Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah

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Speaker 21 Okay, if you thought season two of Sniffy's Cruising Confessions was spicy, buckle up.

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Speaker 73 New episodes every Thursday.

Speaker 74 This is Erin Andrews from Calm Down with Erin and Carissa.

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Speaker 35 Hey everybody, Robert here. And if you've been paying attention, we just finished six episodes on Oprah Winfrey.

Speaker 35 And obviously that dealt with a lot of the most toxic things about her career in media and her show.

Speaker 35 But as I noted a couple of times, we didn't go into much detail about three of the worst things she's been involved with, Dr. Phil, Dr.
Oz, and John of God, because we had done two parters of those.

Speaker 35 Well, given that all of those were had, you know,

Speaker 35 a year or more old, in some cases older than that,

Speaker 35 we made the decision to run them as one big episode as a bonus. You know, you're not getting less original content, obviously.

Speaker 35 But we clipped these together as one big episode so that there's a lot less ads.

Speaker 35 So you can kind of listen through this story of all of these the very worst people associated to Oprah with fewer ads than you'd heard before

Speaker 35 so take a listen my friends and

Speaker 35 yeah I I love you go to hell

Speaker 35 Robert Evans behind the bastards podcast this is introduction not very good I liked it thank you Sophie thank you for lying about it being a good introduction. But you know what is good.

Speaker 35 Certainly better than my introduction. Is our guest for today, Mr.
Andrew T.

Speaker 35 Fuck yeah, what's up? I'm alive. Can't kill me yet.
Nope, nope, can't. So you have made it through the Rona so far, Andrew.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 35 I have to say, your hair looks as badly in need of a cut as mine does. Yeah.

Speaker 35 I can't decide. Are you, I'm like debating whether to just shoot the moon and grow it to like donatable lengths.
Yeah, fuck yeah.

Speaker 35 Shave my head. I don't know.
It's it's unpleasant. It's it's at the very unpleasant point of the growth.
Like it like

Speaker 35 the back of my neck. It's fucking disgusting.
It's terrible.

Speaker 35 But we could do what if we did like a locks of love thing, but instead of for people who need hair, it's for like weird horny people on the internet. Yeah.
Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 35 We raise money for some charity. I don't know what kind of charity.
Like,

Speaker 35 bombs, not food, maybe.

Speaker 35 That sounds like a charity. I mean, it could be like sort of an OnlyFan situation.
Yeah. I imagine the recording of people cutting it

Speaker 35 will be useful to somebody. Yeah, that'll be ASMR for some very weird person.
Yeah. And yeah.

Speaker 35 So, Andrew,

Speaker 35 Andrew,

Speaker 35 Andrew, as a general rule, when you and I get together, we talk about a horrific story of colonial genocide,

Speaker 35 which is what our friendship has been based on up until this point.

Speaker 35 Even before the podcast, that's the fucked up part. Yeah, I would just call you randomly in the middle of the night and be like, have you heard about what they did to Haiti?

Speaker 35 And I'd be like, nope.

Speaker 35 Let's hear it.

Speaker 35 Today, though, today we have a story that's horrible, really, really horrible.

Speaker 35 But it's actually a little bit of a reverso because it's like in part the story of this weird belief system from Europe being adopted

Speaker 35 honestly by people in a colonized nation and then used to justify horrific misbehavior on behalf of cult leaders. So that's kind of cool.
Yeah.

Speaker 35 Yeah.

Speaker 35 Cool. New shit.
Yeah. I guess you could call it a type of, I don't know.
I don't even know what to call this. It's a real motherfucker of a story, though.

Speaker 35 This is the tale of John of God. Have you ever heard of John of God?

Speaker 35 I've heard of neither John nor God. So

Speaker 35 no John of God. Now, people might be confused.
There's an actual like Jesus-y guy, like a Catholic person called John of God. I think he's a saint or some shit.
This is not that guy.

Speaker 35 This is a modern spiritual medical grifter, repeatedly endorsed by Oprah Winfrey, who turned out to be a mass rapist and possibly a baby farmer. So that is

Speaker 35 what we're getting into today. You're welcome, Andrew, for booking out.

Speaker 35 Yeah. Yeah.
Thanks for having me, Jesus Christ. Yeah.

Speaker 35 Yep. It's going to be an interesting tale today.

Speaker 35 But before we get into John of God's story, we have to go back in history to the mid-1800s and to a man with what I would have to say is one of the most unreasonably cool names I've ever come across in my research.

Speaker 35 Are you ready for this name? You're not wrong for this name. Nobody's ready for this fucking name.

Speaker 35 Hippolite Leon Dinizard Reveal.

Speaker 35 That is a fucking name.

Speaker 35 Hippolyte Leon Dinizard Reveal. That is a fucking name.

Speaker 35 Reveal is like so.

Speaker 35 I like going subtle on the final landing. It's just like, yeah, we can do it normal.
We can do it normal. I like that.

Speaker 35 Fully 50% of his four names sound like Pokemon.

Speaker 35 I've got a Hippolyte. I've got a Denizard.
It fucking rules.

Speaker 35 So Hippolyte Leon Denizard Reveal was a French educator, and he wrote under the markedly less cool pin name Alan Kardec, which I don't understand.

Speaker 35 If you're Hippolyte Leon Denizard Reveal, you lean into that shit.

Speaker 35 This guy did not know what was clickable. Very frustrating.
That's wild. Yeah, that's giving up.

Speaker 35 Speaking as a guy who's named after fucking the godfather guy, like, and like that's that, you don't give up the gift of a name that cool. Very frustrating.

Speaker 35 So anyway, under the boring name Alan Kardec, he wrote a series of books about spirits.

Speaker 35 And Kardec's core contention was that all living animals were inhabited by immortal spirits that bounced around from body to body over the ceaseless aeons.

Speaker 35 Kardec also believed that spirits could become disembodied through a variety of causes, and that these free spirits could impact the world in positive and negative ways.

Speaker 35 Kardec's theories became the religion of spiritism, which is still practiced around the world today. And it is particularly popular, for reasons I don't really understand, in Brazil.

Speaker 35 It has something like 3 million adherents there.

Speaker 35 Damn. Yeah.
That is.

Speaker 35 I guess

Speaker 35 it's sort of like a French version of sort of like an animist type religion, right? There's, yeah,

Speaker 35 I think.

Speaker 35 I think

Speaker 35 you're very keen to recognize that because I suspect it has a lot to do with that. And usually Spiritism winds up being kind of like a Spiritist-Christian hybrid.

Speaker 35 And it does, you're right. It kind of does, because a lot of these places had sort of animist traditions prior to Europeans coming in and fucking shit up.

Speaker 35 And so Spiritism felt like this kind of genuine synthesis of these old traditions with, you know, the new Christianity. I think you're probably onto something there.

Speaker 35 I guess that's kind of the shit that happened with like Catholicism

Speaker 35 in South America where it basically became saints became a pantheon. Yeah.
Or the polytheism. It's like, yeah, it's fine.
Just a slight demotion and everyone's the same. Yeah, it's whatever.

Speaker 35 So, we don't hear a lot about spiritism today in the United States.

Speaker 35 And probably the reason why is that a sizable number of what were originally the religion's chief pillars have just become normal facets of like fringe spirituality.

Speaker 35 Like, a lot of stuff that was originally part of the spiritualism religion that Kardec cooked up just kind of became things that like people who like crystals all believe in. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 35 Yeah.

Speaker 35 Yeah.

Speaker 35 And even Christianity, kind of like mainstream evangelical Christianity in the United States, has even absorbed a number of spiritist beliefs, or at least different Christian cults around the world have done that.

Speaker 35 And in a number of places, including Brazil, this has led to spiritual healers becoming a very big deal.

Speaker 35 Spiritual healers are individuals who claim to be able to carry out magical healing sessions because their bodies act as conduits for dead medical doctors, saints, and sometimes just God himself.

Speaker 35 Now, in the United States, this is often seen in Pentecostal communities, who I talk about a lot because people need to know more about them.

Speaker 35 Have you ever seen like spiritual surgery sessions?

Speaker 35 Oh, shit.

Speaker 35 I feel like I can imagine it, but I can't think of one. But yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it's. It's kind of like laying on of hands type shit.

Speaker 35 Laying on of hands, but then they'll like pull their hands away. They'll be like, oh, there's a tumor inside you.

Speaker 35 The devils put a tumor around you.

Speaker 35 And they'll pull their hands away and they'll have like a bunch of bloody pieces of meat in their hands. And it's almost, it's always like chicken or something.

Speaker 35 Like they get guts from like an animal and they do sleight of hand, like magician shit to make it look like they're kind of like that guy in Temple of Doom pulling out, you know,

Speaker 35 deceased organs.

Speaker 35 Yeah, like that's, that's a big thing in the United States.

Speaker 35 And

Speaker 35 it's cool.

Speaker 35 It's a big thing in the parts of the United States that I'm going to guess most people don't know anything about.

Speaker 35 Like most Americans would be like, this isn't a big thing in the United States, but you're wrong.

Speaker 35 I mean, it is, it is like nice how the state of the art of like 16th century magic has kind of remained the same.

Speaker 35 Yeah, if you can palm a chicken heart, you can get away with a lot.

Speaker 35 Yeah, the most important thing to realize about just the world is that people have never been dumber than they are now, and they have never been smarter than they are now.

Speaker 35 Human intelligence, regardless of the actual amount of knowledge that exists, is a flat plane.

Speaker 35 Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 35 So yeah, spiritual surgery is is a thing that happens here in the United States, and it's a thing that happens all over the world.

Speaker 35 The various kinds of spiritual healing traditions have existed since time immemorial. There's like a whole tradition of it over in India that has nothing to do with Christianity.

Speaker 35 It's like shit like this has been happening for thousands of years, right?

Speaker 35 But over in Brazil, a combination of spiritism and Christianity has created a thoroughly unique tradition of what is generally called psychic surgery.

Speaker 35 Now, unlike most similar traditions around the world, in Brazil, this psychic surgery often includes real cutting with surgeons using actual knives on the eyes and bodies of their patients.

Speaker 35 So that's a cool wrinkle. But

Speaker 35 that's fucking crazy.

Speaker 35 Oh, God. I mean, I guess it's like, on some level,

Speaker 35 it's got to be a little bit similar to like, you know,

Speaker 35 an alchemy thing where it's like, you know, sometimes the problem is just a little bloodletting is needed or like pressures building up and like that will work occasionally yeah and it's kind of like you know um people who for like whatever reason because of like a depressive disorder cut themselves um like they feel they like they tend to feel relief for one reason or another and it's like because it

Speaker 35 it releases endorphins and stuff so like you do that in the context of a powerful religious experience and it can feel really good to people

Speaker 35 yeah yeah so anyway yeah uh the Brazilian to first pioneer this technique was Jose Pedro di Ferritas or Zay Arrigo.

Speaker 35 According to his autobiography, an obviously problematic source, he started working at a mine until age 14.

Speaker 35 In 1950, at age 29, or he started working at a mine at age 14. And in 1950, when he was 29, he began to suffer a series of blinding headaches followed by hallucinatory trances.

Speaker 35 This all culminated in his body being taken over by the spirit of a bald German man in a white apron with a massive team team of spectral doctors and nurses at his beck and call.

Speaker 35 So he's got like a whole German surgery team in his head.

Speaker 35 Jesus Christ.

Speaker 35 Now, this magical dead German was Dr. Adolf Fritz, a field medic in the German army who died in the trenches in 1918,

Speaker 35 which is cool.

Speaker 35 It's bizarre that like this Brazilian mine worker would choose like it's got to be a German field medic. That's that, but that's, that's what he picks.

Speaker 35 Um, and I guess we all consider Germans trustworthy. I can't think of anything in history that would make me not trust German doctors.
Um, so yeah, that scans.

Speaker 35 So, uh, together, Dr. Fritz and Zay Arrigo had a wildly successful 20-year career performing surgery to adoring audiences of as many as 800 followers at one time.

Speaker 35 Zay Arigo would go into trances and become so taken with the spirit of Dr. Fritz that he would grab random kitchen knives and use them to cut out tumors and the like from his patients.

Speaker 35 He became known as the surgeon of the rusty knife. And this was not like,

Speaker 35 nobody was like talking shit at him by calling him this.

Speaker 35 That's like, that's some shit. That's like a prison nickname, the surgeon.
Yeah, that is like a prison nickname. Yeah.

Speaker 35 Like if you're, if you get like locked up and they're like, oh man, that's the knife. That's the rusty knife surgeon.
Like, that's the dude you don't want to fuck with.

Speaker 35 That's like the Butcher Bill motherfucker, right?

Speaker 35 yeah yeah yeah that's incredible and that's that was a compliment yes that was a compliment yeah because like that's that's part of the evidence to these people that he's like so clearly holy and sacred is that it doesn't even matter that he's using a rusty knife because and again you'll see this throughout the whole episode and all these guys we talk about like part of the thing everybody focuses on is that like none of his patients feel any pain none of them get infections even though you know he's just cutting them with a dirty knife like that's how holy this is Yeah.

Speaker 35 So that's cool. And yeah.
You know what? It's cool. Yeah.
You know, blood of Jesus, that works. It's fine.
It's antiseptic, largely. Yeah, the blood of Jesus is profoundly antiseptic.

Speaker 35 Yeah, so he prescribed various medications, generally a mix of herbal remedies and complete nonsense. His patients could redeem their prescriptions at a local pharmacy run by his brother.

Speaker 35 The height of Zayarrigo's career came when he removed a tumor from a popular senator.

Speaker 35 He was arrested in 1956 and convicted of practicing medicine without a license, but he was pardoned by the president of Brazil.

Speaker 35 In 1962, he was arrested and jailed again for the same thing, but the police allowed him to continue healing from his cell.

Speaker 35 He died wealthy and beloved in 1971 due to an auto accident that his spirits failed to warn him about. So

Speaker 35 this guy would be like an amazing character in like a Batman video game, I feel like. He feels like real final boss energy.
Yeah.

Speaker 35 Yeah, yeah. But he's, we're just getting started with Zay Arigo.

Speaker 35 So Zay Arrigo dies, and in 1990, this guy Rubens Feria, who's a 44-year-old engineer and software salesman, kind of looks back in history 19 years and is like, this guy made a fuckload of money.

Speaker 35 What if I start claiming to channel the spirit of the same dead German guy?

Speaker 35 Next up, Rubens Feria is like, Dr. Fritz is in my head.

Speaker 35 And he starts like, pretty soon, he's attracting crowds of a thousand people every day to this giant hangar-style building he buys in Rio de Janeiro.

Speaker 35 His patients were renowned to feel no pain even when he cut into them, and they reportedly never got infections from all of his eyeball scraping and body gouging.

Speaker 35 Christopher Reeves is reported to have visited Mr. Faria for healing.

Speaker 35 It didn't work.

Speaker 35 Boom. Too soon, but boom.
Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 35 just not making a joke. It clearly didn't do the trick.
Yeah, seriously. Damn.
Yeah. I mean, that's a bummer.
He seemed like a nice guy, but yeah, this was not the treatment. So in 1995, Mr.

Speaker 35 Faria married Rita Costa at age 34. He dumped her a few years later for a 19-year-old friend of his daughter's.
Mrs. Costa reported her former husband to the police for non-payment of taxes.

Speaker 35 The police confronted him during a surgery in Rio and arrested his bodyguard for possession of an illegal weapon.

Speaker 35 That bodyguard then testified that he'd been secretly helping his boss dispose of the corpses of a number of patients who died as a result of Mr. Ferry's hacking on their bodies.

Speaker 35 So it turned out like a bunch of people were dying and getting infected and his bodyguard was just throwing them in a hole.

Speaker 35 I guess I was going to say, like, what does it take to have the confidence to just cut people with a fucking rusty knife?

Speaker 35 And I guess it is, you just have to, you have to break a few eggs to make a magic omelet.

Speaker 35 You know, I've always said there's no, nothing builds confidence like having a large, heavily armed man willing to dispose of corpses for you. That really, that's all any of us really needs.

Speaker 35 I guess that's you for most people that I know.

Speaker 35 I mean, yeah,

Speaker 35 I'll do a little bit of corpse disposal. You know, it's like a, yeah.

Speaker 35 So a raid on Ruben's fairy's compound revealed more than a thousand boxes of conventional prescription medications suggesting that this spiritual healer was actually practicing traditional medicine, but just without a license.

Speaker 35 He was arrested in jail, but while his district police chief agreed that Farius needed to be locked up, he still professed a strong belief in the myth of Dr.

Speaker 35 Fritz, telling the Guardian, In my opinion, I think that Dr. Fritz does exist, but that Rubens Faria is doing things that he shouldn't.

Speaker 35 So I think he's really channeling this German guy, but that doesn't mean he's not permitting crimes, too.

Speaker 35 Oh my God. Really threatened the needle.
Thanks, Doc.

Speaker 35 Yeah. My favorite is that reminds me a little bit of

Speaker 35 I've known various people that have gotten out of Scientology and the worst of them sometimes say shit that is basically akin to like, well, I don't agree with all the homophobia and all the cult stuff, but obviously Xenu is real and, you know, controls our lives through us here.

Speaker 35 You know, shit like that, where I'm like, you know, it's, it's like, it's just about the practice of it, not like the underlying like logic of it. It's amazing.
Hey, I I mean, you know,

Speaker 35 I worship L.

Speaker 35 Ron Hubbard, not for his spiritual teachings or any of the things he wrote about space aliens, but for his ability to get boats full of young people to search for gold that his past life buried.

Speaker 35 Exactly. That's what I celebrate about LRH.

Speaker 35 Yeah.

Speaker 35 So, yeah, this all is the background I think that's necessary to understand John of God.

Speaker 35 So,

Speaker 35 on November 17th, 2010, Oprah magazine writer Susan Casey published an article about her visit to Brazil, where she'd met with the country's new hottest psychic surgeon.

Speaker 35 Oh boy, João Tiexeira DeFaria, better known as John of God.

Speaker 35 This sparked a visit by Oprah herself and an avalanche of uncritical positive stories about how cool this new John of God guy was.

Speaker 35 For the first time, a Brazilian psychic surgeon attracted mass interest outside of Brazil.

Speaker 35 But foreigners had been trickling into the country for years before that, and one of them, an American named Heather Cumming, wrote a book about John of God, the man who became her guru.

Speaker 35 It is a thoroughly uncritical work of puffery from a woman who clearly worships her subject. But it's also our best real source or best source on the early life of John of God.

Speaker 35 So I'm going to start by reading from that. And I'm going to give the caveat that this information, this is all information that a mass rapist cult leader wanted to convey about his early life.

Speaker 35 So, you know, noted. A little bit of salt here and there.

Speaker 35 So,

Speaker 35 João Tiixera de Faria was born on June 24th, 1942, in the poor village of, oh boy, Cachoira di Fumacha in the state of Goyas in central Brazil.

Speaker 35 His mother, Donna Luca, was a popular member of the community and a dedicated housewife.

Speaker 35 John of God would later speak highly of his mother, and I have no reason to suspect she wasn't a nice person, other than perhaps the fact that her boy grew up to a mass raping cult leader.

Speaker 35 The biography of John of God continues: quote: In the 1940s and 50s, there were no paved roads or infrastructure in this part of Brazil.

Speaker 35 The roads connecting the towns were dirt, studded with cattle grids, and wound their way through farms and villages.

Speaker 35 When construction of paved roads began in the late 1950s, João's mother ran a small hotel and cooked for the road workers to augment the family's meager income.

Speaker 35 Joao often says that his mother became famous for her delicious cooking. His father was less successful.

Speaker 35 He was a tailor and owned a laundry business, but money was not great, and young João and his four brothers and one sister lived in constant economic anxiety.

Speaker 35 Young John had to work from an early age, starting as a cloth cutter in his father's shop at age six.

Speaker 35 He only attended two years of primary school before economic necessity forced him to end his formal education and take up a series of increasingly brutal jobs. Now

Speaker 35 That's what his biography says. That's not the only version of that we have.
A 2005 ABC News profile on him notes that based on interviews with people from his hometown,

Speaker 35 quote, he is said to have been so rebellious that he was thrown out of school after the second grade and could not keep a job. So that's a different version of his background.
Sure, sure. Yeah.

Speaker 35 But probably either way,

Speaker 35 shit, shit was, yeah,

Speaker 35 he had to do some shit. He got off to some shit and did some shit.
Yeah, and he age of seven. Yeah, and he had basically no school and he never learns to read or write.

Speaker 35 That's the important thing here.

Speaker 35 Yeah,

Speaker 35 not a reader, this guy. So

Speaker 35 his biographers, though, claim that he worked many jobs as a well digger, as a bricklayer.

Speaker 35 And, you know, generally, they say that he spent his late childhood and early adolescence in hard manual labor.

Speaker 35 He never learned to read or write, but he did learn how to play pool. And this provided him with something of an escape from the dreary existence poverty had forced upon him.

Speaker 35 John's biographer claims that he was a brilliant natural clairvoyant who earned pocket money by actively prophesizing events at the pool hall.

Speaker 35 Yeah.

Speaker 35 This is very funny because she notes that, quote, after being given money, he would return to the pool hall. He is an excellent pool player to this day.

Speaker 35 And I can't prove what I'm going to say next in any way, but my suspicion is that there is a germ of truth to this, but that he's not clairvoyant.

Speaker 35 John just discovered he had a knack for pool hustling and various forms of cheating that required quick hands and charm.

Speaker 35 This is a guy who would go up to spend his life doing sleight of hand stuff to giant crowds.

Speaker 35 The fact that he's a pool hustler as a kid makes total sense. So I think that's what's actually going on on here: he's like,

Speaker 35 Yeah, he learns how to hustle at a pool hole. Well, it's also like you can

Speaker 35 the range of predictable items of things that could happen in a pool hall is like

Speaker 35 finite and like less than 30, I would say. I feel like you could just shoot shoot a lot of shots of the dark, and that shit's going to come true eventually, yeah, pretty quickly.

Speaker 35 Yeah, yeah, so yeah, he he spends a lot of time as a kid in a pool hall. He learns sleight of hand, he learns how to how to grift.

Speaker 35 And yeah,

Speaker 35 so so far, the biographical information that we've got from his biography by his follower Heather Cummings has been broadly reasonable.

Speaker 35 This changes with this next paragraph. Quote, he also remembers walking into the fields with the villagers and pointing to roots and plants that would heal their ailments.

Speaker 35 The first recorded occasion of Joao's paranormal abilities took place when he was nine years old while he was visiting family in the town of Novoponte with his mother.

Speaker 35 It was a beautiful, cloudless day, but Joao had a premonition that a huge storm was coming.

Speaker 35 He began pointing out houses, including the houses of his brother, and saying that they would be blown down or lose their roofs. He urged his mother to leave before the storm.

Speaker 35 Although she was not convinced, she humored her son and they sought refuge in a friend's home nearby.

Speaker 35 Exactly as he had predicted, the thunderstorm appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, and badly damaged or destroyed about 40 houses in a small town.

Speaker 35 And depending on where you find this story, he always claims a different number of houses were destroyed. So I don't know.
Yeah.

Speaker 35 So

Speaker 35 he predicts a storm. This is

Speaker 35 his first case of clairvoyance.

Speaker 35 But despite being clairvoyant and able to read storms in the sky, he found himself still forced to labor in order to get by. At age 16, he moved to his city, Campo Grande, to try and make a living.

Speaker 35 He was only successful in fits and starts, and before long, he found himself unemployed and living under a bridge at the edge of town.

Speaker 35 One day he headed to the water to bathe, and John claims as he approached the water, a beautiful woman called to him and invited him closer. They talked for hours.

Speaker 35 The next day he returned to the water to speak with her again, but he found a brilliant shaft of light in her place. He heard her calling his name, and so he approached.

Speaker 35 She told him to visit the Spiritist Center in Campo Grande, which he did. So

Speaker 35 that's his version of events. The spirit meets him and they talk for hours, and then she sends him to the Spiritist Center in town.

Speaker 35 So like,

Speaker 35 yeah, he arrives, and the director of the center, like, knows his name already and says they've been waiting for him. And then John immediately like collapses.
He like passes out.

Speaker 35 And when he returns to consciousness,

Speaker 35 there's this huge group of people standing around him. And they tell him that he has incorporated, which is the term they use for when you're taken over by a spirit, the entity King Solomon.

Speaker 35 And he cured 50 people while possessed by King Solomon.

Speaker 35 Which I remember King Solomon as the guy who cuts up babies, but I don't know.

Speaker 35 And as far as like the luck of the draw draw goes hey that's a good get good get yeah name oh yeah king solomon ks that's a big one yeah

Speaker 35 hey could have happened to anyone could have happened to anyone amazing could have happened to anyone i mean i i would love to i don't know not king solomon which king would i want to

Speaker 35 henry the eighth henry the eighth that's a good that's a bad i mean that's a bad king but that's a fun king to to incorporate to be or king leopold i could ride a tricycle take that's true yeah i guess uh

Speaker 35 i guess uh

Speaker 35 the old dude the old old dude from the bible he probably got up to some nebuchadneza oh nebuchadnezzar nep you mean like the the babylonian emperor yeah that's a good one right those guys those guys got up to some

Speaker 35 yeah oh man and it's so much more impressive to take on nebuchadnezzar that guy's got a way better name than solomon

Speaker 35 a little lame Yeah. Yeah.
So, yeah, obviously, this is all lies. The only truth here is probably that John's age 16 is about when John started fooling around with Spiritism.

Speaker 35 Unfortunately, I'm unaware of any serious journalism that exists to actually document

Speaker 35 what went down with John's early years in the religion.

Speaker 35 But he claims that the director of the center had to take him aside and explain to him that he'd been chosen by an entity of light known as King Solomon.

Speaker 35 This director told him to leave and come back at 2 p.m. the next day to keep healing people.
Since John was homeless, this guy invited him to stay the night at his house.

Speaker 35 John claims that this man's humble home and food were unthinkable luxuries for him, given the poverty he'd lived with his entire life. He was given his own room with an electric fan.

Speaker 35 So that's a big deal. Nice electric fan.
It is like so weird to think about like the band of grifters welcoming in a new grifter. I mean, this is in the retelling, welcoming in a new grifter.

Speaker 35 Like, what the fuck

Speaker 35 was actually happening?

Speaker 35 Yeah, and it's one of those things.

Speaker 35 Yeah, it's convenient that you know out in the at this period of time out in the middle of nowhere brazil um you know lifespans aren't enormous uh so you're you're really if you make it old enough you could just lie about what happened to you when you were a kid because

Speaker 35 right yeah right right right that makes sense that yeah the the earlier most people die the easier it is to be a grifter

Speaker 35 Yes. I mean, when everyone I go to went to high school with is dead, I'm going to have some stories I start telling.
I'll tell tell you that much. Yeah.
No corruption.

Speaker 35 Oh, I was healing the shit out of people in 11th grade.

Speaker 35 You want to take an ad, buddy?

Speaker 35 Yep. You know who else was healing a lot of people when I was in the 11th grade?

Speaker 35 Okay,

Speaker 35 so

Speaker 35 now let's talk about

Speaker 35 products. Nope, we did that.
Now we're back. Okay, so John of God, he meets this Spiritist church, and they tell him that King Solomon's taken over his brain.

Speaker 35 And he's like,

Speaker 35 that's good and normal.

Speaker 35 And yeah, so

Speaker 35 he winds up staying the night with the leader of the center.

Speaker 35 And he tries to explain to him that he's not a practicing medium and he doesn't know anything about medicine and he doesn't understand how he was healing all these people.

Speaker 35 He was actually terrified because he didn't know how to, he was expected to come back the next day and he didn't know how to do what was expected of him.

Speaker 35 But as soon as he gathered at the Spirit Ascent the next day, King Solomon took him over again and he kept healing more sick people.

Speaker 35 John claims this went on for months while the more experienced Spiritist practitioners educated him on the nature of the entities that increasingly took over his body.

Speaker 35 He became known as Medium John, and his new teachers said

Speaker 35 it is kind of funny. Medium John.
It's like the sequel to Big John that's not as good or rhythmic. Medium John.

Speaker 35 Just medium John.

Speaker 35 Every morning at the mine, you could see him arrive. He stood five foot eight and weighed 135.

Speaker 35 Kind of medium at the shoulders and medium at the hips. And everyone knew it was okay to give some lip to medium John.

Speaker 35 It's so, it is like so juvenile to find confusing medium with medium, but that's so funny to me. It's very funny.

Speaker 35 So

Speaker 35 his new teachers told him he needed to devote his whole life to healing other people.

Speaker 35 And this,

Speaker 35 his biographers claim, started a five or six year period of traveling throughout Brazil, healing the sick and the suffering. He became known as João Curador, or John the Healer.

Speaker 35 Through his biographers and in interviews, John always makes sure that people know that he is a healer, but he also at the same time always firmly rejects being called a healer.

Speaker 35 So he makes sure that people knows that like he, everyone started calling me John the Healer, but I'm not a healer. The entities that channel through my body are the ones doing the healing.

Speaker 35 I'm just a conduit. So it's very important to him that you believe both things.

Speaker 35 Yeah.

Speaker 35 So this has a nice side benefit of allowing him to argue that he isn't practicing medicine without a license, which is handy when you're practicing medicine without a license.

Speaker 35 I don't know if you've ever practiced medicine without a license,

Speaker 35 but you got to be careful with it. That is so he's shifting the blame to literal King Solomon, essentially.
Yeah, he's, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 35 If somebody dies while he's performing psychic surgery, it's the dead king's fault.

Speaker 35 That's a hell of a loophole. That's genius.
I mean, I am going to start blaming all of my mini crimes on King Solomon.

Speaker 35 I'm not even going to lie to you about that.

Speaker 35 That seems like a very good idea. Well, especially the baby chopping thing, because he's got

Speaker 35 previous MO on that. Yeah, I mean, yes, officer, I was going 135 miles an hour in a 55, but if I didn't, this fucking king ghost in my head was going to chop up some babies.
Like,

Speaker 35 do you want me to go a little fast or you want some chopped-up babies? That's all I got to ask you. Yeah.
Yeah. It's up to you.
Up to you. It's up to you.
Up to you, cop. Seems reasonable to me.

Speaker 35 You want me to heal you? Let me pull out some chicken gizzards and pretend to rip them from your chest.

Speaker 35 So his biographers next note that he did, that while he did his extraordinary work of healing, Medium John was persecuted by members of the medical and religious establishments.

Speaker 35 He claims that they were threatened by his presence and that he lost count of the number of times he was arrested for practicing medicine without a license.

Speaker 35 John traveled constantly, never more than a few steps ahead of the law. He finally got a break in 1962 when Brazil was thrown into turmoil by a violent coup.

Speaker 35 His biography says the country suffered a revolution and a military government came into power.

Speaker 35 The reality is that Brazil's democratically elected socialist president, João Gouler, was overthrown by a military coup backed by the U.S. government.

Speaker 35 A conservative military dictatorship would rule Brazil for the next 20-ish years.

Speaker 35 John's biography glosses over all of that, because the advent of a military dictatorship worked out really well for him.

Speaker 35 Medium John traveled to the capital, Brasilia, and offered his services as a tailor to the military. Quote from his biography.

Speaker 35 Because he was so young, he was not commissioned to create uniforms, but was given an opportunity to sew a consignment of work pants.

Speaker 35 His expertise impressed his new employers, and he was soon promoted to full-time tailor and assigned to make uniforms for the army.

Speaker 35 Medium Joao continued his healing work quietly on the side, but word of his gift soon spread throughout the barracks.

Speaker 35 One day he incorporated an entity who operated on the wounded leg of a doctor, which healed immediately.

Speaker 35 The doctor was enthralled with Medium Joao's gift, and from that day on he became the spiritual healer for the military and civil authorities.

Speaker 35 He was promoted to Master Taylor and became their protégé for nearly nine years.

Speaker 35 Consequently, he was protected from persecution during that time and traveled extensively throughout Brazil with the army. There's a lot that's interesting there.

Speaker 35 The most fascinating thing to me is that so the army comes to believe that this is a magical healer, and as a result, they promote him to Master Taylor, which is, this is an interesting choice.

Speaker 35 I mean, it's just like keep him in the ranks, I guess. Yeah, keep him in the ranks, keep a paycheck going to the guy while you dictatorship Brazil.
I'm not going to backseat dictatorship.

Speaker 35 There's a lot of bureaucracy. You can't just insert like witch doctor, surgeon general.
Yeah.

Speaker 35 That's like a year eight of the dictatorship thing at best. You know, you get a, oh my God, I want to be witch doctor surgeon general so bad.

Speaker 35 That's you just that sounds even better than Reverend Doctor, to be honest. You just have to, yeah, you have to work within the available structures until

Speaker 35 such time as you don't. Yeah.

Speaker 35 Yeah, I got really fucked up fighting those partisans the other night. I got a bullet in my arm.
I got to go to the master tailor to deal with this.

Speaker 35 Yeah.

Speaker 35 So

Speaker 35 John claims that the the experience of working as a protege, healer/slash tailor with the dictatorship, instilled in him a deep desire to become a successful businessman.

Speaker 35 His fawning biographers explain that he, quote, needed money-making expertise to support his spiritual purpose. This is so he doesn't sound greedy.

Speaker 35 Wonderfully, they claim John just happened to have a great head for business, and his financial success has allowed him to fund his healing mission, all without charging patients a dime.

Speaker 35 This is absolutely a lie, but incredulous white Americans bought it for years.

Speaker 35 So basically, like he claims that he became a great businessman, and that's how he's able to fund his free healing hospital. The reality is like literally the opposite.

Speaker 35 He makes a bunch of money healing people, and he used it to buy like ranches full of cattle and stuff.

Speaker 35 But whatever. Yeah.

Speaker 35 Now, from this point on, the story of Medium John has a decent amount of documentation, so we're going to depart from his terrible, terrible biography.

Speaker 35 But before we do, I want to turn to his biographers for an explanation of exactly who these entities that take over John are.

Speaker 35 They describe the entities as transcendent spirits who are, quote, able to use Medium Joao's body to produce cures by performing visible and invisible spiritual surgeries.

Speaker 35 Quote, Medium Joao can incorporate approximately 37 entities, but only one entity can be incorporated at a time.

Speaker 35 The specific entity may change, however, depending on the needs of an individual patient.

Speaker 35 In addition to the entity incorporated at any given time, there is a highly evolved group of thousands of spirits who actually work on a person while the incorporated entity oversees healing.

Speaker 35 This group is referred to as his phalange. One spirit might specialize in diabetes or heart problems, another in emotional afflictions.

Speaker 35 These entities serve humanity in the hopes of alleviating pain and suffering on the earthly plane. This service is part of their evolutionary process.
So he's a whole hospital of ghosts. Jesus Christ.

Speaker 35 Having like support staff in this like fake...

Speaker 35 like spiritual slave

Speaker 35 system.

Speaker 35 It's like, I mean, I guess it makes it sound more plausible on some level like oh how could you possibly do this no we need you know the help of thousands to to cure your fucking whatever oh yeah no i got nurses yeah is it ever like oh i'm sorry no the gaiku could help you he's out on vacation we just have like the dude who helps me cut people's eyes do you need an eye cut yeah Oh, that's the other side of it is if you were like, if I were designing my own version of some Kakamami bullshit, I feel like it would be, it would involve as little true body horror as possible like no no they people love that shit oh people love getting fucking cut into and blood and shit like if you really want to if you want to like if you want to get some cult shit going on you got to get gross with it man yeah it's part of it it's part of it but oh

Speaker 35 physicality yeah yeah yeah

Speaker 35 that's why you know not everyone's made to be a cult leader andrew i don't think i got what it takes anymore i i believe you could be a cult leader but you're

Speaker 35 it takes some sacrifice. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 35 I don't have the willingness to put in the reps to really get good. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot in common.
Being a cult leader has a lot in common with having great abs, right?

Speaker 35 They both take, you either have to be born with the right genes or you have to put in a lot of time on the bench. Yeah.
And that's not happening for me. Yeah, well, that's, that's, yeah.

Speaker 35 We'll make choices. Yeah, that's not happening yet.
I'll see. We'll see what

Speaker 35 life takes me. It would be cool to be able to incorporate the spirit that could just give you incredible abs.

Speaker 35 One of them has to know how to do abs.

Speaker 35 Okay.

Speaker 35 So John claims that after a few years of making money and getting in good with the brutal dictatorship, his entities told him it was crucial he expand his work and heal more people.

Speaker 35 He wound up being guided to the town of Abadiana in Goyas.

Speaker 35 He first arrived there in 1978 and began his practice by sitting in a chair outside in the middle of the main road and greeting travelers who showed signs of illnesses.

Speaker 35 Through him, the entities would heal these people, and over time, the numbers increased from dozens to hundreds to thousands per day.

Speaker 35 John's incredible healings eventually earned him the loyalty of a mysterious benefactor, who purchased him a plot of land and paid to build a healing center, Casa de Dom Ignacio de Loyola.

Speaker 35 This spiritual hospital, as his followers would come to describe it, eventually received more than 10,000 visitors per month.

Speaker 35 Since Aberiana has only about 19,000 residents, the huge streams of sick and dying people represented a big infusion into the local economy.

Speaker 35 So like, half the population of the city is coming in every week just to see this guy. Oh,

Speaker 35 yeah.

Speaker 35 That's, I mean, I guess you need like desperation tourism sometimes, but Jesus Christ, that's

Speaker 35 that is actually Jesus Christ's business model, also. So, you know what? Maybe, maybe it's just a good one.

Speaker 35 Yeah, if Jesus Christ had benefited from like roadside billboards, I don't think they ever would have gotten to kill him. He would have made too much money, but

Speaker 35 tragic,

Speaker 35 yeah, render into Caesar about 38% and you're fine.

Speaker 35 Yeah, honestly, yeah. So

Speaker 35 this was often glossed over by the positive coverage of John of God, but the extent to which he became an industry for the people who lived around him can't be exaggerated.

Speaker 35 I'm in a quote now from an O magazine profile by Susan Casey, just a terrible article from 2010 that nonetheless revealed some important details about the economic impact of this guru on the small town of Abedianya.

Speaker 35 Quote, several businesses had displays of white clothing. The CASA requests that only white be worn.
This makes it easier, apparently, for a person's aura to be seen.

Speaker 35 There were a number of visividly painted small hotels lined up side by side: lilac purple, canary yellow, lime green.

Speaker 35 One of them, a coral-colored one-story building, opened up to the street, and inside I could see a John of God video playing on a large screen.

Speaker 35 An audience of about 20 people sat in straight-back chairs and watched him cut into a man's chest with what looked like a rusty paring knife.

Speaker 35 The man's eyes were closed, and he was peaceful and still as rivulets of blood ran down his white shirt. shirt.

Speaker 35 Oh,

Speaker 35 yeah, that's awesome. That sounds like the kind of charming small Brazilian town I want to vacation in.
Just have a couple of fucking mojitos and watch some guy commit surgery on people. Hell yeah.

Speaker 35 Yeah. This is like some midsummer shit.
This is like insanity.

Speaker 35 Yeah, imagine like you're just backpacking through Brazil and wind up here on accident. And it's like, oh no.

Speaker 35 Yeah.

Speaker 35 I have erred. I did not want to be here.

Speaker 35 Yeah.

Speaker 35 Holy shit. So John established a cattle ranch nearby, and by the early 2000s, he was known to spend most of his week there running his various businesses.

Speaker 35 He was able to do this because, increasingly, throughout the 90s and early 2000s, a string of foreigners, generally American women, moved in and dedicated themselves to helping his mission.

Speaker 35 This includes the Americans who wrote his biography. John of God's practice involved a series of mass meetings where sick folks would basically fill up rooms and wait to be seen by the medium.

Speaker 35 He'd consult with his entities and then diagnose their problem. I'm going to quote now from a write-up in the Montreal Gazette.
Quote: Once the diagnosis has been made, the healing procedure begins.

Speaker 35 It may be visible or invisible spiritual surgery. If the patient chooses invisible, they are directed to a room to meditate while the spirits do their work.

Speaker 35 Visible surgery can involve sticking a surgical clamp up the patient's nose. It looks very impressive, but it is nothing but an old carney trick, usually performed with a long nail and a hammer.

Speaker 35 Any anatomical text will reveal that there is a roughly four-inch-long passage up the nasal cavity that is quite ready to accommodate a foreign object without any harm.

Speaker 35 John maintains that, yeah, that's that's a good trick. Yeah, he's doing the nails up the nose thing, but he's calling it brain surgery.
Classic, yeah, classic.

Speaker 35 John maintains that the success of his treatment hinges on the patient abstaining from drinking alcohol, eating pork, and having sex for 40 days after the treatment.

Speaker 35 This can provide for a convenient out in case no miracle occurs. Patients can be healed even if they are unable to travel to Brazil.

Speaker 35 All that is needed is a surrogate willing to undergo the spiritual surgery. So that's awesome.
That's a good grift. Oh, God.

Speaker 35 Yeah.

Speaker 35 Oh, well, I mean, I guess it's like, if you're going to be a main grifter, at least bring up your little grifty town around you. Yeah.

Speaker 35 Yeah, I guess. Yeah.
I mean, that's obviously the safest thing, right? Because then they'll have a vested financial interest in protecting you. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I guess that is what a cult is.

Speaker 35 Yeah, that's basically, I mean, yeah, more.

Speaker 35 I mean, this is a little more complicated than just a cult because there's a cult, but then there's also the town who, like, probably a lot of the townsfolk knew that this was bullshit, but they also know there's a fuckload of money in this shit.

Speaker 35 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 35 Yeah. Yeah.
Make everyone invested in you. And yeah, one way or the other, it's got leverage.
It's essentially the same way that, like, the pot industry works in large amounts of the United States.

