Posted on by Matt Thomas

On the Most Outta Control People in History (aka You’re Outta Control!): #1 Keith Rainere

Note: This piece begins a new series, The Most Insane People of All Time (aka You’re Outta Control), which looks at extreme historical and contemporary figures whose behavior, movements, or belief systems veered dramatically beyond the bounds of ordinary reality. The tone is intentionally informal and impressionistic rather than academic, blending biography, cultural memory, and personal reaction. The goal is not exhaustive analysis but a clear read on just how outta control these figures became. This piece takes up the case of Keith Rainere.

Epigraph: 

“Out of control / You’re out of control…”

— Out of Control, The Rolling Stones

Keith Raniere began life in New York in 1960 and built his early identity around claims of extraordinary intelligence and unusual gifts. He cultivated a reputation as a prodigy, a polymath, and a moral philosopher, though many of these claims were exaggerated or unverifiable. In the 1990s he co-founded a multi-level marketing-style company that ran into legal trouble, then pivoted into what became NXIVM, a self-improvement organization marketed as executive success training. Participants attended workshops, advanced through ranks, and absorbed Raniere’s pseudo-philosophical teachings. He adopted the title “Vanguard,” cultivated an inner circle, and emphasized ethics, discipline, and personal growth. Wealthy backers, including Seagram heiress Clare Bronfman, funded the operation for years, allowing NXIVM to expand in upstate New York and attract professionals, actors, and seekers.

Behind the self-help veneer, however, the structure tightened. Raniere exercised increasing control over followers’ lives, and a secret subgroup known as DOS emerged, involving master–slave hierarchies, collateral-based coercion, and branding rituals incorporating his initials. Superman actress Allison Mack played a key role in recruiting members. Investigative reporting in 2017 exposed the group, leading to arrests. Raniere fled to Mexico, where he was found living in a villa with loyal followers, still holding late-night volleyball sessions and maintaining his guru persona. He was arrested in 2018, returned to the United States, convicted on multiple charges, and sentenced to 120 years in prison. The NXIVM empire collapsed, its mythology dissolving into court transcripts and testimony.

And yet what stands out most about Raniere is not grandeur but pettiness. The volleyball — endless, late-night volleyball as the center of spiritual life — already tells you everything you need to know. Important conversations at midnight on the court, guru hanging out in athletic shorts, disciples orbiting. It has strong George Santos energy: self-invented genius, weird rituals, faux casualness masking control. Then the egomania. The IQ mythology, the titles, the little cushion on stage so he’s physically higher than everyone else. It’s not even theatrical; it’s dreary. The branding scandal — initials burned into skin, coercion, sexual manipulation — pushed it fully into outta control territory. And all of it funded for years by the Bronfman money, which makes the whole thing feel even more surreal. Rich people with nothing better to do underwriting a volleyball cult.

What really kills it, though, is the atmosphere. It’s all so fucking boring. Endless seminars. Faux-ethical language. Guru perched slightly above the group. No charisma, no sweep, just control. I basically hate gurus, and Raniere is the worst kind: small, humorless, self-mythologizing. Even when he fled to Mexico, he didn’t become mythic — he just kept playing volleyball in a villa while the walls closed in. Outta control, yes, but also petty. Not a visionary gone wrong, just an egomaniac running a dreary self-help cult.

By contrast, Jim Jones has a sweeping, almost Shakespearean arc. He began as a Midwestern preacher in Indiana in the 1950s, preaching racial integration and social justice at a time when both were rare in American churches. His Peoples Temple grew steadily, and by the mid-1960s he relocated to Northern California, first to Ukiah and then to San Francisco, where he gained real political influence. The early movement was diverse, activist, and in some respects ahead of its time. But alongside the growth came drugs, paranoia, authoritarian theatrics, and increasing control. Facing scrutiny and defectors, Jones moved followers to an agricultural commune in Guyana — Jonestown — deep in the jungle. Life there deteriorated into long work hours, loudspeaker propaganda, and rehearsals for mass suicide. In November 1978, U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan arrived to investigate, accompanied, improbably, by Mark Lane, the JFK conspiracy lawyer hired by the Temple as a defender. After several members attempted to leave, Ryan and others were shot at a nearby airstrip, and Jones ordered the mass murder-suicide — cyanide-laced drink administered to more than 900 people. The trajectory is horrifying, but it has scale: idealism, power, paranoia, catastrophe. You can at least see how it built.

