? I don't think there's any specific explanation for that. And in fact, the medical community in general really doesn't understand Tourette's. It's this huge spectrum of ticks for people. I'm sure people know someone like that; they just have this nervous tick. And then there's, do you take it to the extreme, 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 syndrome, you need to be exhibiting both motor and vocal ticks. 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 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

Srini: I think it really depends on the individual. For my friend, it didn't have that much of an impact, but for some people, it can be really debilitating and cause them to have trouble functioning in day-to-day life.

Marc Elliott: Living 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 it in a little bit, but a documentary called My Tourette came out and documented the work of how Nex Im helped people with Tourette's and they saw it and sent me an email. I talked to him on the phone.

This is someone who had deep brain stimulation and it didn't work. Sereni, it didn't work. So imagine you get electrodes put in your brain and it didn't work, and now you're s 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 needed to have brain surgery. Yeah. Speaking of...

Srini: Nexium, as I, we did this entire series on cults when the Nexium 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'd been told this is something you are going to be living with?

Marc Elliott: With your entire. 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 were 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 Viacom, but then under Viacom, there are all these different types of companies; ESP (Executive Success Programs for short).

At the time, I was an inspirational speaker all around the nation. I was speaking at high schools, middle schools, and 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, and meeting another speaker who happened to actually be a coach in ESP at the time. My whole life, I have always been someone who wanted to work on myself. I have wanted to grow. I had never actually paid to go to a course to do so.

But in my

Marc Elliott: The seminar-selling company doesn't want you to wake up and they're doing everything possible to make you feel as if things aren't

Srini: Working out

Srini: All the other women? You're talking about due process here, obviously. I don't imagine anybody going to a trial without any semblance of due process.

Srini: One thing that I wonder about all this is, 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 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 asks 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. 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 think about. And it, you got to the point where it was annoying like you didn't wanna be around them.

And I'm saying this as somebody who actually found the information to be really valuable, but the way that they

Marc Elliott: I think, even just with you saying "sex cult," like that's a perfect example. Yeah. Just to break that down a little bit, when you said about, look, there's all these other women. So again, just to help the listener, 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 Nexium, it was a secret society. Nobody knew about it. In the trial itself and in court, I might be wrong, I might be off by one, but out of 17,000 people, there are three current women claiming to be victims of a crime.

And yet somehow Nexium 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 and forced labor. People think of this as a sex cult, all this stuff. Are you aware that there's not a single charge of him having sex with anyone in the trial?

Wow. There's not a single charge of rape. There's not a single charge of assault and battery

Marc Elliott: Yeah, so I two, I think there are just a couple of 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. You know 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. Cuz I, I just wasn't there. I'm just talking. So there's that. But with respect to the [once], after it took place, and I looked at the evidence and I looked at the transcripts, you started to see that there were many issues in which the prosecution was trying to, it was a trial of prejudice and hate. One very specific example is they decided to bring in evidence of the abortion history of some of the people that Keith Ronner 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

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

Srini: This is more than just a story about a sex cult; it's a story about how we consume and process information in the modern age.

Marc Elliott: Yeah. Or do you know if have you heard of people who have idiosyncrasies, where, they do things in a certain way or touch 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 kept living with these rules, which are really rooted in fear, somehow if I touched my face, I'm not okay. I'm gonna 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, Castaway. 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. Wow.

Srini: With multi-level marketing companies.

Srini: Turn into

Marc Elliott: If you're not making money, it's because you're a loser. It's not because of bad luck.

Marc Elliott: There's an incredible question. Sereni and I, one very simple thing are that it was clear that this was, for Ning 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—were billionaires, entrepreneurs, doctors, attorneys, all the way down to handymen, 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 and reach so many aspects of different types of people around the world is that when people took it, they loved it. They were having incredible realizations and shifts in their life and relationships in their business, just the relationship with themselves.

So I think that the first thing 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 Nexi. It wasn't a company under, it was a secret society that these women had created with Keith and, of course, whatever one because of the nature of how

Srini: So obviously, the press around Nexium has been largely negative. And, for the most part, all I know is the darker side of this story. You have a very positive side of this 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 heck happened? How did it go so off the rails to get to this guy in Nigeria in prison?

Srini: Seriously, but no, actually I don't think of

Marc Elliott: Curing Tourettes? Yeah. How do you go from there? I want to make it very clear that I did not cure my Tourettes. We did not cure other people.

With Tourettes, it's not something that we have ever said publicly. Even though people who are very against Nexium have made these claims, what the tools in E.S.P. did is that Keith Ranieri, who is the creator of Nexium and then the course's 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 think and learn about myself in a way that I hadn't before, it started to open up a lot of questions and thoughts. Yeah, it just started to open up things in general.

I don't know how else to say that. And in that process, I started to question things so much. And also one of the big parts of

Srini: 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 devotion to dysfunction? Now, 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, well-intentioned coaches, people, leaders, and all that stuff. Leadership can exist without deception, without culty behavior. But I guess I would encourage people to research properly. If there are any allegations against a leader or a coach or a group or an organization where there's smoke, there's 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 blowing smoke?

Marc Elliott: Keith Re Neri? Sure. I think there are a couple of 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, that any time a woman is claiming abuse, or that she was abused, it was just a very hypersensitive time and of course, there could be no questioning around that and that clearly there must be an issue.