Speaker 35 Or, yeah, like any drug, illegal drug business works, where it's like, well, this is where the money is here. So

Speaker 35 nobody's going to start shit. Yeah.

Speaker 35 Don't snitch. This is this is the fucking godfather.
Don't snitch. This is good for all of us.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
That's kind of what's going on here.

Speaker 35 Um, except for instead of good, honest marijuana, it's a guy cutting people's faces and shoving things up their noses. And he actually hates marijuana.
Uh, he was

Speaker 35 famous for saying that, like, if you smoked pot, you had to, like, detox for a whole year before he could heal you.

Speaker 35 The entities don't like weed. Yeah, that

Speaker 35 can't be true, but fair enough, entities. Yeah,

Speaker 35 if there are ghostly entities flying around, there's no way those ghostly entities don't like some fucking dank. Like, come on.

Speaker 35 They love weed. So that last write-up I read you from the Montreal Gazette was obviously written by a credible journalist who was as critical of, who was very critical of John F.
God.

Speaker 35 But I want to read another example,

Speaker 35 another person writing about what his healing sessions look like who actually believed in him and was a member of his cult.

Speaker 35 So here's his biographer, Heather Cummings, recalling one of his healing sessions. Quote:

Speaker 35 The entity, Dr. Jose Valdovino, called for his, and that's the guy he's channeling, is this Dr.
Jose Valdovino, called for his instruments again.

Speaker 35 I opened the special drawer and carefully removed the tray and took the instrument tray to him. He chose a paring knife, a regular kitchen serrated edged knife.

Speaker 35 He passed his hand over the man's eye and told him to relax. He opened the eye wide and pressed down hard and scraped.
See, here it is, he said, as he wiped the knife on the man's shirt.

Speaker 35 I could see a minute dark sliver.

Speaker 35 I know beyond a doubt after seeing so many of these operations that the sliver was not a topical foreign object being removed, but rather something from deep inside that only the entities can see.

Speaker 35 The entity looks into the eye as a representation of the whole body system, not limited to the physical eye.

Speaker 35 I understand this is a symbolic removal on the physical level, but originating from many levels and involving many different

Speaker 35 organs. The son is healed.
You can take him to the infirmary, he said, as he wrote the post-op prescription. So

Speaker 35 that's cool.

Speaker 35 Shit. That's an awesome gig, man.

Speaker 35 That is, I mean, I don't, I, like, I don't wear contacts because I can't touch my eye, I think. Oh, I'll heal you, man.

Speaker 35 Yeah.

Speaker 35 Come over to my house. I'll whip out a big old rusty machete and I'll carve the ghosts out of your eye, man.
It's fine.

Speaker 35 This is where I'm taking machetes in next.

Speaker 35 Damn. God,

Speaker 35 that's an easy grist.

Speaker 35 just start slashing people's fucking faces it's fine holy shit oh man and then yeah can you imagine the first time you try this shit like this will work there's a lot of blind people who are like before he learned how to scrape people's eyes without blinding them like he uh

Speaker 35 there's like a whole village full of his uh his his first draft healings yeah jesus christ i guess some of those people are dead huh yeah i mean you know the good thing is, if you're actually like, if you're doing this kind of grift, I think you definitely want to start out only trying to heal people with serious terminal illnesses like cancer, because then once you fuck up, they're not around very long, right?

Speaker 35 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's really key.

Speaker 35 Yeah, a lot of good advice on how to start a medical grift in this episode. So

Speaker 35 take notes, when society collapses, some of you are going to do very well remembering this stuff.

Speaker 35 So, yeah, like as that story noted, John of God would write prescriptions to his patients, and all of these prescriptions were for a specific herbal pill mixture sold in John of God's own pharmacy.

Speaker 35 The pills were mostly passion flour, and by some accounts, they've netted John more than $10 million a year.

Speaker 35 He also gets a cut of the sales of the white clothes, the hotel fees, the sales of blessed water, and the sales of healing crystals, which he prescribes to his followers.

Speaker 35 So you can see why no one in Abadeana had any interest in questioning whether or not John of God was legit.

Speaker 35 He did face occasional challenges from members of the Brazilian government, particularly folks in the medical establishment who were leery of his psychic surgery.

Speaker 35 But this sort of woo is extremely popular in Brazil, particularly among rural voters, and John of God was both rich and connected, so it is not surprising that very little was ever done.

Speaker 35 What's more surprising is the degree to which foreign journalists bought into his shtick. In 2005, ABC News sent a small team to Abadiana to meet John of God.

Speaker 35 They put together a documentary basically posing the question of whether or not he was a healer or a bullshit artist. And they kind of landed on healer.

Speaker 35 Like ABC News did a pretty shitty job of journalism here. And I'm going to quote from this write-up in the Montreal Gazette.

Speaker 35 Quote, In an attempt to provide a critical view of John's antics, the producers invited two experts, cardiac surgeon Mehmet Oz and James Randy, the world's leading investigator of paranormal phenomena.

Speaker 35 Oz was probably chosen because he was a proponent of various alternative therapies, such as therapeutic touch and refluxology, and would be likely to be somewhat sympathetic to faith healing and perhaps add an air of legitimacy.

Speaker 35 Randy was invited as the token skeptic.

Speaker 35 Oz appeared repeatedly in the hour-long show basically echoing the refrain that science doesn't have all the answers and all other forms of healing need consideration.

Speaker 35 Science of course doesn't claim to have all the answers, but it does look for evidence before jumping on a bandwagon.

Speaker 35 Randy, who could have provided evidence for methods of trickery and for psychological manipulation, was given a total of 19 seconds on the show after being interviewed for hours. Why?

Speaker 35 Because the possibility that cancer can be healed by penetrating the nose with surgical forceps by a healer chosen by God makes for better television than declaring him to be a self-delusional simpleton or a calculating fraud artist.

Speaker 35 So, oh,

Speaker 35 I mean, this has to also be like something like the underlying, like,

Speaker 35 you know,

Speaker 35 faith in Christianity. Like, you know, it's like, oh, you gotta, you know, can't question religion, can't question religion takes you all the way to, well, this could be real.

Speaker 35 This clearly fake shit could be real. It's got to be real.
What else can it be?

Speaker 35 It's wild, man.

Speaker 35 And Dr. Oz is a big part of justifying this guy.
Like, you can't overstate how much Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz played a role in giving this guy legitimacy because his job for his whole career, pretty much, has been to be a real doctor who will get up and say that nonsense makes sense, that nonsense medical treatments are good for you.

Speaker 35 I mean, I think it's like critical to point out that like physicians are not fucking scientists. Like you can be a doctor.
Ben Carson believes in fucking, you know, doesn't believe in evolution.

Speaker 35 Like doctors are just like high-stakes technicians. Yeah.
And

Speaker 35 engineers are regularly

Speaker 35 engineers and doctors actually are not irregularly like part of like terrorist moves. Like Al-Qaeda had a bunch of engineers and doctors at it.

Speaker 35 Because like

Speaker 35 they, you know, if you've got that kind of intelligence, like Ben Carson is a great brain surgeon and is also able to convince himself that the world is 6,000 years old.

Speaker 35 Like the kind of brains that these people have don't, you know, there's a lot of very smart doctors, obviously, too, but you can be a doctor and very dumb.

Speaker 35 Yeah. Yeah.
And you can be a doctor. But I don't think Dr.
Oz is dumb. I actually don't think that's, I think Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz is a very intelligent grifter who's made millions of dollars causing untold harm to the world and to our shared understanding of science. God, I hope that Dr.
Oz ad comes on during this episode.

Speaker 35 He's a piece of shit and a monster.

Speaker 35 I think an ad for Dr. Oz comes on right now.

Speaker 35 I think it's just like worth pointing out that the TEM in STEM,

Speaker 35 none of those things are indicative of actual knowledge necessarily. No, and this is part of why

Speaker 35 people talk about like conservatives in particular like talk a lot of shit about the liberal arts and like philosophy and all this stuff. And it's like, no, no, no.

Speaker 35 The reason why engineers and doctors should have some grounding in all that education is to stop Dr. Oz's from coming about.

Speaker 35 It's to give people

Speaker 35 a broader understanding than just like if you get really good at one incredibly narrow technical thing,

Speaker 35 you can convince yourself to believe all sorts of stupid bullshit because you're a very smart person who doesn't have a wide-ranging education.

Speaker 35 And it's very easy for those sorts of people to convince themselves of the dumbest things in the world. Yeah.
And who have like, who are highly rewarded for it.

Speaker 35 So like, yeah, you watch like any Silicon Valley person make a pronunciation on anything outside of business. And it's like, oh, you are, you are less educated than the average person.
You are

Speaker 35 bad at reasoning.

Speaker 35 Yeah.

Speaker 35 And when a bunch of these people who are really good at one incredibly narrow task wind up responsible for a wide range of things, you have stuff like a viral epidemic get wildly out of hand and kill tens of thousands of people.

Speaker 35 Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Hypothetically.
Hypothetically. Yeah.
And Dr. Oz is, of course, a part of that and was like urging people to take bullshit medical treatments during the coronavirus epidemic because

Speaker 35 he's history's greatest monster.

Speaker 35 You know, he was also cited repeatedly in that 2010 O magazine article because, of course, Oprah gave Mehmet Oz life and nursed him at her metaphorical breast of publicity.

Speaker 35 And I'm going to quote from that next. So this is the write-up in O magazine that really put John of God on the map.

Speaker 35 Quote: Five years ago, Oz had participated in a prime-time live segment focusing on John of God. He examined hours of film footage from the entity's healings.

Speaker 35 He'd looked at scans and biopsy reports, and there were results he couldn't explain. The shrinkage of an aggressive tumor, for instance.

Speaker 35 This guy has a glioblastoma, which is a very deadly brain tumor, Oz recalled. It was grade four.
They biopsied it and proved it.

Speaker 35 As an added credential, the biopsy was done at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, a prominent hospital.

Speaker 35 I took those films down to my radiologist, along with a new set of films the patient had taken after his visit to John of God, which showed the tumor had calcified and essentially died.

Speaker 35 Now, I don't know Dr. Oz's radiologist, but I do know that Dr.
Oz himself is a famous charlatan and a liar.

Speaker 35 I can't speak to this specific case, but it's worth noting that no other doctors got to look at this information.

Speaker 35 I can, however, speak about other cancers that John of God claimed falsely to have cured. In 2005, South African singer Leah Melman refused breast cancer surgery to be treated by John of God.

Speaker 35 She claimed to have been cured by him and showed up on Oprah Winfrey's show to tell everyone the good news about how Brazil's miracle healer had had cured her untreatable cancer, which actually was treatable that she just chose not to get treated.

Speaker 35 She died of her untreated cancer two years after her Oprah appearance in 2012. Oprah did not post a retraction based on any of this, of course.

Speaker 35 Some of this is probably due to the fact that there were many, many other grateful patients, all too eager to come forward and share their own stories of miraculous healing.

Speaker 35 That 2010 article by Susan Casey included the stories of several charismatic foreigners who claimed to have been cured by John and now worked for him or made money taking groups to be healed by him.

Speaker 35 I'm going to read one example. This is a quote from that O magazine article, which

Speaker 35 you can only find it on the Wayback Machine because once this guy got accused of rape by literally hundreds of people,

Speaker 35 opro poll the article. But

Speaker 35 I found it on the Wayback Machine. And if you want to be really angry at an unspeakably shitty journalist, and Susan Casey is one of the very worst who's ever, ever done the job.

Speaker 35 Read that article, because it will make you want to punch holes in your wall. So I'm going to read a quote from it now, so get your whole punch in hands ready.

Speaker 35 Over a good Chilean Red, Edwine, an ordained minister, motivational speaker, and author of The Four Spiritual Laws of Prosperity, recounted the story of her brain aneurysm, deemed inoperable by five neurosurgeons.

Speaker 35 Get your affairs in order, she remembers being told, and try not to sneeze. That's how fragile I was, she said.
So I did it. I went out and got my living will, my durable power of attorney.

Speaker 35 But then I realized, I'm not ready to go just yet. She laughed at the memory.
That's all it is now.

Speaker 35 After her dire diagnosis, at the urging of her prayer group, all of whom say they received the same vision of John of God curing her, Edwin traveled to the Casa.

Speaker 35 I was nervous and I was skeptical, she said. But what did I have to lose?

Speaker 35 Almost immediately, the entity performed invisible surgery on her, a 40-minute process that involves sitting in a group meditation with her right hand over her heart.

Speaker 35 Nobody touched her, but Edwin remembers, I could feel things moving around in my head. It didn't hurt, but it was different.

Speaker 35 Afterwards, she collapsed in exhaustion for 24 hours. Days later, she was told by her guide the stitches

Speaker 35 would be removed. That night, I could feel ping, ping, ping, like stitches being pulled out.
Eventually, a CT scan revealed the truth. Her aneurysm was gone.

Speaker 35 I'm so grateful, she said, nodding toward the heavens.

Speaker 35 Since then, she's been back to the Casa once at Christmas, and now she was headed there for a third time, bringing a group of 20 people who also sought healing.

Speaker 35 So this is the level of journalistic rigor that we're getting in this article.

Speaker 35 The magazine, everybody. The mention of the wine is particularly choice.
Oh, it's got to be

Speaker 35 revolting. Yeah, Oprah magazine was definitely like,

Speaker 35 yeah,

Speaker 35 it was entirely geared at getting wine moms to believe spiritual nonsense and not get their cancer treated.

Speaker 35 Jesus Christ. I mean, Robert, you want to take an ad break real quick? Yeah, you know what else doesn't care if wine moms get cancer treatment?

Speaker 35 The products and services that support this podcast.

Speaker 35 They don't give a good goddamn. Great.
And

Speaker 35 that's the behind the bastards guarantee.

Speaker 35 We're back. Oh, my gosh.
What a great.

Speaker 35 I don't know.

Speaker 35 Whatever this is.

Speaker 35 What a great

Speaker 35 sorry. John of God is a monster and a rapist, and we will only hear more about the horrible things that he's done.

Speaker 35 But I can't have the same kind of hatred for him that I can for these fucking O magazine grifters and Dr. Oz.
And I don't know why.

Speaker 35 I think it's because on like a on like a global level, the amount of harm that these people do is so much higher. And it's also so much like.

Speaker 35 This is going to sound weird, but like the horrible physical crimes that John of God committed, like he just went out there and committed with his own body.

Speaker 35 And there's a level of like commitment to evil that's necessary. Whereas Dr.
Oz and Oprah just like sit in front of a camera and say bullshit that harms so many more people.

Speaker 35 Well, at the same time, they're perfectly friendly and nice people. And so like nobody hates them and they never go to prison.
And

Speaker 35 like, I'm not going to say they're worse than a rapist, but yeah, in a way, they do more damage on a broad scale, right?

Speaker 35 Like,

Speaker 35 yeah,

Speaker 35 it's not good. Well, it's, it's like, sort of like, it's like,

Speaker 35 it's like whatever the, the PR version of money laundering is. They, they clean, they clean it.
They're the cleaners. Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. That's exactly right.

Speaker 35 They're, they're like money launderers for like dangerous bullshit that gets people killed and molested and stuff.

Speaker 35 And they, they, they are responsible in this case for sending thousands of potential victims to this guy who, again, turns out to rape hundreds of people. And like they're being sent there by Oprah.

Speaker 35 But all she gets is traffic for it and more money. And everybody loves Oprah.
And if she ran for president, she would absolutely win.

Speaker 35 And it's fine. And it's just fine because she's a friendly, nice person.

Speaker 35 I'm sure if I got to hang out with Oprah, I would enjoy her company.

Speaker 35 And I would forget momentarily the horrors that her brand has brought into the world. And that's very frustrating to think about.

Speaker 35 Although, to be fair, actually, if she were to graduate to the level of American president,

Speaker 35 she would once again be in company where, probably relatively speaking, her hands are relatively clean.

Speaker 35 And like, I hate to say it, but I suspect she would not be the worst president of my lifetime. Oh, my God.
She might be the best. Yeah.

Speaker 35 It's entirely possible. Yeah.

Speaker 35 Both things are true. You can be the friendly face of a lot of horror and still be the best president.
Yeah, I would still vote for her over the current guy or even Joe Biden, to be honest.

Speaker 35 here we go. Like, it's fucking wild.
This is so dumb, we shouldn't have presidents or billionaires like Oprah, but whatever.

Speaker 35 Anyway, that O magazine article has been scrubbed from the internet because of all the rapes and stuff.

Speaker 35 But

Speaker 35 yeah, it's I almost recommend finding it and reading it just to get a crash course in how to write a really irresponsible article about a cult leader.

Speaker 35 Susan Casey should be in some sort of journalist prison, but instead she went from being Oprah's editor-in-chief to working as the creative director for outside magazine the editor of sports illustrated women and the author of a ridiculous sounding book on dolphins and i am sure that i have ruined any chance of publishing an outside magazine now which bums me out because

Speaker 35 i would much rather do that than write about nazis but i don't like susan casey and i think she's very irresponsible yeah she's the journalistic equivalent of like

Speaker 35 like taking your nine-year-old out shooting for the first time and just getting blackout drunk first.

Speaker 35 I mean, is it like,

Speaker 35 cause it's like, so they, they, generally, there's this like a vested interest in promoting like spirituality and

Speaker 35 Christianity on some level.

Speaker 35 And like, cause it's like when you, when you encounter these people, are you not at any point like, hey, this seems fucked up. I, it's so wild to me that you don't, that they don't have that instinct.

Speaker 35 You know, the key is that all of the people surrounding John of God, because you don't spend much time with him.

Speaker 35 You spend a lot of time around these like, and they're mostly like white American ladies who

Speaker 35 love his shit. And they're all the same kind of, they're all Gwyneth Paltrow kind of people.
And they're all

Speaker 35 like, like, well-heeled and friendly and charming.

Speaker 35 And they know how to speak to a specific segment of the population. And those people find them trustworthy.

Speaker 35 Yeah.

Speaker 35 So Susan felt the need to visit John of God, the author of that O magazine article, so she could write a terrible article. But But

Speaker 35 the ailment that sent her there was the fact that her father had tragically died very young, and the resultant grief had nearly broken her.

Speaker 35 She went to Brazil for healing, and she basically claims that John of God put her into a trance during one of his mass healing sessions, and she was able to visualize her father in paradise.

Speaker 35 Knowing that he was happy and off living his eternal life allowed her to move on. And that's all fine.

Speaker 35 Like, seriously, grief is the worst thing ever, and there are way worse ways of coping with it than paying a guru to help you to hallucinate heaven or whatever. Do what you got to do to get by.

Speaker 35 I'm not going

Speaker 35 x-rays those we believe in but belief without documentation something we perceive with one one of our five senses is considered without with one of our five senses is considered blind faith, sweet, but we don't really trust it.

Speaker 35 So she's saying that like it's it's silly to believe in radio waves, but not the power of ghosts to heal people's cancer.

Speaker 35 The hand waving of naked eye into evidence is fucking revolting. She is hand waving so hard it could power a fucking windmill farm.
Like, Jesus.

Speaker 35 So she actually makes the argument in that article that it's unreasonable for us to reject the reality of John of God's powers just because there's no proof behind them.

Speaker 35 This is reinforced by something she writes about her arrival in the hotel at Abadiana. Quote, as I hoisted my luggage up to the second floor, a small sign of the wall caught my attention.

Speaker 35 Don't believe everything you think, it advised. Which is like, that's kind of gaslighting, right? Like,

Speaker 35 it's like gaslighting via decoration.

Speaker 35 That's a yeah, that is exactly, that is what abusers say. That's fucking insane.
Yeah. Holy shit.
In this same uncredulous way, she writes about the entities that John of God channels.

Speaker 35 Quote: If you spend time at Abadianya, you will hear the phrase the entities over and over again, sometimes plural and sometimes singular, and you will come to use it yourself as if it were a completely ordinary thing to say.

Speaker 35 What it actually means, however, is so extraordinary that it defies our sense of what is logical or even possible in this world.

Speaker 35 The healing entities who work through John of God are the spirits of deceased doctors, surgeons, masters, and saints. Heather's website explains matter-of-factly.

Speaker 35 They use medium Joao's body, channeling their power through him. Sometimes the spirits show up anonymously, but there are several who make regular appearances.
They include Dr.

Speaker 35 Augusto D'Almieda, a surgeon and army man with a serious and efficient manner, Dr.

Speaker 35 Oswaldo Cruz, whose specialties were infectious diseases and bacteriology, Saint Francis Xavier, co-founder of the Jesuit Order, along with Casa's patron, Saint Ignatius of Loyola, a priest and nobleman from the 16th century.

Speaker 35 Despite the presence of saints, Medium Joao, born a Catholic, makes it clear that Casa is not a church but rather a spiritual hospital. My mission has nothing to do with religion, he says.

Speaker 35 So,

Speaker 35 oh, have these,

Speaker 35 have these guys ever been like sued by the estates of these people? This feels a little bit like Mormons like

Speaker 35 baptizing people in

Speaker 35 like post-mortem.

Speaker 35 Most of the poor people who come to John of God are too poor to sue if their serious diseases don't get cured. And most of the rich people aren't actually coming there for serious diseases.

Speaker 35 They're coming there for things like, like Susan has, where they're sad, you know? Yeah. That's a lot of those patients.
Sorry, I meant the estates of these spirits, of the

Speaker 35 man. Yeah, that would be fun to try to sue someone for that.
I don't know that there's any legal precedent.

Speaker 35 I think it's really funny that you're like talking about like, okay, well, we've got this infectious disease doctor, but actually he's calling it a second opinion from the 16th century noble.

Speaker 35 Yeah, exactly. It's like, hey, my grandpa, you know,

Speaker 35 admittedly, my Nazi grandpa probably wouldn't have supported this. I guess it's not the best court case, but,

Speaker 35 you know. Yeah.

Speaker 35 Oh, boy. Susan goes on to write, quote, at the CASA, skeptics are as welcome as believers.
I had already noticed that skeptics didn't tend to stay that way.

Speaker 35 Many harumphing empirical scientists had become impassioned John of God advocates after visiting and witnessing him in action.

Speaker 35 She doesn't go on to quote any of these scientists or give any evidence of this. She just like says it

Speaker 35 because this is again a perfect piece of journalism. At one point, Susan attends a healing and says that John of God called for doctors in the audience to come forward.

Speaker 35 In her recitation of events, these learned men were all bowled over by John's inexplicable healing abilities.

Speaker 35 As far as I can tell, Susan took no action to determine if any of these men were actual doctors.

Speaker 35 A real journalist, Michael Usher, did report critically on John of God in 2014 for 60 minutes, and I want to compare how she and Michael both wrote about the medium's eye scraping surgery.

Speaker 35 Quote,

Speaker 35 and this is Susan, from my vantage point, only ten feet away. The change in his body and demeanor was easily visible.
Now his eyes were more intense and they flashed noticeably darker.

Speaker 35 His gait became stiffer, his movements more deliberate. He turned to the three women standing against the wall, took the one closest to him by the hand, and gently sat her in a wheelchair.

Speaker 35 Her eyes fluttered wide as she meditated.

Speaker 35 Reaching to the tray, he selected a short knife with a wooden handle, a cheap-looking type that you might use to pair an apple, and he held it up to the room, making sure that everyone saw its sharp blade.

Speaker 35 He tipped her head backward, running his hand across her face, and he opened her left eye, holding the eyelid wide.

Speaker 35 Then he began to scrape the knife across her eyeball, back and forth with visible pressure. Unbelievably, the woman sat absolutely still, without flinching or recoiling.

Speaker 35 I had a hard time watching this, believing as I do that the words knife and eyeball should never appear in the same sentence.

Speaker 35 After what seemed like an eternity devoid of trauma, he put down the knife. The orderly took the wheelchair and steered it into the infirmary.

Speaker 35 As she had the entire time, the woman appeared to be napping. How on earth could a knife cross your eyeball and not hurt?

Speaker 35 Later, I would interview another recipient of this treatment, Connie Price62 from Jackson, Michigan. There was no pain whatsoever, she said of the five-minute scraping.

Speaker 35 I could feel the energy coming through him. I remember the heat pouring through that man's body.
Price found the treatment beneficial. I can see a lot better now.

Speaker 35 So you'll notice the only evidence of efficacy of healing is they didn't look to be in pain when this guy was rubbing a knife on their eye.

Speaker 35 And they said, one of them said afterwards, I can see better now. There's no, again, that's not evidence.
That's an anecdote. And that's not an anecdote based on like actually testing her eyesight.

Speaker 35 Is that, and also it's like, aren't there, isn't the whole thing? That's like,

Speaker 35 there aren't, are there nerves on your eyeball? Because that's how they do like basic, right? Yep.

Speaker 35 It's actually really easy to, it's the same thing with like shot. It's actually very easy to rub a knife and even cut a little bit on an eyeball without somebody being in horrible pain.

Speaker 35 Right.

Speaker 35 And, you know, even when you actually are cutting into people's chest, like, it's easy for people to not feel pain.

Speaker 35 Like, again, people who, like, there are people who, like, do cutting and stuff, or who will, like, like, I have friends who, like, will suspend themselves from the fucking

Speaker 35 things in the roof of a building with like hooks in their back. And

Speaker 35 like, it feels good to them. Like, there's like a release of endorphins.

Speaker 35 Like, there's pain too, but, like, they're not, like, screaming in agony the whole time, even though you would think they would be.

Speaker 35 Like,

Speaker 35 there's, yeah, exactly. Like,

Speaker 35 the fact that these people don't report pain or anything isn't weird and is part of like a long-documented history of people experiencing temporary relief from faith healing and stuff like that.

Speaker 35 There's nothing mysterious about it.

Speaker 35 Um, for decades, Pentecostal revivalist preachers have done things like pray over people with injured legs and then have them discard their crutches and dance around.

Speaker 35 And the explanation for how this works is the same as the explanation for why, if you throw your back out, you might find yourself forgetting the pain during a moment of extreme danger or extreme excitement.

Speaker 35 Like, it's just

Speaker 35 sometimes our brains override our experience of pain. It happens.
It's a thing that people do.

Speaker 35 It's like those stories of women lifting cars off their babies. So,

Speaker 35 yeah, that's how Susan Casey uncritically reports on a healing session. Here's how a real journalist, Michael Usher, reports on a pretty much identical healing session.
John of God is not a surgeon.

Speaker 35 He is not a trained doctor, yet he is presented with a tray of medical instruments, scalpels, and all sorts of scissors. He takes a scalpel and scrapes eyes.

Speaker 35 He sticks knives and scalpels of some sort down the back of people's throats. And he claims he is getting to tumors.
He claims he is getting to the root of people's illnesses.

Speaker 35 He claims he is getting to what makes people ill or sick. None of it is done with an anesthetic, and you don't even know if what he's using is sterile.

Speaker 35 Yeah.

Speaker 35 Yeah.

Speaker 35 Yeah. That feels about right.

Speaker 35 A large part of why John of God's magic seems to work is the fact that he performs it all in public, among and in front of a large and enthusiastic crowd of true believers, many of whom also happen to be desperately ill.

Speaker 35 John tells them that they can all help fuel his work and heal themselves by sitting in the current and basically meditating for hours while he does his thing.

Speaker 35 As Susan Casey writes, On any given day, maybe 400 people form the current, spelunking so deeply into their interior realms that they might well be asleep or anesthetized.

Speaker 35 While doing so, they refrain from opening their eyes or crossing their arms or legs. These things, they are told, cut off the flow of energy as surely as would kinking a hose.

Speaker 35 So

Speaker 35 this is.

Speaker 35 At least she said they were told in that one. Yeah.

Speaker 35 If I'm throwing a lot of shade on Susan Casey for her bad article here, it's because her choice to platform John of God with no critical thinking or even an attempted examination brought his line of bullshit to the eyes and ears of millions of vulnerable people.

Speaker 35 Oprah Winfrey had her on her show in 2010, and one of the millions of women who watched that episode was a Dutch choreographer named Zahira

Speaker 35 Leinkke Maus.

Speaker 35 She suffered from sexual trauma, and Winfrey's episode, Do You Believe in Miracles, convinced her that Medium John could heal her.

Speaker 35 She waited in line twice to receive his healing after traveling to Brazil. On her first visit, he prescribed her some of his herb pills.

Speaker 35 When those didn't do the trick, she went back and he offered her a spiritual cleansing in a rare private session.

Speaker 35 From the Washington Post, quote, she waited until everyone in line had their turns until finally she was alone, and John of God invited her into his office and then into his bathroom.

Speaker 35 That's where Moe says he raped her, all while leading her to believe it was part of her healing. Now, Moz was one of hundreds and perhaps thousands of rape victims of John of God.

Speaker 35 And I want to end on this note to get to the point of what's really happened here, which is that an American industry based on uncritically looking at spiritual healers funneled victims into this guy's hands and allowed him to achieve a level of influence and

Speaker 35 basically like built a spider web for this fucking spider of a man.

Speaker 35 So we're going to continue the story of John of God in part two, but right now we're going to continue the story of Andrew T of God's

Speaker 35 pluggables.

Speaker 35 Oh, shit.

Speaker 35 You know, just go to the Yo's This Racist podcast.

Speaker 35 I met Andrew T. His last name is spelled T I everywhere.

Speaker 35 Yeah, that's it.

Speaker 35 That is it. Well, I'm Robert Evans.
You can find me on the internet at findthebastards.com. You can find me on Twitter at iWriteOK.

Speaker 35 And if you want, want, I will just sort of rub a machete all over your eyes. It's going to cost you, I don't know, let's say I don't take any money, but we do ask for $3,000 donations to

Speaker 35 our medical center. So give me $3,000 and

Speaker 35 I'll rub a machete on whatever part of your body you want. That's the

Speaker 35 guarantee. That is a guarantee.
Absolute guarantee.

Speaker 35 I also have a podcast called The Women's War. It's upbeat.
It tells you about

Speaker 35 how to

Speaker 35 make things that don't suck out of your society when it sucks. So maybe listen to that too.
And I don't know, go in Christ and cut up people's eyes.

Speaker 35 Yep.

Speaker 35 That's the podcast.

Speaker 35 Yeah, it is. Dope.
That's part one of the podcast. Okay.

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Speaker 35 Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast where we talk about terrible people. And this is part two of our series on John of God.

Speaker 35 The trivial bastard is also Oprah.

Speaker 35 And Dr. Oz and Susan Casey, the author of that terrible article.
So pull up a fine Chilean red

Speaker 35 and get ready to hear some more.

Speaker 35 I have to, this is off topic, but I want to tell something I just ran across to my guest, Andrew T, before we roll into the episode. Andrew, how are you doing today? What's up?

Speaker 35 J-O-G. Ready to hear about the rest of this, motherfucker.
Well, before we do that, I just came across something on Twitter.

Speaker 35 It's a book that's being sold.

Speaker 35 It's like a part of the Joe Biden grift because every politician has a grift now. And this is a coloring book called a hot cup of joe and it has a cartoon of a sexy Joe Biden on it.
Nope.

Speaker 35 Yeah.

Speaker 35 A piping hot coloring book with America's sexiest moderate Joe Biden.

Speaker 35 Jesus Christ. Yeah.
It's this feels like abuse. It's awful.
It is abuse. It is abuse.

Speaker 35 Yeah. That's oh, well, that's fucking horrendous.
It's almost worth buying so you can have it for whatever happens with the election just to have this fucking horrible thing.

Speaker 35 Yeah, I don't want to give this person money, but I do want to see inside this terrible, terrible criminal coloring book.

Speaker 35 The sexy 70-something politicians thing is one of the weirdest aspects of modern politics that you have these two old

Speaker 35 and clearly not in the best of health men, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, both of whose supporters have to depict them as like muscle-bound, like, like, like, like, hunks. And it's like, guys,

Speaker 35 they're elderly, dying men. Stop it.
Like, you don't, like, even if you think they're the right person to be president, you don't have to pretend that they're like,

Speaker 35 you don't have to get thirsty about them. What is wrong with you, people? They both wear diapers.
Like, let's talk about that situation. They're not out here, like, bench pressing.

Speaker 35 Yeah, yeah. They're not doing wind sprints.
Like, Joe's abs don't exist because he's an old, sick man. And that's okay.
I mean, that's fine. Ideal, but, like, whatever.
Like,

Speaker 35 stop it. Stop it all of it.
The flush on his face is melting day by day. Yeah.

Speaker 35 It's what happens

Speaker 35 as you die. Like,

Speaker 35 he's not. Which is fine.
It's not fine. They're dying.
Okay.

Speaker 35 Yeah. Like,

Speaker 35 yeah, this is not on them because they're like pretty normally aged men for their ages.

Speaker 35 Stop making.

Speaker 35 You don't have to make them sexy. What is wrong with you?

Speaker 35 If I could just do a tiny poll and just point out that Sophie's idea of a sexy man is Popeye, and

Speaker 35 we can just

Speaker 35 live in that for a second. I dare you

Speaker 35 to find a better example of uncut eroticism than

Speaker 35 Robin Williams as Popeye in that 1980s Popeye movie that absolutely exists. Look it up.
It's fucking

Speaker 35 something else. Insanity.
Yeah.

Speaker 35 People made that.

Speaker 35 People made that and no one stopped them.

Speaker 35 Isn't that Robert Altman? I think so, yeah. I think it's Robert Altman.
You keep talking. I'm going to look it up.
No, I'm not.

Speaker 35 Don't do it to yourself.

Speaker 35 Never mind.

Speaker 35 It's great. So

Speaker 35 we're all back from

Speaker 35 the hellscape. I couldn't help it.
Yeah. All right.

Speaker 35 It's time to get back into this episode. Talk about John of God some more.
I just had to, that hit my world like a fucking carpet bomb.

Speaker 35 And I had to, I just had to talk about it. So

Speaker 35 back to you. You hit your world like a cruise missile at your wedding.

Speaker 35 Yeah, like one of Raytheon's fine products hitting a wedding, which, you know, if you've ever thought not enough weddings have missiles hit them, then you're the kind of customer Raytheon's looking for.

Speaker 35 All right, we really should start the episode now. So, yeah, no human being has ever embodied the phrase, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, better than Oprah Winfrey.

Speaker 35 Like many of you, she was a regular background figure in my childhood. My mom would have her on when she was working from home while we did chores, etc.

Speaker 35 Like, she was just on in the background all the time. And compared to the other background figures of my childhood, guys like Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage, she was pretty benign.

Speaker 35 At least she seemed that way. way.

Speaker 35 I don't know if I would describe her as a monster, but her career has been a masterclass in how to enable monsters. Winfrey was a longtime friend of Harvey Weinstein.

Speaker 35 Uh, she regularly hosted Tony Robbins, another sex pest and self-help guru. She is largely responsible for making Dr.
Phil and Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz into household names, and both of those men have gone on to do incalculable harm to society.

Speaker 35 And of course, she is the reason John of God and his clinic were put in front of the faces of millions upon millions of gullible, desperate Westerners.

Speaker 35 After that O Magazine article was published in 2010, she dedicated a special episode to John of God, inviting the author of that article and a doctor onto her show.

Speaker 35 They were both total converts, but how they and Oprah presented John to their audience is really interesting to me. And I want you to click that first link and play it to about 38 minutes, Andrew.

Speaker 181 Because you went expecting to find what?

Speaker 182 Well, I went to just gather evidence to see what's true.

Speaker 181 Susan, when you were there, did he, I heard that he actually invites medical doctors from around the world to come up and witness him do these things.

Speaker 183 Is that correct? Yes, and they always are sort of very careful not to ever pit themselves against the medical, the mainstream medical profession.

Speaker 183 They, you know, they're very much like they're not, he's never going to do a heart transplant up there.

Speaker 183 It's like he's going to do whatever he can do with his ability to heal, and then you might have to go to your doctor for the rest.

Speaker 35 Yeah. Okay.
I'm betting. That's good.
Yeah. What did you think of that, Andrew? What did you think of that framing?

Speaker 35 Incredible. Incredible.
I mean, the one thing watching the clip is that

Speaker 35 what is, sorry, what is the journalist? The quote-unquote. Susan Casey.
Yeah. Yeah.
Journalist. What? That's a strong word for Susan.

Speaker 35 The one thing watching that is that Susan looks almost exactly as I thought she would. Yes.
She looks

Speaker 35 exactly the type of white woman that would promote this shit. Yes.
Yeah. And whatever picture you, I guarantee you, 100% of you, whatever picture you have in your head of Susan Casey is accurate.

Speaker 35 Because there's only

Speaker 35 wild. Yeah.
It's awesome, isn't it? Yeah.

Speaker 35 Yeah. It's.
And then also like this, this thing where he's like, he's not going to do a heart transplant, but he's like, you might have to go to your regular doctor for that is like

Speaker 35 just like key like sweeping shit under the rug. It's like, well, of course you will need real medical care also.

Speaker 35 What's really cool about that is that it is very clearly and obviously an answer of Susan and this other doctor, who we'll talk about in a minute, whitewashing John of God.

Speaker 35 So, like, they know that if they're going to be on Oprah's show and talk to a mainstream audience, they have to put in a little, they can't just be all like, especially because this is 2010 and we aren't where we are now.

Speaker 35 Now, you could just say, doctors are bullshit. This guy's the only real healer in the world.
We could get away with that.

Speaker 35 Back then, you had to be like, oh, no, you still, regular doctors are still great for things. He's just helping with other stuff.
And like, that was necessary to get people on board.

Speaker 35 But John of God's Cult produced propaganda, too. And this is why I say that Susan Casey and this doctor are like...

Speaker 35 intentionally whitewashing him because for this episode of Oprah's show they use clips from a documentary that John of God's Cult produced

Speaker 35 and in the actual documentary

Speaker 35 there is no time wasted telling people that they need to consult their doctor so I'm gonna play next have you play next a clip from that actual the documentary produced by the cult that shows kind of how internally

Speaker 35 they talked about his healing powers? And it's very different from how Oprah did.

Speaker 184 You said to me in reply to my question,

Speaker 184 Can you help me to become healthy again?

Speaker 184 And he replied,

Speaker 184 You are already healed.

Speaker 35 Holy shit.

Speaker 35 Yeah.

Speaker 35 So, yeah, you see, like, in that, there's no talk about, like, oh, yeah, you got to, uh, you got to fucking

Speaker 35 consult a physician. Yeah, no, he just heals your shit.
Yeah.

Speaker 35 So the doctor guy that Oprah has on there is, is a fellow named Jeffrey Rediger.

Speaker 35 And he's really interesting to me because he is a very real medical professional and was actually or is actually a member of the Harvard Medical School faculty.

Speaker 35 He researches spontaneous healing, which is like when people go into remission or whatever and there's no clear explanation why, which is a thing that happens.

Speaker 35 People get better from things we don't understand why. That's a thing that happens.

Speaker 35 And

Speaker 35 he is clearly there to inject both credibility and skepticism into the discussions about John of God, kind of like Dr. Oz was earlier.

Speaker 35 For example, Oprah at one point plays a video of one of John of God's brain surgeries where he's like shoving stuff up people's nose.

Speaker 35 And Dr.

Speaker 35 Rediger is really upfront and clear about the fact that this brain surgery through the nose stuff is sleight of hand, that he's not actually performing surgery, that there's a ton of space in the navel cavity and nothing inexplicable is going on.

Speaker 35 So

Speaker 35 he does state that to the audience, but he does that while he buys into the fact that scientifically inexplicable healing occurs at John of God's center.

Speaker 35 So I'm going to play another clip from that Oprah episode so you can kind of see how this skeptic talks about this healing.

Speaker 181 Dr. Jeffrey Rediger traveled to Brazil also to see John of God's work firsthand.
Explain, if you can, the medical risks of surgery without anesthesia or proper sterilization.

Speaker 181 It doesn't look like he's like sterilizing the knife or

Speaker 181 the probe or.

Speaker 182 Well, yeah, as a physician, I have to say, you don't try these kinds of things at home

Speaker 182 and or with your loved ones.

Speaker 182 And

Speaker 182 this guy has a second-grade education.

Speaker 182 And I do have to say that these are things that I don't understand, so I can't fully endorse things that are beyond my understanding.

Speaker 182 But I've seen them happen.

Speaker 182 Generally, without anesthesia, you see enormous pain. I take care of people every day in pain from surgery and other events.

Speaker 182 The risk of infection is typically great and something that we have to take seriously.

Speaker 181 So, have people followed up with these people who've gone through these procedures? Maybe infections came later.

Speaker 182 Well, I think every situation of spiritual healing is different.

Speaker 35 So, did you catch what went on there? This is really interesting to me. So, Dr.

Speaker 35 Rediger notes that the psychic surgeries, which like use real knives and actually cut people, he notes that that's dangerous. Like, he tells people not to do it at home.

Speaker 35 But he also says he's not aware of anyone getting infections. And then when Oprah points out that they could have gotten infected later, he doesn't respond to that.

Speaker 35 You'll notice he doesn't say that that's possible, even. He just sort of says that, like, a bunch of things could, like, that's really,

Speaker 35 yeah,

Speaker 35 that's amazing.

Speaker 35 But it's the kind of thing, because it's been acknowledged, even though he doesn't then go on to state that, like, actually, yes, we have no data that these people to suggest these people aren't getting infected.

Speaker 35 We're not performing any follow-ups. I didn't take any attempts to actually determine whether or not people got infected later.
He doesn't say that.

Speaker 35 He gives a non-response so that show can move on and the audience can move forward, content that John of God, that these are real, serious, skeptical people, and that that makes John of God even more real because this medical professional has vetted him with the requisite amount of skepticism, even though none of that was actually done.