Marshall Applewhite is stranger still. A former music teacher who fell into an intense partnership with Bonnie Nettles, he constructed a theology blending Christianity, UFO lore, and apocalyptic expectation. After Nettles died, Applewhite grew more isolated and doctrinaire, leading the group known as Heaven’s Gate. Members lived communally, detached from ordinary life, waiting for a spacecraft they believed was trailing the Comet Hale–Bopp. In 1997, Applewhite convinced followers that they needed to leave their bodies to board it. Thirty-nine members died in a coordinated mass suicide in Rancho Santa Fe, California, wearing matching clothing and following a carefully staged sequence. The whole thing is eerie rather than theatrical — calm, methodical, and deeply surreal. Of the three, Applewhite may be the most bonkers, but also the most otherworldly, a teacher who wandered into cosmic delusion.

So the comparison is stark. Jones is tragic and terrifying, a charismatic reformer turned paranoid autocrat. Applewhite is cosmic and surreal, a gentle-seeming teacher convinced salvation lay behind a comet. Raniere, by contrast, is just small — petty control dressed up as philosophy, volleyball instead of vision, branding instead of belief. All three are outta control, but in different registers: tragic, cosmic, and contemptible.

The Most Insane People of All Time (aka You’re Outta Control!): #2 John McAfee
The Most Insane People of All Time: #3 Elizabeth Holmes (aka You’re Outta Control!)
Posted on by Matt Thomas

On it, Pete

Note: Some stories get better in the telling. This one doesn’t need to. It arrives fully formed—one line, perfectly placed—and has stayed that way ever since. I’ve told it for years and it still lands exactly the same. No embellishment required.

It’s September, 1989.

Two new teachers had just arrived at St. George’s School in Spokane, WA. These are Paul Hogan and Pete Aiken. Paul would go on to have a long and distinguished career, eventually becoming Principal of Jesuit High School in Portland—a major job, the kind that makes a life. I have no idea where Pete is today.

That night, my dad Ross invited them over to the house for dinner. It was one of those late-summer evenings that still carried a little warmth but hinted at the coming turn. Ross was out back at the grill, working over the barbecue with a beer in hand. The adults clustered nearby, talking, drinking, getting to know the new arrivals. There was that particular tone of adult conversation—half-professional, half-social, everyone just slightly aware of roles and impressions.

Out in the yard, it was just the three of us: Pat, Mike, and me. We were playing catch with a tennis ball. Nothing serious. Just throwing it around, loose, casual, the way kids do when the game isn’t really the point. At some point, either Mike or I made a bad throw. It sailed wide of Pat—too far, too high—and rolled past him.

A completely ordinary moment. The kind of thing that happens a hundred times in a backyard, in a summer, in a childhood.

Pat was six. He didn’t chase the ball. He didn’t complain. He didn’t turn to us. Instead, he turned—calmly, deliberately—and looked over at Pete Aiken, one of the brand-new teachers, a guest in our home, a man he had just met. And in a tone of quiet assurance, as if assigning responsibility in a meeting, he just said:

“On it, Pete.”

That was it. No smile. No wink. No awareness of what had just happened. The ball was recovered. The game went on. The adults kept talking. The evening continued. But something had shifted, just slightly, just enough.

Because in that moment, a six-year-old child had somehow crossed the boundary between worlds—between kids and adults, between play and work—and issued a line that did not belong to him, but fit him perfectly.

I don’t remember what happened next. I only remember that line. And I remember that we have been laughing about it ever since.

The On It Pete Blues (Pete’s POV)

I was new to the city, new shirt, new street,

Standing in a backyard trying hard to be discreet,

Ross on the grill and the talk running deep,

Just another first night—then I heard, “On it, Pete.”

I hadn’t been briefed, hadn’t learned the terrain,

Didn’t know the house or the shape of the game,

Just a beer in my hand, trying not to overreach,

Then a six-year-old turned and delegated to Pete.

Now I’ve worked in schools, I’ve handled my share,

Rooms full of noise, moments needing repair,

But nothing quite like that clean little feat—

Being calmly assigned by a kid in bare feet.

No panic, no pause, no doubt in his beat,

Just a glance and a nod—“On it, Pete.”

And the ball got found, and the night rolled on,

But I knew right then something strange had gone on—

In a yard full of voices, one line cut through the heat:

I wasn’t just visiting.

I was on it.

Pete.

Dedication:

For my brother Pat. And for Pete. Just get on it already baby.

Note: If you liked this story you may also like the stories below, which also cover my time at St. George’s High School.