I just wanna 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. What I do believe in is due process, and I believe that if we want to be 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 chose to do something that her husband was not aware of - she got a brand - and for whatever reason she then

Srini: Crazy. So what do you make of that? How are you presenting a different side of this story? So how does somebody like Sarah's story become the dominant narrative?

Srini: Because their business plan is flawed. For example, the market

Marc Elliott: What's the 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 the arbiter of truth, like that it is just telling the truth and not recognizing what it's 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, imagines 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 'S

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

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

Marc Elliott: Get coverage for. Exactly. Again, you have 17,000 people. You have three, it was current students that were claiming to be victims of a crime. You then have maybe about another 50 to 80 people who have claimed to be victims.

And there's a civil lawsuit. There are people suing Claire Bachman who has enormous pockets. And so these people are now claiming to be victims. But it was, the narrative was just so strong and the exaggerations kept building on exaggeration 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, it's so dangerous when you make an individual or a group of people and you make them a monster.

I experienced that with Tourette's, people didn't understand what was going on, and you just 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

It's I mean, if I think once the truth comes out about the injustice, I think people will look back at the Nexxxt 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's just to question a woman's experience. Even me on this podcast, I'm afraid to talk about questioning Sarah because of the backlash people might have. But it's important to question, and it doesn't mean I'm against women 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 few decades, we've seen how many wrongful convictions there are, how many false allegations there are.

One 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

Marc Elliott: Don't do 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 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 mean, 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? When you use the word, these people are being exploited. If they're taking a course and they're driving 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 ones. What I can tell you specifically about NXIM is that from what Rick Ross is saying is

Srini: 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. Yeah, I've

Srini: This, 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, after I ask you like, 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: understanding the role that our modern media landscape plays in creating narratives. Because I know this from my experience of being on a reality TV show: the girl that they matched me with was portrayed as the villain.

And I, people are like, "You're not fighting back, you're not defending yourself." I'm just like, "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 portrayed."

Srini: Who produces media 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 of this?

Marc Elliott: My relationships 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 understand, without diving deeper and looking at the evidence and knowing what I know about what has happened and transpired, why I'm fighting to expose the injustice and stand by my friends to help exonerate them, and also to fight against the FBI.

But I think for the people that really know me and were my closest, 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: once you're in that type of adversity, you really find out who your true friends are. So it's been painful, but that's part of the journey. I have one.

Marc Elliott: perceived. 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 at our fingertips, at just 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. Yeah. I can't even remember off the top of my head. No, you have so many guests. I know. But he, he talked about, I, 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 just want to get our feelings off our chest, whatever it might be

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

Srini: 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 are people who came out of Landmark and their lives changed. Then there are people who just go back to Landmark over and over again and they

Srini: Are you there?

Marc Elliott: I think it's and I think I've said it before on here, I think it's someone's courage and strength to do, to stand for something, even when it's not popular. And whether that might be a stand out in public or might be an unpopular thought in your own mind, to do something that's unconventional, that is scary, takes courage and it takes strength. And that's something that, unfortunately, one of the things we taught in the courses about, was 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 the courage to make an unpopular decision sometimes. And I think that would help people a lot. Amazing. I can't agree more.

Srini: Thank you so much for taking the time to join us to share your story, your wisdom, and 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 that you're doing?

Marc Elliott: So, what do you think?

Marc Elliott: So people can go check out my website at markelliot.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 Doss, they can also check out the Dossier Project.

Srini: Amazing! And for everybody listening, we wrap up the show with that.

Marc Elliott: Saturation. They have too many distributors in a given area, which they never consider because they're just trying to make as much money as they can from everybody. But the bottom line is they always blame you. They make you feel like you are responsible for whatever shortcomings there are.

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Marc Elliott: Experiences, but my, just to cut you off there is, I guess my question is, what's the problem with that though? So what. So what if you, what if the fact that at that moment in your life, that's what you wanted to do? Yeah.

Srini: I agree with you. I've done my fair share of these types of workshops and each one of them has had its 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. Cause we were talking about my own experience with the seduction community and I remember for three years I realized, I was like, wait, my whole life is this thing. I don't have a life outside of this. 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.

Srini: Have you ever heard our podcast guests say something that you wanted to remember? Or maybe you read something in a book and then the day goes by and you can't remember what it was or where you heard it or where you read it. And in the world we live in, there's so much competition for our attention. We're constantly inundated with blogs, social media posts, text messages, emails, Netflix, whatever it is.

And if you ever tried to build a second brain, you probably noticed that you end up spending a lot of time maintaining and organizing folders, which ends up becoming a part-time job in and of itself. But what if there was a better way? Our new Ultimate Guide to Building a Second Brain and Memory will show you how to build a second brain that allows you to capture everything and find anything without creating any folders or spending any time organizing the information you need.

If you wanna be able to put the information that you consume to use and make it actionable, then this guide is for you.

Marc Elliott: 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 chorus that's 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.

I completely agree with you. That's not a good business model either. There's not, I completely agree with that. That's not what happened. I didn't see that in any of it 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 gonna learn from their mistakes.

They're gonna learn, there's gonna be a certain point where they don't have money. And then they're gonna learn from that and be like, I can't keep doing this. But I don't think we wanna live in a society where we micromanage the decisions of other adults. I think that

Marc Elliott: Organize your digital life.

Srini: Okay. That's fair. What about the situations where people spend money they can't afford to spend?

Srini: Be sure to check out our Ultimate Guide to Building a Second Brain at UnmistakableCreative.com/brain.