Speaker 35 It's amazing. Like this is a masterclass in how to white, and like it's laundering bullshit.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 35 It's even like the way that like they can claim they've addressed the infection risk by saying, oh,

Speaker 35 because they brought it up. It's fucking revolting.
That's crazy. Yeah, it's awesome.

Speaker 35 I want to play one more clip from this episode because we just got to.

Speaker 182 Believe, and this is what medicine and psychiatry need to examine: is I believe the powers of belief, the powers of the mind, are far more powerful than we have even begun to explore.

Speaker 182 I believe that's an unexplored wilderness in terms of research.

Speaker 181 So you said that since you made that trip as the skeptic, and then you were there in the presence, and then had the whole bleeding experience yourself, that it turned your life upside down? How so?

Speaker 182 Well, if you can say

Speaker 182 something to the effect that I believe this in my head, but I don't believe it in my heart, I don't get it, it's too much.

Speaker 182 And then a little incision manifests on the skin over the area of your heart, that means none of this is what we think it is. Something.
I don't know what that means.

Speaker 182 And there's, I'm sure, religions can layer on many different interpretations.

Speaker 181 Do you see yourself a religious person?

Speaker 182 Because of this, I'm actually more interested in the development and cultivation of a spiritual life.

Speaker 35 All right.

Speaker 35 Yup.

Speaker 35 So

Speaker 35 that's interesting.

Speaker 35 One of Rediger's claims is that while he's watching John of God perform these surgeries, he spontaneously started bleeding from a hole in his side, which is kind of like a stigmata thing.

Speaker 35 Right.

Speaker 35 He's introduced as a skeptic who traveled to John of God's Center in order to take samples and medically vet whether or not this man was

Speaker 35 a serious healer.

Speaker 35 And he says later in that interview, quote, some people I spoke with were able to remember the events going around them completely, and some people seem to enter a sort of altered state during these surgeries.

Speaker 35 When I was assisting in one of these surgeries, John of God cut this woman's cornea. She didn't flinch.
She didn't try to pull away from him. I can't explain that.

Speaker 35 I heard some people use the term spiritual anesthesia. I have no way to understand that.

Speaker 35 It's interesting that he says that because like there's actually a lot of reasons why someone wouldn't feel their eye getting scraped. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 35 It's like, it's like perfectly explicable and like lending essentially the name of your institution and by claiming to be baffled to give it like credence is like, God, truly pathetic.

Speaker 35 It's also like even accepting his words at face value until the end, it's like, okay, yes, the brain can do a lot.

Speaker 35 Yes, psychology is more powerful probably in terms of physiological stuff than, you know, we give it credit for. And then pivoting to i want to have a spiritual life is like

Speaker 35 just an abdication of curiosity yep

Speaker 35 it's just like what do you yeah this i mean it's it is remarkable that some of these people don't feel pain probably it's documented in other media you know other types of uh formats of this kind of shit and sure worth exploring but being like yeah I want to see I want to learn more about these spirits is like

Speaker 35 incredible

Speaker 35 He's such a piece of shit. And it's, yeah, obviously, like, I've scraped my cornea before when I was out hashing in the woods, and it didn't hurt.

Speaker 35 It hurt afterwards, like, because just like it fucked up my ability. Like, my eye was taking in too much light.

Speaker 35 It was like, kind of blinded me. It was very much debilitating afterwards.
But the actual getting scraped by a branch in the eye, it didn't cause pain.

Speaker 35 which is part of why it took me a while to realize what had happened.

Speaker 35 Yeah, I don't know. It's like, there's also a lot of data on how altered, mind-altering states like people have in these religious moments can impact perception of pain.

Speaker 35 Worship is definitively a mind-altering state. John of God requires his patients to go through an elaborate series of meditations before and after treatment.

Speaker 35 And I actually found a scholarly study of his surgeries conducted by doctors from a Brazilian medical school.

Speaker 35 They note, the surgeries were always performed by John of God and occurred in a large, non-sterilized and open room with dozens of spectators, most of whom were other patients and their relatives or friends.

Speaker 35 During each of these surgical sessions, approximately five patients usually remained standing while side by side in front of one of the room's wall.

Speaker 35 Rarely, patients were submitted to the surgeries while they were seated in a chair.

Speaker 35 Visible surgeries were performed in a few minutes in a very grandiose and theatrical way, invoking strong emotional involvement and even perplexity among the audience.

Speaker 35 Incisions were performed with either sterilized scalpels or kitchen knives, and surgeries were performed in rapid succession.

Speaker 35 The cleanliness of the instruments contrasted to reports of other mediumistic surgeries performed by dirty or even rusty implements.

Speaker 35 So you'll notice the stories about this guy that uncredible sources state always say that he's just using like random kitchen knives, sometimes even that they're dirty.

Speaker 35 When actual scientists studied his, like they, no, his knives are always sterilized, and he's not cutting open people deeply and removing organs. He is scraping their skin and their eyes.

Speaker 35 The fact that they don't get, a lot of them don't get infections, isn't weird. Have you ever gotten a scrape that didn't get infected?

Speaker 35 You've probably gotten a lot because your body is reasonably good at not dying from random scrapes.

Speaker 35 Otherwise, there wouldn't be people.

Speaker 35 It's very frustrating.

Speaker 35 Another frustrating thing is that this study goes on to note that

Speaker 35 they don't know,

Speaker 35 they couldn't find any evidence of infections among John's patients, but they also note that they didn't actually get to follow up with any of these people further than a day or two on because a lot of them were traveling in from elsewhere.

Speaker 35 So the paper is a proper scientific paper, and it concludes that we need to do more research and track these patients for longer term to determine whether or not anyone's getting infected, which is what you say if you're an actual scientist.

Speaker 35 Dr. Rediger, on the other hand, just gets on Oprah and announces that this is all inexplicable.
Like, science can't explain this. It's like, yes, it can.
You just didn't try.

Speaker 35 Like, you didn't even try.

Speaker 35 And I hate it.

Speaker 35 Science doesn't work when you don't do it. That's a remarkable conclusion.
Yeah. Thank you, doctor.
I found a good critical write-up of Dr. Rediger's performance on the blog Science-Based Medicine.

Speaker 35 I'm going to quote from that now.

Speaker 35 Unfortunately, the camera angles used made it impossible for me to judge whether John was doing what he claimed.

Speaker 35 In the only close-up shot that was presented, it was clear to me that the knife never touched the woman's eye, and when John actually appeared to be doing something, the camera never focused on the woman's eye.

Speaker 35 How convenient.

Speaker 35 It was almost as though Oprah producers were making a conscious effort not to show a camera angle that would allow viewers to judge whether the procedure actually being done was what John of God claimed.

Speaker 35 Personally, I'd have loved to see an ophthalmologist or even just a surgeon rather than a psychiatrist, because Dr. Rediger is a psychiatrist, allowed to have a close-up view of John's activities.

Speaker 35 Rediger is also shown in a video clip apparently bleeding from the chest, apparently after having viewed John do his cornea scraping bit.

Speaker 35 He expresses fear and is concerned that the bleeding doesn't stop as soon as he thinks it should, pointing out that he doesn't have a bleeding disorder. So, again, Dr.

Speaker 35 Rediger's a psychiatrist, which makes him a legitimate medical professional, but does not make him particularly competent to rule on whether or not someone's reaction to a light surgical cut is inexplicable, because that is not what what psychiatrists specialize in.

Speaker 35 Yeah.

Speaker 35 Oh, but it's also just being like the arrogance of being able to say, I can't explain it. So it is therefore, I won't explain it.
Yeah. I won't find out how to explain it.

Speaker 35 So it's therefore inexplicable. Yeah.
It's super great.

Speaker 35 Yeah, and it's also noted in that article that Dr. Rediger isn't just a psychiatrist.
He's a psychiatrist who's built an entire brand off of embracing spontaneous healing.

Speaker 35 At the time this came out, he headed up the Initiative for Psychological and Spiritual Development. And on his old website, he wrote this explaining what the Institute did.
Quote,

Speaker 35 We live in a culture that has advanced enough that we can send the person with a medical problem to the medical doctor, a person with an emotional problem to the psychologist, a person with a spiritual problem to the priest, minister, or rabbi.

Speaker 35 Yet the Initiative for Psychological and Spiritual Development is founded upon the belief that, beneath all and behind all the masks and appearances that we present to the world, there is something more, and whatever healing potential exists comes from this place.

Speaker 35 Which is

Speaker 35 great nonsense. Beautiful, beautiful nonsense.
So Dr. Redecker's initiative appears to be defunct now.
I don't think it exists anymore.

Speaker 35 I can't find evidence of that, but I didn't look super hard, so maybe I'm wrong.

Speaker 35 He does have a book out, however, called Cured with an exclamation point, and it's about people going into spontaneous remission.

Speaker 35 I don't know enough about Redecker to declare him an absolute grifter, but I do know that he was once a ghost on Coast to Coast AM, which is like Alex Jones for people who are a little bit less racist than Alex Jones.

Speaker 35 So I'm going to say it's probably fair to call him a grifter. You don't go on Coast to Coast FM if you're like a AM if you're like a credible person.
Well, it's also like

Speaker 35 the

Speaker 35 you know, not acknowledging that spontaneous remission is

Speaker 35 a severe outlier event. Yeah.
And like, yeah, it's possible, but like putting your treatment faith in that is insane. Yes.
Yeah. And yeah, but it's a great grift.
It's a thing.

Speaker 35 People want to read about it. People love reading books about magical healing and shit.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 35 So, yeah, Dr. Rediger is part of the grand tradition in the medical field of credentialed medical professionals who provide cover for miracle-slinging con men.
And of course, Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz would be another example of this type of person. Another example is provided in Susan Casey's O Magazine article about John of God.

Speaker 35 And this is her again attempting to do some real journalistic research to talk about how it's not weird to believe that this guy could be curing cancer.

Speaker 35 Quote: Though belief in the effectiveness of prayer is as old as civilization, the results are tough to pin down.

Speaker 35 Bernard Grad, Ph.D., a Canadian biologist from McGill University, worked with a spiritual healer named Oscar Estebani, conducting controlled studies in the late 1950s and 60s, using mice that had been uniformly wounded.

Speaker 35 Estebani would place his hands upon the wire covers of certain cages, willing those animals to heal. The results were dramatic.

Speaker 35 In one experiment, the wounds on Estebani's treated mice were very significantly smaller after two weeks than those of mice that had been left to heal on their own.

Speaker 35 The team also discovered that plant seeds exposed to energy healing grew at a faster rate. There was a force here, they agreed, and it appeared to be doing something beneficial.

Speaker 35 What that force was, however, no one could say for sure.

Speaker 35 Now,

Speaker 35 these studies happened. They're a real thing that happened.
You can read them.

Speaker 35 Bernard Grad did carry out those studies, and if you look them up, you'll find conclusions that are pretty similar to what Susan Casey writes in her bad article.

Speaker 35 What you won't find is any clear follow-up to this study.

Speaker 35 In fact, basically, the only writing about this research you will find comes from either woo-woo bullshit practitioners or other medical griftsmen trying to convince people that energy healing is real.

Speaker 35 This makes it difficult to refute because there really aren't direct refutations of Dr. Grad's work.

Speaker 35 What we do have, however, is almost a century of additional research into quote-unquote energy healing.

Speaker 35 Because again, this stuff was done in the 50s and 60s. Like it wasn't a big study.
It was conducted a long time ago.

Speaker 35 You can't say that it was conducted.

Speaker 35 We can't prove to a point of certainty that these people were actually conducting it well or abiding by all the rules they said they were.

Speaker 35 And there's another 70 years of other studies into this that show very different results. So again, she picks out this one study from 70 years ago that says what she wants it to say.

Speaker 35 She ignores, for example, the fact that in 1999, three psychiatrists with a Lancet evaluated multiple studies, several hundred of them, that showed links between religious faith, faith healing, and energy healing, and health benefits.

Speaker 35 Here's how Science magazine reported on their findings.

Speaker 35 Quote, Typically, they say, these studies ignore other factors that may improve health, such as abstinence from tobacco and alcohol, and even the scientifically sound practices, they contend, were inconsistent and don't justify bringing religion into medical practice.

Speaker 35 Richard Sloan of Columbia University and his colleagues reviewed every article containing religion and physical health they could find in Medline, an online service that indexes medical studies.

Speaker 35 Many of them, he says, focused on such groups as Roman Catholic priests or Benedictine monks, which forbid certain risky behaviors.

Speaker 35 Others looked at more general populations of churchgoers and found lower disease rates, but failed to take into account that only people who are in fairly good health can go to church.

Speaker 35 When these confounding factors were taken into account, either by the original researchers in a follow-up study or by Sloan's group, the alleged benefits usually disappeared.

Speaker 35 Overall, Sloan says, the evidence is very unconvincing and weak, much weaker, for example, than the link between marital status and health. So, again,

Speaker 35 you can point out there's a couple of individual studies that like haven't been refuted that suggests a benefit between energy healing and health.

Speaker 35 And then there's hundreds of studies that show no connection at all. And if you only pay attention to the studies that say what you want, it sounds great.

Speaker 35 If you look at the mass body of research, it doesn't look so good. But Susan Casey doesn't do that.

Speaker 35 Yeah, so that's cool.

Speaker 35 Following that 2010 episode of the Oprah show, Oprah herself visited John of God in 2012.

Speaker 35 She described the encounter as blissful, and in her wake, thousands upon thousands of other seekers made the call to travel down Brazil way for some psychic healing.

Speaker 35 By 2014, John's humble center had transformed into a straight-up commercial empire. Those passion flower pills alone grew into a $10 million a year business.

Speaker 35 Celebrities visited, including Paul Simon, the Princess of Japan, and Bill Clinton. Maybe.
Probably. We don't exactly know.
There's a bunch of celebrities who are rumored to have gone.

Speaker 35 I'm going to guess probably. Bill Clinton seems like the kind of guy who'd try this.

Speaker 35 Yeah.

Speaker 35 But something else. Well, especially like all the other shit.
It's like, who the fuck knows what's happening there? Yeah.

Speaker 35 Yeah. But something else also cropped up over the years.
Allegations of sexual misconduct by John of God.

Speaker 35 Objective observers noted that he seemed to have a strange non-medical fixation with women's breasts performing surgery aimed at treating heart conditions and other ailments by groping them and cutting around their nipples.

Speaker 35 So that's good.

Speaker 35 Oh, God. It's always like the most obvious shit, and yet there's still going to be years of like, of where they're like, I don't know.
He just, you know, he was just interested in heart surgery.

Speaker 35 Like, yeah, it's, it's always so transparent when the shit finally, like, when the mask starts to slip, I feel like. Yep, yep, it is.
But you know what? Mask never slips?

Speaker 35 The mask of capitalism. And that means it's time for us to take our mask off and put some products and services on.

Speaker 35 Yeah.

Speaker 35 Hell yeah.

Speaker 35 We're back.

Speaker 35 Okay.

Speaker 35 So,

Speaker 35 yeah, we left off. You know, John of God has gotten this huge boost from Oprah and her grift community.
People are flooding in from all around the world, but also some stories start to come out.

Speaker 35 Allegations, all vague at this point, no individual names attached, but that he's sexually harassing and assaulting people.

Speaker 35 The allegations were enough that in 2014, a real newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald, sent a real journalist, Tim Elliott, to look into the matter.

Speaker 35 Tim's article provided the first comprehensive look at John of God's operation by someone who wasn't clearly two steps away from joining his cult.

Speaker 35 Like Susan Casey, the center provided him with a white expat handler to introduce him to John of God's world. Since Tim was a man, his handler was a man, Diego Coppola.
Here's Tim's article.

Speaker 35 Quote, Coppola was born in Peru, but spent most of his life in California, where he worked as a computer engineer.

Speaker 35 After visiting the Casa in 2001, just to check it out, he married a Brazilian and moved to Aba Diyana.

Speaker 35 These days he manages the Casa's 50-strong staff, a multinational team of volunteers who take care of logistics, channeling the constant flow of visitors and, most importantly, forming an impenetrable buffer around medium Joao, sheltering him from the ceaseless demands of a ravening public.

Speaker 35 Everybody wants a piece of medium Joao, says Coppola. Before I arrived, Coppola had promised me an interview with Joao, although he now lets me know that this is far from guaranteed.

Speaker 35 He is not like you and me, Coppola tells him. He lives in another realm.
Timetables don't mean much to him. What matters to him is doing the work, taking care of the healing.

Speaker 35 So that's good. Yeah.

Speaker 35 Yeah.

Speaker 35 I mean, like, the handler for this sort of situation is always like, it's so fucking sinister. It's so crazy to me that people get sucked into this shit.

Speaker 35 It just seems like on the face, like, get the fuck out of there. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 35 Now, the reality is that john of god spent most of his time living in luxury on a ranch compound nearby he only worked about half the week and later revelations would suggest that he spent much of his downtime sexually abusing women although he also spent a lot of his work hours sexually abusing women too so who knows tim elliott spoke to an australian seeker a woman named sarah layton from melbourne she's very emblematic of the success cases for john of god and i'm going to quote from him again This is her fourth trip to the Casas since 2011, during which time she has sought treatment for her liver, kidney, and heart, as well as female problems.

Speaker 35 She also had lots of psychic surgeries, which is when the entities operate on patients remotely.

Speaker 35 You wake up after one of these surgeries and you can actually feel the stitches in your stomach, she tells me. Real stitches? No, psychic stitches, she says.

Speaker 35 What has helped her most, though, is the emotional healing. She's had a hard life.
After being sexually abused as a child, she was tortured. Before coming here, she had attempted suicide four times.

Speaker 35 She estimated she has spent $50,000 all up in airfare donations. I always donate to the CASA because John of God doesn't charge anything.

Speaker 35 And medications such as healing herbs, which are sold at the CASA's pharmacy. I use my inheritance, $20,000 from my grandmother, to pay for a lot of it, but it's worth it.

Speaker 35 My heart is healed, which Western medicine wasn't able to do. And my gynecological problems have stopped.
So there's a lot going on there.

Speaker 35 Yeah.

Speaker 35 Yeah, first off,

Speaker 35 you see, like everyone claims he doesn't take money, and then this woman's like, but I spent $50,000 here, which is like, yeah.

Speaker 35 I mean, I guess to that end, that's not that different than any religion, but

Speaker 35 yeah, or than actually getting medical treatment in the legal way if you don't have health insurance, or if you do have health insurance in a lot of cases,

Speaker 35 fuck. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 35 Yeah.

Speaker 35 But like, you'll notice that, like, and this is true with a lot of the most dedicated case studies who will come out and talk about this guy's healing is their actual medical complaints are really vague.

Speaker 35 And there's certainly there's nothing in that that you can track pathologically.

Speaker 35 She's like, she vaguely says gynecological problems, but also says like, it's really my heart and like my emotional emotional problems that he healed.

Speaker 35 And Susan Casey, the O magazine author, was in the same boat. She was grieving, not physically ill.

Speaker 35 And I've read a lot of stories about women who received healing from John of God, and an overwhelming number of them came in with emotional pain.

Speaker 35 And these people do seem to have gotten real relief at the center, but there's nothing magic about what provided them with the relief.

Speaker 35 I'm going to quote now from a woman who wrote a story about like her own treatment by John of God. This is what she described it as, quote, meeting the medium was a solemn process.

Speaker 35 Hundreds of people in white flocked to the Casa every morning, some in wheelchairs, other frail from chemo. In an orderly line, we waited to go before him so he could prescribe our cures.

Speaker 35 Mine was as follows. Five trips to the local sacred waterfall.
Four months without sex, alcohol, or black pepper. Four months of blessed herbal capsules.

Speaker 35 A translator quickly scribbled these directions on a small piece of paper. For three hours a day, I sat in meditation in the current room, helping to conduct energy for healings.

Speaker 35 It felt special, purposeful. I napped, hiked, and stood under that freezing holy waterfall.

Speaker 35 I prayed in front of the Casa's triangle, a big wooden wall hanging whose three sides represented faith, love, and charity. And then I went home.

Speaker 35 And like, yeah, if you're fucked up and grieving and like in a lot of pain and you go to

Speaker 35 a distant location that's like set up to be solemn and relaxing and chill and you detach from the internet and you stop getting wasted all the time and you spend a bunch of time hiking in nature and hanging out at waterfalls, that will help with your grief.

Speaker 35 Yeah, of course it will.

Speaker 35 And having someone confidently say, this is helping with your grief. This is helping.
You will get better.

Speaker 35 Like, that's a lot of what people need in those moments is like someone to really confidently tell them, like, this will pass and you will feel better. All of that stuff helps.

Speaker 35 There's nothing magical about it. It just is,

Speaker 35 it's good to go

Speaker 35 like when you're really fucked up in the head, it's good to stop getting wasted and to spend a lot of time hiking. Like, there's nothing controversial or inexplicable about that.

Speaker 35 Yeah.

Speaker 35 So in other words, a lot of the miraculous powers attributed to John of God are really just examples of the fact that life in his center is on balance healthier than the lives a lot of people left behind.

Speaker 35 That Sarah woman Tim Elliott interviewed even told him she expected the same thing. She said, quote, you're in the fifth dimension here, whereas in Australia, it's the third dimension.

Speaker 35 In Australia, people don't understand spirituality. It's either work or going out and getting drunk.
I find I have to escape that.

Speaker 35 And like, yeah, if your life, if you were, if you were like depressed and getting wasted every night and like that makes your body feel worse, it's bad for your health.

Speaker 35 And you go to a place and a guy's like, stop doing that for four months. Hike.

Speaker 35 Meditate. Yeah, that's going to help.
Yeah.

Speaker 35 I mean, honestly, just like I could prescribe just don't be in Australia. Come on.
Yeah, get out of Australia as a general rule. Get out of Australia.
We all know.

Speaker 35 We all know what you people get up to. Yeah.

Speaker 35 But of course, John of God and his adherents couldn't just claim that the man had provided people with a relaxing retreat because claiming that this is magical and it also can treat cancer and stuff.

Speaker 35 That's where the real money's at.

Speaker 35 So, when Tim did his interviews, his patients referred to John of God as a spiritual x-ray machine.

Speaker 35 And in the very dumb biography, John of God, Heather Cummings claimed that John was able to see each of his patients as a hologram, which is why all staff patients and visiting journalists were asked to wear white.

Speaker 35 He says it made them easier to read. It also, coincidentally, opened up a huge market in town for white clothing, of which John of God got a cut.

Speaker 35 Awesome, smart. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 35 And the uniform like starts to take away your identity and makes you more easy to manipulate and all that shit.

Speaker 35 Yep, as business expanded in the wake of Oprah's show, John and his followers created new treatments. They opened up a series of crystal beds.

Speaker 35 Patients paid $60 an hour for the right to lie around a bunch of rocks. They also opened up a gift shop.

Speaker 35 Tim Elliott writes that it sold: quote, books, CDs, DVDs, tote bags, t-shirts, coffee mugs, and crystals. All crystals have been blessed by the entity, reads a sign on the wall.

Speaker 35 There are John of God pendants, postcards, and travel pillows, even glow-in-the-dark John of God wall stickers.

Speaker 35 I really like imagining like the fucking entity sweatshop where the guy just has to like, or the spirit just has to bless

Speaker 35 like a just a, you know,

Speaker 35 40 gross of crystals or else they can't go home. Yeah, yeah, the entities are like, yeah, they're working long hours to make sure all those fucking crystals are holy enough.

Speaker 35 Yeah.

Speaker 35 Both the gift gift shop and cafe also do a brisk trade in water that has been blessed by the entity. People at the Casa treat the blessed water like nitroglycerin.

Speaker 35 Don't drink it all at once, Jana Sue Jones says one afternoon when she sees me swigging from a bottle. You'll be up all night.

Speaker 35 Sarah Layton tells me she regularly buys 10-liter jugs of the stuff to take home in her luggage. It's just water.
Oh my god. Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 35 a lot of religions have fancy water. Now, the heart of the whole grift is the pharmacy, though.

Speaker 35 When I first started reading about it, I assumed it just stocked a variety of herbal remedies that he was giving people, but it turns out that the reality was even dumber than that and more brilliant at the same time.

Speaker 35 Here's Tim.

Speaker 35 Quote, I had assumed that the pharmacy would stock a range of different herbs to treat a variety of different conditions, but note there is only one herb for sale here, Passiflora, the flower of the passion fruit plant.

Speaker 35 When I asked Coppola about this, he explains that it's not what's in the capsules that counts, but rather the spiritual prescription that John of God writes for each patient.

Speaker 35 The intentionality of that prescription is transferred to the capsules at the time of purchase, he says. That's fucking brilliant.
That's a great grift right there. Yeah.

Speaker 35 I mean, that's like the homeopathy grift. You know, it's the, it's that you can put magic in whatever.
Yeah. And if you have a line on passion fruit flowers, which does sound good.
Yeah.

Speaker 35 And again, all of the people who see John,

Speaker 35 actually just being seen by him and showing up and being in that line is free, but they all get prescriptions for these herbs. And, you know, some buy $50, some buy $10 worth.

Speaker 35 but the average, Tim knows that the average purchase is about $20, which would account for $40,000 a day in herb sales alone. Jesus.
So

Speaker 35 great grift. A fucking plus grift, John of God.
Like, very smart. So, Abadiana is a small town.
It is not located in a nice part of Brazil.

Speaker 35 Before John of God, its biggest industry was a series of brick factories. By the mid-aughts, John was by far the largest business in the area, and this gave him power.

Speaker 35 The way Tim describes it, John of God's financial leverage leverage turned Abadiana into his own personal thiefdom. Quote: The biggest industry by far is Medium Jiao.

Speaker 35 There are no less than 72 posadas or hotels here, all catering to Casa pilgrims, most of whom come on two-week tours and arranged for booking agents.

Speaker 35 These tours cost many thousands of dollars and must be approved by Joao, or rather, the entity. There are rumors that he also demands a percentage from the tour operators, but Coppola denies this.

Speaker 35 Medium Joao owns farms and some mines. He doesn't need more money.
Not if he's making 40 grand a day from herb sales, he doesn't. doesn't.

Speaker 35 He also is definitely getting that kickback. Yeah.

Speaker 35 My friends in the pot industry got into the wrong business. Just convince people that any random plant cures every

Speaker 35 and start selling that shit. Like, that's the fucking money.
You don't even need real plants. They could just be putting grass in those pills and people wouldn't notice.
Yeah, or nothing.

Speaker 35 Yeah, or nothing. Just sawdust.
It's brilliant. So it soon becomes apparent just how much the town has been molded in the Joao, the entity's image.

Speaker 35 Photos of him are everywhere on street polls, in the posadas and cafes. A whole industry has sprung up around the sale of white clothes for visitors who forget to bring their own.

Speaker 35 He is THE brand here, one visitor told me. The locals are now worried about how long he's going to live.

Speaker 35 The entity oversees everything here, from new businesses, which must be entity approved, to new construction.

Speaker 35 One Australian CASA staff member told me that before building a house here, she ran the plans past the entity.

Speaker 35 Now, Tim did eventually get to conduct an interview with John of God, but only after he made it through a gauntlet of fawning former patients.

Speaker 35 The center made him interview all of John's regulars, men and women who claim he healed them.

Speaker 35 The goal of this was obviously to instill a sense of awe in him, so that by the time he got to talk to John of God, he was in a mentally receptive place.

Speaker 35 But Tim is a good journalist, and this did not work on him. In fact, he says that by the end of the whole routine, he suffered from miracle fatigue.

Speaker 35 Quote, if one more person tells me about their amazing recovery, I'll kill them.

Speaker 35 I'm a fan of Tim.

Speaker 35 Very good. When they sat down to talk, Tim became probably the first reporter to directly ask John of God about the sexual abuse allegations against him.

Speaker 35 John's response: I thought you came to talk about me, not other people.

Speaker 35 That's fucking awesome. I mean, I guess if you're going to pass the buck,

Speaker 35 why not? Jesus Christ. Yeah.
At this point, John tried to break off the interview to go nap, but Tim asked him about another allegation.

Speaker 35 Local reporters had alleged that he diverted donations meant to build a soup kitchen and use them to renovate his house. John responded with a rant that he wasn't a thief.

Speaker 35 The person making the allegations was a thief. So like, very credible guy here.

Speaker 35 Then the interview ended. And for a while, that was about all anyone had on the allegations against John of God.

Speaker 35 The Montreal Gazette had a big laugh in 2015 when John of God had an endoscopy, which revealed a tumor, and he had to undergo major surgery and chemotherapy to have it removed.

Speaker 35 When asked if this was hypocritical, John of God responded, what barber cuts his own hair? And went right back to fleecing thousands of people per year, which is just great.

Speaker 35 Like, I'll cure your cancer, but if I get cancer, I'm going to get some fucking chemo.

Speaker 35 Yeah,

Speaker 35 that's, I mean, look, he had an answer and the right answer ready to go, I guess. Yeah, that is the right answer.
You know what will cure your cancer?

Speaker 35 Oh, God.

Speaker 35 We are FDA backed to say that all

Speaker 35 cancers are cured by whatever product and/or service comes up next. So again, the FDA completely backs and supports this.
And if they have a problem with what I'm saying,

Speaker 35 they can come after me. Come on, you fucking FDA cowards.
Bring it on. Bring it on.

Speaker 35 Anyway, here's healing.

Speaker 35 We're back,

Speaker 35 and I am just waiting for the FDA to

Speaker 35 try and take me on. Let's do it.
Come on,

Speaker 35 you'll take, they'll take this cancer from your cold, dead hands. Yeah,

Speaker 35 yeah,

Speaker 35 fucking it. I don't know.
I don't know.

Speaker 35 Who knows what's happening anymore? Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter.

Speaker 35 In September of 2018, a very brave Brazilian activist, Sabrina Bittencourt, went public with allegations from dozens of women against John of God. The blowback against her was immediate and severe.

Speaker 35 John was well connected in the Brazilian government, as well as extremely popular. An avalanche of death threats forced Sabrina to flee her home country for Spain.

Speaker 35 One of John's victims was hounded into suicide by her own family, who were all adherents of the medium and members of the cult.

Speaker 35 The story did not disappear, though, because as the weeks went by, dozens and then hundreds of new women came forward with their own stories of sexual abuse and rape at the hands of John of God.

Speaker 35 By the time the 300th allegation hit, the chief lawman in Goyas was forced to issue a preventative incarceration request against John of God.

Speaker 35 Initially, John expressed a desire to work with law enforcement and comply with the investigation. From a local news story, quote, I am grateful to God for still being here.

Speaker 35 I'm still a brother in God. I want to comply with Brazilian law.
I am in its hands. João

Speaker 35 de Deos is still alive, he told his followers. When he left only 10 minutes later, he told reporters that he was innocent of all accusations.

Speaker 35 The psychic's appearance caused a visible uproar in the center. Some followers greeted him with applause, while others complained about the presence of reporters.

Speaker 35 Respect my father, one of the volunteers asked. Now, I included that quote about that John of God cult member saying, respect my father,

Speaker 35 which is really, because I think it's really interesting. And it's interesting because John's actual daughter accused him of sexual assault.

Speaker 35 In January of 2019, after 300 other allegations go public, John of God's own daughter goes to the Brazilian magazine Veja to announce, quote, under the pretense of mystical treatments, he abused and raped me between the ages of 10 and 14.

Speaker 35 Oh, God.

Speaker 35 She claims the abuse from John of God only stopped after one of his employees impregnated her. In response to this, John of God beat his own daughter so badly that she suffered a miscarriage.

Speaker 35 She told Vea, my father is a monster. True.

Speaker 35 Now, eventually, more than 600 women came forward to level accusations against John of God. Like, it is hard to overstate.
And that, I'm sure it's thousands.

Speaker 35 Like, if 600 women came forward in a climate so dangerous where, like, at least one of his victims was hounded to suicide, I suspect he is guilty of thousands of acts of sexual assault.

Speaker 35 But we know 600 women-leveled accusations. Rather than report to the police, as he said he would, John of God went on the run, withdrawing $9 million in cash in an attempt to flee the country.

Speaker 35 But he was unsuccessful in this and eventually had to turn himself in. Raids on his compound found millions of dollars in cash, as well as a large number of illegal firearms.

Speaker 35 Police who interrogated him started to report bizarre incidents, including their computer spontaneously typing the letters 000

Speaker 35 a bunch of times, the printer printing spontaneously, and a mini fridge exploding. These reports are almost certainly untrue.

Speaker 35 They come from tabloid sources, but there is a lot of evidence that sympathetic Brazilian police certainly wanted citizens to believe this was all going on.

Speaker 35 You know, we started this episode talking about like the police tend to be on these guys' sides because they believe the bullshit. Yeah.

Speaker 35 Less than a month after making initial allegations, Sabrina Bittencourt released a bizarre six-minute long video accusing John of God of having run a 20-year-long human trafficking operation.

Speaker 35 She alleged that the cult leader's spiritual hospital was nothing but a cover for a baby smuggling empire that sold infants to parents in the U.S., Australia, and Europe for up to $50,000 apiece.

Speaker 35 Bittencourt alleged that John had established a network of isolated farms and mines and that he would bribe poor girls aged 14 to 18 to move there and spend the next decade continuously pregnant.

Speaker 35 Once born, the babies were sold on the black market. After 10 years, the birth mothers were executed to prevent any witnesses.

Speaker 35 Sabrina wrote, quote, or stated, quote, hundreds of girls were enslaved over the years, lived on farms in Goyas, served as wombs to get pregnant, for their babies to be sold.

Speaker 35 These girls were murdered after 10 years of giving birth. We've got a number of testimonies.

Speaker 35 We've received reports from the adopted mothers of their children that were sold for between 20,000 and 50,000 in Europe, USA, and Australia, as well as testimony from ex-workers and local people who are tired of being complicit with John of God's gang.

Speaker 35 Now, those are some wild-ass allegations.

Speaker 35 Yeah.

Speaker 35 And

Speaker 35 unfortunately,

Speaker 35 I don't know if any of this really happened. Sabrina was absolutely right about John Ivgot's career of sexual abuse.
Hundreds of women came forward, including his own daughter. And

Speaker 35 there's so much testimony. It's very clear what happened.
But the baby smuggling stuff,

Speaker 35 there's not hard evidence of this. An investigation is ongoing into it.
And Sabrina Bittencourt, she got hounded out of her home and deluged in death threats and suffered a mental breakdown.

Speaker 35 She came out with these allegations days before committing suicide.

Speaker 35 She was a sexual abuse survivor herself, clearly traumatized by that, as well as the ocean of death rates.

Speaker 35 This doesn't mean that that her allegations weren't accurate because there's actually a long history in brazil that includes to the present day of like religion like particularly christian cults that have like farming communes abducting people basically and forcing them into slavery to like grow plants and shit like stuff happens in brazil it's a big country and there's a lot of areas that are beyond the rule of law this is not impossible but it's really hard to know exactly what's going on.

Speaker 35 And you won't find any credible publications that have gone into the the matter in detail because really all we have are the allegations and the fact that they're being investigated.

Speaker 35 And unfortunately, it is unlikely we will ever know the truth.

Speaker 35 Uh, because if Bittencourt's allegations are accurate, it is highly unlikely that the Bolsonaro administration would allow the truth to get out.

Speaker 35 Because Jair Bolsonaro has connections to John of God, and a lot of members of his political party were backers of John of God.

Speaker 35 And if John of God was operating a massive multi-million dollar baby smuggling empire, he absolutely did it with the consent and help of powerful men in Brazil.

Speaker 35 And the truth's just not going going to fucking get out. So

Speaker 35 this is not a satisfying ending in that case, because I can't tell you what happened with his whole baby smuggling business. Pretty clearly he raped a whole lot of people and it was a monster.

Speaker 35 But there's just a lot that's unclear about this story that will be up in the air for years.

Speaker 35 Hopefully good investigations will kind of come to a more concrete conclusion about some of this stuff in the future.

Speaker 35 I will say, though, while our story doesn't end in the most satisfying way possible, it does end with something that kind of resembles justice.

Speaker 35 In December 2019, a judge in Goya sentenced John of God to 19 years and four months in prison for the rapes of four different women. His lawyers are appealing, but John is incarcerated today.

Speaker 35 And at age 77, he is very likely to die in prison. So

Speaker 35 that's something.

Speaker 35 Yeah,

Speaker 35 something

Speaker 35 I guess resembling justice. Jesus.
Yeah, if you like squint. Yeah.

Speaker 35 Oh.

Speaker 35 It's okay. So, Robert, as someone who spends a lot of time looking at men like this, is there ever a case where it's like, it just feels like these,

Speaker 35 like the patterns of this shit is always the same. And I guess it's maybe self-selecting because it's the shit we hear about.
Yep.

Speaker 35 Is is, but why did it, it always feels like it follows like such a similar blueprint. It's like,

Speaker 35 you know,

Speaker 35 like every cult feels the same.

Speaker 35 Yeah, I mean, mean, because they, because they, they all operate on the same principle. Like, every cult feels the same in the way that every oil and gas company works broadly the same way.

Speaker 35 Because the same sort of tactics, the same sort of promises attract and work on the same sort of people. And the same kinds of folks are able to successfully carry out these grifts because

Speaker 35 being able to do the work that these kind of people do. Like, John of God isn't all that different from

Speaker 35 a guy like L. Ron Hubbard.
Like, they all have more, they're more, more alike than different, or all that different from Sarah Paula White Kane, Donald Trump's spiritual advisor. They're all the same.

Speaker 35 They just pick different kind of ways to do the same thing.

Speaker 35 And some of them are more successful than others, and they're all differently successful. But it is, it's always the same grift.
And it, it just

Speaker 35 leaves a huge amount of human shrapnel in its wake, which sucks. Fuck.
Yeah. Jesus Christ.
This is fucking dark as shit, man. Yeah, man.
This one's a rough story. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 35 And, like, I just, I wish we knew more about the baby farming stuff. There just doesn't seem to be

Speaker 35 solid information.

Speaker 35 And also, just like Sabrina Bittencourt, by the time she came out with those allegations, was like pretty broken, like, like, broken in the sense that, like, human, a, an ocean of hate from other people had like shattered her psyche.

Speaker 35 Yeah, which is also tragic. And,

Speaker 35 you know, what she did was very brave, and she brought down this guy, but it cost her her own life, which is really fucked up.

Speaker 35 God.

Speaker 35 God. It's fucking horrible.
Yeah, it's not great. Yeah.

Speaker 35 Another successful episode of Behind the Back.

Speaker 35 We really nailed it today.

Speaker 35 Just grim shit.

Speaker 35 How often does it end in anything resembling justice?

Speaker 35 It can't be that often. Yeah, not all that often.
Most of them don't wind up in prison.

Speaker 35 I guess everyone dies, but still. Yeah, about 15% of the time, something that resembles justice happens to these guys.

Speaker 35 Yeah.

Speaker 35 About 15% of the time, I'll say. I feel like that's high, Robert.
I feel like it's probably high. Maybe, maybe.
Look, if you, the fan, want to go through and run the numbers, please do.

Speaker 35 I hate numbers and don't trust them. Yeah, I don't do math.

Speaker 35 Someone do run the stats. Run the stats on the bastards.
Yeah. Let us us know.

Speaker 35 Run the stats or just listen to Run the Jewels.

Speaker 35 It's better. But only ones.
Only one. You can't do both.
Yeah. No, absolutely.
That's the key.

Speaker 35 Andrew, do you have anything you want to plug after that really just uplifting conversation you're just having? God, I guess.

Speaker 35 I mean, look, this is probably the only podcast that I can comfortably say that yo is this racist. Well, we take some of the worst,

Speaker 35 you know, just situations and shit in the news, people's like questions on racism is horrible often. Not horrible, horrible, but I can definitively say we're less depressing than this.
So, word.

Speaker 35 Check it out.

Speaker 35 Yep.

Speaker 35 You can find us on mindthebastards.com where we will have the sources for this article or this episode. You can find me on Twitter at iWriteOK, and I have a podcast called The Women's War.

Speaker 35 Check it out. The Women's War is uplifting and not, it's hopeful.
Yeah, yeah, it's more hopeful than this bullshit. So,

Speaker 35 yep.

Speaker 35 Damn.

Speaker 35 Fuck the man.

Speaker 35 Yeah.

Speaker 35 Thanks for having me. This is, I mean, I can't say it was fun, but it was certainly something.

Speaker 35 Yep. It was certainly something.

Speaker 35 So,

Speaker 35 yep, we're done. I'm gonna stop.

Speaker 35 Yeah.

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Speaker 21 Okay, if you thought season two of Sniffy's Cruising Confessions was spicy, buckle up.

Speaker 27 Season three is here, and Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso are taking things deeper.

Speaker 35 They're tackling trending topics, offering practical advice, and having hilarious and heartfelt conversations with a range of queer celebs and sexperts who know their stuff.

Speaker 41 This season, they're covering it all, from circuit culture to hook up horror stories to locker room shenanigans.

Speaker 44 No stone is left unturned.

Speaker 46 And let's be real, 2025 hasn't exactly been a breeze.

Speaker 50 So Gabe and Chris are doing the work, keeping the community informed with chats on prep, harm reduction, and how to cruise smart in a wild political climate.

Speaker 55 Oh, and this season, they want to hear your stories.

Speaker 58 Their call-in segment is getting even hotter, and they'll react to your wildest cruising confessions on air.

Speaker 63 No pressure.

Speaker 64 So if you're ready for round three, just push play.

Speaker 69 Sniffy's Cruising Confession, sponsored by Healthy Sexual from Gilead Sciences, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 73 New episodes every Thursday.

Speaker 74 This is Erin Andrews from Calm Down with Erin and Carissa.