Scenes from St. George’s, Part I: Erosions, First Love, Headmasters
Scenes from St. George’s VII: Senior Year II and Coda (with cameos by Bill Gates, Soft-Water, and Twin Peaks)
Posted on by Matt Thomas

On Comebacks and Failed Comebacks IV: Muhammad Ali

Note: This essay is the third entry in the series “On Comebacks and Failed Comebacks.” The earlier pieces looked at very different kinds of returns: the moral vindication of Kofi Annan and the small, tactical in-game comebacks engineered by Joe Nash of the Seattle Seahawks.


The story of Muhammad Ali operates on a much larger stage. Ali’s exile from boxing after refusing the Vietnam draft and his eventual return to the championship ranks is one of the most famous comebacks in sports history. But the episode described here—the Los Angeles suicide rescue in 1981—is a smaller and stranger moment.


The event appears to have genuinely occurred, yet it also carries the faint aura of legend that often surrounds Ali’s public life. The champion arrives, speaks to a desperate man at a window, and the crisis resolves itself. It is almost too perfectly aligned with the myth of Muhammad Ali not to raise a few questions about performance, storytelling, and the way public figures sometimes inhabit the roles the world expects them to play.


In that sense the episode captures something essential about Ali’s comeback. By the time his boxing career entered its final chapters, he had become more than an athlete. He had become a figure whose life continually generated stories that felt larger than ordinary events.


Whether one treats the Los Angeles episode as simple heroism, public theater, or some mixture of the two, it remains a fascinating illustration of how Ali’s legend continued to grow long after the great fights were over.

Some comebacks are measured in championships.

Others are measured in stories.

The career of Muhammad Ali contains both. His return to boxing after the long exile of the late 1960s is one of the great sporting comebacks of the twentieth century. Stripped of his title for refusing induction into the Vietnam War, banned from the ring during what should have been his athletic prime, Ali eventually returned to reclaim the heavyweight championship and cement his place as the most famous boxer on earth.

But the Ali comeback is not just about boxing.

Long before the exile and the triumphant return, the story had already begun to take on mythic dimensions. In 1964 a young fighter from Louisville named Cassius Clay stunned the world by defeating Sonny Liston for the heavyweight title. Soon afterward he announced that Cassius Clay was a “slave name” and that he would henceforth be known as Muhammad Ali.

The change was shocking to much of the American public at the time. Ali aligned himself with the Nation of Islam, spoke openly about race and politics, and quickly became one of the most controversial athletes in the country.

Then came the draft.

In 1967 Ali refused induction into the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. The consequences were immediate and severe. He was stripped of his heavyweight title, banned from boxing, and faced the possibility of prison. For several years the greatest fighter in the world was not allowed to step into the ring.

The exile transformed him.

When Ali eventually returned to boxing in the early 1970s, he was no longer merely a talented heavyweight with a flair for poetry and bravado. He had become something larger: a political figure, a symbol of resistance, a man whose name carried moral and cultural weight far beyond the sport.

The comeback fights that followed helped cement that transformation. In 1974 Ali traveled to Zaire to face George Foreman in the legendary The Rumble in the Jungle. Foreman was younger, stronger, and widely expected to win easily.

Instead Ali introduced the world to the “rope-a-dope,” leaning back against the ropes and absorbing Foreman’s punches until the younger champion exhausted himself. In the eighth round Ali knocked him out.

It was one of the great theatrical moments in sports history: the exiled champion returning to reclaim the crown.

But somewhere along the way Ali’s comeback had begun to operate on another level entirely.

He had become something more than a boxer. Part athlete, part moral figure, part living myth. And like all myths, the Ali story eventually began to generate episodes that feel almost too perfectly suited to the character.

One of the strangest of these occurred in Los Angeles in 1981.

A man was threatening to jump from the ledge of a ninth-floor building. Police had been negotiating for hours. Crowds gathered below, watching the terrible drama unfold at a distance.

Then Muhammad Ali arrived.

Accounts differ slightly in the details, but the basic outline is consistent. Ali spoke to the man from a nearby window, urging him not to jump. Eventually the man climbed back inside the building with Ali beside him. Photographs exist of the moment, and police officers later confirmed the story.

By all reasonable accounts, Ali helped save the man’s life.

And yet the story carries a faint aura of improbability.

Not because it didn’t happen—it clearly did—but because it feels so perfectly aligned with the Ali persona that one can’t help wondering about the role of performance in the moment.

Ali had always understood something most athletes do not: that being Muhammad Ali was itself a kind of public art.

From the beginning he blurred the line between competition and theater. The rhymes, the predictions, the playful insults directed at opponents—all of it was part of a larger performance. Ali didn’t simply fight boxers. He performed the role of the greatest boxer in the world.

By the early 1980s that role had evolved even further. Ali was no longer just the heavyweight champion. He had become a global cultural figure, a symbol of resilience after exile, a man whose public presence carried moral weight.

