This particular episode of today explains features some troubling descriptions of sex and body modification.

You might want to ask the kids to leave the room.

My name is Josh Block. I'm the host and co-producer of CBC podcast Uncover Escaping Nexium.

I came upon this story when I ran into this old childhood friend of mine, Sarah Edminson.

She told me that she had just left a cult.

The hardest part for me is just when I go through it, like recognizing so many opportunities I had just to run.

It's so hard to explain to people why I felt like I couldn't.

I had known that she was part of this strange, what I thought was a self-help organization, but I did not know the extent of what I would later find out.

You're right, we didn't speak the whole time during this. You didn't really know me then, but you didn't know me when I was 18 and you knew me when I was 16 and when I was 3.

She told me on that first visit that she had been branded on her body with the initials of the group's leader Keith Reneary.

While I'm talking about it, it's just mixed with all this regret and shame of like, like we think about making a stupid decision.

This feels like the worst, stupidest, most awful decision.

And that somehow that experience was a wake-up call for her.

Keith Reneary has built up this mythology around himself. He claims that he is a super genius that he was speaking and full sentences by the age of one, could read the age of two, was a judo champion and a piano prodigy.

And turns out to be true that in 1989 he took this high IQ test, the super high IQ test, and he scored incredibly high.

And the Guinness Book of World Records listed him as one of the smartest men in the world. And he used that as a calling card.

Yes, well, sometimes it even amazes me.

Before starting next year, he actually ran this multi-level marketing company called Consumers Byline, where he sold household appliances and vacation packages.

We've been able to concentrate all this purchasing power, literally hundreds of thousands of buyers, to get a better deal from the sellers.

That company was later, a number of attorneys general, ended up claiming the company was a pyramid scheme and the whole thing was shut down.

And not long after that, Nexium was born, but now instead of selling fridges, they're selling self-help.

Our main emphasis, our main belief, is to have people experience more joy in their lives. And from that, all sorts of interesting effects appear to happen.

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