Speaker 79 Now, I know I didn't invent being a busy mom, but during football season, between the sideline gig, everything else I have going on, and my little one, it's a lot.

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Speaker 35 What's lighten my dumpster foods? I'm Robert Evans, hosting Behind the Bastards.

Speaker 35 That little introduction was in honor of my hometown, Portland, which just had a police officer murder a man who was having a mental health crisis.

Speaker 35 And we'll probably be lighting some dumpsters on fire tonight.

Speaker 35 Although you won't hear it the day that this happens. But anyway, that's all beside the point right now, because the point right now is that I'm introducing our guest today, the Inimitable.
Matt Lieb.

Speaker 35 Hey, what's going on? Matt,

Speaker 35 how are you doing? I'm doing well. I'm excited to be here.

Speaker 35 Big fan of the pod. Love me some bastards.
And you are, you do a Sopranos podcast. And the name is, I believe, Pod Yourself a Gun.
That's right. Pod Yourself a Gun.

Speaker 35 That's the world's only Sopranos podcast. Don't go looking for any other ones because they do not exist.
Little-known TV show, The Sopranos. You might have heard of it.
Very obscure.

Speaker 35 A niche TV show that only people who really like art understand.

Speaker 35 And that's why we talk about it. We talk about the art.

Speaker 35 It's fun thinking about that because I believe the song that introduced that show was something about waking up in the morning and getting yourself a gun, which is what I did this morning.

Speaker 35 You bought a gun? I did. I did.
I did buy a gun this morning.

Speaker 35 Not for Sopranos-like uses.

Speaker 35 Although I am Italian. So you can't really know for sure.
You can't really know for sure. Yeah, you woke up with a blue moon in your eye and you decided, I'm going to go get myself a gun.

Speaker 35 And then I'm going to commit crimes in the pine barrens of New Jersey. Yeah.
They do that a lot in the show, right? A lot of pine barren crimes. They do it at least once and it's great.

Speaker 35 Yeah, they're chasing that guy through the, yeah. Yeah, the Russian.
Yeah, and they leave their DNA everywhere. Well, they pee everywhere.
And, you know, they also.

Speaker 35 Look, we Italians are not a subtle people.

Speaker 35 No, they spend that whole episode literally like dying of like cold and they're lost in the woods, but they spend all the time talking about how they're starving because they haven't eaten in 12 hours.

Speaker 35 It's the most Italian thing in the world. But I want to hear about this gun.
Oh, it's just a gun.

Speaker 35 But today, we have something much more exciting than a gun. We have a bastard.
And our bastard.

Speaker 35 Are you ready for this? I'm so excited. Are you settling in? Yes.
Dr.

Speaker 35 Mehmet Oz.

Speaker 35 I never introduced them like that. We're talking about Dr.
fucking Oz today. Yes, that's right.
Who'd have thought he'd be a bastard? A TV doctor? Yes.

Speaker 35 Who would have thought a TV doctor could be a bad man? No,

Speaker 35 they take an oath. TV doctors, they say do no harm and get good ratings.
That's the Hippocratic oath.

Speaker 35 Do they also oath to be bad guest hosts on Jeopardy? Because he sucked. I didn't enjoy it.

Speaker 35 Honestly, if you are going up against LeVar Burton for any job, your first action should be like, you know what? I'm bowing out. Yes.

Speaker 35 Immediately. I'm not going to compete with LeVar Burton.
Respectfully fuck off, sir. Fighting Jordy, fighting Kunta Kinte, fighting whatever the reading rainbow guy's name was.
No, sir.

Speaker 35 I think it was just LeVar. LeVar.
Yeah.

Speaker 35 Yeah, no, I did not watch him on Jeopardy, but I have seen the show

Speaker 35 and had no idea he was a bastard.

Speaker 35 Yes, he's a piece of shit.

Speaker 35 He's a different piece of shit. We're also going to be talking in the very near future about Dr.
Phil, who's a much worse person. Fuck, Dr.
Phil. Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz is bad for some reasons that you'll suspect, you know, the pseudoscience stuff, but also for some, I think, more complicated reasons, which we'll have us a nice talk about at the end of this episode.

Speaker 35 So I've always said that one of the great tragedies of American public life is that that our very best doctors are usually like kind of schlubby dudes and ladies who maybe aren't the best at social graces and certainly don't have enough time because they're wildly overworked to do TV appearances.

Speaker 35 Yeah, yeah,

Speaker 35 I agree. They're not hot.
I've always said doctors,

Speaker 35 they're not hot. I look at them and I'm like, ew.

Speaker 35 We need to put a couple of billion dollars into a national program for more fuckable doctors. Come on.
Yes, yes. Doctors who fuck.
That's the next level of healthcare in America.

Speaker 35 It won't be universal healthcare, but at least doctors will look fuckable. Now, I mean, I think the problem is not their fuckability because it's inherently hot to be a doctor.

Speaker 35 It's more the fact that they're not necessarily, even the ones who have a good bedside manner, are good at explaining things, just don't have the time to spend a lot of it on television because they're busy saving lives.

Speaker 35 This has led to a thriving industry, well documented in this show, of grifter health influencers and scam artists selling people poison with honeyed words and practice smiles.

Speaker 35 Today, though, we're talking about a different kind of medical grifter, kind of a grifter who helps to launder those more shady grifters, the guy, people who aren't doctors, people who have no medical training, who are just trying to sell you nonsense cures.

Speaker 35 The guy we're talking about today exists to give them credibility and launder them into the public consciousness, and his name is Mehmet Oz.

Speaker 35 Mehmet Oz is maybe the most influential public physician in the country, possibly the world. He is, in every professional sense of the word, an excellent doctor, exceptional even.

Speaker 35 Within Within the bounds of what it is he is trained to do, he may be one of the best in the world at what he does.

Speaker 35 And he uses his, you know, the thing that makes him a bastard is that he uses these exceptional qualifications, along with his charisma, his handsome face, to sell millions of people on nonsense cures every single year.

Speaker 35 And that's a bad thing to do.

Speaker 35 It's kind of made worse. We'll talk about this a lot by the fact that he is.

Speaker 35 He's a heart surgeon and he's an exceptional heart surgeon. That's so sad.
It's always sad when like an amazing doctor is a piece of shit. This is like how it felt when

Speaker 35 Ben Carson turned out to be a Trump guy. I was like, but you're so good at the

Speaker 35 brain.

Speaker 35 Which you talk to doctors. They'll be like, yeah, of course it's always surgeons.
Yeah.

Speaker 35 Yeah. And they're the ones who think they're gods, right?

Speaker 35 They essentially have a god complex and they'll be really good at one thing and then they'll also think that they're good at like politics and shit like that.

Speaker 35 I think good surgeons are so prone to being also like nonsense.

Speaker 35 Like so many of our nonsense public doctors are surgeons for the same reason that so many of our terrorists are engineers.

Speaker 35 They're people who get really good at a specific thing and it lets them convince themselves that they know what they're talking about in a wider variety of things than they really do. That's crazy.

Speaker 35 It just makes me glad that I never, you know, got really proficient in any one skill. Never gain skills.
I never,

Speaker 35 ever learn how to do things. You'll become too smart for yourself and think that you are God.
If no one learned to do anything, we would still be living in the mud and eating grubs.

Speaker 35 And you know what we wouldn't have?

Speaker 35 Take oil salesman. Oh, yeah.
Or that.

Speaker 35 We would have very little at all.

Speaker 35 Mimit Sengiz Oz was born on June 11th, 1960, to parents Suna and Mustafa Oz, who must have fucked at some point in October of 1959 in order to conceive him.

Speaker 35 We have to assume his parents fucked in October. We don't know that.
Yeah, he could be Immaculate Conception. I know.

Speaker 35 You know, Robert. It's possible.
I would say right now, the most likely theory is that they fucked sometime in October. Oh, all right.

Speaker 35 His father, Mustafa, had been born in Bozkir, a village in southern Turkey. He had grown up poor in the countryside during the Great Depression.

Speaker 35 And obviously, you know, Great Depression, bad time everywhere. Real bad time if you're like in rural Turkey, you know?

Speaker 35 You're dealing with a different kind of poverty than even like our grandparents dealt with here.

Speaker 35 So he had to work himself to the bone in order to make something of himself, in order to get into medical school and distinguish himself enough that he was able to earn scholarships, which allowed him to immigrate to the United States as a medical resident in 1955.

Speaker 35 So

Speaker 35 this is a hardworking man and a man who has to struggle. I mean, I guess in ways that are kind of difficult to imagine for most of us, even as difficult as our present times are.

Speaker 35 He's like a true lift yourself up by your bootstraps kind of guy. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 35 Came from the middle of like nowhere rural Turkey and worked himself into becoming a good enough doctor that he got it, you know, he was able to get over the racism of the fucking 1950s immigration system.

Speaker 35 That's an achievement. Yeah.
No, good for him. Started from the bottom and now he's on TV selling fake cures.
That's his dad.

Speaker 35 Oh, that's his dad. That's not Nehem.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's Mustafa.
Yeah. So we're talking about his dad and his mom right now.
His mom, Suna, came from a much wealthier background.

Speaker 35 I don't know if this is what helped his dad get into the country or not. It may have been.
Her father was a successful pharmacist, and both sides of her family came from Istanbul.

Speaker 35 She grew up with a lot of money. As befits his more modest upbringing, Mustafa was an observant traditional Muslim.
Sunna's family was more moderate and secular.

Speaker 35 Mehmet and his two sisters grew up split between both approaches to religion. The Oz kids spent their childhood speaking Turkish and English fluently at home, so they grew up in a bilingual house.

Speaker 35 Mehmet was

Speaker 35 from a young age, ambitious, starving for success, and his father's approval. He was wont to note that he was born in the year of the rat, according to the Chinese zodiac.

Speaker 35 In one interview, he noted of this:

Speaker 35 you run the maze. If you put cheese in that maze, I swear to God, I'll get to it, and I'll get to it really fast.
But should I be running after that cheese? Am I in the right maze?

Speaker 35 All of these questions, which people much greater than I am think through, I put on the back burner as I'm running after that cheese. What the fuck?

Speaker 35 Like, he says way too much stock into the year of what animal you were born into.

Speaker 35 At least he wasn't born into the year of the pig. And he's like, well, what you got to do is you got to take your snout and put it into the trough of life.

Speaker 35 And just really got to just shove your face into food

Speaker 35 as hard as you can. You roll around in the shit and then you hope that someday you find another piggy to fuck.
And then you have little piglets.

Speaker 35 It's like, look, I was born in the year of the pig, and that's why I dispose of bodies for the mob. It's just what you do.

Speaker 35 Well, that's

Speaker 35 a nice take on year of the rat for him.

Speaker 35 It is, it is telling because what he's saying there is like, I don't think about why I'm doing what I'm doing. I just, I just strive to, to, to achieve things.

Speaker 35 And I don't think about whether or not they're good or bad. I just, I have to achieve.
Yeah, he just wants that cheese. Yeah, he wants that cheese.

Speaker 35 It's ambition without an analysis, I think is what you'd call it. And he's pretty open about that.
Now, Mustafa, his dad, repeatedly told the growing Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz, who's not yet a doctor, obviously, that when he'd grown up, when Mustafa had grown up, he hadn't been able to relax for even a second on his road to escaping poverty and establishing himself as a cardiothoracic surgeon.

Speaker 35 So he's like telling his kid as he grows up, like, you know, like, if you want to succeed, you can't relax for even a second. You can't take a moment off.
You always got to be hustling.

Speaker 35 And that's how Mehmet grows up. He's an excellent student, but no amount of success is ever enough for his dad.
He later recalled, I'd say I got a 93 on a test. He'd say, did anyone get better?

Speaker 35 That was always the question he asked.

Speaker 35 Cool dad.

Speaker 35 Sounds like a fun guy, Woodhang.

Speaker 35 Yeah.

Speaker 35 The school I grew up in, because of just where we were in North Texas, like about half of the kids in my school were either from India or from China or Japan.

Speaker 35 And so you had a lot of kids who would talk that way about their parents, right?

Speaker 35 And some of them had, especially around our senior year, there were a couple of kids who had to get like taken in by an ambulance because they would just like, in one case, seizing as a result of stress.

Speaker 35 Like, Jesus.

Speaker 35 Good to put this kind of pressure on a kid. Yeah, like straight having like nervous breakdowns just from like trying to get good grades.
Right. Once again, don't get good at anything.

Speaker 35 It's not worth it. Develop skills.
Don't develop skills. You'll get seizures.
You're at risk of seizures. You're at risk of your dad not loving you.
You know, you just got to.

Speaker 35 He won't love you no matter what. Yeah, exactly.
Stop caring about your dad. You know, just coast.
Coast. Find some dirt.
Eat some grubs. You'll be fine.
Yeah. Start a Sopranos podcast.

Speaker 35 Start a Sopranos podcast.

Speaker 35 That's all you've got to do, dude.

Speaker 35 Really bringing it back there.

Speaker 35 So Mehmet decided to become a doctor when he was just seven years old. He recalls standing in line at an ice cream parlor.
Quote, I remember it like yesterday.

Speaker 35 There was a kid in front of me who was 10. My dad, just to pass the time, said, What do you want to be when you grow up? The kid said, I don't know.
I'm 10.

Speaker 35 My father waited until he was out of earshot and said, I never want you to tell me that if I ask you that question. I never want you to tell me you don't know.

Speaker 35 It's okay if you change your mind, but I never want you to not have a vision of what you want to be. Mehmet, go kill that kid.
Kill that kid. Fucking cut him.

Speaker 35 Murder Murder that loser kid and tell me what you want to do with your life.

Speaker 35 God damn. That is way too much pressure.
Way, way too much pressure. Yeah, that's so much pressure to put on a kid.

Speaker 35 And it seems like the kids like that always end up becoming the, like, going into the career that their father wanted them to do. And then eventually their dad dies, and then they're like, oh, fuck.

Speaker 35 I didn't get to do what I wanted to do with my life. And now I'm miserable.
Yeah. Yeah.
It's, it's, it's a real bummer. Yeah.
Um, it's not, just don't put pressure on people. There's plenty of grubs.

Speaker 35 By the time Mehmet was ready to start school, his father was wealthy enough to pay to send his son to Tower Hill School, a K through 12th grade private college preparatory school in Wilmington, Delaware.

Speaker 35 Jesus, that sounds horrible. I know.
It sounds like a fucking nightmare.

Speaker 35 The fancy boy

Speaker 35 sounds like uniforms, ties.

Speaker 35 Yeah, probably like weird shorts

Speaker 35 during the summer. Yeah.

Speaker 35 The fancy boy prep school worked well enough that Mehmet was accepted to Harvard, where he played football and water polo. His grades were, as always, exceptional.

Speaker 35 One of his roommates later recalled, he was very competitive. There was never any question that he wasn't going to be a doctor, he wanted to be a fantastic surgeon.

Speaker 35 So, people around him, like everyone kind of recognizes this kid is brilliant. Everyone recognizes he's got the drive he's going to achieve, you know, so good for him.
I mean, it's just like

Speaker 35 I just look back now at my own childhood and I'm like, god damn it, if I can think of one friend

Speaker 35 where I knew what they wanted to do for a career. I don't think we ever talked about like, what's your career going to be? No one was like, I'm a doctor.
You know, it was, it was mostly just like,

Speaker 35 you know, how's, how's your hip-hop album working out? And they're like, good. And they're like, cool.
And that was the whole thing. That's interesting.

Speaker 35 I think it was different for me because there was definitely a lot of pressure to have something. You know, I went to a public school.

Speaker 35 I didn't go to a private school, but I went to a public school in my early schooling years was in a dirt poor farming town called Idabelle, Oklahoma.

Speaker 35 And the school was as good as it could be in a place like that. But like they paddled us and stuff.
Like it was not

Speaker 35 a high-end educational

Speaker 35 in a public school? Yeah. Yeah.
Oh, damn. They still did that in Oklahoma back in them days.
Yeah.

Speaker 35 You got to sign the paddle afterwards, too. That was nice.

Speaker 35 But when I was in, I don't know, third grade or so, I moved to Plano, which is a fairly wealthy suburb of Dallas. And the schools, the public schools, are very good.

Speaker 35 And there is a lot of drive to achieve. Like I said, a lot of like kids who were really motivated by their parents to achieve.

Speaker 35 And so you either were kind of planning to be a doctor or, you know, something on that level, or you were planning to join the military because it was Texas. And I was in ROTC.

Speaker 35 So me and all my friends, I think we all kind of assumed we're all going to join the army, you know? Yeah, yeah. I went to public school, you know, my entire life.

Speaker 35 And I think most of my friends either wanted to, they were either going to go into the army or they were, um,

Speaker 35 or they wanted to be famous musicians and or athletes. So see, my brother is a doctor and knew he was going to be a doctor from the, he's my older brother too, from the time that he was like seven.

Speaker 35 So like, and I, and I'm like, la la la, no idea. So that was,

Speaker 35 I'm just saying,

Speaker 35 like, a level of ambition at a very, very young age has always been a turnoff for me when it comes to like friends because it just uh they they always have that like sense where they're trying to get there you're you're some sort of stepping stone into their

Speaker 35 whatever their career path is and i don't like it so oz took only one break during his relentless progress through medical school uh and his that break was to do a compulsory i think it was a one-year term of service in the turkish army in order to maintain his dual citizenship um other than that straight on to like becoming a doctor that's the only kind of break he So I guess that's his gap year is being in the Turkish army.

Speaker 35 I'm just going to take a break, have a gap year, and join the military of a foreign country. Yeah, it helps suppress, you know, Kurdish liberatory movements and stuff.
Whatever. Yeah.

Speaker 35 They got to stop trying to have their own thing. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 35 He got a four-year degree in biology and then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he doubled up working on both an MD and an MBA. He succeeded in earning both.

Speaker 35 So that's interesting to me. He gets both, he he gets at the same time as he's getting his MD, he also gets a business degree.
Yeah, this is

Speaker 35 very, there's a lot of foreshadowing going on. Yeah, there's some foreshadowing.

Speaker 35 He earned both, obviously, with flying colors. He's an incredibly intelligent man, right? This isn't just a guy, like we'll talk about Dr.
Phil later. Dr.
Phil, I don't think, is very smart.

Speaker 35 He's incredibly good at reading and manipulating people. He's not particularly a genius.
Mehmet Oz is a genius. Like, I think he almost certainly is an actual genius.
Yeah.

Speaker 35 In 1985, at age 25, he married Lisa Lamolle, who was the daughter of a cardiothoracic surgeon who worked with his father. They met at like a party or something.

Speaker 35 This relationship gradually opened him up to alternative medicine and Eastern mysticism because Lisa's mom was hardcore into homeopathy, meditation, and other new age stuff.

Speaker 35 We'll talk about that more in a little bit. For the next decade and change, Dr.
Oz's career zoomed forward.

Speaker 35 He became triple board certified, which I don't know what that means, but it sounds impressive. It's at least three boards.
It's at least three boards. That's three more than I've been certified.

Speaker 35 Yeah, I got zero boards under my not a one. Fuck.
Not a single board between the three of us.

Speaker 35 We really should find a board just to get us some certifications, guys. Just to get certified.
If you're a board, if you're a medical board, there's a board out there. Well, at least you know what?

Speaker 35 The state of New Jersey has certified me as a reverend doctor. So I'm one board certified.

Speaker 35 Is there a board in the Universal Life Church? Because I am a minister/slash Jedi Knight. I'm going to say that counts.
All right. I'm board certified.
Can you get me painkillers?

Speaker 35 You know, I know a guy.

Speaker 35 Sounds legal enough.

Speaker 35 So he starts working as a heart surgeon, and he's very good at being a heart surgeon. And he's not just good at the heart surgery part, he's good at the science part.

Speaker 35 Over time, he authors hundreds of peer-reviewed articles and he's awarded 11 patents. One of them is for a solution to preserve transplanted organs.

Speaker 35 Another is for an aortic valve that can be implanted without open heart surgery. Like, he's not just really good at the mechanics of surgery.
He's an excellent scientist. Yeah.

Speaker 35 11 patents is pretty good. Seriously.
One might say he's the wizard of Oz.

Speaker 35 I think I read like six articles with variations of that title on the guy. All right.
Well, I got to go then.

Speaker 35 Bye, guys.

Speaker 35 It's just a thing. Journalists can't fucking help themselves.
Oh, you can't help yourself if you're anybody. You see Oz and you're like, oh, I got to call him a wizard.

Speaker 35 Got to call him a wizard.

Speaker 35 Dr. Oz was hired by Columbia Medical School as a teacher.
And as, you know, he's also working. They've got a hospital.
He's working there, but he's also teaching.

Speaker 35 And he very quickly rises to the level of full professor and becomes the vice chair of the cardio of the heart surgery department, basically. How old is he at this point? He's in his 30s.
Oh, man.

Speaker 35 Yeah.

Speaker 35 Like everything I've read right now on its own would be a career trajectory any doctor in medicine would envy like yeah you could die happy with that being your resume like that's a hell of an achievement yeah my god yeah in 1995 a new york times profile referred to dr oz as quote probably the most accomplished 35 year old cardiothoracic surgeon in the country

Speaker 35 he might be the best at what he does in the entire united states at this point i mean i don't know how to measure that but he's he's very good.

Speaker 35 I mean, I don't know any other heart surgeons by name, so fuck. I mean, he's the guy.
Yeah.

Speaker 35 Now, the article that I found that quote in, however, gives some hints about what was to come, because that article was about Dr. Oz's increasing experimentation with alternative medicine.

Speaker 35 It opens with the story of one of his patients, a 49-year-old diabetic smoker who suffered a critical heart attack. She went under Mehmet's knife for a dangerous surgery.

Speaker 35 Quote, at the invitation of Oz and his patient, there were two other people on hand in surgical gowns and masks, a second-year medical student named Sally Smith stationed at the patient's feet, and a 52-year-old healer named Julie Motts, who was standing at the patient's head.

Speaker 35 As volunteers in Oz's Cardiac Complementary Care Center, they worked for free through the operation, seldom moving except to reposition their hands.

Speaker 35 As Oz requested sutures and clamps and units of lidocaine, Motts called softly to Smith to move her hands from the small toe of the patient's right foot to a point on the sole known as the bubbling spring.

Speaker 35 What they were doing, no one else in the operating room knew how to do, or had ever seen done during a coronary bypass, or had ever thought worth doing, even as an experiment.

Speaker 35 In this ultimate theater of scientific medicine, the women were using their hands as kings once did to treat subjects with scropula and as Jesus is said to have done and as shamans and mothers and Chinese Quigong practitioners still do.

Speaker 35 They were using their hands to run a kind of energy, which science cannot prove exists, into the patient's kidney meridian, which also may or may not exist. The kidney meridian?

Speaker 35 Yeah, you got to get that meridian.

Speaker 35 That's the best part of the kidney is the meridian.

Speaker 35 That's the most delicious part of the kidney is the meridian. Oh, man, with fucking on a Ritz cracker sliced thin.
I'd love to be somewhere.

Speaker 35 You just want to get, you want to get like some duck fat or some butter, and you want to get it sizzling in the pan, and you just slap that meridian on for like a half a second, and it's good to go.

Speaker 35 That's all you fucking, just a little bit of, little bit of char, you know?

Speaker 35 I mean, this all feels like he's going to to start turning his patients into foie gras. And I'm

Speaker 35 very excited for what's to come, this heel turn that he's going to take.

Speaker 35 So, yeah, that's, that's, that's silly. I, I, I think that's silly.
Um,

Speaker 35 but

Speaker 35 at the other hand, like it's in a hospital. These people are clearly following sanitation guidelines.
They're not getting paid. The patient's not getting charged extra.

Speaker 35 So I don't have a problem with that. And he's the smartest doctor in the world.
It's like one of those things where you're like, I feel like this is wrong, but I don't know enough to dispute it.

Speaker 35 So I'm going to let him fuck with my kidney meridian.

Speaker 35 I'm not willing to morally condemn him for that, even though I think it's silly, just because like, yeah, yeah, what's the fucking harm in seeing, you know?

Speaker 35 And in that case, if you're actually doing it in a medical context, you're guaranteeing everybody's taking proper sanitation procedures. Fucking whatever.

Speaker 35 And it seems like from what I can tell, that sounded

Speaker 35 non-invasive. It's unaligned.
Yeah, yeah, they were just doing energy work or whatever. Yeah, they were throwing, you know, crystals and doing fucking pendulums over him.

Speaker 35 It falls into the category of it couldn't possibly hurt, so why not give it a shot, right? Yeah, which is, we'll talk about this more later, but that's kind of what they were going for.

Speaker 35 You know what else can't hurt?

Speaker 35 I don't. The products and services that support this podcast guaranteed to not harm you.
In fact, every one of the products of ours that you buy extends your life by exactly 45 minutes. So,

Speaker 35 you know, spend all your money and gain immortality.

Speaker 35 We're back.

Speaker 35 We're talking about Dr. Oz, who in the mid-90s has started some weird alternative medicine stuff.

Speaker 35 Now, he's not the person who starts the alternative medicine program at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, which is also like a teaching hospital, whatever.

Speaker 35 It's one of those hospitals that they have a medical school with, you know, how, you know, the thing. If television has taught me accurately, all of the doctors are fucking constantly.

Speaker 35 Doctors fuck and teach. That's what they do.
Doctors fucking they teach. That's all they do.
You know, when you're not teaching, you're fucking.

Speaker 35 And Columbia Presbyterian was among the most reputable medical establishments on planet Earth. Still is, as far as I'm aware.
So this alternate medicine program there is kind of an odd thing.

Speaker 35 It was not started at the behest of anyone at the top of the school.

Speaker 35 The whole thing came about because in 1993, a retired utility executive named Richard Rosenthal gave them three-quarters of a million dollars as a private grant in order to establish a center to study alternative medicine.

Speaker 35 Just gifted money and just said,

Speaker 35 do this. Start a magic doctoring school.
And they're like,

Speaker 35 okay.

Speaker 35 Now, Richard had been motivated by having several close friends of his get terribly sick in such a way that doctors told them there was nothing that could be done to help them.

Speaker 35 And his response was to basically throw a bunch of money into a hole to see if alternative medicine could come up with solutions. And it's one of those things I could make fun of.

Speaker 35 Like, this is almost exactly a week after my mom just died of a type of cancer that when you get diagnosed with it, pancreatic, there's basically nothing they can do. You know, it's

Speaker 35 even like, like, she went through chemo and it did nothing, you know?

Speaker 35 I get it. You go through something like that.
Okay, well, let's try other shit, you know?

Speaker 35 So

Speaker 35 I can't even blame Richard for, like, it seems like he was motivated out of grief to do this.

Speaker 35 Yeah, you can't blame people for trying to try any other alternative to, I mean, you know, something in which there is no cure in modern medicine. I might blame the snake oil salesman.

Speaker 35 I'm never going to blame someone who's like, well, doctors said they can't cure me, so I'm going to eat this root. You know, fuck it.
Why not? Go for it. Who gives a shit?

Speaker 35 Like, it can't hurt if you're definitely going to die. Yeah.

Speaker 35 And it is, to be honest, like, it is kind of within, even you could argue within kind of medical best practices because one of the things, if like I took EMT training years ago, one of the things they tell you is that you're not supposed to use an AED, you know, like paddles

Speaker 35 to restart a heart. You're not supposed to use them on an infant.
But if an infant is in, you know, the state where like you use them on them because they're dead. Shock the shit out of them.

Speaker 35 Yeah, they're dead. You can't make dead worse.
So like, why not? So I guess like, yeah, you can't, I don't know, can't make it worse.

Speaker 35 Why not see if it, if, if something happens i'm not against the basic idea of testing some of this shit is what the worst thing you're going to get out of that is a really cool tick tock video of electrocuting a dead body absolutely and then you get a fuckload of followers and then you start selling brain pills

Speaker 35 it's a perfect plan

Speaker 35 uh so yeah um

Speaker 35 So I can't blame the college for this. I can't blame the guy for funding it.
It's a reasonable thing. Why not? You know what? That's kind of my attitude is why the fuck not?

Speaker 35 And that's more or less what the dean of faculty of medicine at the college said. Like, all right, well, we're not paying for it.
Why not give it a shot?

Speaker 35 That said, a lot of medical professionals were really angry about the idea. Dr.

Speaker 35 Victor Herbert, a Columbia medical school graduate and a professor of medicine at Mount Sinai and a board member of the National Council Against Health Fraud, publicly lambasted the lecturers brought in by the program as con artists and sociopathic liars.

Speaker 35 And knowing the kind of people who get into the selling this shit business, I don't know if he's wrong about that. A lot of these people are fucking sociopaths, you know? He says, quote, I am nasty.

Speaker 35 I call practitioners a fraud, practitioners a fraud. It's my feeling that the Rosenthal Center has been promoting fraudulent alternatives as genuine.

Speaker 35 And I get his critiques.

Speaker 35 That is one of the, like, I can say on one hand, what's the harm, but also maybe the harm is that people hear this stuff is being done in a hospital, so it must help when it doesn't.

Speaker 35 And maybe some of those people do that, not the way Dr. Roz is doing it, where we're going to do the normal medical procedure.
We'll have this done.

Speaker 35 Maybe some some people decide, I just want to have the energy work done, and then they drop dead of a heart attack because it doesn't replace a valve, you know?

Speaker 35 I'd like to think that even at a hospital or a research facility with Western medicine, that they still peer review and try out different, you know, like alternative medicines, right?

Speaker 35 You know, like some of them, some of them work. Some of them work.

Speaker 35 Like there was a time when, you know, acupuncture was seen as kind of like a crock, and now it's like kind of just a standard part of Western medicine it's just you know so yeah and there's a there's a lot to be said about even acupuncture you know I went through a lot of it as a kid and it did nothing for me but my grandpa swore by it for his Parkinson's and even if it was I don't know you could say it's like fucking

Speaker 35 whatever placebo but he experienced relief so I don't care like yeah yeah

Speaker 35 I don't know. I'm not going to get into like it, because I don't know, I don't know all of that.

Speaker 35 I know it's one of those things where there's a number of divergent opinions on acupuncture, but a number of things that were initially considered alternative medicines have been found to have medical, you know, benefits.

Speaker 35 Not that that's the norm, but it has happened in history, you know, different kinds of traditional or whatever treatments.

Speaker 35 So this is very controversial, though, is the point I'm making. And a number of people even picketed the college when the Rosenthal Center opened.
None of this dissuaded Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz from participating in it. His explanation as to why he embraced alternative medicine was, to be quite honest, kind of brilliant.

Speaker 35 He said that his, by this point, vast experience as a real doctor had really informed him of the limits of medical science.

Speaker 35 Specifically, he said that while he could sow bypass grafts and even implant a new heart into someone's chest, he couldn't change the habits that had made them sick in the first place, nor could he cure the emotional issues that they were dealing with.

Speaker 35 Depression, he pointed out, was a major risk factor in heart patient recovery post-surgery. And things like meditation, right? That's kind of considered woo, new age.

Speaker 35 That can help with depression and that can help with healing. And he's right about that.
That's not

Speaker 35 a bad point to make.

Speaker 35 So he seemed to insinuate when he was talking to the New York Times: why wouldn't a caring physician want to try everything possible to improve his patient's odds?

Speaker 35 He could point out that meditation had shown some benefit for heart disease patients. Who was to say that other stuff wouldn't work? Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz told the New York Times that he felt ethically obliged to experiment in new directions in medicine. The article makes it clear that Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz had not let up one bit in the workaholic tendencies that he inherited from his father as well. And I'm going to quote from the Times again here.

Speaker 35 Mehmet Oz is one of those rare beings who seem incapable of sloth.

Speaker 35 He's doing a heart transplant right now, his secretary says on the phone, and he's got a double lung transplant waiting, and those are in addition to his two regularly scheduled open hearts.

Speaker 35 And then at three, he's supposed to fly to Boston to deliver a lecture.

Speaker 35 So exceptional is Oz's energy that some of his colleagues use him as a benchmark, correlating their own vitality as a fraction of a full Mehmet unit.

Speaker 35 He runs down lobs, size's tennis partner, mentor, and department chairman, Dr. Eric A.
Rose, who at 44 is one of the top heart transplant surgeons in the world. So

Speaker 35 I can't tell you how nervous I would be going into a lung transplant procedure and then hearing like, this doctor's got to do a heart after you and then got to fly to Boston.

Speaker 35 I'd be like, you think you could maybe take your time with this, bro? Like, could you? I get that. I do.
It is a matter. We'll talk about the ZN2.
We don't have enough of these guys.

Speaker 35 It's actually a major health problem how few people there are that can do this. Yeah.

Speaker 35 But it is exhausting. Everything you read about this guy's daily, like, you're just one of those people who, I think, I kind of get the feeling.

Speaker 35 I don't want to psychoanalyze someone, but you get the feeling he can't be alone and

Speaker 35 still. Like, he, he, he has to always be moving towards something.
Yeah, he's got his dad in the back of his head

Speaker 35 telling him to murder that kid in the ice cream shop. Yeah, to kill that fucker.
Kill that fucking kid. He doesn't know what he wants to be.
Yeah.

Speaker 35 Just like, I mean, I imagine that would create a bit of a problem later in life with stillness. Yeah,

Speaker 35 I feel for him a little bit in that. Sure.
Now, the article also goes into more detail about how Dr. Oz's wives family, Dr.
Oz's wife's family piqued his interest in alternative medicine.

Speaker 35 His father-in-law was one of the surgeons on the first heart transplant team in Texas. He'd also been nicknamed the rock doc by Rolling Stone for playing music in the OR to relax patients.

Speaker 35 His mother-in-law had developed a special low-fat diet for her husband's cardiac patients. And this was really before it was accepted that low-fat diets would be good for heart patients.

Speaker 35 She once refused surgery for her own inflamed gallbladder and handled it instead by altering her diet. She taught her son-in-law, Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz, about using Arnica for sore muscles and herbal tea for stomach aches.

Speaker 35 So he gets brought in in part by to alternative medicine by these people who have a real medical background and are doing things that aren't widely accepted, but also may help.

Speaker 35 You know, music, I think there's some data now on how music can help with certain aspects of the healing process. Right.

Speaker 35 Mother-in-law seemed to be on the cutting edge of that. When you said the rock doc,

Speaker 35 I got concerned. I thought he was going to replace people's hearts with crystals and shit.
And I was like, oh, no, oh, no.

Speaker 35 They all die, but my God, their hearts are pretty.

Speaker 35 So, this is how Mehmet gets introduced to the wide world of quack cures. And it makes sense.

Speaker 35 He enters it through largely reasonable ways, alternative treatments that have some positive impact on people. That's in there's extremely reasonable stuff in the article in general.
Like, Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz points out that in 1995, American hospitals had only recently allowed family to stay in the hospital with a patient, while in Turkey, it was common for families to do this.

Speaker 35 And of course, having loved ones nearby can help a patient's morale, which can influence how well they heal. No one, I think, today would even like think to disagree with that.

Speaker 35 It didn't used to be common.

Speaker 35 It changed. So he's, he's in medicine during a time when a lot of stuff that like just wasn't that is kind of now common sense medicine wasn't.

Speaker 35 And I think that kind of opens his eye to like, well, maybe all this other shit works. Yeah, maybe everything in my head is correct.
Yeah.

Speaker 35 We're slowly getting to him turning into a complete narcissist. Yeah.
And the article kind of veers right from, yeah, having loved ones in the room can influence how well you heal to Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz's love of energy work, particularly his work with a lady named named Motz, who believed she could sense the energy of heart transplant patients.

Speaker 35 The Times article certainly does not portray this woman in a particularly positive light.

Speaker 35 Quote, She now has her surgical sea legs under her, but the first time Motz observed open heart surgery, she had a shaky debut.

Speaker 35 She had been standing at the patient's head, outside the sterile field, periodically telling Oz what changes she was able to sense in the patient's energy.

Speaker 35 The patient was obviously not awake, but probably had some awareness, most likely smell and perhaps hearing.

Speaker 35 Open heart patients are often fitted with headphones and provided with tapes to listen to, including, if they want, Oz's own specially recorded soupy trance music.

Speaker 35 For the bypass team, it was quite a novelty to hear Mott's report that she was registering the patient's moods in her body, various states of fear, anger, or satisfaction perceived as roughness in her chest or turbulence in her stomach.

Speaker 35 At one point, seeing that Motts was not looking so good herself, Oz asked a burly assistant to take her outside for some air. When he returned, he said, I sense a change in my stomach.

Speaker 35 It's a tenseness. No, it's a growling.
No, wait a minute. I'm just hungry.

Speaker 35 Oh my God. I swear she's like, she seemed like she is just describing her own feelings and then just ascribing them to an open-hearted person.

Speaker 35 But yeah, it's one of those things. I'm not sure exactly what type of energy work this person is doing

Speaker 35 because there's a few different kind of categories of it.

Speaker 35 She's checking the vibes, dude. She's checking the vibes.

Speaker 35 Just making sure, you know, the vibe dipstick is filled with oil.

Speaker 35 I should note, if I'm going to be totally fair, that Riki, which has its origins in Japan, has been shown in some early scientific studies to help diminish the symptoms of chemotherapy and to significantly alter people's experience of physical and emotional pain.

Speaker 35 And I have some friends who swear by it for kind of physical and emotional pain in particular.

Speaker 35 I don't know what Riki is. I've heard of it.
Is it like when Mr. Miyagi rubs his hands together and then he quits? It's an energy work, I guess.
I don't know.

Speaker 35 it's not a kind of thing that i particularly believe in and i kind of think in a lot of cases it's that you have a good relationship with the practitioner and you trust them and it can be you know an emotionally soothing thing which can i don't know um there were early studies scientific studies that showed that it could diminish the symptoms of chemotherapy and reduce people's experience of pain now further studies were commissioned after these early studies which starting in the early 2000s were more negative a number of hospitals did however add re key practitioners to their stable of

Speaker 35 available providers, in part as a result of like the work that Dr. Oz and the center at Columbia was doing.
You can find these people in hospitals now.

Speaker 35 And it's worth noting that a number of the positive studies about REICI and other similar things were conducted by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

Speaker 35 Their work is problematic, to say the least. And I'm going to quote now from an analysis of several studies conducted by this organization by Professor Dr.
Edzard Ernst.

Speaker 35 Quote, three studies suggested that energy medicine had an effect, but their authors either applied statistics inappropriately, confounded the effects of energy healing by adding unrelated interventions to the experimental condition, or failed to design or blind equivalent placebo controls.

Speaker 35 Their results are therefore untrustworthy. The two studies that were well designed failed to demonstrate effects from energy and healing.

Speaker 35 The odds of generating a useful result of a clinical trial of energy medicine are small. Moreover, what impact would negative studies have?

Speaker 35 Scientists will simply say, we could have told you so, and proponents are unlikely to change their mind.

Speaker 35 Proponents may then claim that the negative study must have been flawed or that energy medicine cannot be investigated by the tools of science.

Speaker 35 Or they might rely on the NCCAM, that organization I talked about, funded studies that generated biased but apparently positive results.

Speaker 35 The NCCAM's approach encourages a self-perpetuating cycle of misinterpreting research and conducting flawed research, which inevitably generates some studies that erroneously claim positive effects and give the false impression that the efficacy of energy medicine is still scientifically unresolved.

Speaker 35 Man, we are just veering into anti-vax territory and like anti-mass territory people who just they Google stuff and then they go, this article right here says that mass actually can't be

Speaker 35 COVID. They can't analyze.
And it's from a government science organization.

Speaker 35 You know, these guys like, and here's a study that said, and it's like, well, okay, but you actually look at scientists, you don't have a vested and often financial interest in this, and they point out all these very obvious flaws in the study.

Speaker 35 It's worth noting that the NCCAM was founded in 1998, three years after the New York Times article about Dr. Oz and the alternative medicine center at Columbia was published.
Now, Dr.

Speaker 35 Roz at this point was not yet on Oprah's show, but he had been featured on TV several times for his pioneering work with mechanical hearts, as well as his embrace of alternative medicine.

Speaker 35 You can draw a a direct line. I don't know if we would have an NCCAM without Dr.
Oz. I don't know.

Speaker 42 You can't say that for certain.

Speaker 35 But he is someone who, before his embrace of alternative medicine, starts to be well known as an exceptional doctor and scientist. He embraces this stuff.
Columbia starts studying this stuff.

Speaker 35 And even though everything they find is pretty inconclusive, the fact that it's in an actual hospital lends it legitimacy. This organization is started in order to test this stuff.

Speaker 35 The organization is filled with people who already believe in it, carrying out tests that are flawed.

Speaker 35 And it helps prepare this culture of believing too much in this stuff. My God, it's just like, it's a real-life Facebook group, you know?

Speaker 35 It's just like everyone already believes in all the stuff and they just keep

Speaker 35 like just co-signing each other's bullshit. And it's one of those things, like, again, I know people who swear by Riki, who gain, you know, emotional.

Speaker 35 benefits from it, who think it helps with, you know, a number of things,

Speaker 35 including like physical, including emotional pain and like if you find something that helps you alleviate your emotional pain more fucking power too you know you're never going to hear me say a damn word against it you know go with god that's that that's all great but uh i mean you want to relieve pain yeah try some morphine though dog because that oh my god morphine there's no downsides to morphine no best part i can't think of one downside to morphine it's not a single one yeah it just feels good the whole time and you just need to take more

Speaker 35 My issue is not so much with any particular treatment, not that not, not even an issue that people would like.

Speaker 35 It's number one, a lot of people will issue actual medical treatment in favor of some of this stuff, and it's not going to.

Speaker 35 I'm trying to be as fair as I can. Really is not going to solve your blocked cardiac pathways, you know? Like, it's not going to fix it.
Yeah, I mean, energy is great, but Plavix works wonders.