So when the story of the suicide rescue circulated, it seemed less like an unexpected episode and more like the natural continuation of the legend.

Of course Muhammad Ali would appear at the window.

Of course Muhammad Ali would talk the man down.

Of course the cameras would be there.

None of this means the moment was insincere. Ali may well have acted from genuine compassion. But it is also possible—one suspects just slightly—that he understood something about the scene as it unfolded: that the story would become another chapter in the larger narrative of Muhammad Ali.

If so, it was a brilliant instinct.

Because the image of the champion talking a desperate man back from the ledge captures something essential about the Ali comeback. After the long years of controversy and exile, Ali returned not merely as a boxer but as a figure people wanted to believe in.

The story may be small compared with the great fights—the Rumble in the Jungle, the Thrilla in Manila. Yet in its own strange way it may be just as revealing.

A champion reclaiming his title is impressive.

A champion stepping to a window and becoming, for a moment, exactly the hero the world expects him to be—that is something else entirely.

And Muhammad Ali, more than anyone, always understood the power of the moment.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On Talent and Talent Spotting

This piece grew out of ordinary days at school rather than any single dramatic event. It’s about leadership as I’ve experienced it—imperfect, iterative, and learned mostly through miscalibration. The Bash & Pop line isn’t about suppression; it’s about timing. Talent is fragile. So is trust.

Epigraph

“Lick it shut before I lose my guts
Or I might rip it to tiny pieces.”
—Bash & Pop, Tiny Pieces

I.

You can tell within thirty seconds which young person is carrying voltage and which one is carrying rehearsal. At Rits Uji it happens once or twice a year: a student, or a recent graduate drifting back onto campus, unmistakably alive. It’s not polish. It’s not performance. It’s the high of being, for once, unedited. They don’t need to say much. You see it in the way they stand, in the way they occupy air without apology.

When that happens, the moment goes strangely timeless. I don’t feel older or younger—I feel outside of age entirely, the way I used to at the International Student Forum when a handful of kids ran circles around the adults simply because their energy was cleaner. That’s when I have to be careful. The instinct to spill truth rises fast, to say something too honest or too directional. I’ve gotten it wrong before—said too much, too soon, watched a young person recoil from a truth they weren’t ready to carry. That’s when the Bash & Pop line surfaces: seal it before instinct turns into damage.

II.

Youth talent isn’t just something you identify; it’s something you steward. And stewardship starts long before contracts, titles, or decisions about who someone is going to become. At Rits Uji my job is mostly invisible: CAS, Student Council, the quiet nemawashi that turns chaos into consensus. But the real work happens in smaller moments—when someone bright crosses your field of vision and you feel the spark you could either fan or overwhelm.

That’s the danger. Talent doesn’t need fireworks; it needs pacing. Recognition without collapse. Direction without hijacking momentum. My own instinct can run hot—I want to give the whole truth at once, to offer the map before they’ve even decided where they’re going. Leadership, for me, has meant learning restraint. Not caution. Respect for the shape that hasn’t formed yet.

III.

The flip side of youth talent is youth fragility. It’s just as easy to read. Today it was a judo kid—curled in the nurse center, eyes red, voice small—caught in the churn that forms when discipline starts to eclipse humanity. You can see when excellence becomes pressure, when identity narrows to a single verb.

That responsibility feels heavier. One wrong word—one too-direct truth—can land harder than anything they face on the mat. So I measured my voice. Offered steadiness instead of analysis. The temptation to diagnose, to explain the larger pattern, was there. But not every insight needs to be spoken in real time. Sometimes leadership means keeping the ink from running red.

IV.

Restraint has a cost. Not dramatic. Just a quiet pressure in the chest—the sense of holding back a sentence that arrives fully formed but can’t yet be given. That’s the part of leadership no training covers: seeing a young person clearly and deciding how much of that clarity they can carry.

You swallow the rest. Not because you doubt it, but because timing matters more than brilliance. The wrong truth, delivered too early, can fracture trust. The right truth, delivered at the right moment, steadies the ground under someone who is still learning how to stand.

V.

With my son, talent has never been about molding or steering. It’s the opposite. I want his spark to move in whatever direction it’s already leaning, and I want to run alongside for as long as he’ll let me. That’s the calibration I carry into school without meaning to—the belief that momentum matters more than mastery, that the job isn’t to sculpt but to notice and match pace without crowding.

Watching him grow taught me the discipline I try to practice at Rits Uji: let the young be young. Let the talent be wide before it is refined. When the moment grows too bright or too raw, when the truth wants to spill too quickly, the choice isn’t silence. It’s timing.