Speaker 35 Plavix is a lot better.

Speaker 35 And it's, it's, it's more to the point, even more than that, is it, it gets us on this

Speaker 35 road of increasingly accepting and legitimizing things that there's no, there's not a scientific basis for. And that leads us to shit like, let's drink bleach to cure the coronavirus.

Speaker 35 Like, you know, it's where the road ends, I have more of a problem with than Dr. Oz experimenting with an energy worker during a surgery.
Like, it's where that leads to.

Speaker 35 And he plays a major role in legitimizing that.

Speaker 35 He helps put our national foot on the gas pedal into the post-science age. Yeah, it's a slippery slope to that, you know, downing that brain octane oil.

Speaker 35 Exactly. Exactly.

Speaker 35 So, yeah.

Speaker 35 At this point, though, we're talking still in the mid-90s. Everything Dr.
Roz is saying is reasonable from a certain point of view. He's not claiming that Reiki is going to cure cancer.

Speaker 35 He's not even claiming it's going to cure your heart disease. He's saying it could help with recovery and a lot of recovery is mental.
And he's not, you know,

Speaker 35 it's possible he's right. You know,

Speaker 35 he's not yet a bastard. It's certainly not impossible for this kind of stuff to have a mental impact, which can positively affect recovery.
Okay. Yeah.

Speaker 35 So yeah, he's not a bastard at this point. Nearly all of his alternative medical claims were things that you could argue were at least to some extent reasonable based on the way he framed them.

Speaker 35 And he was most importantly, regardless of whatever kind of woo-woo stuff he got into, an exceptionally gifted medical perfection professional who was performing something like 250 heart surgeries a year.

Speaker 35 You know, that's 250 lives a year. Yeah.
Extended.

Speaker 35 That's great. He's not a bastard yet.
Yeah, he's doing great work so far. Yes.
Despite the

Speaker 35 heart stuff, fine. A little bit of energy, a little bit of heart surgery.
It works out.

Speaker 35 And the thing, though, that is, I think is happening during this period, and I don't know how conscious a choice this is by Dr. Oz.

Speaker 35 I think it is because of the fact that he gets an MBA as well and the fact that he's very good at getting press, very good at getting on TV, at getting in the news.

Speaker 35 I think he is at this point crafting his career to make himself into an ideal candidate for famous TV doctor.

Speaker 35 I think he is building a background that will allow him to establish his celebrity career later.

Speaker 35 It is not hard to see how a handsome doctor with TV experience, a New York Times profile talking about alternative medicine, and a seriously impressive resume was going to wind up eventually on Oprah Winfrey's radar.

Speaker 35 He almost built himself perfectly for that to happen.

Speaker 35 And he tried in the early 2000s. He tried with his wife to start a TV show.
They like filmed a pilot episode. It didn't really take off.

Speaker 35 But he succeeds in, and I think he's pushing, and his wife is pushing him to. to get in, she's very much his business partner, to develop himself into a media personality.

Speaker 35 And he eventually succeeds in 2004 in getting invited to Oprah Winfrey's show.

Speaker 35 Now, Mehmet immediately endeared himself to Winfrey's audience with his willingness to discuss frank health details in a way that was demystifying and humorous.

Speaker 35 He most famously explained that healthy poops tended to be shaped like an S and should hit the water like an Olympic diver with very little splash.

Speaker 35 Oprah herself later recalled, When he made it okay to talk about the shape of a good poop, I knew he could talk about anything. He always found ways to make the human body endlessly fascinating.

Speaker 35 Man, that is, I mean,

Speaker 35 I'm low-key impressed that he impressed Oprah with the doo-doo shapes.

Speaker 35 It's mom stuff, you know? Moms love poop. Moms do.
They love talking about doo-doo. That's the thing.

Speaker 35 And that's what, like, Oz does exactly the right things to endear himself to like millions of middle-class moms. Yeah.
Which is. The best market in the country.
It's an incredible market.

Speaker 35 You can make all of the money if you can get a few million middle-class moms to love you. Yeah, I worked at this

Speaker 35 digital,

Speaker 35 what do you call it, like a digital production company. And the most famous person that we dealt with was a famous Facebook mom who had millions of followers.

Speaker 35 And I would watch her stuff and I was like, this is, you know,

Speaker 35 maybe the most. awful shit I've ever seen.
It was just a lady in a car yelling at people about kids. Yeah.
And but she was a famous mom.

Speaker 35 I mean, if you can become a famous mom, you will be one of the most famous people in the country. Yeah, I mean, it's

Speaker 35 the power of particularly middle-class moms can't be exaggerated. Like, in Poland, the cops and the feds were able to fuck over as many people as they wanted until they started gassing moms.

Speaker 35 Right, exactly. The whole country's pissed.
Yeah, they're like,

Speaker 35 hey, listen, you can do that to people of color, but those are moms. Those are white moms.
Those are white moms.

Speaker 35 That could be my mother. Yeah.

Speaker 35 You know what else?

Speaker 35 Yeah, where are you going with that? Where are you going with that, Ryan?

Speaker 35 I thought you were going to say you know what else is your mom. That's where I thought you were going with that.
You know what else is your mother? The products and services that support this podcast.

Speaker 35 We're back.

Speaker 35 So we've all just agreed that Matt is very funny.

Speaker 35 That was the discussion over the break.

Speaker 35 You made this one into a two-parter, Matt. So the audience can thank you for two episodes about Dr.
Oz this week. All right.
Or they can blame you. And if they blame him, Matt's home address is.

Speaker 35 Oh, we love to dox our guests.

Speaker 35 Dox me, baby.

Speaker 35 So Oprah had Dr. Oz on her show 55 times over the course of five years.
She gave him the nickname America's Doctor, which stuck.

Speaker 35 And although I'm not saying this in a positive sense, is unfortunately accurate.

Speaker 35 He's definitely America's doctor.

Speaker 35 Just appealing to the lowest common denominator of the stupidest human being.

Speaker 35 America's doctor. And if you look at the health of the average American, you can tell the quality of job he's done.

Speaker 35 Eat more bread.

Speaker 35 Everybody, eat bread. Well, actually, that's the one thing he is.
He's actually pretty good about like weight loss. Well, I don't know.
That's still debatable. Stop defending Dr.
Oz.

Speaker 35 I'm not going to to defend. I just love to be fair, you know? I know you do.
You're very fair. Look, say what you will about Hitler.

Speaker 35 Say what you will. He was a vegetarian, and that's good for the environment.
The man cared about animal rights.

Speaker 35 By 2009, it was clear that Dr. Oz had more than enough star power to justify a shot at his own show.

Speaker 35 Oprah's production company had little trouble finding a buyer for what was sure to be a blockbuster new series. Her show celebrated the launch of Dr.
Oz's show with an entire episode dedicated to Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz, which acted as something of a coming out party for his brand. From a press release on Oprah.com.
This is talking about the special Dr. Oz episode.

Speaker 35 Moving personal stories and extraordinary surprises are featured throughout the hour as Dr. Oz meets viewers who share how his advice saved their lives.

Speaker 35 From those who noticed life-threatening diseases their doctors missed to those who lost weight thanks to his diet tips from Dr. Oz.

Speaker 35 Real people step forward to offer their thanks to america's doctor plus it's the reunion that dr oz never imagined would happen as oprah show producers track down a young boy he cared for in the aftermath of hurricane katrina and the two reunite for the first time he's like the perfect perfect guy for this i mean i love that it's literally sounds like an hour-long special of people just thanking him which might be the most narcissistic thing i think i've ever heard yeah i mean like it's one thing for oprah to do that because I think America does legitimately owe her thanks for just years of content, you know?

Speaker 35 Years of mostly dangerous health-based content. Oh, yeah.
No, I mean, it's awful content, but the fact is, it's quantity over quality in America. And, you know, but an hour of just thanking Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz and having people come up to him, like, you saved me is fucking wild. It's worth noting in terms of his bastardry that

Speaker 35 in kind of the acceleration from, hey, maybe energy healing works to becoming a monster.

Speaker 35 The early 2000s is the period in which Oprah becomes aware of a Brazilian healer named John of God, who believes he can do psychic surgery and like remove tumors. John of God.
Yeah.

Speaker 35 Yeah. Oh, of, of the, of the Brazilian of gods.

Speaker 35 And on the episode in which she introduces John of God to America, Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz comes on and gives his professional opinion that like he seems like he's really having an effect on people, and I can't explain it. I don't think medical science can explain what this man is doing.

Speaker 35 Basically, giving a real doctor's opinion that this guy's got to be legit. Yeah.

Speaker 35 John of God later turned out to be a mass rapist on these on a scale, hundreds of victims, on a scale almost incomprehensible. We did a two-parter on John of God.
You can listen to it.

Speaker 35 It's a fucking nightmare.

Speaker 35 This guy never gets half the following that he has if it's not for Oprah and Dr. Oz.
So, wow.

Speaker 35 Holy shit. Oh, it's good shit.
Good shit. I found a fascinating New York Times article written a few months into Dr.
Oz's new show. It notes that, in transitioning to his own series, Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz had to spice up his act

Speaker 35 for a daily daytime audience, quote, potentially distracted by the tantrums of a toddler or the yelping of a labradoodle. They go on to summarize his early episodes.

Speaker 35 His show tackles topics as diverse and diversely weighty as skin cancer, kitchen burns, sleep eating, and pubic hair hair loss, returning constantly to the same television motherload Winfrey profitably mined, weepy overweight guests who vow and often fail to get in shape, and it has taken its star far away from any sort of traditional medical practice.

Speaker 35 He explains that transition as the product of frustration.

Speaker 35 Too often, he told me, he would sit in an office and be telling you stuff too little, too late, that if you'd been able to lose a little weight or if your diabetes had been managed more aggressively, then it would have dramatically altered your destiny, which is now to go downstairs and have open heart surgery.

Speaker 35 With his TV show, he can exhort Americans to end all aspects, to tend to all aspects of their health, head to toe, before they reach a point of no return.

Speaker 35 Lose weight, go to Brazil and get sexually assaulted by a con man. Oh, God.

Speaker 35 Oh, boy.

Speaker 35 You know, there's always that point.

Speaker 35 You know, I've listened to your show, and there's always that point in the episode where the comedian or the guest has no other option but to just say, fuck, that sucks, dude.

Speaker 35 Like, there's no other comment, but what? Oh, that's crazy.

Speaker 35 But, you know, hey, John of God,

Speaker 35 Dr. Oz,

Speaker 35 they all sound like great people.

Speaker 35 Yeah, yeah. And it's going to get worse.
You know,

Speaker 35 this is kind of the period. One of the things he's supposed to do in this period is he starts cutting back on his surgical practice and performing fewer surgeries.

Speaker 35 Yeah, because he's got to keep up all those TV dates. Yeah, in order to tell people about John of God, the mass rapist, and in order to tell people about, I don't know, some stuff that's good, right?

Speaker 35 Telling people to eat healthier is a good idea. America's diet sucks.
His diet advice, I think, is, well,

Speaker 35 we'll talk about that later. It's also problematic.
Anyway, he's trading objectively useful medical work for being a nonsense doctor, but he's making millions of dollars. Yeah.

Speaker 35 And in America, that is the ultimate marker of doing the right thing. Yeah.
That's the only thing that tells you whether or not you're doing the right thing.

Speaker 35 If you make a lot of money, then whatever you're doing is the right thing to do. Yeah.
It's morally correct to make a lot of money. Yeah.

Speaker 35 Morally righteous. Righteous wealth.
Yes. You know what else is righteous, Matt?

Speaker 35 Is it the products and services? No, my man. It's you.
Because the episode's over. Part one is over.
And

Speaker 35 we're going to sail out. But first, you've got to plug your pluggables.
And I just decided to compliment you before we roll. Yeah, that's very nice.

Speaker 35 Here, I thought you were just trying to get me to talk about products and services. Well, I thank you for having me on.
I have a product and/or service called the Pod Yourself a Gun.

Speaker 35 It's a Sopranos podcast. And

Speaker 35 yeah, if you like the Sopranos, or even if you don't, check it out on the, you know, wherever the podcast store is. Podcast.

Speaker 35 All right. Well,

Speaker 35 this is the show that that it is, and we're done doing the things that we do. So go out into the world and, I don't know, find Dr.
Oz and scream at him. Give him a good, give him a good screaming.

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Speaker 35 This is behind the bastards, the podcast where we neg our audience in order to make them more closely drawn to us. It's a tactic I learned

Speaker 35 from pickup artists. From pickup artists.
Yes.

Speaker 35 Really, this whole show is based on the lessons I learned as a pickup artist.

Speaker 35 You can't see it, but I'm wearing an enormous hat with ostrich plumes coming off

Speaker 35 made out of purple felt. It's an incredible hat.
The most fuckable hat. The most fuckable hat.
Yes, that was actually the first name I pitched for this podcast.

Speaker 35 Sophie said that that means nothing and no one will listen to it. So we won't lie.
I don't know if he lies on my name and saying that I turned down his ideas.

Speaker 179 That's just not the case.

Speaker 35 Sophie, I think we can all agree that one of the best things to do is to lie about things your colleagues didn't do because it's funny.

Speaker 35 I agree with it. Thank you.

Speaker 35 On to the show.

Speaker 35 We're talking about Dr. Oz.

Speaker 35 And as we left the last episode off, he had just, you know, gotten Oprah, right? Yeah. Started his TV career.
Gotten Oprah hard.

Speaker 35 So he started his TV career. And he also starts right around the same time he gets on TV for the first time.
He starts a daily morning radio show on Oprah Winfrey's Sirius XM channel.

Speaker 35 Never a good good idea. Sirius XM? No, terrible idea.
What is it about giving people three hours of uninterrupted airtime? You know, there's just something about it.

Speaker 35 I, I, you know, and this is an opinion that's pretty controversial within iHeartRadio. I think radio should be illegal.

Speaker 35 And I think it should be a felony punished by prison time for being on the radio or having a radio or thinking about the radio. Yeah.

Speaker 35 I think the only form of entertainment that should be legal is specifically my podcast. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 35 One podcast.

Speaker 35 Yes, yeah. And there should legally only be one Sopranos podcast allowed, which, as it turns out, is the case.

Speaker 35 I think if we could get Chuck Schumer's ear, we can make this happen.

Speaker 35 We'll tack this onto the pot, Bill. No one will notice.

Speaker 35 So

Speaker 35 Dr. Oz has the Dr.
Oz show. He's got a radio show on Winfrey's XM channel where he covers very scientific topics like how God changes your brain and the happiest people in the world.

Speaker 35 Now,

Speaker 35 I found a New York Times article that was written just a few months into his tenure with his TV show, kind of at the start of his burst into stardom.

Speaker 35 And the interviewer who talked to Oz for this article seems as impressed as everyone always is by the manic, somewhat inhuman pace at which Mehmet Oz works.

Speaker 35 By this point, he'd also written six books with titles like You, the Smart Patient, You on a Diet, and You Having a Baby. It's like the series is the

Speaker 35 famous you series. Cole and whatever.

Speaker 35 And he co-writes these books with another doctor. I can't tell you how much of their writing was.
A lot of times, I'm not saying this is the case with Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz because he's a wild workaholic, but a lot of times when you have a guy that's his kind of famous and they write a bunch of books, they write like 10% of the book and they have someone else, a co-author or a ghostwriter, do the rest.

Speaker 35 I don't know if that's the case here. There's always one

Speaker 35 Matt Damon who's writing most of Goodwill Hunting, and and then there's a Ben Affleck who gets top booking. And I do believe Matt Damon writes most of his books.
Oh, 100%.

Speaker 35 Yeah.

Speaker 35 So 9 million copies of his various titles are in print by this point, like the first year of his show. So he is a very wealthy and successful man, pretty much out the gate.
Like money machine.

Speaker 35 Getting the start on Oprah kind of guarantees it. Basically, if Oprah likes you enough to put you on her show more than once, you're going to get rich.
God damn. Yeah.

Speaker 35 I just should have spent my youth trying to get on Oprah. We all should have.
We all should have.

Speaker 35 So, Dr. Oz gets a semi-regular column for Time magazine because, again, they see this guy get famous.
They're like, we got to get some of that Oprah money too. We get this guy on Time.

Speaker 35 People will start reading Time again.

Speaker 35 And yeah, it's interesting. They give him a column.
And in 2008, they included him on their list of the world's most 100 most influential people.

Speaker 35 So, before they hire him to a call, they call him one of the world's most influential people. And as soon as he gets listed as one of the hundred most influential people on the planet, Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz calls his dad, right? Like, find him.

Speaker 35 Yeah, this has got to be the thing. How can he not be impressed by this? Am I enough for you, Papa? So, when he tells his dad, his dad's first question is: what number?

Speaker 35 How high are you on the list?

Speaker 35 And this is not a ranked thing. Like, it's not the top hundred, like, going to one.
It's just these hundred people are all very influential. It's not a listical, bro.
Yeah, it's not a listical.

Speaker 35 Oh, my God.

Speaker 35 But Dr. Oz, in this interview, seemed to acknowledge that the fact that his dad reacted that way said a lot about both, you know, his dad and about their relationship.

Speaker 35 He told an interviewer, quote, he wants to know what number. Are you kidding me? There are six billion people on the planet.
It's a rounding error.

Speaker 35 oh god but but like but like what number though because you do one seriously would how high are you motherfucker yeah come on how influencer are you you're basically me yeah

Speaker 35 so that interviewer along with the new york times wrote quote it's also the kind of thing that goads the sun to climb mountain after mountain seldom pausing to enjoy the view The good doctor did admit to engaging in a number of time-saving measures.

Speaker 35 Over the years, he did numerous columns, which were often just recycled from other columns or chunks of his books.

Speaker 35 He'd provide the same list of skin moisturizing or metabolism boosting tips in different magazines or online articles. Even so, his workload was enormous.
The Dr.

Speaker 35 Raj show was instantly one of the most popular shows on the planet, and Mehmet was contracted to record 175 hour-long episodes per year, which is a fucking brutal work schedule on its own.

Speaker 35 And the man continued to practice as a surgeon, albeit at a reduced rate.

Speaker 35 The New York Times interviewer who visited him in 2010 seemed to find his behavior and kind of his compulsive workaholism somewhat unsettling.

Speaker 35 I never saw him without a portable larder of baggies, plastic containers, and thermoses of food and drink, and all of it, every crumb, every drop, was healthful.

Speaker 35 Low-fat Greek yogurt mixed with brightly colored berries, spinach, slaw, raw almonds, raw walnuts soaked in water to amplify their nutritional benefit, a dark green concoction of juices from vegetables, including cucumber and parsley, roughly every 45 to 60 minutes, as if on cue, he would ingest something from his movable buffet, but only a little bit.

Speaker 35 His portions assiduously regulated, like

Speaker 35 an intravenous drip of nutrition. It was the most efficient, joyless eating I have ever seen.
That is so weird. I'm sorry.
That seems so weird.

Speaker 35 That made me so uncomfortable to just look at the dude.

Speaker 35 He's cool, dude. Like, that's, you know, he's living life in the most drab way possible, just

Speaker 35 trying to make TV shows and do heart surgeries, you know? Yeah. Who has time to enjoy anything when you're daddy? Enjoyless, efficient eating.

Speaker 35 He's like, I don't eat or drink anything that I would enjoy. Yeah.
You're welcome.

Speaker 35 That's just so unsettling. I mean, you know what? I have known a couple of people in my life, all very skinny, who have told me, like, I just don't really like eating.

Speaker 35 Like, yeah, there's some foods that I prefer to others, but I just don't really enjoy it one way or the other. Like, I've known like some of those people wound up on the soylent thing.

Speaker 35 And I guess, like, I mean, yeah, fine. fine.
It's like, it's whatever, you know, it's your life.

Speaker 35 If you want to eat your monkey food, eat monkey food, but don't, you know, be surprised when I judge you, you know? Yeah. Like, it's uh, that's weird.
At the start, the Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz show was broadly inoffensive from a medical perspective.

Speaker 35 He gave a lot of fairly good common sense health advice, health advice, and provided a lot of people with a friendly medical face willing to explain things their doctors might not have the time or the bedside manner to properly lay out.

Speaker 35 But Oz's fascination with alternative medicine was present from the beginning.

Speaker 35 And as time went on, he veered more and more in that direction, following both the topics that consistently drew the most viewers and the topics that were easiest to put together.

Speaker 35 Because 175 hours of content a year is a lot. I mean, really, though, like at some point, you run out of shit to talk about and you have to just be like, oh, pendulums over the heart.
Do they work?

Speaker 35 You know? Yeah. Yeah.
Punching people in the dick. Could it improve your bowels? Yeah.

Speaker 35 Try it. Try it.

Speaker 35 I mean, you know, we have to do, I don't know how much content we have to do per year, 52 weeks, two hours a week.

Speaker 35 Yeah, we do like 110, maybe like with some of the episodes that go over, 120 hours of content a year for this show. And that's a lot.

Speaker 35 175 hours of video content is huge. Like you can't.

Speaker 35 There's not that much good and also entertaining medical advice that you could give in a year, let alone every single year.

Speaker 35 I mean, just like, there's only so many organs to talk about, you know, after a while, you just got to invent shit. Yeah, and it's this thing.

Speaker 35 It's this kind of this inevitable churn of capitalism leading us all into this specific kind of nonsense because you can't not

Speaker 35 have content.

Speaker 35 Legally, you're contracted to, but also you have this whole team of people whose ability to pay their rent, whose ability to afford their homes, to keep their kids in school is dependent upon you doing this show.

Speaker 35 Outside of just the fact that he's rich, like

Speaker 35 he's fine, but

Speaker 35 it's this thing. You have to keep putting out the thing, and you will never have enough meaningful shit to put out to do it.
Right.

Speaker 35 So, you start, in his case, doing nonsense about mediums and shit, and in our case, doing episodes about Dr. Oz.

Speaker 35 When you run out of bastards, eventually you just got to find one on TV. We're not out of bastards, but like last week, I spent 30 hours reading about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Speaker 35 I needed an off week, you know?

Speaker 35 God, we all need off weeks. That That is one of my favorite, absolutely real documents to read.

Speaker 35 Yeah, that's why we brought you on, actually. Yeah,

Speaker 35 I'm actually one of the elders of Zion, and I got some protocols for you.

Speaker 35 Oh,

Speaker 35 good times. So

Speaker 35 for an example of the kind of nonsense creep, I guess you'd call it, that like advanced upon his show. In March of 2012, Dr.
Oz did a show titled Medium versus Medicine.

Speaker 35 Oz's guest was a psychic who claimed she could communicate with the dead. This was one of several, and by this point, probably dozens of episodes dedicated to people who claimed to talk to the dead.

Speaker 35 Energy healing was, you know, on the fringe, certainly, but at least it was something that when he started doing it, there were scientific studies saying there might be something to it.

Speaker 35 Those studies have since been... to

Speaker 35 a large extent discredited. But when he started doing that, there was some evidence.
It was a thing to try. You know, he wasn't completely out of left field.
Yeah, people were at least testing it out.

Speaker 35 Doing episodes on mediums talking to the dead is well outside of plausible deniability territory, right? Like, you're just doing nonsense at this point.

Speaker 35 You know, it depends how they're talking. If you go up to a dead body and start talking to it, you are technically talking to the dead.
Now, that would be a fun show. Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz breaks into morgues and talks to corpses. Yeah.
Hey, how'd you die? Just

Speaker 35 having his bodyguards, mace police officers rolling into a crime scene be like, who did this?

Speaker 35 Have this go down?

Speaker 35 Are you okay?

Speaker 35 I am a doctor.

Speaker 35 Do you want some almonds?

Speaker 35 They're soaked in water for more nutrition.

Speaker 35 All right, someone get me a crystal.

Speaker 35 So, yeah, he had, yeah, Dr. Oz had among his psychic guests, famous grifter king John Edwards on his show, not the politician,

Speaker 35 the talks to dead TV show guy. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 35 And he praised the reading that he received from John Edwards, saying,

Speaker 35 Let me tell you, it changed my life. I've learned in my career that there are times when science just hasn't caught up with things.
And I think this may be one of them.

Speaker 35 Which is almost exactly what he said about John of God, the guy who raped hundreds of people.

Speaker 35 Yeah. That's how you know, like, to stay far away from anything when he's just like, man, this is

Speaker 35 a brand new groundbreaking territory. And you can go, all right, guys, it's a rapist.
Ron. And it's one of those things.

Speaker 35 Part of how he's like, the intelligent way to frame this is you start with the true thing, which is there are things science can't explain.

Speaker 35 One of those things is the nature of consciousness and what happens to it after, you know, vital sciences.

Speaker 35 We don't know. There's not an objective answer to that.
But it going this way is kind of like being like, yeah, you know, we can't explain like the slit box experiment.

Speaker 35 Like, there's a bunch of shit in physics. I don't know.
I'm not a science guy, but like, you know, particle and wave shit, you can't explain that. There's a bunch of shit you can't explain.
Magnets.

Speaker 35 Yeah. How do they work? How do they work? It's this, it's this jump from, yes, there are things we can't explain to, so let's listen to this man talk to the dead.

Speaker 35 Millions of people gather around.

Speaker 35 Gather around. He's going to channel your dead aunt.
Yes. Yes.

Speaker 35 Maybe not

Speaker 35 a reasonable way to take a reasonable starting point. Yeah, especially when you're a doctor on TV.
Yeah.

Speaker 35 And I want to quote from a write-up I found in the Journal of the Missouri State Medical Association. Quote, During another show, Oz interviewed Dr.

Speaker 35 Mosara Fali, a miracle healer to Sylvester Stallone, Prince Charles of England, and others, regarding his use of iridology.

Speaker 35 According to the widely debunked bizarre belief, each part of the iris corresponds to a specific area of the body, and a person's state of health could be diagnosed by examining particular regions of the iris.

Speaker 35 After expressing his amazement at Dr. Ali's diagnostic abilities, Oz stated, I want to applaud Dr.
Musaraf Ali because these are ancient traditions and they have been around for centuries.

Speaker 35 So who am I to dismiss them?

Speaker 35 Other than a very well-educated man. A doctor.
You're a doctor, Mehmet. You had me at Prince Charles.

Speaker 35 Yeah. It's like, you know, there's a lot of cultures who say that you should remove the clitoris surgically

Speaker 35 because

Speaker 35 it's healthier and it stops dangerous masturbation. It's ancient.
Who are we to say this is a bad idea? Who are any of us to say anything is wrong? Yeah.

Speaker 35 Oh my God. I love it too.
Just like, I was amazed by his ability to look into my eyes and diagnose that my dad will never love me.

Speaker 35 How did he know? How did he know? It does bring me joy that Prince Charles got fucked with because fuck Prince Charles.

Speaker 35 I wonder what his eyes said. It's funny.
He said the same thing. It said, your dad will never love you.
That's all he does. He goes to famous people and he goes, your dad will never love you.

Speaker 35 Your dad will never love you. Thank you so much.

Speaker 35 There's this

Speaker 35 one of the big aspects of this guy's success and of the success of the things he pushes is Orientalism, right? Right.

Speaker 35 Like this idea of like the forbidden and strange and wondrous and magical East and all of the,

Speaker 35 we don't understand all of these like, oh, India is so mysterious, yada, yada, yada. Um,

Speaker 35 what if you were to say, like, well, for centuries, tobacco companies have said that tobacco can cure like

Speaker 35 different lung ailments. Who are we to dismiss these ancient traditions? Yeah, the Q-zone could be real.
Exactly. Like, it stops people from stuttering.
Do more cocaine.

Speaker 35 I mean, yeah,

Speaker 35 just the idea, and I've always found this in general to be the biggest load of horseshit, is when people have

Speaker 35 said, you know, this is like an ancient healing technique. And it's like, you mean like bleeding people with leeches?

Speaker 35 You know, you mean like cutting off someone's leg because he got a fucking, a small infection on his toe?

Speaker 35 It's this fucking thing with Dr. Oz.
Like

Speaker 35 it's one thing if you're just like traveling to another part of the world, you see some sort of medical or treatment you've never seen before and you're like, well, who am I, who am I to say anything about?

Speaker 35 Right. Like, I don't know.
Dr. Oz is a doctor on TV talking to millions.
You're literally the person who should be saying something about the legitimacy of this. Right.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 35 You're, you're the guy. You're the person.
You are, in fact, the person who should say something about this. Who am I? You're you.
You're the most famous doctor in America. Yeah.

Speaker 35 And that's what that write-up in the Journal of the Missouri State Medical Association notes. Quote, who? Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz is a trained clinician and scientist, someone who can read a scientific article with a critical eye.

Speaker 35 He is someone who can filter out the noise of the placebo effect or discern the simple carnival tricks of a charlatan. The problem is that most people in his audience cannot.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 35 I mean, he has a literal responsibility to tell people that these guys are full of shit. But he also has a responsibility to his show sponsors and to the network for ratings, you know?

Speaker 35 You know who else has a responsibility to the show sponsors? Wow.

Speaker 35 i know that was i think that's got to be the first time

Speaker 35 that's got to be the first time it's ever actually been a relevant segue so good so good anyway here's products

Speaker 35 ah we're back talking about dr oz having just a great time um so obviously the fact that Dr. Oz, I mean,

Speaker 35 probably the fact that most of his audience couldn't discern whether or not any of these nonsense treatments were real, um, is a big part of why the Dr. Oz show became an overnight success.

Speaker 35 Yeah, before very long, it was being watched by 4 million viewers every single day.

Speaker 35 Over the next half decade or so, he won two Emmys. His guest list included First Lady Michelle Obama, who loved Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz for his focus on healthy diets for children and, in general, his crusade to get Americans to lose weight. Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz claimed through medicine that through math that I cannot verify, that his show inspired Americans to lose 3 million cumulative pounds per year.

Speaker 35 I don't know, maybe. Yeah, they base that on what? Like, did people call in to say how many pounds they've lost to the show?

Speaker 35 I mean, I'm sure he found some way to make the claim or whatever, but it's very, it's, I don't know, maybe it is one of the things that he does.

Speaker 35 That is, we'll talk about there's problems with some of the diet tips he gives people, actually, significant ones.

Speaker 35 Um, but telling like inspiring people to lose weight is not usually bad for their health, although it can be. Yeah.
Sometimes people take it too far and it depends on the fucking health problems.

Speaker 35 You know, it's a mixed bag, I guess we'd say.

Speaker 35 But the other stuff isn't a mixed bag. So I guess we'll call that his great success.

Speaker 35 So

Speaker 35 yeah, it is good. I will say it is unequivocally good that Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz continually pressed his audience of millions of people to eat more fruits and vegetable fruits and vegetables, to get better sleep, to exercise regularly, and to get their flu vaccinations.

Speaker 35 That's all rat, right? Yeah. But shit, I could have told you that.
Give me a tip. Yeah,

Speaker 35 you don't have to be a doctor to say that. Say that, doctor.
No, that shit. Yeah.
Eat better, piggies. I mean, but he's charismatic.
People like him. It's good that he does that at least.
Yeah.

Speaker 35 They don't trust me, so they won't give me the show, but they should.

Speaker 35 Yeah. The unfortunate part is that this guy gained, because he's handsome,

Speaker 35 a lot of ladies out there think Dr. Oz is hot.

Speaker 35 He's very charismatic.

Speaker 35 He's very charming. And he gains this enormous influence with Middle America.
And he uses that influence to do some really fucking questionable shit.

Speaker 35 And I'm going to quote now from a write-up in the AMA's Journal of Ethics. He has told mothers that there were dangerous levels of arsenic in their child's apple juice.
There weren't.

Speaker 35 And suggested that green coffee is a miracle cure for obesity. Federal regulators discovered altered data in hyped coffee bean evidence.

Speaker 35 The Food and Drug Administration tested for arsenic in apple juice and found the vast majority of apple juice tested contained to contain low levels of arsenic.

Speaker 35 And given these levels, he was confident in the overall safety of apple juice consumed in this country. Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz also featured two guests on his show who claimed that genetically modified foods were cancer causing, despite repeated safety reports that found no adverse effects.

Speaker 35 Man, yeah, I mean, he's like, he's veering, he's getting there. Like,

Speaker 35 I'm watching him slowly go from Mehmet to Mangala.

Speaker 35 Yeah.

Speaker 35 Come on, let him be Mangala.

Speaker 35 It is too good a pun to.

Speaker 35 I get that you want to be fair, Robert, but let's go for it. All right.
We're doing it. But no, we're watching him

Speaker 35 turn into a snake oil salesman, and it's very exciting. Yeah.

Speaker 35 So. Dr.
Oz's enthusiasm for alternative medicine has had the effect of creating instant fads over any health product he even vaguely suggests on his show.

Speaker 35 When he mentions the purported health benefits of white mulberry, red palm oil, or brown seaweed, all of which he's claimed can do things like cut weight, reduce aging, or beat the flu, those products fly off the shelf.

Speaker 35 Oz often doesn't endorse specific brands, but he doesn't need to. Online retailers watch closely and immediately slap, as seen on Dr.
Oz, on their pseudoscientific products. Yes, I've seen this.
Yeah.

Speaker 35 I've seen this. This is where we get to the big harm.

Speaker 35 He did one episode that focused on so-called relaxation drinks and included a close-up shot of five cans of beverages he said might help calm you down. Just a Miller high life.
Yeah.

Speaker 35 He just puts a can of Colt 45 on the table.

Speaker 35 Billy D. Williams walks out.

Speaker 35 It's a steel reserve. Trust me.
You'll be relaxed. You'll be calm as shit.

Speaker 35 You might yell at your mom, but it'll be fun afterwards.

Speaker 35 Yeah, you will very calmly put your hand through a taxicab window.

Speaker 35 As soon as the episode aired, a quote, liquid sleep aid called iChill bragged on their website, Dr. Oz is talking about a new way to wind down with relaxation drinks.

Speaker 35 They are the newest trend in helping you relax and calm down. And the best news is they contain natural ingredients already known to promote relaxation.

Speaker 35 Mulberry, Laudenum.

Speaker 35 I remember the eye chill. That turned into like an entire thing.
There's so many. Yeah,

Speaker 35 we're about to talk about it. Yeah.

Speaker 35 And also, if there was a Laudanum drink, I would be buying it.

Speaker 35 So the problem with all with this is that all of these different relaxation drinks are filled with a variety of chemicals like melatonin and theanine and taurine.

Speaker 35 These drinks are unregulated as they are not medicines or dietary supplements, but the chemicals chemicals they include all have actual impacts on the central nervous system.

Speaker 35 Pregnant women and children are often advised to avoid products with some of these chemicals, but the beverages in question rarely note this.

Speaker 35 No data exists on how these chemicals might impact people and the quantities they are added to in these beverages, or when combined with other chemicals, or when combined with medications people drinking them might be taking.

Speaker 35 Responsible doctors, writing

Speaker 35 for the journal Nature Neuroscience, wrote a warning about these beverages that specifically called out iChill by name.

Speaker 35 Quote, existing research on the potential benefits and harms of some components of relaxation drinks suggests that they may not always be safe.

Speaker 35 Indeed, the FDA issued a warning last year to the manufacturers of melatonin-laced brownies, citing safety concerns from the literature, including effects on the autonomic nervous system and visual system and increased expression of symptoms in a sleep disorder.

Speaker 35 Other components of relaxation drinks, such as L-theanine or amino acids, such as taurine, may be considered safe for consumption only at some doses by the FDA.

Speaker 35 But relaxation drinks are not subject to such regulations, nor are they required to disclose the amounts of their ingredients. Oh my God.
I mean, first of all, did you say melatonin brownies?

Speaker 35 Yeah, buddy. What the fuck? Like, I want to eat and just get tired immediately.
Like, that is very strange. It, like, here's the thing about brownies.

Speaker 35 I've never eaten one and been like, I just want to relax. Like, no, I'm trying to get a little sugar rush.
To be honest, to be honest, a sleepy time brownie, delightful. I would be very down.

Speaker 35 Listen, pod brownies are very different.

Speaker 35 It's not the same as relaxation.

Speaker 35 Like, one is like an ambient brownie, and the other one is like a brownie that makes you hungry for more brownies. Pod brownies make sense.
Ambient brownies exist. I would love one.
Thank you, buddy.

Speaker 35 I mean, I guess I'd rather do that than just swallow an ambient, but man, that is.

Speaker 35 I'm like, I'm like, gets to sleep and also got a brownie. I'm sounds awesome.
It's bad for your health. I'll tell you that much.
Apparently, am I remembering this correctly, Robert?

Speaker 35 But wasn't the eye cho, like, like the bottle and the marketing, like similar

Speaker 35 style to like an energy drink similar to like a five-hour energy? That was like the aesthetic. No, no, no.
I think those were, those were, they had like a weird different shaped plastic bottle.

Speaker 35 But like the, the problem is that, again, number one, you've got a lot of people with like, who are on medications that this shit interacts with.

Speaker 35 Which is crazy that like literally a relaxation drink could be contraindicated for your prescription medication. Okay, so everything Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz recommends, I guess, outside of like death psychics, comes with this caveat. Um,

Speaker 35 some of the herbs and natural medicines that he recommends do have health impacts, but they also have consequences, medications they might not interact well with. Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz does not bring this up when he shotguns half-assed advice out to an audience of millions.

Speaker 35 That article in Nature Neuroscience that I referenced, warning about the relaxation drinks Oz recommended, it's been read 10,000 times.

Speaker 35 So the article warning people that these things can be contraindicated and might have impacts on your health and your central nervous system, read 10,000 times. Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz's episode suggesting these drinks, listened, watched 4 million times. God damn.

Speaker 35 Yeah.

Speaker 35 People started to notice that this was a problem by the mid-aughts. Doctors had been complaining for a while, but in 2013, Forbes wrote a listicle laying out the silliest things Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz has suggested on his show, including the fact that having 200 orgasms a year would extend your life by six years. Here's how he explained that bit of math on his website.

Speaker 35 Dude, I'm about to live to 200 years old. Yeah, I ain't never dying, motherfucker.
I ain't never dying. I get one out at least once a day.

Speaker 35 365.

Speaker 35 Here's his website. If you have more than 200 orgasms a year, you can reduce your physiologic age by six years, Dr.
Oz says.

Speaker 35 He bases the number on a study done at Duke University that surveyed people on the amount and quality of sex they had.

Speaker 35 They looked at what happened to folks that are receiving a lot of intercourse over time, and the fact is it correlated.

Speaker 35 Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Speaker 35 Is it sex? Because he didn't say nothing about sex. He said orgasms.
And I do that on my own.

Speaker 35 No,

Speaker 35 he talked to them about the amount and quality of sex they had, but like

Speaker 35 it's correlated. So, again, he's basically lying here.
Yeah, yeah. You number one,

Speaker 35 what is the possibility that people who are having a lot of good sex are in better health?

Speaker 35 That's why they're able to have a lot more good sex because they're like, they're physically healthy, and so it's easier for them to like,

Speaker 35 uh, what if, what are the odds that, like, if you're having more sex, you're more social, you're more likely to have a long-term romantic partner, that increases your lifespan.

Speaker 35 Yeah, again, I'm, of all people, never going to be the guy to say there's not health benefits to sex. There sure is.
Oh, yeah. Dr.
Oz is

Speaker 35 exaggerating this.

Speaker 35 He's taking an actual study that showed some interesting stuff and he's turning it into a lie.

Speaker 35 Yeah, he's turning it into like pretending he has quantifiable data and that like correlation and correlation is causation. Like that,

Speaker 35 that's what he's trying to do.

Speaker 35 Yeah, there is data that suggests that regular intercourse reduces men's mortality risks by 50%, which doesn't mean that fucking stops men from dying, particularly because it's men who benefit in this way.

Speaker 35 It means that men are less healthy than women, tend to die faster. And when men have partners that they live with, they are more likely to have a medical problem noticed.

Speaker 35 If they have a heart attack, someone's going to be there to call them. Like, there's a lot of reasons why this is the case.
Yeah, they're not dying alone, you know?

Speaker 35 Yeah, it's not the fact that just fucking magically adds, like, reduces your age by six years if you do it enough. Like, that's nonsense.
It's nice to think it, though. It makes it nice to think it.

Speaker 35 I'm going to print out that article, show it to my girlfriend, and say, hey, you got to help me live longer. You know, I'm not coming enough.
I'm going to die.

Speaker 35 We got to do this more.

Speaker 35 Yeah, just start fucking in public. And when the cops come, be like, this is medicine.
Yeah. It's like, do you want me to die six years earlier than I should? I have a right to this.

Speaker 35 Dr. Oz said I should fuck more.

Speaker 35 Now, on its own, recommending that people get more sexes is, you know, fine. I'm very pro-sex, but I am anti-encouraging people to misunderstand health science.
The nature of Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz's audience and the sheer breadth of things he suggests makes it difficult to analyze the total health impact of his show. But there are some dire case studies, as Vox notes in their write-up.

Speaker 35 Quote, There's the case of a man who followed Oz's suggestion of curing insomnia by pouring uncooked rice into socks, heating them in a microwave, and wearing them to bed.

Speaker 35 The man got second and third degree burns on his feet.

Speaker 35 And the reason he got burned is because he was diabetic. He didn't have the same level of feeling in his feet.
Oh my God.

Speaker 35 If he had gone to a doctor and said, Hey, I heard about this thing that might help with insomnia, the doctor would say, Well, you're diabetic. You don't have as much feeling in your feet.

Speaker 35 I'm worried you might burn yourself.

Speaker 35 Dr. Ross is just saying, Hey, this will help you sleep.
Do it, whoever you are. Like, again, it's probably

Speaker 35 talking to 4 million people. It will be bad advice for some of them.
I mean, it's it's like,

Speaker 35 this all feels very much like when Trump was telling everyone about the wonders of hydroxychloroquine. Oh, yeah, we're going to talk about that later.

Speaker 35 And then people are eating fucking fish food or like fish tank cleaner and dying. And people are like,

Speaker 35 how could people be so stupid? And it's like, people are stupid. You can't tell them to.
eat the fucking fishball cleaner. Yeah.
They'll do it.

Speaker 35 They'll fucking do it.

Speaker 35 So this guy guy sued, but the case was thrown out because the judge determined that Oz cannot establish a physician-patient relationship through TV. I agree with the judge.

Speaker 35 That's my problem with his show is that he is a physician purporting to be giving medical advice, but is also not taking anyone's individual circumstances into account and more to the fucking point, not liable if he does any of the irresponsible things that would lend a physician doing their job traditionally in trouble.

Speaker 35 I mean, it is medical malpractice, whether or not he's legally liable for it or not.

Speaker 35 I would agree.

Speaker 35 And I'm going to continue that quote from Vox. Not everyone agrees with the judge's reasoning.

Speaker 35 Rochester, New York medical student and blogger Benjamin Maser has been publishing anonymous stories sent to him from health professionals about the impact Oz has had on patient care.

Speaker 35 One reported that her dad had a heart attack and five stints placed in his heart, which required him to take aspirin and plavix to prevent blood clots. He was watching Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz, who said Plavix was not necessary. So he stopped taking it.
About a month later, he had another massive heart attack and coded and had to be shocked back to life.

Speaker 35 She continued, my dad admitted to following Dr. Oz's advice and not asking his own cardiologist.

Speaker 35 Man,

Speaker 35 that's really bad.

Speaker 35 Did he have like an alternative, or was he just like decided one day that Plavix is going to be? I'm sure it was. If I know my Dr.
Oz, I'm sure it was, you don't need to take Plavix.

Speaker 35 Eat these different heart-healthy foods and avoid these foods, and that'll do all that Plavix will do. Yeah, yeah.
Eat some beans and put your face in some boiled water, and you should be fine.

Speaker 35 I suspect it was dietary advice that if you're someone who doesn't really need Plavix, it's fine, or might even help you to not need it later in life if you adopt healthier habits.

Speaker 35 But the problem is, again, the way he's framing it, there's going to be a lot of people who are like, just had stints placed in their heart. I don't need Plavix.
Fuck it. You know, Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz, the TV doctor said, I don't need this medicine. I just need more acai in my belly.
The TV doctor also said he can talk to ghosts. So I'm going to go talk to,

Speaker 35 I mean, you will be talking to ghosts faster if you follow all of Dr. Oz.
Yeah, exactly. I want to talk to ghosts.
I'm going to stop taking my Plavix and die of a stroke.

Speaker 35 Now, on his show, Dr. Oz claims that the trust of his audience is the entire reason for his relevance.

Speaker 35 Quote, the currency that I deal in is trust, and it is trust that has been given to me by an audience that has watched over 600 shows.

Speaker 35 He repeatedly references the fact that he is responding to the very real and very understandable unfilled needs of Americans who feel alienated from modern healthcare, which is an expensive and often inhumane labyrinthine bureaucracy.

Speaker 35 True. This is true.
Yeah, absolutely. 100% true.
Yeah. How you exploit it is a very different thing.
But the thing he is replacing. it with is by and large nonsense.

Speaker 35 And I'm going to quote from that right up in the Journal of Ethics again. When it comes to epistemic boundaries, Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz admits he applies different standards of evidence compared to those accepted in the medical establishment.

Speaker 35 When challenged by a reporter for the New Yorker about his questionable evidentiary standards, he replied that all data could be differentially interpreted.

Speaker 35 You find the arguments that support your data, he said, and it's my fact versus your fact. It's not that he doesn't offer data.
It's common for Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz to offer some plausible mechanism from test tube experiments conducted by manufacturers, combined with personal anecdotes from his own or consumer's experience to support the products he's promoting.

Speaker 35 A study of 80 recommendations made on the Dr. Oz show in early 2013 found that published evidence supported 46% of recommendations, contradicted 15%, and did not support 39%.

Speaker 35 Gotta love a good like coin flip on whether or not he's fucking lying to you and having an adverse effect on your health.

Speaker 35 If your doctor said, hey, you know, 46% of the time, I give pretty good advice. Yeah.

Speaker 35 You would be like, I i think i might get another doctor but he would reframe it to be like i'm batting 500 here and be like oh 500 that's a good batting if you assume medicine is like baseball i'm a great doctor no he's crashing it yeah

Speaker 35 i'm doing a great job now to his credit the journal does note that a decent chunk of the blame for dr oz's success lies in the very very flawed state of mainstream medical science quote we settle for incomplete selectively published data in journals heavily subsidized by pharmaceutical pharmaceutical companies and for outcomes that don't give firm answers.

Speaker 35 While not on par with offering anecdotes as evidence, the fact that debates persist about what constitutes sufficiently high, unbiased quality evidence to support decisions in the profession as a whole creates a wedge that Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz seems to exploit.

Speaker 35 So again, this is the Journal of Ethics being like the fact that you can pay to get a study done, the fact that we pharmaceutical companies lobby to allow them to market things in dishonest ways, The fact that doctors are bribed by companies like Purdue Pharmaceutical with vacations to recommend people take medication that is not in their best interest to take.

Speaker 35 That's why this motherfucker has a job. And the fact that healthcare is expensive, right? The fact that we don't have single-payer healthcare.

Speaker 35 It all combines to the fact that a lot of people who are not idiots, I'm not saying

Speaker 35 you can be, I'm sure.

Speaker 35 There's people who are brilliant electricians who fucking are brilliant at whatever, who are great at whatever it is they do, but they're not fucking doctors because most of us aren't.

Speaker 35 And it's hard to get. I am very fortunate in that I have a couple of good friends who are doctors.
And I am luckier than I can, one of them is a guy who was on the show recently, Cavahoda.

Speaker 35 I'm luckier than I can, that I can say to be able to like, every now and then send them a message being like, hey, what should I do here?

Speaker 35 Even if it's a question of like, I'm having this problem, I don't know what kind of doctor to see to like get this dealt with. I don't know whose job this is.
And I don't want to like

Speaker 35 my

Speaker 35 ex a while ago had a non-cancerous brain tumor, and it was a fucking nightmare figuring out.

Speaker 35 It took a series of different doctors and tests to figure out what kind of doctor she needed to go to to get the medication that would help.

Speaker 35 And it's, of course, people are like, well, this guy is explaining things and he's nice. And he's saying that I have the power to deal with this.
If I change my diet, if I do this, if I do that.

Speaker 35 He's giving us alternatives to dealing with the bureaucracy of medical institutions in this country.

Speaker 35 I have a Kaiser and

Speaker 35 I had to go to a rheumatologist and I tried to get a hold of him on the phone and they sent me through six different call centers to finally get to his specific office.

Speaker 35 And then I asked the lady, oh, can I get the extension so that I don't have to deal with that? And she's like, oh, sorry, we're not allowed to do that. And so now

Speaker 35 I'm just recording every phone call and just, you know, freestyling to the hold music because it's the only thing I can do. I'm like, you know what?

Speaker 35 I might as well turn this into content because this is fucking ridiculous. You know, there's like

Speaker 35 the amount of bullshit you have to go through makes people like Dr. Oz feel like a good alternative, you know? Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely. And it's,

Speaker 35 it fucking sucks. It does.
It just really fucking sucks.

Speaker 35 And it fucking sucks because there's a lot of wonderful people who are part of the medical system, like the fucking doctors

Speaker 35 in the in the ER who were with my mom in her last days, like incredibly competent and compassionate and like

Speaker 35 amazing people who, in their entire careers, will never be able to do as much good as Dr. Oz does harm because he has 4 million people watching him every day.

Speaker 35 It's a bummer. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 35 You know, it's not a bummer. Oh, wow.

Speaker 35 Capitalism is actually a bummer, but it's the water we swim in. So here's some fucking ads.

Speaker 35 We're back.

Speaker 35 So, in 2014, Mehmet Oz was called before a Senate subcommittee to answer questions about his unfounded claims about dietary supplements.

Speaker 35 Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill went off on him, saying, I don't know why you need to say this stuff because you know it's not true.

Speaker 35 Why, when you have this amazing megaphone and this amazing ability to communicate, would you cheapen your show by saying things like this?

Speaker 35 And he just pulled out a lot of money and he just started making it rain all over Congress. Do you know how many houses I have?

Speaker 35 She pointed out several examples of the things he cheapens his show by saying. He had called green coffee extract a, quote, magical weight loss cure.

Speaker 35 Recent research has suggested that long-term use of green coffee extract causes bone density loss in animals.

Speaker 35 But you are, in fairness, you're losing weight. Your bones are lighter.
That's weight. Bones are heavy as hell.

Speaker 35 It was everywhere when that came out. It was at literally not just like, it was not like bed, bath, and be everywhere.
It was

Speaker 35 get light bones. You can fly like a bird.

Speaker 35 And again, those are studies in animals, but it's the kind of thing where a responsible doctor would say, well, some studies in animals have shown that this might

Speaker 35 cause bone density loss. So unless, you know, your weight is a really disastrous health situation and your bone density is fine.
I wouldn't recommend this. Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz is just saying it's a magical weight loss cure. I mean, he's not wrong.
He's not wrong. Yeah.
Oz called raspberry ketone, quote, the number one miracle in a bottle to burn your fat.

Speaker 35 This is a fun one. First of all, it's all gasoline.
Part of why people, well, actually,

Speaker 35 part of why people are attracted to stuff like this is that like raspberry ketone, that's natural. It sounds like, oh, if I just like getting raspberries, that's going to help me lose weight.

Speaker 35 This chemical in a natural, healthy fruit. Of course, it makes sense that like some wonderful plant-based medicine would be able to help me lose weight.
Yeah.

Speaker 35 Raspberry ketones don't come from raspberries. They can, but it takes 90 pounds of fresh raspberries to produce a single dose.
As a result, they are manufactured synthetically. A fact Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz did not feel the need to explain because, again, he's really critical of GMOs, and it might seem hypocritical to note that raspberry ketones are actually synthetic lab nonsense.

Speaker 35 I love when people say things like, it's natural. It's like, I think cyanide is natural.

Speaker 35 There's a lot of like natural poisons out there. Fucking snake venom is natural.
The fucking arsenic and the apple juice that he's worried about is natural. Yeah.

Speaker 35 It is possible based on animal studies that these ketones may have some ability to reduce or slow weight gain, but no studies have ever been conducted on how raspberry ketones impact human beings.

Speaker 35 There have been reports that they increase blood pressure and heart rate in humans. Dr.
Oz does not warn about this. Likewise, when Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz told his viewers that Garcina cambogia may be the simple solution you've been looking for to bust your body fat for good, he did not also warn them that it can interact negatively with diabetes medications, painkillers, and psychiatric medications.

Speaker 35 Oh my God. Why would you need to warn people that?

Speaker 35 Look, what are the odds someone looking to lose weight has diabetes medications? Zero. what are the odds that someone who has diabetes is sitting around watching dr oz's show zero

Speaker 35 what are the odds that a middle-class american is addicted to painkillers zero zero

Speaker 35 during the senate inquiry senator mccaskill pointed some of this out and she told dr oz quote when you feature a product on your show it creates what has become known as the dr oz effect dramatically boosting sales and driving scam artists to pop up overnight using false and deceptive ads to sell questionable products.

Speaker 35 In the wake of this, which was a fairly bad day on Capitol Hill for him, Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz released a somewhat contrite statement where he noted, I took part in today's hearing because I am accountable for my role in the proliferation of these scams, and I recognize that my enthusiastic language has made the problem worse at times.

Speaker 35 We're good so far? Yeah, not bad. Pretty good so far.
Oz added in his statement, to not have the conversation about supplements at all, however, would be a a disservice to the viewer.

Speaker 35 In addition to exercising an abundance of caution in discussing promising research and products in the future, I look forward to working with all those present today and finding a way to deal with the problems of weight loss scams.

Speaker 35 God, I, I, yeah,

Speaker 35 it's amazing. I'm just talking about, I'm just asking the question.

Speaker 35 We have to have conversations about this. You know, a conversation would be noting, for example, green coffee extract causes bone density loss in animals and perhaps be worse.

Speaker 35 That's a conversation. Well, you and I have had about these things as a conversation.

Speaker 35 I love people who are like, I'm just asking the question.

Speaker 35 And I'm not a doctor. I'm a guy who's addicted to an unregulated plant.

Speaker 35 Oh, my God. Which I just took more of while standing next to my unregulated gun.

Speaker 35 Yeah, dude, you're living the unregulated. Not a drum right now.

Speaker 35 So

Speaker 35 Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz, also making this statement, pointed out that he believed the greatest disservice he'd done to his audience was to not recommend specific products, which had provided room for a wide industry of shysters to stick his name on their website.

Speaker 35 So, like, oh, I was just saying green coffee extract, and a bunch of companies I couldn't verify started selling it with my name on it. I should have recommended a specific brand.
Yeah,

Speaker 35 what I need to do is cut deals with specific companies so that you can only be taking their bone density loss drugs. Yeah.
I mean, exactly. Good call.
Fucking amazing. Yeah.

Speaker 35 So, in the wake of this day on Capitol Hill and this amazing response, physicians across the country asked Columbia University in a letter, basically, what the fuck?

Speaker 35 Why is this guy still on your faculty?

Speaker 35 Columbia claimed it was because of their commitment to, quote, the principle of academic freedom and to upholding faculty members' freedom of expression for statements they make in public discussion.

Speaker 35 Hell yeah, dude.

Speaker 35 That's like fucking mad. Yeah.
They're like anti-cancel culture letter. You know, they're just like, stop trying to cancel Dr.
Oz. It's freedom of speech.
You have freedom of speech.

Speaker 35 I mean, doctors also are held to different standards than the rest of us. They take an oath.
They'll make a match. If like your Uncle Jimbo says, hey, you know, take some green coffee extract.

Speaker 35 It'll help you lose weight. Yeah.
Nothing wrong with that. It might not be good advice, but that's just a guy saying a thing.
Doctors are held to a different standard. Yeah.

Speaker 35 it's on you if you listen to your crazy Uncle Jimbo. It is definitely on the doctor if he recommends you lose some bone density so that you look better in that dress.

Speaker 35 It's

Speaker 35 awesome. It's dumb.

Speaker 35 So on April 15th, 2015, 10 prominent physicians sent a letter to Columbia University calling Oz's faculty position there unacceptable and citing his, quote, egregious lack of integrity.

Speaker 35 The only change wrought by by the congressional inquiry and the flood of condemnation from the medical community seems to be that Dr. Oz started endorsing specific supplements and pseudomedicines.

Speaker 35 God, he's Alex Jonesing it.

Speaker 35 He's Jonesing it hard. He's so much smarter than Alex, though.

Speaker 35 You focus it just on the health. None of this nonsense, like political shit.
Everybody's going to love you and you'll make way more money.

Speaker 35 Yeah, a 2018 analysis of his show by the Health News Review found, quote, in the Dr. Oz show, 13 out of 19, 68.4% shows had ads relating to general show content.

Speaker 35 57.9% had specific products mentioned by the host using their commercial name. And 36.3% of shows mentioning products by name named more than one product.

Speaker 35 It also found that 78% of the medical statements made on the Dr. Oz show did not align with, quote, evidence-based medical guidelines.

Speaker 35 So if those guidelines guidelines mattered, they'd make more money, dog. Half a decade earlier, 46% of his statements are more or less fine.

Speaker 35 Now it's down to what, Jesus, 22%.

Speaker 35 Wow. So we're seeing, again, he mattered the quality of the, because again, you're running out of good content.

Speaker 35 You only have so much good medical advice you can give when you're doing an hour a day, 175 times a year for fucking 15, 16 years. Eat fruit.
Exactly.

Speaker 35 The actual amount of things that an average person can reasonably do to improve their own physical health doesn't really take that long to explain to you. You know, it's pretty simple stuff.

Speaker 35 And most of us know a lot of it already. We know when we're, I know that pounding kratom and Coke Zero isn't a wise healthcare decision.
No, no, but you know it.

Speaker 35 And you can, you know, fucking, you don't need a Dr. Oz to tell you that.
You know, you just, no, you know, just

Speaker 35 the fact that I bought the $100 entire smoked leg of

Speaker 35 pig from Costco, the giant prosciutto leg that you can cut. Well,

Speaker 35 I know buying that and not also purchasing, I don't know, salad in order to have sufficient fibroids.

Speaker 35 I recognize that was a poor health decision. Yeah.
No one tricked me about this. And at no point did I think this $100 worth of smoked ham is a solid health care move.
It's smoked.

Speaker 35 What could be so bad with smoked? And smoked, it's good for my Qzone.

Speaker 35 Traditional medicine. Yeah, this is really good for all of my kidney meridians.
I need all the smoked hams I can get. Oh, my meridians are fucking rocking right now.
I am peaking in meridians, bro.

Speaker 35 Let me fucking tell you, my meridians are as hard as a goddamn rock. Feel my kidneys.
Feel my kidneys. It's just like, why is your kidney swollen?

Speaker 35 The Dr. Oz show is still on the air.
In 2018, President Trump Trump appointed Dr. Oz to a council on sports, fitness, and nutrition as part of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Speaker 35 He is still on that council under Joe Biden. Bipartisan, baby.

Speaker 35 Two years later. Bipartisan.
Oh, no politician is dumb enough to want to piss off Dr. Oz.
You're never going to hear Joe Biden throw away. Well, except for Claire McCaskill.
God bless her.

Speaker 35 She was the only one who had the guts to stand up to Dr. Oz.
I think other people did.

Speaker 35 I'm not an expert on what went down in that congressional thing, but she she seems to be the main one who was really angry at him, which good on you, Claire.

Speaker 35 I love that a bipartisan decision is just like, let's share this grifter, you know, between administrations. Like, good, you know what? Gotta like.

Speaker 35 We all agree that you should be able to lie about health care as an MD.

Speaker 35 That's so 2018 is when he gets appointed to this council. Two years later, during the COVID-19 pandemic,

Speaker 35 he endorsed hydroxychloroquine. Later that year, he endorsed reopening schools, saying, I tell you, schools are a very appetizing opportunity.

Speaker 35 I just saw a nice piece in The Lancet arguing the opening of schools may only cost us 2-3%

Speaker 35 in terms of total mortality. What the fuck?

Speaker 35 2-3% of the crowd. That's barely anybody dying.
That's barely hundreds of thousands of deaths. He said 2% to 3% as if that's not a huge number of people.
He's losing his goddamn mind.

Speaker 35 And it's one of those things, not making a point pro or against gun control either way, but if somebody against gun control said, what, keeping these things legal is only going to cost us 1% of the country, you'd be like, you're a fucking maniac.

Speaker 35 Like,

Speaker 35 you are a dangerous person.

Speaker 35 Man.

Speaker 35 But he's like, we got to, and he didn't, yeah, this outraged a lot of people. And Oz apologized as he apologized for vaccine hydroxychloroquine.
Yeah, he daisied it.

Speaker 35 He claimed regret that his comments had confused and upset people and basically pointed out the Lancet wasn't saying 2% to 3% of the country was going to die.

Speaker 35 It was, I think, more like 2% to 3% of like cold children or something would get sick. And like, it was, he, he,

Speaker 35 but the way he phrased it was, it's only going to cost us two to three percent of the country. Like,

Speaker 35 I don't care what the actual study, again, I don't care what the study is. I care what you said to your audience of millions.
And also, I care about the fact that, in any case, that's fucking evil.

Speaker 35 Yeah. Like, that's an evil thing to say.

Speaker 35 Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's pretty wild to just look at 2% to 3% of the country as like expendable if it means that my fucking dirtbag ass fifth grader can be stuck inside in a school all day.

Speaker 35 And listen, I get it. People with kids, they want their kids to go back to school, but that's easy.
You don't say the quiet part out loud, you know? Yeah, it's one thing to say, hey, look.

Speaker 35 Living in a society, there's all kinds of cost-benefit sort of analysis

Speaker 35 we have to do. Like, right? Cars improve a lot of efficiencies in certain ways, and people like have them.
They're also going to cost X many lives.

Speaker 35 You know, we could change these sorts of laws, but it would, it would lead to this sort of problem. You know, we have certain freedoms that may cost lives.
And like, right.

Speaker 35 To be like, that's just living in a society, right? There's no, our society is not angled around absolutely reducing mortality in every way.

Speaker 35 And there's a cost to not having these schools open, and it's a very real cost. And like, we have to like, that's a way to say that.
I'm not saying that's the argument I'm making because I'm not.

Speaker 35 I'm thinking no no i don't think we should open schools out until we actually have i don't know like 80 of the fucking country vaccinated or whatever yeah yeah but like um but that's a way you could that's a way you could make that argument and not sound like a gibbering sociopath

Speaker 35 and it's weird to like you know be like all right it was a poor choice of words and it's like bro at this point saying words out loud to millions of people is your job yeah you're choosing to do the job you could never work another day in your life and you would never

Speaker 35 you're rich. You don't need to do this.
You're choosing to. So go fuck yourself with that explanation.

Speaker 35 Fucking fix some hearts already. Stop talking.
We're getting to that. So today, Dr.
Oz works to continue to monetize his brand with his wife and business partner, who he also writes books with.

Speaker 35 His daughter seems to be getting in on the griff too, with books like the dorm room diet, which she wrote when she was in college, I think.

Speaker 35 The dorm room diet. It's just free pizza and dick.

Speaker 35 The dorm room diet. Hey, you know, if you pour coffee into instant ramen, you can do that right, exactly.
It's a two bird's worth stone.

Speaker 35 I've done that, by the way.

Speaker 35 We've all been there. Kind of proud of it.
It's real good if you add in vodka.

Speaker 35 He is worth tens of millions of dollars and is not in any danger of being worth less anytime soon.

Speaker 35 We've talked a lot about the harms of his specific recommendations and the disinformation he spreads, but at the end of this all, I keep coming back to that 2010 New York Times article, specifically its end, when I think about what may be his worst crime against medicine.

Speaker 35 Quote, on the stairs at Columbia Presbyterian, apropos of nothing, he began talking about certain Japanese, Sardinian, and Costa Rican populations that live unusually long, and said that their shared trait was activity, activity, activity.

Speaker 35 His first column for Time magazine, Living Long and Living Well, ran in a section called How to Live 100 Years.

Speaker 35 At another point, in his Rockefeller Center office, he said that so many people thrill to being on television because, quote, there's an element of eternity to it. You are storing you.

Speaker 35 You are taking your life force for that brief moment when you're on camera, and you're storing that for all eternity, which makes you someone who will never truly die.

Speaker 35 That is a fucking bonker's way of looking at being on TV. Holy shit.
That is

Speaker 35 out of its goddamn mind.

Speaker 35 He is literally one year away from wanting to be buried with his cats, you know? Like, this dude wants some pyramids and some live cats in a casket with him. This is, he's a pharaoh.

Speaker 35 Yeah, I'm going to continue the quote.

Speaker 35 And he described his own investment in television by saying, I've always felt that when I looked at my tombstone, it shouldn't say, Mehmet Oz banged out 10,000 open heart operations.

Speaker 35 I've probably done 5,000. Am I any better at it than 10,000? He shook his head.
It's just a different number on a tombstone. No, it's not.
It's 5,000 other people whose lives you extended.

Speaker 35 Those are actual humans. Those are human beings.
It's not about

Speaker 35 how better it's already great at it. It's about saving additional lives.
My God.

Speaker 35 That's wild. One of the, he has dramatically, he still does perform surgery, I think, sometimes.
He certainly was in the late aughts because he's a doctor. He just doesn't do nearly as much.

Speaker 35 He used to do a lot more, and he's cut it by more than half. the amount of actual heart.
And it's the one thing he's good at. I mean, I almost he's amazing at it.

Speaker 35 So one of the things that I should note here is that right now, even with the assumption that every available training position for cardiothoracic surgeons is filled,

Speaker 35 we are looking at a projected shortage of 1,500 cardiothoracic surgeons or 25% of the workforce by 2025. Four years.

Speaker 35 There is a desperate need for the thing that he's definitely one of the best in the world at a tremendous and terrible need for it.

Speaker 35 And he has stopped doing that in order to give people bad medical advice that will hurt some of them on TV. And

Speaker 35 I want to be really clear here. I am not saying that just because you become a cardiothoracic surgeon, you have to do that until the day you drop.
You don't. You can quit.

Speaker 35 And that's not immoral. It's not evil to be like, I've done enough.
A good friend of mine was a cardiologist for 30-something years and quit to travel around the world as a photojournalist.

Speaker 35 And I don't think there's anything immoral. You do not owe the world doing just because it's valuable and there aren't enough people doing it forever.

Speaker 35 I am not, and you don't, you don't have to quit to do some other valuable job. You can just quit to enjoy your life, be with your family.
I'm not saying that. Yeah.

Speaker 35 But he didn't quit to be with his family. He quit to give people bad health advice.

Speaker 35 He quit to do crimes. Yeah.
He is doing something that should be illegal instead of performing an additional 5,000 life-saving surgeries. Right.
Yeah. That's evil.
Yeah. No,

Speaker 35 that is bad. That is that is definitely immoral to like have the ability.

Speaker 35 It's like being Superman and having the ability to save someone from a burning building, but being like, fuck, dude, I'm kind of on my way to do this TV interview that's going to get me more interesting.

Speaker 35 Yeah, but I'm going to sell people pills instead.

Speaker 35 Lex Luther can suck it, you know? I got pills to move.

Speaker 35 The way that he phrases that is incredibly telling, right? Like, it shouldn't say Mehmet Oz banged out 10,000 open heart operations. Am I any better at it than 10,000?

Speaker 35 It's like, that's not, I care that you get better at it to the extent that it improves patient outcome, but like, I don't care.

Speaker 35 Like, the thing that's good about performing 10,000 open heart operations is presumably somewhere near 10,000 people have had their lives extended because of you. And that's amazing.
That's.

Speaker 35 Tens of thousands of

Speaker 35 cumulative years you've added to the lives of people who are loved and who do things themselves, who do incredible, like who have their own ways of contributing to society, who have children.

Speaker 35 It's such a sick way of looking at it. It's really good.

Speaker 35 It's like, I'm already really good at it. So I decided

Speaker 35 I want to go get into TV now.

Speaker 35 If he'd been like,

Speaker 35 I did my car, I performed 5,000 surgeries. Now I want to become an actor.

Speaker 35 You have that right. Absolutely.
I'm never going to say that's. I mean, it depends on the movie, but yeah, yeah, for sure.
Yeah. If you're in Michael Bay movies, we might have another talk.

Speaker 35 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 35 Yeah, but that's again, it's not that he's decided he wanted to go into TV, it's not that he decided to go into entertainment, it's that he decided to do a job to go from doing a job where he was unequivocally saving lives to doing a job where he often gives people advice that could shorten or at least reduce the quality of their life.

Speaker 35 I mean, I guess he got tired of helping people and was like, you know, time to make some fucking bank. Yeah, it's time.
I mean, it's not just makes them bank, but he's like, man, I saved 10,000 lives.

Speaker 35 I'm going to have to kill 10,000 just to fucking net neutral this shit, you know?

Speaker 35 You know, he's just trying to, he's trying to balance the scales of his good and evil.

Speaker 35 It's so fucking frustrating.

Speaker 35 I

Speaker 35 really dislike this man. Yeah.

Speaker 35 He's so handsome, though, dude. He's very handsome.
He's very handsome.

Speaker 35 He made a lot of money, so that's good. That is good.
And, you know,

Speaker 35 he's out there every day

Speaker 35 giving hope to people who are currently dying of a very, very treatable ailment and saying, nah, dog, put your feet in some hot rice. Put your feet in some hot rice

Speaker 35 and see what happens, dude. Just see what happens, you know, like someone's got to be doing that job.
It's this fucking thing. Part of the Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz problem and the part of it that he is he is leaning into, but is not his fault is this thing that's a broader problem that I've gotten trapped in that a lot of that everyone who's a public figure is at risk of getting trapped in,

Speaker 35 which is the fact that if you're good at something and also have some measure of fame or popularity,

Speaker 35 you start to think you can extend your skills to everything. I was in the gym the other day since I'm in Texas with my family.

Speaker 35 And since I'm vaccinated, and everyone wears a mask, but I've been going to a gym. Yeah.
And my family's vaccinated. It's like, it's a thing we get to do now.
Okay. Yeah, you're allowed.
Yeah.

Speaker 35 I've been going to a gym and the gyms have like news programs on, right? And I saw saw Dr. Oz on and it was Dr.
Oz True Crime because I guess Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz has added a true crime thing where he's like talking about this woman who murdered her kids and interviewing like the ex-wife of the husband of the woman who murdered her kids and like dude this thing is like you don't have any why are you doing this like oh because because it's popular with the same people who like your show and why why like why not why not stick your hand into this thing that is is is deeply painful for a lot of people and make money off of it.

Speaker 35 Um, why not do it? Because if you're if you're famous and good at one thing, there's no reason not to do absolutely everything. I yeah, I just hate it.

Speaker 35 Yeah, it's especially since it's it's uh again, he he has the

Speaker 35 God-given skills to actually do good and help people, and he chooses you know this shit. And I gotta say, I blame his dad.
I blame his dad. I blame his dad, too.
His dad, you, Mustafa, Yeah, Mustafa,

Speaker 35 you fucked up, dude. I mean, you did a great job by pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and yada yada.

Speaker 35 But, you know, maybe you should have, maybe you should have maybe been more encouraging for him to just maybe, you know, pick one thing and stay with it rather than, you know, venture off into television.

Speaker 35 I will say, at least with the true crime stuff, that, like,

Speaker 35 I know he's like, he's a little bit kind of like getting into kind of our territory here with the podcast business, and I don't like that

Speaker 35 but i'm glad i don't have a true crime podcast that he's currently cannibalizing if he starts a soprano's one i will lose my mind if dr oz decides one day like i want to do a prestige tv rewatch uh show for cnn

Speaker 35 that'll be it dude oz you'll be on my goddamn list i don't think his podcast publishes anymore the one that he was doing i don't see any new episodes past 2019.

Speaker 35 well i mean,

Speaker 35 he's doing a true crime show.

Speaker 35 That's as close as you get to the podcast business.

Speaker 35 Yeah.

Speaker 35 You know what I'm saying? Those are the number one pods out there, dude. Pisses me off.

Speaker 35 My pods.

Speaker 35 All right, guys.

Speaker 35 That's the episode. Do you have any plugs?

Speaker 35 Yeah.

Speaker 35 Plug the plugs?

Speaker 35 My name is Matt Lieb, and

Speaker 35 I'm on Instagram, Matt Lieb Jokes. The Graham.
Yeah, I'm on The Graham. I'm also on Twitter at Matt Lieb, but follow me on Instagram.

Speaker 35 And yeah, and if you like the Sopranos, pod yourself a gun.

Speaker 35 Pod yourself a gun, baby. Well, get out there, and again, find Dr.
Oz in the street. And Sophie,

Speaker 35 what is the legal definition of incitement?

Speaker 35 I'm not, for legal reasons, I'm not going to answer that question.

Speaker 35 All right. Well,

Speaker 35 just go out and wander the streets, um, angry and

Speaker 35 agitated. Yeah,

Speaker 35 so we're without any clear goal, yeah. Okay, angrily wander the streets agitated with an unclear goal.
That's what I want all of my listeners to do.

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Speaker 58 Their call-in segment is getting even hotter, and they'll react to your wildest cruising confessions on air.

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Speaker 64 So if you're ready for round three, just push play.

Speaker 69 Sniffy's Cruising Confession, sponsored by Healthy Sexual from Gilead Sciences, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 35 Fuck you!

Speaker 35 That's the introduction. Just

Speaker 35 fuck you, people who listen and give us an income. Allow us to see you, Chase.
Live a comfortable life. Not you, Jamie.
Just the audience.

Speaker 35 Just the people who support us with their ears. I'm insulting.
Just out the gate. Fuck them.
That's right. What are you going to do about it? You're going to listen to another podcast?

Speaker 35 Like there are other podcasts? Like you have other options? Like there's a flooded marketplace of things exactly like what I do that you could just turn to? Ha! I don't think so.

Speaker 35 And don't investigate otherwise. No, please don't.
search podcasts on Spotify.

Speaker 35 I feel like what you just said all could have come out of Dr. Phil's mouth at one point, the second the cameras turn off for his show.
Well, Jamie, the orca is out of the tank

Speaker 35 because that is the subject of today's episode.

Speaker 35 And also, you're Jamie Loftus, my guest on the show that this is, which is Behind the Bastards. Yes, it is Behind the Bastards.
And I'm... I'm here.
I'm mainly here to bring the Dr.

Speaker 35 Phil ASMR videos this week. Excited is the wrong word.
Dreading? Dreading is the right word. I'm dreading that, Jamie.
You're going to either really love them or really hate them.

Speaker 35 And I can't figure out which it's going to be. I can't imagine loving them because they involve Dr.
Phil. And I think he's going to love them.
You know, it's one of those things.

Speaker 35 We just did the Dr. Oz episodes, and Dr.
Oz, also bad, obviously. He was on this show, but you have to respect him because he is a brilliant doctor.

Speaker 35 Like he's a man who, for all of the harm he's done by spreading pseudoscience, has performed like 5,000 successful open heart surgeries, which is an achievement, you know, and has patented a bunch of useful medical devices and stuff.

Speaker 35 He's a person who's made like bafflingly selfish decisions that I don't respect. But as a person, I have to have some level of respect for the things that he has achieved because he's impressive.

Speaker 35 Dr. Phil is just a piece of shit.

Speaker 35 Dr. Phil is just straight up trash.

Speaker 35 We were talking about this off-mic. There was some Dr.
Drew drama in Los Angeles this week that actually, like, for once ended well and online bullying

Speaker 35 persevered.

Speaker 35 And Dr. Drew was like nominated to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority

Speaker 35 board. And what is, okay, I don't know Dr.
Drew. What does Dr.
Drew do? I'm assuming he's a nonsense doctor, like all of the other doctors we talk about. He may be technically a doctor.

Speaker 35 I'm not totally sure.

Speaker 35 I think he's a radio doctor. Oh, that's the best kind of doctor.
He also mediates the reunions of teen mom and teen mom 2 and 16 and pregnant and causes

Speaker 35 damage to lots and lots of young minds all the time.

Speaker 35 He technically does have, he is a doctor. I don't know if he's currently licensed, but I know him from VH1

Speaker 35 in like middle school where he had celebrity rehab with Dr. Drew, sex rehab with Dr.
Drew, Celebrity rehab presents Sober House.

Speaker 35 And

Speaker 35 that sounds like my nightmare. Like that sounds, that sounds like the hell that I would go to is Sober House.
Oh, no.

Speaker 35 I could have shortened my description and said, he's Adam Carolla's best friend, which is also true, which is like,

Speaker 35 oh, yeah, no.

Speaker 35 Yeah, he hosted like a famous radio show called Loveline Forever, and Adam Carolla was also on the show, and

Speaker 35 they're close. And so, yeah, he was nominated to serve on the homeless authority board.

Speaker 35 And it took, it only took about a day where like activists just bullied him into bullied people into withdrawing the nomination pretty quickly. And he had a few spicy little comments about it.

Speaker 35 He was like, I can't, like, he basically was like, These online bullies are trying to cancel me for

Speaker 35 not being a good doctor and irrelevant for this job so you know sometimes bad doctors fall i like i love to see it well that's fascinating i'm so happy to have learned about dr drew but today we're talking about dr phil and it's it's time to get in get into the it's time to have us a philgasm

Speaker 35 okay

Speaker 35 a mcgrawsm a magrazm mcgrawsm a mcgrawsmcrawgasm yeah

Speaker 35 um

Speaker 35 so philip calvin mcgraw was born on September 1st, 1950, in Veneta, Oklahoma, about four hours from where I grew up.

Speaker 35 His father was Joseph, and his mother was Anne Geraldine, or Jerry, is what she preferred to go by. He had two older sisters and one younger sister.

Speaker 35 When he was a kid, his father moved the family down to the oil fields of North Texas, which are about as unpleasant a place as I've ever encountered on this earth. Not a good place to just exist.

Speaker 35 You don't want to, as a general rule, stay away from oil fields.

Speaker 35 Not nice places. So

Speaker 35 his kind of like southern desolation is Phil McGraw's early childhood,

Speaker 35 which, you know, I can tell you from experience what that does to a kid. And

Speaker 35 it makes you either

Speaker 35 a washout or ambitious and angry. One of the two.

Speaker 35 You either wind up an alcoholic working on an oil derrick or you do everything possible to escape

Speaker 35 the desolate South. Anyway, Phil's going to take that second one.
I like what he went with it. Yeah.

Speaker 35 I have strong feelings about that part of Texas and that part of Oklahoma.

Speaker 35 Phil was a precocious child, and his parents seemed to agree that he basically raised himself. He expressed a hunger for money from a young age, and he was coddled.

Speaker 35 His mother thought he could do no wrong. Young Phil was the center of attention for everyone but his father, who was himself obsessed with work.

Speaker 35 The elder McGraw would end up moving the family half a dozen times for the sake of his career. By age 11, Phil was spending summers driving a freight truck owned by his grandfather in Monday, Texas.

Speaker 35 By age 12, he was flying planes illegally without a license as he traveled with. Yeah.

Speaker 35 Oh my God. Okay.
I mean,

Speaker 35 the driving a driving at age 11, not as uncommon as you might think in certain rural parts of the world. Still a bit young.
Driving a freight truck is a bit is a bit odd at age 11.

Speaker 35 It was a shark jump. And then unlicensed driving

Speaker 35 a pilot at age 12?

Speaker 35 Honestly, I looked up Dr. Phil Young because sometimes it's shocking and you're like, whoa, Dr.
Phil used to be hot. Not the case here.
But

Speaker 35 there's a picture of him as a kid. And now I'm like, that does look like a kid that would steal a plane.
Yeah. It just does.

Speaker 35 He's not even stealing a plane. His dad needs to fly to these desolate airstrips in the middle of nowhere to deliver oil field equipment.
And

Speaker 35 Phil goes with him and flies the plane sometimes. My guess is that his dad is just like, I'm taking a nap.
You're flying this oil field equipment across Texas. I trust you.
Lay him the bastard.

Speaker 35 Okay, Dad. Okay, Dad.

Speaker 35 Child, Dr. Phil looks like adult Chris Cuomo.

Speaker 35 Whoa, I see it. I see it.
Okay, it's honestly shocking that he was not a bald baby. No, if someone wants to make a comic book, Dr.
Phil child pilot, it's a pretty decent premise.

Speaker 35 I've heard worse.

Speaker 35 So yeah, this is how Phil spends his childhood up until the point when his dad, Joe, turned 40 and decided apropos of nothing that he was going to abandon his family and become a psychologist.

Speaker 35 Hold on.

Speaker 35 We truly don't have more info than that. I have not found more info than that.
His dad's like, I'm going to become a psychologist. You guys can keep doing your thing.

Speaker 35 You know, like, that's basically how it's set. And so Joe leaves his wife and three daughters behind.

Speaker 35 I think they stay stay in texas and he brings phil with him to kansas where the two started a new life together i don't like this the closeness of father and son here it sounds like why is it oh i hate because every time we go over stories like this you're like it can't be daddy issues everything can't be just daddy issue but then it but then it always is Yeah, it's interesting.

Speaker 35 One of the things that's just interesting to me is like the

Speaker 35 ways in which Dr.

Speaker 35 Phil and I's early background are similar and then diverge and this is a big divergence point because when i was a kid my dad left for like a couple of years um to work somewhere else but it was because we had no money we were at like the edge of bankruptcy and the only job he could get was in new york living on a friend's couch and like working at a radio station so he could send back money to us so it wasn't like and like i didn't go with him he like had to go alone to new york to support the family and stuff But it is this weird, grew up in the same area, moved around a bunch when we were little.

Speaker 35 Our dad leaves you know but in phil's case he goes with his dad and they just abandon all the women um right right right like dr phil's dad is like you're my wife now like this

Speaker 35 you're my wife now boy my wife pilot

Speaker 35 fly the plane phil you're my wife now dr phil child wife pilot

Speaker 35 The pitch is getting better and better and better. It's going to be sold by the end of the episode.

Speaker 35 I actually just got an email from Netflix and it's a check for $112 million dollars so we are now contractually obligated to make this show jamie

Speaker 35 i would honestly rather do that more than anything else i know that would that would be a dream let's leave this life behind

Speaker 35 okay so we're abandoning podcasts to do that

Speaker 35 to do dr phil child wife pilot yes i think that would put a lot of positivity back into the world so so they just they just bail and it's not for financial reasons i mean it is they're they're poor as his dad wants to go to school and is like I can't take care of this family anymore by is what it the way it's been described in the articles I've read now maybe dr.

Speaker 35 Phil could could give us a more detailed story but I have not run across it yet okay

Speaker 35 yeah

Speaker 35 Most of the info I have on his childhood comes from a Dallas Observer article, and they explained the whole abandoning of Phil's mom and sisters as a financial move. Okay.

Speaker 35 Phil apparently told the Dallas Observer, quote, there just wasn't enough money to do otherwise. So

Speaker 35 we can only feed two members of this family. So girls, you're on your own.
Phil and I are going to Kansas. Phil, okay.
Yeah. Extremely, very,

Speaker 35 very, sounds like a really healthy family dynamic so far. You get the feeling he grew up in a healthy environment.
That's true.

Speaker 35 Healthy families are all alike. They allow 12-year-olds to fly planes.
That is how the famous quote goes. That's how Anna Caranita starts.
I love that that book so much.