VI.

In the end, talent spotting is less about brilliance than about restraint. Not leading from the front, not pushing from behind, but matching rhythm long enough for someone to find their stride. Youth talent dazzles. Youth fragility aches. Somewhere in that overlap, leadership becomes atmospheric rather than performative.

They don’t need speeches or interventions or the full weight of truths learned the hard way. They need someone who can read the moment, steady the air, and resist tearing it open before its time. And if you’ve judged the moment correctly, they outrun you.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On the Top Five Male Athletes of All Time

Note: Today I am releasing the first of four pieces in a long-gestating project on the greatest athletes of all time. Like all lists, I am fully aware that this will engender disagreement, and that’s part of the point. My criteria include sporting accomplishments — championships, MVPs, world records — as well as off-the-field impact and historical significance. Some figures, like Michael Jordan, have a mixed legacy; others, like Pelé, have an almost unblemished one. I would love to hear your thoughts, so please do consider dropping a comment whether you agree or disagree. This piece will be followed by numbers six through ten for the men, and then a separate top ten for women.

1. Babe Ruth

Babe Ruth remains the number one choice. He completely changed the game of baseball with his power hitting and his two-way play. America’s game would never be the same. From humble beginnings in Baltimore, he became the highest-paid and most visible athlete in the world. His larger-than-life personality — the booze, the women, the cigars — all contribute to his myth.

The 1927 Yankees remain shorthand for the greatest team ever assembled, and Ruth’s pairing with Lou Gehrig gave baseball one of its most iconic duos. The relatively early deaths of both men add a certain pathos to the story. Ruth won seven World Series titles, hit 714 home runs in an era when power was rare, and essentially invented the modern slugger. He even has an iconic candy bar named after him. Unassailable.

2. Muhammad Ali

Next to Ruth, Ali is 1A. You could argue Jordan for pure dominance and brand success, but Ali was not only great in the ring — he intersects with 20th-century history in ways that put him over the top.

From his origins as Olympic gold medalist Cassius Clay to his name change, his foregrounding of Muslim identity, his refusal to fight in the Vietnam War, and his connections to the Black Power movement and Malcolm X, Ali became far more than a boxer. He later paid a tragic physical price for fighting too long, and his public battle with Parkinson’s disease only deepened his stature.

Ali talked better than anyone before or since, floated like a butterfly, stung like a bee, and was a three-time heavyweight champion of the world. He looms large not just in sport, but in global cultural memory. A clear number two.

3. Michael Jordan

Jordan comes in at number three — though among younger generations he is arguably better remembered than Ruth or Ali, which suggests that his status may continue to rise.

From his famous early cut from his high school varsity team, to the game-winning shot as a freshman at North Carolina in 1982, to his early playoff frustrations against Boston and Detroit, Jordan’s arc is mythically clean. Once he broke through, the dominance was total: six NBA championships, five MVPs, ten scoring titles, and an undefeated Finals record.

Off the court, Jordan became the most successful sports marketer in history. His shoe deals and advertising footprint dwarfed anything that came before. His legacy is not without complications — gambling rumors, the David Stern suspension theories, a rocky tenure as owner of the Charlotte Hornets, and an ongoing public feud with Scottie Pippen — but none of that erases what he was on the court. An undeniable number three.

4. Pelé

Pelé belongs at number four because he remains the single greatest icon in what is almost certainly the world’s most popular sport. I grew up on basketball, baseball, and football, yet even I knew who Pelé was by the age of six.

For people like my son — a soccer fan and influencer — Pelé is bigger than Ruth or Ali. Other players, Messi included, may rival or surpass him on pure technical grounds, and Maradona has a competing mythos, but Pelé’s status as a hero from the global south remains unmatched.

He won three World Cups with Brazil, scored over 1,000 career goals depending on how one counts, and became the first truly global sports celebrity. By all accounts, he was also a gracious and generous human being. There is little that detracts from his legacy. A natural number four.

5. Jackie Robinson

Jackie Robinson belongs on this list for his brave and immensely graceful breaking of baseball’s color barrier — and by extension, professional team sports in America.

Credit is due to Branch Rickey for taking the risk, but it was Robinson who carried the weight. Through his base stealing, his hitting, his defense, and above all his composure, Robinson became a model of quiet strength and dignity under pressure. He won the inaugural Rookie of the Year award, an MVP, a World Series title, and was a perennial All-Star.

One may admire Jordan without loving him, but Robinson is universally — and rightly — beloved. He helped reshape not just baseball, but American race relations more broadly. A fitting number five.

Dedication:

For Steve Treader, the greatest sportswriter I know.