Speaker 35 And it turns out that's the thesis statement of the whole thing.

Speaker 35 How did you just pronounce that, Robert? I don't know. Anna Karenina? What is it?

Speaker 35 I was going to let it fly. Yeah, I wasn't.

Speaker 35 Honestly, I think that had Anna Karenina been a child pilot, maybe she wouldn't have gotten crushed by that train. No, no.
And she could have been Dr. Phil's dad's child wife.

Speaker 35 I actually don't know what happens in that book. I pretended to read it when I was like 11.
I just stared at it

Speaker 35 really hard over a course of months. Per the results of a 2006 court case, I am not allowed to read Russian literature.
So

Speaker 35 in more recent post-fame interviews, Dr. Phil claims those early days with his father were a humbling experience.
Quote, we were so poor, we couldn't even pay attention, which is...

Speaker 35 I don't, I think is less a true statement. Not that I'm saying they weren't poor.

Speaker 35 I think he just said that because he knows it was a pithy thing and he makes his whole living off of like saying stupid Dr. Phil witticisms.
They couldn't even pay 10.

Speaker 35 And I've heard that a thousand times. Like I have heard a thousand different people say, explain their origins that way.
So I don't know. Fuck you, Dr.
Phil. Be original.
The moms absolutely lose it.

Speaker 35 I bet it does. I absolutely bet it makes the moms lose it.

Speaker 35 Someone when Dr. Phil quips.
They love it. Someone on Reddit during the Dr.

Speaker 35 Oz episode, you know, I noted a couple of times that his audience and the people that he makes money off of is like middle-aged moms,

Speaker 35 and that that's a great business because they have all the money, or at least control all the money.

Speaker 35 Like, middle-aged moms are one of the most profitable demographics to get in your corner in the entire world. Right.

Speaker 35 And someone was like, You're being like unfairly negative towards middle-aged moms. I was like, It's just a statement of fact.
Like, look in the audience of a Dr. Oz show.

Speaker 35 Like, it's not 16 to 30-year-olds, like, men.

Speaker 35 It's a bunch of moms. Like, my mom mom loved Dr.
Oz.

Speaker 35 That's who his audience is. It's not like a negative statement.
My mom loves Dr. Phil.
No, yeah, I don't think that that's a negative

Speaker 35 state. So if anyone's hearing that, and that's not like what they're intending to say, just who the audience is.

Speaker 35 Who's the target audience? Yeah. It's like saying, like, men 18 to 35, listen to Joe Rogan.
That's not like, I'm not even.

Speaker 35 It is negative to listen to Joe Rogan, but I'm not being negative when I say that. I'm just accurately describing his audience.
Yes. Right, right.
Yeah. Fuck you, Joe Rogan.

Speaker 35 Doctor, I, as someone who was raised by Dr. Phil moms, I am fully, and it's like not,

Speaker 35 but I mean, it is the primary demographic. Yeah.
At least at the peak. I don't know who's watching Dr.
Phil now. No matter your demographic, there's a grifter for you.

Speaker 35 Look, I've been honest about the fact that there was a period of time in my life when I liked John McAfee

Speaker 35 before I knew about, you know, the murder and the rape and stuff. Right.

Speaker 35 Like we all, we're, we all have a grifter we're vulnerable to. It's nothing to be ashamed of.
You just need to acknowledge it. And in the case of middle-aged suburban moms, it's Dr.
Phil and Dr. Ross.

Speaker 35 Mine was, I think, the grifter that really got me was Lou Perlman, who made all the boy bands that made me want.

Speaker 35 Oh, my God. I mean, one of my favorite, not my favorite, but one of the most legendary

Speaker 35 bastards. Absolutely amazing person.
Like

Speaker 35 Mr. Blink himself.

Speaker 35 No, without any sort of joking, like a genius,

Speaker 35 just has a genius in terms of knowing exactly what a specific age group of people want. Right.
It doesn't mean that we were like not smart, but we were clearly targeted by.

Speaker 35 Yes. Yeah.
Yeah. We all have a thing we're vulnerable to.

Speaker 35 Anyway, we're, we're getting off topic, um, which is fine because it pads the runtime. And that's what I do as a grifter is I pan the runtime in order to make more money off of you fucking sorry.

Speaker 35 Roberts.

Speaker 35 Shameful. So, yeah, the details that Dr.
Phil gives about his childhood, like he gives that kind of pithy, we were so poor, we couldn't even pay attention quote.

Speaker 35 But in the interview with the Alice Observer, the details he actually gives make it seem like the issue for Phil was less a matter of crushing poverty.

Speaker 35 Like, I think they were kind of poor, but I think they were like my kind of poor, like, which was not crushing poverty. It was not you're malnourished.

Speaker 35 It's just there's no money for anything but the basics, you know, but the basics are covered. Absolutely breaking even.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. But you're not like, you know, you're not like in

Speaker 35 absolute destitution, you know, like not to exaggerate it, but like you're poor. Like that's kind of what I think is

Speaker 35 really happening. And part of why I think that is because his real complaint about that time in his life is that he couldn't buy any cool shit.

Speaker 35 Quote from the Dallas Observer, it didn't help that he was fiercely competitive, he says, and he lacked the clothes and the car to compete for girls.

Speaker 35 So I think that's more the big thing for him, right? Like, okay, you're not that poor. You just don't have enough money to impress girls with possessions.

Speaker 35 Right. Okay.

Speaker 35 I get that level of poverty. Yes.
Yeah. I think most of us had more or less that level of poverty.
We're like, especially like, I was like one of the poorer kids in a school that was not poor.

Speaker 35 So there were kids in my school who drove BMWs.

Speaker 35 And like, I had a beat-to-shit Ford Taurus.

Speaker 35 I'm not complaining.

Speaker 35 I had a Ford Taurus. Like, I'm not complaining.
I had a car.

Speaker 35 But, like, you see the, you see the kids whose like parents are rich, and you're like, ah, shit, I feel so poor because they have like a brand new Jaguar.

Speaker 35 That, that's, I think, the kind of poor he is. Yeah.

Speaker 35 Our school is like the kid with the Ford Taurus was like, oh my God.

Speaker 35 He has a car. What a cool boy.
Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, that was just for my senior year, but yes, I did, I did eventually get a car.

Speaker 35 So thankfully, the young Dr. Phil was huge, quickly crossing six six feet.
He's a massive man, if you've ever like seen him next to normal-sized people, he's a very large person.

Speaker 35 I forget that, but yes, yeah, is he like six full-time

Speaker 35 inch or two taller than me, and I think quite a bit broader. Like he's a big motherfucker, but most of that's mustache, Robert.

Speaker 35 Most of that's a lot of it's mustache now, but when he was younger, he was in good shape and he was he was very like muscular.

Speaker 35 And as a result of how big and strong he was, he was a shoe-in for the high school's football team.

Speaker 35 He later recalled, quote, I was Phil the jock, and that was my currency. And by currency, he means that's how he got girls, right?

Speaker 35 He didn't have the car, he didn't have, but he was able to like get girls because he had, you know, he was, he was on the football team. He was tall.
He was tall.

Speaker 35 He was, and he was apparently quite good at football. In Phil's senior year, his father moved to Wichita Falls to start his psychology practice.

Speaker 35 Not yet a doctor, Phil spent his entire senior year living alone. He didn't go with his dad this time.

Speaker 35 He supported himself and he played football because he was like, there was a period of time where he might have made it into the NFL. So he didn't want to leave his high school and like disrupt that.

Speaker 35 He said, quote, it wasn't what you were supposed to do, but I was pretty independent. Interesting.
College scouts had started eyeing him pretty early on.

Speaker 35 And he had, it seems like he had a real chance of getting at least picked to play college ball.

Speaker 35 He did get picked to play college ball. His dad had gone to the University of Tulsa on a football scholarship.
And in short order, Phil was picked by scouts for the same college.

Speaker 35 So he gets a college scholarship to the University of Tulsa. He becomes the captain of the freshman football team, and

Speaker 35 he says he was very good. A lot of articles you'll say were very good.
We're going to talk about this in a little bit because his team at least was shit. Like,

Speaker 35 not just a bad, not just like not good in the year, but like one of the all-time least successful college football teams in the history of college football.

Speaker 35 No, yeah, I'm trying to think of other, there's that is like such a like celebrity that grows to be evil. I feel like that is a pattern of like, I could have been a big sport dog.

Speaker 35 That was his Hitler's art school, right?

Speaker 35 Right, right, right.

Speaker 35 Like, and you just know that's parties. He doesn't let people forget it.
Like,

Speaker 35 yeah.

Speaker 35 I'm looking up celebrities who played high school sports,

Speaker 35 Matthew McConaughey. It just seems like not making it big in college sports can be potentially a villainous origin story.
I mean, I never had any chance. I was on the high school.

Speaker 35 I did like, sorry, I did one year of football in junior high i never had any uh chance of of of going pro and i didn't like football there was a period of time where i might have been able to like do do do well at fencing um i did i was in like a special pro was pretty i was pretty good at fencing um at that pay

Speaker 35 but no i i got bored eventually i love hot for you i could see that for you i was saying take it back up if you're really tall it helps yeah but never like never never at the college level or anything so i was gonna say i ran track in junior high but then i threw up one time and I quit permanently.

Speaker 35 And to this day, I do not run.

Speaker 35 I was captain of the varsity basketball team and I'm really, really short.

Speaker 35 I had no,

Speaker 35 so I'm the most athletic of our bunch. Sophie is the most successful athlete in

Speaker 35 this call. Amazing.
Amazing. Yeah.
Send pics. Oh, there are picks.

Speaker 35 There are pics, Jamie. I will personally send them to you.

Speaker 35 You know, I will say, having watched the video of that guy shot-putting a fucking

Speaker 35 bobcat, I think that should be a moment. That's the most amazing thing I've seen in such a long time.
That was, that was, that,

Speaker 35 you know, what that was is the greatest example of like quality husbanding that I think I've seen on Twitter. Like, oh my God, that's

Speaker 35 that's that's a that's a you did you did good, man. That's exactly what you're supposed to do.

Speaker 35 Like, that's that's that's wholesome masculinity right there is shot putting a wild cat away from your wife

Speaker 35 wait that's so what a hero well and it's also you know it's not going to do any damage to the cat now he did get out his gun to shoot the cat but it charged back at the family and i feel at that point the cat had chosen violence you know he gave he gave the animal a chance to end the interaction

Speaker 35 thank you for that uh that fine forensic analysis that's that's my that's my opinion on the by now weeks old video of a guy hulking a bobcat across a yard like to be fair he chose violence.

Speaker 35 Yeah, the cat chose violence. That's my end statement here.
So, um, yeah. Anyway, Dr.
Phil, a lot of interviews, you'll see he was very, very good, could have, maybe could have gone pro.

Speaker 35 Um, I don't know how accurate that is.

Speaker 35 I'm not great at football, but I found an incredible analysis on the sports website Grantland about a game that he played in, that his freshman football team played in, that is like one of the most famous games in college ball history because of how badly his team did.

Speaker 35 Yeah.

Speaker 35 Grantland calls it one of the craziest games in NCAA history. For starters, the bulk of Phil's team were like actively dying of the flu while they played.

Speaker 35 Quote, an especially virulent strain of flu had been cavorting through the Tulsa athletic dorm, somehow overcoming the formidable sanitary standard those three words imply.

Speaker 35 And 15 of Tulsa's 22 starters were shivering, feverish wrecks. They tried to act energetic, but they were so weak, Tulsa coach Glenn Dobbs remembered in 1985.

Speaker 35 My sons Glenn III and John were on the team. Their eyes were glazed with fever.

Speaker 35 The team doctor pleaded with the coach to call off the game, but Dobbs, a former Tulsa star who, because the world just does whatever it wants, had been an icon for the Saskatchewan Rough Riders of the Canadian Football League, refused to surrender.

Speaker 35 I just never liked backing out, he said afterward. Tulsa had two defensive linemen who were well enough to travel.
One of them passed out before the coin flip.

Speaker 35 So this game is a fucking disaster from the beginning. I love this shit so much.
This is so good.

Speaker 35 Finally, a sports movie for me. That is.
Everyone's just puking and shitting to death.

Speaker 35 Also, someone named Glenn III is involved. Like, just the funniest fucking thing.
Passing out before the game starts. Oh, that is just.
And kudos to the Grantland writer.

Speaker 35 It's a very entertaining article. Grantland, I miss Grantland.
Yeah.

Speaker 35 By the end of the first quarter, Phil's team was down 14 to zero, which is a significant, like they're getting, it's not a great start to a game, but it's not insurmountable.

Speaker 35 However, by the end of the game, they were down by a record-breaking 100 points to six.

Speaker 35 Oh, my Jesus. Did Phil get any of the points? No, I don't believe so.
Not at all.

Speaker 35 I think it's one of the greatest ass kickings in college ball history. Wow.

Speaker 35 Like in the entire history of the sport, like Dr. Phil's team got their asses beat almost the worst.
Way to lose, Phil. Yeah, it's like a famously, a famous ass kicking.

Speaker 35 It does like several rounds of like going back to being sad and then going back to being funny and then going back to being sad and then going and finally landing on being the funniest shit I've ever heard.

Speaker 35 It's incredibly funny.

Speaker 35 So, Dr. Phil brags about this game today, saying that it and that football in general helped awaken in him an interest in psychology by teaching him that people with advantages don't always win.

Speaker 35 That said, the author of that Grantland article takes pains to point out that there is actually no evidence whatsoever that Phil played in this game.

Speaker 35 And the facts that do exist from this time make it seem kind of unlikely. I don't know how to, like, it was far enough back that there's not any comprehensive way to know for sure, really.

Speaker 35 But the doubt thrown onto it by this investigation might mean that as a grown-ass multi-millionaire, Dr. Phil lied to David Letterman about playing in one of the worst ass kickings in sports history.

Speaker 35 And I have no idea what this says about him. Like, I don't even know how to analyze that.

Speaker 35 There's so many levels there because if he did play in it, you're like, oh, what a, yeah, okay, that's fun.

Speaker 35 Yeah, you like, I can see, like, if I was, if I, if I played in, if I partook in a famous ass kicking in a sports history, I would brag about that as an adult.

Speaker 35 It would be funny, you know, you get enough distance from it, sure.

Speaker 35 Lying about it, though, lying about it is baffling.

Speaker 35 What is that's like a game of 4D chess I can barely conceive conceive of.

Speaker 35 I have no idea what's going on with Dr. Phil.

Speaker 35 And for the most part, I do know what's going on with him. This is just baffling to me because he's clearly a narcissist.
It's very strange as a narcissist to lie about this, you know?

Speaker 35 To lie about one of the greatest failures. Yeah, to lie about just getting just like fame historically wrecked.

Speaker 35 Anything for clout, baby. Anything for clout by any means.
Speaking of clout, you know who has all of my clout, Jamie.

Speaker 35 Does it happen to be a product or maybe even a service? It is the products and services that support this podcast.

Speaker 35 I sacrifice all of my clout to them, like members of the ancient cult of the old ones sacrifice virgin babies to Nyaralothep, the crawling chaos. Much like that.
Yeah, here's some ads for dick pills.

Speaker 35 All right, we're back.

Speaker 35 We're back. We're back

Speaker 35 worshiping the old gods. I don't know, might

Speaker 35 deliver up some of my bodily fluids to a Shoggath later. Who knows? Who knows? We're talking about Dr.
Phil. Anything can happen.

Speaker 35 So, anyways, after this, at some point, I don't know the exact year, but at some point pretty soon after this disastrous game, because Phil was definitely on the team, at some point after this, Phil had another sports disaster.

Speaker 35 He went in to tackle a running back and he got hit really hard. And I don't mean just like, you know, sprained something.
I mean, he woke up blind.

Speaker 35 Oh my God. The kind of head injury where when you come to your eyes don't work, which is

Speaker 35 medically speaking, bad. It shouldn't be allowed.

Speaker 35 No, it shouldn't be allowed. It's scary.
It absolutely like, I don't know.

Speaker 35 I think adults should, I think if you're like 22 and older, you should be allowed to play football, but certainly 18-year-olds should not be, nor should they be allowed to join the military, by the way.

Speaker 35 Yeah. Yeah, sure.
So,

Speaker 35 he's still, yeah, it was the head injury was bad enough. His eyesight came back, obviously, but it was a serious head injury.

Speaker 35 Um, and it ended in this, there was no chance of him continuing his career after that, right?

Speaker 35 Like, it's one of those things where, like, you don't get to ever play football again because you get hit in the head one more time, that might be fucking it for you, you know? Right.

Speaker 35 Um, once his eyesight, yeah, and he still suffers. Like, he's there's after effects of this today, like, it's it's a lifelong injury.
Um, he got really messed up.

Speaker 35 It's a bad thing to do. Yeah.

Speaker 35 Yeah, it's bad.

Speaker 35 Once his sight came back, Phil returned to Wichita Falls to heal and to plot his next move. He decided to put his college education on hold now that he couldn't do a football scholarship.

Speaker 35 And he decided, you know, the thing to do now, I'm not going to, I'm going to, I'm going to think about college later. I'm going to make some money now, right?

Speaker 35 Which is not an unreasonable call to make in the situation.

Speaker 35 And I'm going to quote from a write-up in the Dallas Observer. He worked at a health club selling memberships and wound up owning a partnership interest in that club and a a half dozen others.

Speaker 35 That was typical of the way he did things, says Scott Madsen, who went into the building business with his future brother-in-law. He is the smartest guy I ever met, a born leader.

Speaker 35 Even at a young age, he had the insight to figure out how things work. Others took a more damnable view of his business practices.

Speaker 35 I didn't know of anyone who had a business deal with Phil at the time who felt they came out on top, says David Dickinson, a former friend of McGraw's from Wichita Falls.

Speaker 35 It's like playing golf from someone who moves the ball around all the time. So how young is he when he gets into business? He's like right now.
He's like maybe 20 at the most, like 19 or 20.

Speaker 35 And very quickly, he's a part earner, becomes a part owner in the sports club he's working at, becomes part owner in like a half dozen other clubs.

Speaker 35 So

Speaker 35 he doesn't have a degree yet of any kind. No.
But he's clearly very good at...

Speaker 35 Specifically, the thing that Phil is objectively one of the best people in the world at is negotiating. Like he is a terrifying negotiator.
I haven't run into any disagreement about that.

Speaker 35 He's got all the like the strong traits grifters have. Yeah.
And he's he's very good at

Speaker 35 negotiating in a legal manner, which is a separate skill just from grifting, you know, and is honestly like the best kind of grifting because you can't get in trouble for that shit. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 35 If he's willing to go into this game that young, that's so

Speaker 35 his brain.

Speaker 35 He's wired for it, you know? Or at least maybe with a football injury, scrambled his wires and made him wired for it. I don't know.
His reality is stressing me out. Okay.

Speaker 35 He's triggering my fight-or-flight response. This is good.
Feeling good. Yeah, that's how Dr.
Phil works. He really, really triggers a lot of responses.

Speaker 35 Now, the article notes that when you interview, that Dallas Observer article notes that when you interview a bunch of people who have known Dr.

Speaker 35 Phil over the course of decades, you tend to get two very different pictures of the man.

Speaker 35 One from the people who like him is of an incredibly gifted expert in practical psychology who has a passion for helping people. And the other picture you get of Dr.

Speaker 35 Phil is a, quote, charismatic opportunist who achieved great things by betraying the people closest to him in order to make a quick buck.

Speaker 35 One of these spurned former friends is Eldon Buck, who claimed to the observer, I put Phil in a couple of oil field deals, and everyone pays me but him.

Speaker 35 Phil is a smart, smart, smart son of a bitch, but he's only out for one thing, and that's Phil.

Speaker 35 Now,

Speaker 35 Phil denies all of this, but it is worth noting, as we've just heard, that Buck is not the only person with allegations like this against him.

Speaker 35 He's not even just one of two, but we're going to get to that story in due time.

Speaker 35 And he's also involved in oil fields down the line. Anything that'll make him money.
Like, this is like kind of all happening over a period of a couple of years.

Speaker 35 He's just, he starts making money and he immediately reinvests that money. He's in a bunch of businesses.

Speaker 35 You know, I have a good, a very, very close friend who has that kind of brain, who's just always spinning off their money into one business or another.

Speaker 35 I don't know how they do it, but they just are able to keep track of like the fact that like I've, I've got an investment in this business and through that business, I have an investment in this business and an interest in these other three businesses, and those give me an interest in this.

Speaker 35 And like, this is how all of that, like, I don't, I don't understand it, but like, it's kind of like being an engineer, you know?

Speaker 35 Some people have the kind of brain where you can open up like a fucking HVAC system or like the flight control system on an airplane and know what all of the little cords and all of the lights go and do and how to how to how to work all of that.

Speaker 35 Some people have a brain that allows them to just business, you know? I respect people who use it for good, but holy shit, what an exhausting

Speaker 35 sounding

Speaker 35 it sounds like a nightmare. I keep all of my money in a pile

Speaker 35 and I will never have investments.

Speaker 35 Like I will never, like, I keep it in a bank, but like I have no, I have no investments and never will because the idea of investing money is terrifying to me and makes me want to huddle around a fire with a spear and stab outsiders.

Speaker 35 I spent my, all my savings on Dilbert Dilbert NFTs. Well,

Speaker 35 that's going to appreciate, you know, Jamie. I got a good feeling.
It's the only thing they're not making any more of.

Speaker 35 That's a real thing.

Speaker 35 The Tashi Dilbert guy

Speaker 35 made Dilbert NFTs, and the only difference from a regular Dilbert is that he says, fucking this one. And so

Speaker 35 much money. Anyways, I would pay good money for a Dilbert NFT where he admits responsibility for the Oklahoma City bombing.
Oh my God.

Speaker 35 I think that would be a good NFT. If you're listening, Scott Adams, I'll invest in that one.

Speaker 35 Dilbert admits to making a 6,000-pound fertilizer bomb and parking it out in front of the Murray building. That's the NFT I want.

Speaker 35 I can guarantee you that Kathy Geisway, creator of Kathy Comics, does not know nor care what an NFT is. And that's why she is, she is really,

Speaker 35 she's my strength in this world. Stan Kathy.
Stan Kathy. Stan Kathy.
You know who else I stand, Jamie? Who?

Speaker 35 No one. That was like, it's not time for an ad pitch.
He loves when it's so funny. He loves to do the like fake ad thing.
And then he thinks that I can't.

Speaker 35 I can't stop myself. He's just so good at it.
I mean, you know who I actually stand, who I have an unreasonable

Speaker 35 affection for and can't be convinced otherwise. No, no.

Speaker 35 I think I have a reasonable love of LeVar Burton, as everyone does, right? It's like a Capybara. You know, it's like loving a Capybara.
Like, it's LeVar Burton, of course. No, um, Werner Herzog.

Speaker 35 Herzog is my, my unreasonable love. Um, Robert, I would love, you should start making Werner Herzog fan cams.

Speaker 35 I don't know what that means, Jamie.

Speaker 35 I'm gonna make one of you, and you're gonna be horrified. If they're, I wonder if Robert fan cams exist.
Listeners,

Speaker 35 what the fuck is a fan cam?

Speaker 35 It's how do I describe a fan cam? It's usually like it's uh it's a short video made on an app. I don't know what the app is, but it's just a series of clips of you.

Speaker 35 And they put a glittery filter over it. And there's like a cute song on in the background.
I don't think there's a lot of video of me where like you can actually see me.

Speaker 35 So that might be hard to do. Robert, you would absolutely hate it, my friend.
I know I would. There's enough video footage of you for a fan cam.
You need like three clips. Well,

Speaker 35 all I'm interested of is a fan cam of Werner Herzog diving into a bunch of cactuses because he promised a group of little people that if they made it through the filming of a movie without injury, he would horribly hurt himself by diving into a bed of saguaros from 12 feet up.

Speaker 35 Is that true? Yeah, he absolutely did it. And they begged him not to.
They were like, please don't do this. Like, we don't want you to hurt yourself.
And he said, I made a promise.

Speaker 35 And if I don't fulfill my promise, there's no reason for me to be alive. And then he dove into a pile of cactuses because he's a fucking lunatic.
And I love him so much.

Speaker 35 Wow. Okay, Verner.
Oh, Werner Herzog.

Speaker 35 Watch a Gweir, The Wrath of God. So, Dr.
Phil Robert?

Speaker 35 Dr. Phil.
Yeah, sorry. We're

Speaker 35 off the topic a little bit. So, after three years as a business/slash con man, Phil McGraw decided to return to the education system to study psychology.

Speaker 35 He started off at Midwestern University in Wichita Falls, where his father had gone, and then transferred to the University of North Texas, which is where the people who gave me huge amounts of drugs went to school.

Speaker 35 I don't think Phil spent his time half a mile outside of campus downing 100 milligrams of 2CI and 15 to 20 milligrams of

Speaker 35 5MeO MIPT and vaporizing DMT, which is probably why he graduated UNT with a PhD. While my friends and I all dropped out of college to go, you know, do stupid shit.

Speaker 35 Anyway.

Speaker 35 Yeah, Dr. Phil's not fucking punk enough.
No, he's not.

Speaker 35 In his recollection, Phil both hated and excelled at college. He later recalled, I almost quit every day.
The faculty just jacked with you all the time.

Speaker 35 I remember telling one professor, either kick me out or get off my ass. He did succeed in impressing other professors, though.
His mentor at UNT was Dr. G.
Frank Lawless, who still considers Dr.

Speaker 35 Phil, quote, by far the most brilliant psychologist I ever worked with, which is meaningful praise, but also we are talking UNT here.

Speaker 35 You know, we're not talking like one of the famous psychology schools in the country. So not

Speaker 35 a nothing compliment, but not like a doctor, not like people saying Dr. Oz is the the best heart surgeon ever, you know, because that motherfucker's working at Columbia, right?

Speaker 35 They know from heart surgery. Right.
Okay. I don't know.

Speaker 35 I'm not throwing shade at Frank Lawless. I'm just saying I don't think Dr.
Phil is the most brilliant psychologist ever to exist.

Speaker 35 I haven't gotten past the fact that Frank Lawless sounds like a made-up person. That sounds like a cartoon character.
I am assuming he's Xena's father.

Speaker 35 So McGraw got his doctorate in 1979 and returned to Wichita Falls for reasons that are impossible to explain.

Speaker 35 Any person who returns to Kansas, I just don't, I don't understand.

Speaker 35 He started a business partnership with his dad, and together the two veered their practice towards treating the mental ailments of the rich and socially prominent, circulating among country clubs to cater to doctors, lawyers, bankers, and their wives.

Speaker 35 One of Dr. Philm's Phil's friends later claimed, Phil moved right into the money circles.
If there wasn't a buck in it, he wasn't much interested.

Speaker 35 So, you know,

Speaker 35 that's the field he gets gets into is, is dealing with like rich people who are neurotic or whatever. Okay.
So he comes to being a charlatan early. Yeah.
I mean, you know,

Speaker 35 I, at this point, again, if you're grifting rich people, I don't care. Who cares? Yeah.
Sometimes I might find it interesting for an off week, but I don't consider that evil behavior, right?

Speaker 35 They have too much money, whatever. He specialized in cognitive behavioral therapy, which Phil at least claimed was a cause and effect therapy that treated thoughts and behavior the same.

Speaker 35 Quote, people would come in and say, I had a hard childhood, therefore I am not doing well as an adult. A Freudian would say, let's work through your childhood.

Speaker 35 I would say, that's fine, but right now you are an adult. You have a choice to stop yelling at your kids.

Speaker 35 I've done CBT. Yeah,

Speaker 35 that doesn't sound bad, right?

Speaker 35 Like, that is a reasonable take, which is like, okay, it's fine to like, you know, work through a difficult childhood, but you can't be shitty to your kids just because you had a bad childhood.

Speaker 35 Reasonable statement. Past trauma doesn't excuse current bad behavior.
Perfectly valid statement. Absolutely.

Speaker 35 And this kind of no-nonsense approach was very popular with some of his clients. I can see how it would have been useful in a number of cases.
But Dr.

Speaker 35 Phil himself admits that he was, quote, probably the worst marital therapist in the history of the world. I was teaching what they taught me, but I was real impatient.
Everybody was getting divorced.

Speaker 35 The way he relates it, realizing the shortcomings of his education convinced Phil to seek out less traditional ways to practice his profession and to market it.

Speaker 35 And I should note here as an aside that during this period, Dr. Phil got married and was briefly with a woman woman before cheating on her repeatedly and then leaving her.
Oh,

Speaker 35 yeah. So,

Speaker 35 anyway, well, maybe he should have been a little more patient. Maybe he should have taken some of his own medicine.
Yeah, I mean, he

Speaker 35 does. I mean, to be fair, he admits he was a bad marriage therapist.
So, I can't call him like a hypocrite.

Speaker 35 If you're saying, I was a, I, I was a shitty husband and a shitty marriage therapist, that all scams, right? You know, like,

Speaker 35 um, that's I, yeah, he's being honest here, so we won't belabor the point. Okay.

Speaker 35 Yeah, he started holding pain clinics, weight loss clinics, and executive, giving executive recruiting advice and even expert legal testimony for court cases. He was like an expert witness.

Speaker 35 Yeah, and this is like for court cases, right? Like you need someone to come and,

Speaker 35 you know, you have like somebody who's claiming like, oh, you know, I can't be

Speaker 35 held responsible for this because I'm, I'm, you know, like mentally ill or whatever, like, you know,

Speaker 35 not guilty by reason of insanity. He comes in and he's like, yes, that's valid or no, that's not valid, depending on who pays him, you know? So just a general mental health professional

Speaker 35 opinion. Yeah, it's kind of, we just, we just finished the chauvin trial.
You know, we had all these kind of use of force experts.

Speaker 35 There's a bunch of people in different fields whose main job is to take that

Speaker 35 expertise in another field and testify about it in court because it's relevant, right?

Speaker 35 You have like engineering specialists who are like, I'm going to go testify about this bridge that collapsed to either defend the people who made it or explain how irresponsible they were.

Speaker 35 Whatever, like, that's a whole, yeah, there's a whole industry. Dr.
Phil gets into the providing that. There's a lot of money in that industry, too.

Speaker 35 There's a fuckload of you can get real goddamn rich doing that. Yeah, well, yeah, especially if you're willing to lie about your area of expertise.
Yeah.

Speaker 35 And by the way, lawyers listening, I will testify as an expert witness on literally anything. As a certified reverend doctor in the state of New Jersey, my purview is wide.

Speaker 35 So, you know what? 12 grand an hour. The podcast is just going to disappear one day and it's

Speaker 35 the instant. I'm fucking done.
You know, like,

Speaker 35 fuck this podcast. I'm going to go lie under oath about, I don't know, whatever.
Anyway,

Speaker 35 Dr.

Speaker 35 Phil started, yeah, holding, you know, so he started, he gets into like the whole business of if I really want to make money at scale as a psychologist, having individual, even if they're rich, individual clients isn't the thing to do.

Speaker 35 I'm going to do a bunch of clinics on like dealing with pain, dealing with weight loss, you know, recruiting people.

Speaker 35 I'll do like, so he gets very quickly into the, I'm less about helping people and more about making money as a psychologist. Okay.

Speaker 35 In 1984, he meets Thelma Box, an insurance and real estate agent from Graham, Texas, who asked him to go into business with her to create a brand new motivational seminar. Now,

Speaker 35 we're talking again, like the 70s, 80s, which is the golden age of motivational seminars. That's when this whole thing really explodes.
Motivational seminars are basically short-term cults.

Speaker 35 For two to five days, several dozen dozen to several hundred to sometimes even a couple of thousand people will pack into an auditorium where a charismatic front man and a handful of his buddies will coach them, usually by hyping the room up using simple crowd work tactics to make people feel temporarily elated and tricking them into having like cathartic experiences and thinking they've learned something.

Speaker 35 You know,

Speaker 35 that's the whole idea. Have people get like people, the mania of a crowd kind of going, make people cry or laugh and think like something significant has happened.
Ask probing personal questions

Speaker 35 in public in front of a bunch of people. It's a whole big grift.
Yeah. Thelma box was a, well, I don't know, grift.
I think a lot of people just like them.

Speaker 35 I've known people who like admit that they never got anything long-term out of it, but just enjoy the experience. And I guess if that's your thing.
It kind of depends. Whatever.

Speaker 35 Some people are just like, they're like, yeah, I know Tony. Well, Tony Robinson is maybe not the best example, but like, I know this person's like.

Speaker 35 basically full of shit but you know i i had a couple hundred dollars to burn and a weekend to burn and it made me feel good You know, I don't care, I guess, if that's your thing.

Speaker 35 We all have to take joy where you can get it. Yeah.

Speaker 35 There's a lot of people who like to, there's people who like to climb the ice-filled sides of mountains with crampons and fucking like pitons and stuff. And a lot of them die.

Speaker 35 There's people who like to do cave diving, which is the deadliest thing you could possibly do to relax. So like, I don't know, people do shit.
I don't care.

Speaker 35 But most of the people doing these seminars are actually like people at some kind of like crisis point in their life having a difficulty. And that, that's, that's the problem with it.

Speaker 35 And it's like it depends on how you sell it too. Like, if you're like promising, oh, if you come this weekend, you're going to leave and make a million dollars in the next couple, you know, that

Speaker 35 there's varying degrees of cooling. There's varying degrees.
Some of them are just like, I'm going to make you feel good about yourself so you can go out and attack the world.

Speaker 35 And I guess that's kind of less problematic where it's like, okay, like, whatever, you know, it's basically expensive church.

Speaker 35 Okay. Yeah.
Like, you will not make me not hate myself, friend. Better men than you have tried.

Speaker 35 So, uh, Thelma Box, who, you you know is phil's friend is a huge fan of these kind of motivational seminars she'd done all the big ones zig ziglar actual guy out there uh you can find his books at any given estate sale uh dale carnegie you can also find his books at any given estate sale uh tony robbins you can also find his books at any given estate sale all the estate sale greats she does their seminars

Speaker 35 with like boogers on the side of the books yeah

Speaker 35 most of her classes had been focused on uh her career like they'd been like focused on helping salesmen, right? Because that's a big subset of this industry. She sold insurance and real estate.

Speaker 35 So there'd been conferences to help real estate and insurance salesmen sell better.

Speaker 35 Box felt that there was a market for a seminar focused instead of financial stuff on personal growth, on how to actually be a better person. Now, Box had gotten to know Dr.

Speaker 35 Phil because her son had hired him to renegotiate a bunch of bank loans. She decided Phil was the best negotiator she'd ever seen.

Speaker 35 Quote, he has a God-given gift, a combination of charm and charisma that can mesmerize a room full of people. And again, people who disagree about a lot of stuff about Dr.

Speaker 35 Phil, nobody disagrees about this part. He's apparently just an incredible negotiator.

Speaker 35 So she decides he's going to be a great frontman for this life improvement seminar she wants to host.

Speaker 35 Now, her initial plan had been to lead a success seminar for single women, but McGraw pushed back against this. He didn't want to limit himself to just female customers.
Instead,

Speaker 35 the plan that he made was for bot, or instead, he was like, we should do like a general life improvement for everybody.

Speaker 35 Like, come here and I'll help you deal with whatever things are holding you back in your life, right? Like, that's kind of how Phil innovates the pitch.

Speaker 35 Now, initially, the plan that Box had fronted was for Box and Phil to be 50-50 partners in this venture. But right before they started going,

Speaker 35 yeah, exactly. Right before they started going, Dr.
Phil demanded that he was going to walk if she didn't bring his dad in as an equal shareholder.

Speaker 35 Oh, yeah. Bringing daddy into it?

Speaker 35 yeah and this this was a negotiation tactic from box quote getting his dad involved would give phil control i didn't want to be a minority owner but he threatened to do the seminars without me now since box was not a doctor and she'd already given phil all of her ideas she didn't feel like she could do the seminar without him but he could do it without her so she was kind of in a tight spot here so she agreed she claims that she basically

Speaker 35 yeah he's that's the guy he is she claims she built the um the the curriculum of the program from the ground up designing most of the games and all of like the different like worksheets and shit you had to do and basically in fairness like i don't think box is a great person she's taking all of the information for this from other seminars she attended and is just modifying them enough to avoid

Speaker 35 scripting the grifter and the grifter never likes that yeah she gets fucked over by phil but like i don't particularly like her either so i would i want to take that negotiation tactic and apply it to the stand-up comedy world and be like all right i know that you're supposed to be featuring for me, but actually my dad is going to be opening now.

Speaker 35 And so you're actually,

Speaker 35 so it's going to be my dad, then you, you'll be doing a shorter set. I will then be doing five hours.
Like that's, oh, that would be so fun.

Speaker 35 Yeah. I'm, I'm, I'm excited for that for you, Jamie.
Thank you. But you know what isn't exciting?

Speaker 35 What isn't exciting? Life without the products and services that support this podcast. Absolutely.

Speaker 35 I'm kidding not even really worth living like if we're being frank what are you even doing without these products and services what are you nothing nothing all right here's ads

Speaker 35 we're back oh i hope you all spent money because this whole wheel of blood doesn't keep turning if you don't put money into it people oh boy you know yeah that's how it works yeah that's how it works

Speaker 35 would you want this to fall apart no yes Anyway, so yeah, the basic idea of these seminars that Box mostly cooks up and Phil is supposed to present is to teach people how to find out what they want from life by making them more accountable, by expressing vulnerabilities, stripping away self-deception, which all just means like making people cry in a big room surrounded by other people, you know?

Speaker 35 Like that's the goal.

Speaker 35 That's the goal. Yeah.
With no connection to the outside world and you gaslight them into believing something that they don't.

Speaker 35 Short-term cults, which is the kind of cult I'd like to do because it does sound exhausting having to like every time i watch my favorite tv show which is the waco tv show where they made david koresh have incredible cum gutters 50 minutes 40 seconds before editing

Speaker 35 before waco i just it it seems like it's exhausting like we all love david koresh but my god the man had to put in a lot of work just to just to keep a cult going like it just doesn't seem worth it Where to begin with that sentence?

Speaker 35 Short-term cults. Like if I could just do like a limited waco, like five or six times a year over the course of like four days, that seems much better.
It's like a juicing.

Speaker 35 Yeah, it's a juicing of the spirit.

Speaker 35 You're just left like, you feel like you're better off. You're probably not.
It doesn't matter because you can sleep for three days. Yeah.

Speaker 35 Sophie, take out, take down a podcast idea, the 40-minute waco. I think we can make a lot of money with this.

Speaker 35 Anyway, back to Dr. Phil.
So what made

Speaker 35 this seminar thing that he launches with Box special is the group dynamic, getting 100 or so people together in a room, crying and sharing stories and having the kind of addictive cathartic experiences that make seminar hosts rich people phil and box were good at it and dr phil instantly gained a reputation as a magnetic host one attendee recalled quote his voice was mic'd and he sounded godlike i watched powerful men crumble as he questioned them he knew just the right buttons to push wow you know it's not that he's a great psychologist is that he is an incredibly intuitive man who understands people which is why he's a good negotiator he does have a great voice I'll give that to him.

Speaker 35 He does. Oh, yes.
Yeah. He knows how to manipulate people, right? He's a great manipulator, and that you could make a lot of money doing that.
That's the most like dangerous trade in the world:

Speaker 35 understanding people, but just not caring what happens to them. Yes, yes.

Speaker 35 I understand people, but care about what happens to them, which is why I tell them to buy machetes and bolt cutters and Claymore anti-personnel minds. Yes.
Definitely saving lives.

Speaker 35 By the way, when you're ordering your Claymore anti-personnel line, use promo code bastards for 15% off if you buy four or more. Claymore,

Speaker 35 fuck anyone in front of you. What?

Speaker 131 No.

Speaker 35 Sophie. Robert,

Speaker 35 Dr. Phil.
Dr. Phil.
Okay, yeah. So this seminar series was called Pathways, and it became hugely popular.
For a while, they were making fucking bank.

Speaker 35 And the whole process of doing this awoke in Phil, or at least accelerated, a deep desire to get on TV.

Speaker 35 He started pushing for his own talk show, schmoozing with a Hollywood producer who made the mistake of attending one of his seminars.

Speaker 35 Phil succeeded in talking said producer into filming a pilot episode of a show where three people went through Dr. Phil's training and told their stories of, like, you know, how it had helped them.

Speaker 35 The show sounds incredibly boring, and clearly it was not picked up. Now, over his years with Pathways, McGraw developed into a talented showman.

Speaker 35 One of his co-workers, David Dickinson, later recalled, Once he got in front of the room, it didn't take long to feel the power. He loved being godlike and worshipped.

Speaker 35 The only reason it didn't become become a cult is because Thelma wouldn't let it. Yeah.
Wow. Wow.
Okay. He really does sound like

Speaker 35 Chaos Fraser. Yeah.

Speaker 35 Chaos Frazier. Yes.
Yeah. Yes.

Speaker 35 Dr. Phil was on Frasier.
For all you Frasier heads. Dr.

Speaker 35 The show, the episode, The Devil and Dr. Phil.
I mean, the thing is, if you actually, Frasier was a big show for my family growing up.

Speaker 35 And so like while my mom was dying, we watched a lot of episodes because, you know, know, there wasn't a lot that she could do, and it was kind of a thing that was nostalgic for all of us.

Speaker 35 Um, yeah, but one of the through lines of the series is that Frasier's not a good psychologist, like not a good psychiatrist, like he's bad at

Speaker 35 like that's why he's on the radio. Yeah,

Speaker 35 he's a bit of a drifter, too.

Speaker 35 Yeah, Niles is supposed to be good, yeah, yeah. Niles is competent, um, although problematic.
Uh, definitely some stalking behavior from Niles. Um, oh, yes, Niles is also canceled, but

Speaker 35 Nobody on that show is a good person but John Mahoney, the only good cop, Frasier's dad.

Speaker 35 That's absolutely true. And not even Eddie is safe from

Speaker 35 cancellation. And honestly,

Speaker 35 not a good cop. John Mahoney admits to lying on the stand in order to get a man incarcerated during an episode of Frasier.
It's just like an offside comment. Yes, he absolutely does.
I forgot that.

Speaker 35 He's just such a damn charismatic actor. I can't stay mad at the man.

Speaker 35 So by the late 1980s, Pathways had moved to Dallas, where each year more than a thousand people would pay $1,000 each to attend a single weekend event with McGraw. That's a million bucks in a weekend.

Speaker 35 So

Speaker 35 again, great money in this.

Speaker 35 Yeah, so Dr. Phil is, I don't know if he's a millionaire at this point, but he is well off at this point.

Speaker 35 Now, he, unfortunately, like his dad is involved in the whole thing, and Dr. Phil never had a great relationship with his father.

Speaker 35 I think he was just kind of using him to get control of the thing, but like he and his dad don't get along. They're both egomaniacs.
And to make matters worse, the older Dr.

Speaker 35 McGraw was basically just kind of like there to cash a check. Like when he would show up on stage, he'd be like erratic and kind of say nonsense and not really help the business at all.

Speaker 35 So worse than nothing.

Speaker 35 Worse than nothing. The two men started to hate each other, which a number of employees noted as somewhat hypocritical.

Speaker 35 Quote, come on, here is a guy who was running a relationship seminar and he doesn't speak to his own father in the training room for years. He didn't walk his own talk.

Speaker 35 That is a fair hypocritical criticism. Fair point.

Speaker 35 That's hilarious, though. And while Dr.
Phil's relationship with his dad

Speaker 35 kind of went to shit, his relationship with Thelma Box, who had founded the program that made him rich and developed its curriculum, got even worse.

Speaker 35 The Dallas Observer writes, quote, though McGraw and Box were partners for more than seven years and friends for more than a dozen, his treatment of her didn't seem much better.

Speaker 35 On November 16th, 1992, Box received a faxed memo from McGraw informing her that he had made a tentative deal to sell his interest in Pathways to Midland philanthropist Steve Davidson.

Speaker 35 McGraw was ready to move on, his father ready to retire. That's why his father had sold his one-third interest, the memo informed her, to a Wichita Falls businessman.

Speaker 35 Of course, the new partners, quote, understand yours and my relationship and know that I am committed to you as a friend and associate and expect fair treatment.

Speaker 35 Basically, he sold me down the river, says Box, who recalls having heated discussions with McGraw about either selling her own Pathways interest or buying him out in the two weeks prior to the memo.

Speaker 35 Phil and I hadn't been getting along. He stopped talking to me, and I knew we couldn't go on that way.

Speaker 35 What he had neglected to tell her, she says, is that he had engineered this corporate takeover scheme by actually selling his interest more than a year earlier.

Speaker 35 On October 15th, 1991, he signed an agreement for his sale of path for the sale of his Pathways stock for $325,000. I absolutely told her I was selling, McGraw says.

Speaker 35 What she didn't like was who I was selling to.

Speaker 35 Now, you can take whoever's word you want on this, but the author of that article was giving a memo, was given a memo that McGraw sent to the buyer of his stock, in which he agreed, the buyer agreed, that the sale would be kept

Speaker 35 confidential from everyone, including Box. So I'm going to go ahead and say that Phil is the liar here.
He basically knew

Speaker 35 he wanted to sell out early when his stuff was worth more than hers would be. Like with

Speaker 35 only a third of it left,

Speaker 35 she's not going to get as much money for it.

Speaker 35 And he lies.

Speaker 35 She's trying to buy it from him for a year after he's already sold it and he's just stonewalling her.

Speaker 35 Like,

Speaker 35 yeah, it's a shitty way to treat a business partner. It absolutely is.

Speaker 35 Yeah, it's like, it's hard to care about anyone involved in this, this whole situation, but he does sound like the party who wronged her.

Speaker 35 Yeah, and he acknowledges that the material from his first best-selling book was basically lifted entirely from the Pathways curriculum, but he has never acknowledged that Thelma Box actually wrote the curriculum he based his best-selling book on so oh and they definitely didn't mention whoever thelma box stole it from so no no and that again that's the thing like right the point is that he is a con man not that she is particularly a victim here you know it's like i don't care about thelma box In 1989, Dr.

Speaker 35 Phil was living and working in Wichita. He keeps going back to fucking Kansas, enjoying his Pathways money and working as a psychologist.

Speaker 35 One of his patients was a young woman who he started and maintained a, quote, inappropriate dual relationship with. Again, wait, that means dual.
Yeah,

Speaker 35 he is her doctor and he is fucking her.

Speaker 35 Oh, don't fuck your doctor. Come on.
Yeah, shouldn't be doing that with the patient you're providing psychiatric care to. Definitely don't fuck her doctor.
Kind of a no-no.

Speaker 35 But also don't fuck your doctor. He then made the relationship even more inappropriate when he hired her part-time while she was still his patient and lover, which is so many conflicts of interest.

Speaker 35 No.

Speaker 35 That is.

Speaker 35 You got to give the man credit for really going out of his way

Speaker 35 to do the most unethical version of that thing he could.

Speaker 35 You're right, Robert. I do got to hand it to him.
Critical support to Dr. Phil for managing the fucking, the fucking, I don't know, what do you, the trifecta, I guess.
I will. My spirit is worn down.

Speaker 35 I'll hand it to him.

Speaker 35 Dr. Phil considers this transgression to just have been a misdemeanor.

Speaker 35 But the journalist from the Dallas behind the journalist who wrote that Dallas Observer article looked into the situation. He found the woman Dr.

Speaker 35 Phil had the relationship with, and he found out a lot more besides, and it's pretty fucking sketchy.

Speaker 35 Quote, In 1984, she was a college student returning home after her sophomore year depressed, lonely, and suicidal. I was emotionally abused as a child, she says, and suffered from low self-esteem.

Speaker 35 When McGraw began treating her, she says, he became fully involved in her life, demanding to know with whom she spoke, when she went to bed at night, what she did that day.

Speaker 35 If I was depressed or anxious, his first question was, why didn't you call me? Every time I felt bad, he insisted only he could fix me.

Speaker 35 When she wanted to spend the following summer working for a professor at the Houston University she was attending, he persuaded her to work in his biofeedback lab in Wichita Falls.

Speaker 35 He kept me totally dependent on him, she says. So that's textbook abuse.
Like, that's just like literally textbook abuse. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Couldn't be clearer. Hate it.

Speaker 35 I hate it so much. On so many levels, too.
Yeah. Like on multiple levels.
God, that's fucking terrible.

Speaker 35 It's really bad. It's really, he's a bad person, Jamie.
He's just a real bad person.

Speaker 35 He's your employer. Like, fucking hell.
Not to be like complimenting Dr. Oz, but by this point in the Dr.
Oz story, he's performed thousands of open heart surgeries. Again, Dr.

Speaker 35 Phil, they're both grifters. Dr.
Phil never does a single good thing, like,

Speaker 35 to even the scales at all. He's just a monster.
Right. And you get the feeling Dr.
Oz, I have never heard a complaint that he's abusive in his personal relationships.

Speaker 35 People mostly, I've heard reports that he's kind of a narcissist, but I've never heard that he's like a monster. Dr.
Phil's a monster. You can make a fan cam of him already.
I don't know.

Speaker 35 I'm just, he's a useful, he's a useful comparison. I just really hate Dr.
Phil. Yes.
So the formal complaint this woman filed led to a decision from the psychology board that Dr.

Speaker 35 Phil's practice would have to be supervised for a year.

Speaker 35 Before that time came up, he quit his practice and moved to Dallas to start a new company, Courtroom Sciences Incorporated, or CSI, with his neighbor from Wichita.

Speaker 35 His job was basically to use his psychology knowledge to help lawyers pick jurors. He loved the work, particularly the adrenaline that came from the high stakes of a court case.
Dr.

Speaker 35 Phil's company was a hit, and his client soon included every major airline on earth, three TV networks, and dozens of Fortune 500 companies. Before long, it came to include Oprah Winfrey.

Speaker 35 Damn it, Oprah. No!

Speaker 35 Yeah.

Speaker 35 I mean, like, you know, it's coming, but

Speaker 35 it's a longer. Why, Oprah and airlines?

Speaker 35 Yeah,

Speaker 35 the two sacred things in our society, Oprah and the airlines.

Speaker 35 I want to know every single time Oprah comes into the discussion,

Speaker 35 I am like, where was Stedman on all of this? Where does he because Stedman? Yes, Stedman, what were you fucking doing?

Speaker 35 Stedman, where is Stedman writes books that are alleging to be about something, but are actually about nothing,

Speaker 35 but he's nice, so I don't care. Yeah.

Speaker 35 I hope that Steadman was like, something's not right, Oprah. And she was like,

Speaker 35 I'm not listening to you, Stedman. I'm assuming that's how their relationship works.
She was like, I'm going to make so much money. An outrageous amount of money, Steadman.
Stedman, quiet.

Speaker 35 We're getting a yaw. I will be able to clone you when you die, Stedman.
That's how much money I'm going to make off of that. Maybe that's what sold him.

Speaker 35 I used to do little fan drawings of Stedman, Graham, and

Speaker 35 the barefoot Contessa's husband hanging out.

Speaker 35 That's very unsettling, Jamie.

Speaker 35 They would just be like sharing an umbrella. Anyways.
So Oprah had made the questionable decision to do an episode of her show on the dangers of disease in the American beef supply.

Speaker 35 A bunch of Texas cattlemen sued her for fraud, defamation, and, you know, just hurting their businesses. Now, I have no idea who's in the right here, and I really don't care.

Speaker 35 The case looked like to be going badly for Oprah until she brought in Dr. Phil to be a part of her trial team.

Speaker 35 He instantly recognized her as someone he could make money off of, and he set to work charming her. Phil did his job.

Speaker 35 He coached her and the defense team in how to respond under questioning, and he won Oprah's adoration. And to his credit, it seems like he did a good job because she was exonerated.
Oh, wow.

Speaker 35 And after the case ended in her favor, she did a verdict episode of her show from amarillo texas where for the first time she introduced dr phil mcgraw to a national audience she called him one of the smartest men in the world she was so impressed that she added that he was this like literally the most intelligent man she'd met in her 12 years of talking to medical experts she said she wanted to share his brilliance with the world Yeah, this hyperbole is gonna get and we are we are going to talk about where this hyperbole gets all of us in part two of our epic series, Dr.

Speaker 35 Phil.

Speaker 35 What a dick.

Speaker 35 Is that the subtitle of this? Yep.

Speaker 35 Perfect.

Speaker 35 Fucking A, Dr. Phil.

Speaker 35 Come on.

Speaker 35 You're a dick. Could you not? Could you not? Could you just go back to football? I feel like one more head injury could really solve a lot of our problems as a country.

Speaker 35 The thing is, like, that every single time you're like, well, goddamn, I bet that if this whole football thing had gone different, the world would be a lot less Dr. Phil.

Speaker 35 Yeah, I don't even necessarily want his football career to have gone well if he just gotten hit 20% harder, you know?

Speaker 35 That would have been enough for me.

Speaker 35 Okay, okay. You know what?

Speaker 35 I see your point of view. Yeah.
Anyway, Jamie, you got any pluggables you want to drop?

Speaker 35 Yeah, just the usuals. You can listen to Vectil Castle Veta podcast and my urinza on iHeartRadio.
And then I have a new podcast coming up about Kathy Comics

Speaker 35 in June that Sophie's producing. I'm excited.
Check out Jamie's erotic Kathy podcast. I assume it's erotic.
Is that correct?

Speaker 35 No. I mean,

Speaker 35 it's very, you know what?

Speaker 35 I commit, you know, I wish that Kathy was having a lot of sex, but you can't do that in the newspapers. Not then.

Speaker 35 I mean, it doesn't, she doesn't need to be having sex for the podcast about Kathy to just be like the fundamental, the fundamental eros of Kathy is so overwhelming you know yeah you just you just hear that last name Gus White and

Speaker 35 there's still time there's still time

Speaker 35 I'll let her know but

Speaker 35 it's going to be an erotic podcast can you make it hornier Kathy just like 12%

Speaker 35 anyway I hope the rest of you have a day that's 12% hornier we'll be back Thursday

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Speaker 35 Hello. This is Behind the Bastards podcast.

Speaker 35 Robert, you just had to look out haunted house. Yeah, I

Speaker 35 don't know. I never come into this show with a plan.
Like, I write 10,000 words a week to do this show, and then I, I, I consistently just completely fuck the introductions. Um,

Speaker 35 I think it's nice. I think it's, I think it's fun brand consistency.
That's, that's our Robert. People are thinking.
That's our Robert.

Speaker 35 It's, you know, it's easy to have a consistent brand when your brand is being like

Speaker 35 a brain-damaged drug addict who is incapable of doing anything but writing long essays about bad people. Simple brand.

Speaker 35 I think that's, you're being reductive, but also when people hear you say things like that about theirselves or about yourself, they go, that's our Robert.

Speaker 35 I go, oh, my son, so, so pure.

Speaker 35 So humble.

Speaker 35 So probably shouldn't be trusted with large machinery. Anyway, definitely not.
You know who else shouldn't be trusted with large machinery? Because of the horrible head injury.

Speaker 35 Dr. Phil.

Speaker 35 Oh, okay. I thought that was you introducing me.
I was like, this is really me.

Speaker 35 No, you're Jamie. I would trust you with heavy machinery, although you don't have a driver's license, do you? I don't have a driver's license, but it hasn't stopped me from driving.
Hell yeah.

Speaker 35 Yeah. Well,

Speaker 35 good for you, Jamie. I could probably get a, I keep, I get like, I'm like, I could probably get a driver's license if I really wanted to.
I just don't want to. That's not true.

Speaker 35 I've failed the test several times. The key thing about cops, Jamie, and this is some free advice for all of you out there: they're never ready for you to just tuck and roll.

Speaker 35 You know, like if this, as long as you're driving a cheap car, if they start to pull you over, just tuck and roll and then fucking book it. Like, I guarantee you, they will not be ready.

Speaker 35 Yeah, I like it. They're just not going to be ready.

Speaker 35 Um,

Speaker 35 and anyway, we should probably talk about Dr. Phil some, huh? Sure, yeah, listen, probably, probably chill out with our fill out.

Speaker 35 I

Speaker 35 need to go, actually.

Speaker 35 That's fair. What if I just logged out of this?

Speaker 35 This has been the final episode of Behind the Bastards. I'm so sorry.

Speaker 35 All right. Yeah, let's chill out with our fill out.

Speaker 35 Just a big old pudgy,

Speaker 35 pudgy, bald-headed Phil just flopping around. Yes, with a nice moustache.

Speaker 35 Like a flopping around.

Speaker 35 Like a skink on a hot rock. Okay.

Speaker 35 Okay. Later that year.
So Dr. Phil helps Oprah out

Speaker 35 and like saves her, saves her bacon.

Speaker 35 And she brings him on her show and does her verdict episode.

Speaker 35 She was getting like sued for a lot of money and defamation and shit.

Speaker 35 It was potentially something that would have really damaged her

Speaker 35 bottom line. I was like, I don't know this Lingo.
Okay. So Dr.
Phil later that year would become a regular part of her show.

Speaker 35 And this was part of a pivot in Oprah's show where she went from like doing a normal talk show to what she called change your life TV. Yeah.

Speaker 35 The goal of change your life TV was to take the experience people had in Phil's seminars, the very public crowd-influenced catharsis of emotional change, and put that shit on television for everybody to watch.

Speaker 35 Mostly, this involved Dr. Phil confronting people aggressively about their flaws so they would cry and say they learned something.
Quote, this is Dr.

Speaker 35 Phil explaining his methodology: Yeah, in order for people to change, there has to be a dramatic event.

Speaker 35 I think coming on the Oprah show as an event in itself is a watershed occurrence in people's lives.

Speaker 35 They get told the bottom-line truth about where they are, and in that environment, I don't think they will ever forget it. If you embarrass people on national television, they remember.

Speaker 35 I mean, that's

Speaker 35 you know, that's not untrue. That's not untrue.
Okay, okay, accurate, Dr. Phil, accurate.
Jesus. Okay.

Speaker 35 Yeah.

Speaker 35 So, um. So he's really like heading into the villain years.

Speaker 35 Yeah, yeah. He's, he's all, I mean, he's been in villain territory this whole time.
Right.

Speaker 35 So on Oprah's show, Dr. Phil focused on clients whose problems were things he could justify yelling about to them or yelling at them for.

Speaker 35 One early case was a husband who was verbally abusive to his wife, calling her obscene names. Phil could not just condemn the man,

Speaker 35 but he didn't just condemn the man. He made the man's wife tearfully recount everything he said to her on TV.

Speaker 35 So he's yelling at this guy for being a dick, but he's also demanding that this woman in detail explain every horrible thing her husband said about her to millions of strangers. Right.
Like

Speaker 35 the classic air out the worst thing that's ever happened to you for ratings for someone else. Lovely.

Speaker 35 I don't think is great. You know, I don't think that's great behavior would be my

Speaker 35 take on it. Not a psychologist, but Phil isn't really a psychologist either.

Speaker 35 So Phil then, after making this woman laborously explain the horrible things her husband said to her, got to help provide some of his own homespun wisdom.

Speaker 35 In this case, he told the wife, you taught him how to treat you. Now,

Speaker 35 This is a variation of one of Dr.

Speaker 35 Phil's life laws for people to follow, which he published in his plagiarized best-selling book, life strategies quote no we teach people how to treat us own rather than complain about how people treat us my mom had some

Speaker 35 book robert did she blame herself for people being shitty to her just for it until about 2008 yeah yeah okay well yeah that's good life strategies self matters the ultimate weight solution god i hate all of his titles yeah we had them relationship rescue we had that it wasn't on the main shelf but it was in the house it was in the house, it was somewhere up in there.

Speaker 35 Yeah, well, I don't know. Did it rescue your relationships? Absolutely not.
I think what we got, we got more out of uh John Edwards. Do you remember him or John Edwards?

Speaker 35 Oh, yeah, the talk to the dead guy, yeah, the one who would like uh record people in the audience talking about the dead people they wanted to hear from and then walking out and being like, aha,

Speaker 35 exactly. Yeah,

Speaker 35 that that's a that was a fun crystal. I mean, also, but also a traumatizing one.
They're all traumatizing.

Speaker 35 They are all traumatizing grifts. That's what makes them so satisfying.

Speaker 35 Wow. Wow.
We all learned a lesson, didn't we?

Speaker 35 No.

Speaker 35 No, we didn't. So what's he up to? What's he doing? All right.
So, Dr. Fucking Phil.

Speaker 35 So I want to talk a little bit more about these life laws that he lays out in his first book, because this is a major reoccurring theme, especially in early Dr. Phil.

Speaker 35 Like people will, he'll critique people by explaining which life law they violated, like the one where you're responsible for other people treating you shitty because we teach people how to treat us.

Speaker 35 Which is like an inversion of the truth, which is that if you're like abusers and predators are good at spotting your vulnerabilities and taking advantage of them, right?

Speaker 35 And so you need to be aware of your own vulnerabilities because you need to be aware of how dangerous people might take advantage of you. That's the non-toxic way of framing that.

Speaker 35 The toxic way is, hey, you taught him to be like like that. Like, no, you didn't.
He saw that you had this vulnerability and he took advantage of it. That's a fair way to.

Speaker 35 That's one of the most abuse, abusive tactics in the book. Like, well, actually, it was your fault.
And if you weren't so weak, this wouldn't have happened to you. And he's like, oh, go fuck off and

Speaker 35 I want to try this logic with like crimes. Like the next time I'm caught speeding, like, look, officer, you taught me how to drive this car that way.

Speaker 35 Like by having the road be this straight and me be this drunk, you kind of taught me to speed, you know?

Speaker 35 I will say that every time I try to teach my dog something, that is a something that it's a very low stakes version of that.

Speaker 35 They're like, well, didn't you teach him he could cuckoo on your floor when you don't feel like standing up? And I was like, yes, I guess I did.

Speaker 35 Christ in heaven. Okay, so

Speaker 35 here's how he introduces the concept of life laws in his book. Quote, life laws are the rules of the game.

Speaker 35 No one is going to ask you if you think these laws are fair or if you think they should exist. Like the law of gravity, they simply are.
You don't get a vote.

Speaker 35 You can ignore them and stumble along, wondering why you never seem to succeed.

Speaker 35 Or you can learn them, adapt to them, mold your choices and behavior to them, and live effectively.

Speaker 35 Learning these life laws is at the absolute core of what you must master in this book to have the essential knowledge for a personal life strategy.

Speaker 35 What kind of he went from zero to being like my laws, much like like the law of gravity? That is like, that is galaxy brains

Speaker 35 that are as unavoidable and inquest. Unchanging as the tide.
As

Speaker 35 gravity. Oh, God.

Speaker 35 You have to appreciate the flagrancy on

Speaker 35 display there. Jesus.
Yeah. It's, you know, it's good, Jamie.
It's like you being abused being your fault. To me, that's gravity.

Speaker 35 It's like, oh, I want to put you through a shredder yeah wow yeah that would be fun and i think we could probably get a pretty good primetime tv audience if we actually did that jamie if someone put dr phil through a gigantic if we just put him through a shredder yeah would watch like that scene in fargo that's a yeah it's a that that's kind of like that's where his story is building towards oh we get steve pushimian to present that's a hour of tv right there there you go there you go and i'm sure he'd be happy to do it i'm sure he would.

Speaker 35 Now, I bet, Jamie, you're hungry for some more of Dr. Phil's life laws.
I can see it in your eyes. You're just, you're just, you're just, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 35 So most of these laws are pretty self-explanatory.

Speaker 35 Stuff like life rewards action and you cannot change what you do not acknowledge.

Speaker 35 My favorite is people do what works, which boils down to the idea that we engage in bad behavior because it rewards us in some way. So, Dr.

Speaker 35 Phil says, if you want to stop the behavior, stop rewarding yourself for it, which makes sense until you think about the way, say, heroin or junk food works, because you can't stop it from the reward is the thing, right?

Speaker 35 Like these are all so, so manipulatively worded. Yeah.
The next time you take heroin, punch yourself in the dick so you don't enjoy it as much. I don't know.

Speaker 35 What the heck? Yeah.

Speaker 35 How do you like statistically, most of the kind of people who want advice from me are going to be dealing with something like weight loss. And it's like, no, the reward is eating eating food.

Speaker 35 Like, that's that strategy isn't going to help, you know? It's so frustrating, too, because it's like they're

Speaker 35 the way they're worded is so deliberate that it's like, oh, I understand why people fell for this, too. Oh, yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 35 Yeah. It's just all,

Speaker 35 it's just very, um, very transparent nonsense for the most part.

Speaker 35 Yeah, it's words in a in a certain sequence and charging you, you know, $18.95 for a hardcover. You got to give the man credit it is words in a sequence that is undeniable that dr phil

Speaker 35 that was a sentence that that's a the man uses sentences you know you got to give that to him

Speaker 35 you can't take that from him so yeah some of his rules are however a little more sinister probably the worst well one of the worst is i don't know there's a lot of worsts one is you create your own experiences here's how he explains that one don't play the role of victim or use past events to build excuses.

Speaker 35 It guarantees you no progress, no healing, and no victory. You will never fix a problem by blaming someone else.
That's, first of all,

Speaker 35 not true. And that's just like, I mean, yeah, he's just clearly not even good at the job he's getting famous for saying he's good at.
That's so backwards. Yeah, it's, it's, I mean.

Speaker 35 He sounds like a fucking Catholic priest. He's like, well, push your emotions down, okay?

Speaker 35 It's just such bad, it's particularly all bad advice for like abuse victims.

Speaker 35 Cause if you're an abuse victim, in a lot of cases, part of the healing process is realizing that your abuser is the person to blame and that all these things they got you to blame yourself for aren't things you did wrong.

Speaker 35 And that they like that, that's a big part of healing from that sort of thing. And he's just like, no, no, no, don't be blaming this guy because he was beating you.

Speaker 35 Maybe you didn't do the laundry right, you know? Maybe you should have got him his beer faster. I'm Dr.
Phil. I'm a doctor, you know? Like, God damn it.
I really don't like this guy.

Speaker 35 Yeah, I also want to read you the, we said earlier, one of his rules is we teach people how to treat us, but the actual wording in the book of how he explains that is even creepier than you might guess.

Speaker 35 Quote, you either teach people to treat you with dignity and respect, or you don't. This means you are partly responsible for the mistreatment that you get at the hands of someone else.

Speaker 35 You shape others' behavior when you teach them what they can get away with and what they cannot. This is like, oh, God, you're just like, oh, God.
Okay.

Speaker 35 So what did you you do that you need to believe this in order to live with yourself? Yeah, right.

Speaker 35 Jesus fucking Christ. Yeah, he's, he's really a bad person.
I don't know. We had this at my house.
Wow. It was next to, I like clearly remember it being next to my mom's bed.

Speaker 35 Yeah, like, you know, it's the good book. You got to, got to keep it close to you.
We didn't own the Bible.

Speaker 35 We owned life strategies, the John Edward book, and that other one by that guy who said he could talk to dead people. I forget who it was.
Oh, John Edwards.

Speaker 35 There's a lot of dead people talking to you.

Speaker 35 Yeah. So, despite the fundamental emptiness of Phil's philosophy, or perhaps because of it, Dr.
Phil became a wild success. His first episode ran in 2002 of the Dr.

Speaker 35 Phil show, like he spun off pretty quickly, and he's been on the air ever since.

Speaker 35 He instinctively knew that the real money in this sort of TV was leaning in towards the most tragic and risque stories: drug addiction, spousal abuse, troubled teens, all that good shit.

Speaker 35 He was happy to throw medical best practices out the window. In 2004, he interviewed a nine-year-old boy whose parents said he was being abusive towards his younger sister.
Dr.

Speaker 35 Phil said the child had nine of the 14 characteristics of a serial killer. Then he added, Jeffrey Dahmer had seven.
Jesus. Oh, my God.

Speaker 35 That is a very well-crafted insult. That's beautiful.
Yeah.

Speaker 35 It's like,

Speaker 35 so any reputable psychologist or psychiatrist will tell you that one thing you can't do, as in like, it's forbidden in the discipline, is to diagnose a child as a psychopath.

Speaker 35 You're not allowed to do that because they're children. Their brains are developing and shackling a child with that diagnosis is incredibly unethical.
Dr. Phil did it on national television.

Speaker 35 He did it.

Speaker 35 Isn't he still doing it on national television? I mean, yes, yes, yes. He does this all the fucking time.
Yes. Yes.
From a write-up by BuzzFeed, quote, Dr.

Speaker 35 Phil purports to be a mental health professional, but he's diagnosing from videotape on the air, said then-executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness Michael Fitzpatrick to the Washington Post in a 2004 story about Dr.

Speaker 35 Phil's bad psychotherapy. It's unethical to do that sort of, if you will, pop psychology.
You don't do that for ratings. This is a human being.
A spokesperson for Dr.

Speaker 35 Phil at the the time said that McGraw never labeled the child as mentally ill, which is technically true. He merely brought up Jeffrey Dahmer.
So there you go. This is like just next level.

Speaker 35 It all rings like semi-familiar. It is kind of like interesting to think about how

Speaker 35 used to as a culture, how used to we are of like. Dr.
Phil saying the most fucked up thing he can possibly think of at a child because he's been doing it for 25 years. Yeah.

Speaker 35 And I love how from the beginning. Yeah, I was like, oh, that wasn't an escalation it was just always that

Speaker 35 no people have been complaining about dr phil in this way from the very beginning of his career and it has never made a difference for a single second

Speaker 35 and it's never made him less money it doesn't seem like this is so bleak i think it's just made him more money which is good i mean he picked a good life strategy you know he's got more money than i do so

Speaker 35 Dr. Phil stopped renewing his license to practice as a psychologist in 2006.
He He has never held a valid license in California, where his show is filmed.

Speaker 35 A spokesperson for his show confirmed that he stopped renewing his license because he, quote, no longer worked as a therapist, which I don't disagree with,

Speaker 35 but I would argue he is absolutely marketing himself as a therapist and is still in the business of therapy. He's presenting himself as someone who has a license.
He for sure is.

Speaker 35 And he's not just still doing therapy on his show, he is selling products to companies that make their whole, all of their money from doing therapy. Like he

Speaker 35 I'll get into that now. A Stat News Boston Globe investigation several years ago revealed that Dr.
Phil and his son, some dude named Jay, started a business called Dr.

Speaker 35 Phil's Path to Recovery and the late aughts. This was a virtual reality addiction recovery program where a VR Dr.
Phil would walk you through exercises to help you get and stay sober.

Speaker 35 From BuzzFeed, quote, users don virtual reality goggles and are placed in scenarios with Dr. Phil.

Speaker 35 In one, McGraw sits at a bar, arms folded across his chest, counseling his visitor on how to avoid the triggers of an evening out when alcohol is present.

Speaker 35 In another scene, he reclines in jeans on the backyard patio of his sprawling estate, sparkling pool and fuchsia flowers behind him and a wide blue sky above, and shares coping strategies.

Speaker 35 You'll leave these sessions feeling as though you just had an eye-opening and insightful conversation about your life with Dr. Phil, the Path to Recovery website promises.

Speaker 35 The product is described as the culmination of more than four decades of experience Dr. Phil has working in the mental health profession and addiction recovery.

Speaker 35 So that sounds helpful. That's, yeah, that was thank you for that clarifying statement.

Speaker 35 Now, obviously, there's absolutely no evidence that this program helps with addiction in any way.

Speaker 35 A disclaimer on the website says that it is, quote, solely for general information purposes and is, quote, not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any medical, health, mental, or psychological problem or condition the worst kind of person the worst kind of person because now he's just outright targeting the most vulnerable people he can it's like it was i didn't care when he was targeting other grifters yeah and he's not even doing it in a situation where they can choose to be grifted by him because by the time they're in addiction recovery like they're already paying they probably don't even know that this fucking thing is there right um yeah now despite the fact that there's no evidence that this thing helps in any way a number of addiction recovery programs purchased Path to Recovery to use.

Speaker 35 You want to guess why they bought it? Why?

Speaker 35 Because Dr. Phil gave them free advertising on their show if they bought it.
No.

Speaker 35 Oh, he's a business boy. He's a business boy.
He's a good business boy. He's a really good business boy.
Yeah. Dr.
Phil offered addiction treatment centers free endorsements on both the Dr.

Speaker 35 Phil show and his spin-off series, The Doctors, if they first bought his program. BuzzFeed managed to get a hold of audio of one of these pitch sessions where McGross's salesman told a customer,

Speaker 35 Our job is to get your phones to ring and the admissions hopefully follow. He bragged that Dr.
Phil's viewers were older, high-income people, not the addict calling because I told my mom I'd do it.

Speaker 35 Oh my fucking God.

Speaker 35 Okay, so we've arrived at cartoon villainy. We sure have, Jamie Loftus.
Oh, really? We sure as shit have.

Speaker 35 Okay.

Speaker 35 Does Oprah ever? Because I forget, because over the years, Oprah has endorsed a number of questionable people. And sometimes.
Shout out, John of God.

Speaker 35 And shout out,

Speaker 35 what's his name? Who wrote a million little pieces?

Speaker 35 Oh, yeah, Jonathan Frey, right? Yeah. Yeah.
She's had to like apologize for having endorsed a lot of fucked up people over the years.

Speaker 35 Has that...

Speaker 35 That moment has never happened for Dr. Phil, right? She's never backed off.

Speaker 35 Did she ever back off from him at any point? No, no, no, no, no, no. They're still deeply tied together.
Why would she ever back off on him? I guess that's true. God.
Yep. Steadman, how were you?

Speaker 35 Okay. Well, that was the question I wanted a better answer to.
Yeah. Accept the truth.
The truth is that why would she care? She's she's doing just fine.

Speaker 35 Yeah, she has she has plenty of money. So like,

Speaker 35 what do you expect her to do, JB? I don't know. I don't know.
It's like, you can't expect anyone with that much money to be a good person. You're just setting yourself up.

Speaker 35 Yeah, you're you're just asking to be sad because they just ask me to be whack-a-mold right now, yeah. They never will be.

Speaker 35 Um, because it's not lucrative to be a good person, it's the opposite of lucrative to be a good person. That's true, that's true, yeah, yeah.
You know, what is lucrative, though, Jamie?

Speaker 35 Shilling the products and services that support this podcast.

Speaker 35 Oh, we're back, and I am just having a great time talking with my friend Jay Loft about Dr.

Speaker 35 Dr.

Speaker 35 Philimar

Speaker 35 Philomar.

Speaker 35 What's his middle name? What's his middle name? Oh, that's disappointing. Philip Calvin McGraw.
Calvin, yeah. Jamie, I just talked to you about how Dr.

Speaker 35 Phil has this VR addiction treatment thing, and he basically gives people, gives like treatment centers free advertising if they buy it.

Speaker 35 I hate it. Okay.
You want to guess the quality of the facilities that

Speaker 35 take Dr. Phil up on the software? Only the best, right? is it is it worse than nothing oh jamie it's a lot worse than nothing in some cases

Speaker 35 one facility that took dr phil up on this author offer was inspirations for youth and families a fort lauderdale based treatment center for teenagers phil actually highlighted the facility run by corcoran walsh on his show the day he announced his new vr program saying we think outside the box in designing what addicts need what you need is something that pops out of the noise something that rises above the noise like a distinctive voice.

Speaker 35 And that voice, in this case, is me. Dr.
Phil then introduced Walsh, saying she ran the nation's leading family addiction treatment and dual diagnosis center.

Speaker 35 BuzzFeed actually investigated the facility and found that it had a well-documented history of children escaping and getting into danger.

Speaker 35 Steven Sardouy, a PI who was hired to find two different girls who escaped from the facility and disappeared, said, It seems to be an ongoing problem in that particular facility.

Speaker 35 Obviously, there's a gap somewhere, a loophole somewhere in the system where they're just leaving.

Speaker 35 In the last two years, Inspirations staff members made 180 reports to police about children in their care going missing.

Speaker 35 Sometimes the teens, sometimes the teens left for days, or even escaped the state. One escapee wound up prostituting herself for drugs.

Speaker 35 A number of the teens wound up finding drugs one way or another after getting out of the facility. Six were arrested.
Two were hospitalized. One group who escaped together later robbed a homeless man.

Speaker 35 BuzzFeed talked to Jill Walters of South Carolina, whose 17-year-old escaped from Inspirations in 2016 and wound up on the street in Miami.

Speaker 35 She explained why she initially had chosen Inspirations to help her boy. Quote, They touted this.
We were on Dr. Phil.
They use that as we must be a great facility because we were on Dr. Phil.

Speaker 35 Well, that has nothing to do with how the facility is run. You entrust your child to the care of these people, and something like this happens.
It's good shit. God,

Speaker 35 that's

Speaker 35 I, that, that, that, it wouldn't stop getting worse. That is so fucking off.
It's like, I mean, it's pretty bad. It's pretty, pretty bad, Jamie.

Speaker 35 It speaks to, like, yeah, just the level of clout he, but he's, he still upfolds too, because it's like, yeah, I guess that if you think about it for a while, you're like, oh, well, he's not a licensed doctor, and look at what he's actually saying, but it's like the world was reinforcing his bullshit for so long.

Speaker 35 That is so evil. Oh, my God.

Speaker 35 Yep. It is evil, Jamie.

Speaker 35 Sure, it. But you know what's not evil?

Speaker 35 What?

Speaker 35 The products and services that I just advertised on this podcast that we're not actually cutting to again. I just, I have a problem, Jamie.
I have a problem. You can't stop thinking about it.
And

Speaker 35 I can't stop pivoting to ads, you know?

Speaker 35 You know what, Jamie? I'm an

Speaker 35 addict. Oh, my God.
Get it? Oh,

Speaker 35 oh, yeah.

Speaker 35 Oh,

Speaker 35 can you explain that to me? I hated it. That one's a good one.

Speaker 35 That's a keeper. You know what? We're done with the episode.
Go home. I nailed it.
Wow. Wow.
We've got to end with Dr. Phil ruining the lives of children.

Speaker 35 I mean, I guess that that is where the story is going to end no matter what.

Speaker 35 It's where it began and it's where it'll end. Yeah.
It's where it's how it will continue, I guess.

Speaker 35 Dr. Phil.

Speaker 35 Just kill me now. I, God.
Okay,

Speaker 35 I am going to continue advocate for putting Dr. Philip through a gigantic human-sized shredder on live TV.
I think that that is the kind of dystopian television. Like, we're already at Mask Singer.

Speaker 35 That's the next logical step for me. Fair enough.
Put a hated, a hated evil person through a shredder. It's the modern guillotine, big old shredder.
Yeah, it's the best way to do anything, really.

Speaker 35 Yeah. Is a shredder.

Speaker 35 Anyway, Jamie, Jay Loft, Joeloftus.

Speaker 35 Joe Loft,

Speaker 35 Joe Loft, surely

Speaker 35 God. Yeah,

Speaker 35 we're actually still talking about inspirations.

Speaker 35 So, court records also reveal that the center's co-owner, Christopher Walsh, is by his own admission, a habitual drunkard who in 2015 sued a resort for serving him alcohol, saying they should have known he couldn't handle it.

Speaker 35 And boy, howdy, does it ever get worse? Let's talk about Todd Herzog. Yeah.
Oh, yeah. Boy.
Yeah. That's the end of the inspiration stuff.

Speaker 35 But so Todd Herzog was another, was a repeated guest on the Dr. Phil show.
Now, Todd's backstory is that he won survivor back in the early aughts.

Speaker 35 He got like a million dollars and then became a horrible, like developed a horrific addiction to alcohol, like a life-threatening addiction. Now, Dr.

Speaker 35 Phil and his producers must have salivated at the combination of disastrous alcoholic and reality TV star. Here's how Stat News described what happened next.

Speaker 35 Quote, Herzog told Stat and the Boston Globe that he was not intoxicated when he arrived at the Los Angeles studio to film the Dr. Phil show.

Speaker 35 In his dressing room, he said, he found a bottle of Smirnoff vodka. He drank all of it.
Then someone handed him a Xanax, he said, telling him it would calm his nerves.

Speaker 35 So

Speaker 35 this guy

Speaker 35 managed to sober himself up enough to like try to go on TV. And Dr.
Phil's people basically allegedly made sure there was a full bottle of vodka and a fucking gave him a Xanax.

Speaker 35 Just because, you know, I think the reasoning is the more of a disaster you seem like on air, the more marketable you are. Yeah.
Right, right. Which is a proven model given the star of the show.

Speaker 35 That is like bachelor levels of like fucking.

Speaker 35 Oh, no. Jamie, Jamie, Jamie, Jamie.
Let's get as close as we can to killing people.

Speaker 35 Dear, sweet Jamie Loftus, we are not even at the worst part yet. Oh, no.
Okay, keep going.

Speaker 35 Keep going yeah so by the time uh herzog got on stage he was so wasted that he could barely talk or function dr phil and his assistant walked them out his themselves making a big show of helping him while highlighting just how wrecked he was and i want you to listen to this jamie i want you to watch this obviously but okay um i i want everyone at home or in your car or pooping or whatever it is you're doing.

Speaker 35 God, I can't describe the anxiety of seeing Robert Evans has started screen sharing. I know, I know.
I know. All right.
Here's the Dr. Phil show.
Todd, Dr. Phil.
Hi, I'm Todd. Nice to meet you.

Speaker 35 How you feeling, ma'am? Can you walk?

Speaker 35 Barely.

Speaker 35 I have to have help.

Speaker 35 Sorry, I'm very. That's all right.
R Brandon, why don't you get over there and take Debbie's spot?

Speaker 35 Gotcha. Yeah, I'll I'll go.

Speaker 35 I'm sorry, I'm crying because I just can't believe this is happening. So

Speaker 35 finish come, turn around. One, two, two, three.

Speaker 35 So that's all I want to play of that.

Speaker 35 He can barely move. It is fundamentally unethical to have someone in that state on your television show.

Speaker 35 I mean, even if they had been inebriated of their own volition and being like fed drugs, that is that. Even if they had consented earlier i don't

Speaker 35 think you can consent to that

Speaker 35 yeah absolutely not like yeah god that is like the the worst situation imaginable that is evil yeah it's not

Speaker 35 it's not good jamie it's just not a good thing to do i would say i would recommend not doing that if if i was if someone asked me should i

Speaker 35 take someone who has a problem with addiction and give them drugs and then film them disastrously wrecked?

Speaker 35 I would say, no, that sounds like an evil thing to do. That is absolute

Speaker 35 cruel.

Speaker 35 God, don't you know? It's cruel and good, Jamie. Having seen that.
Cruel and good.

Speaker 35 And they just had that on in waiting rooms. That was just what you watched while you were waiting to see the dentist.
Yeah.

Speaker 35 Fuck.

Speaker 35 So when questioned, representatives of the Dr. Phil show deny that they provided Herzog with alcohol and drugs.
They said junkies lie, in essence, about his claims.

Speaker 35 And then they pointed out that they weren't a medical facility and couldn't watch their guests at all times.

Speaker 35 The director of the treatment facility where Herzog agreed to go for help at the end of the show, however, was horrified when he saw him on television. He was so upset by the condition that Dr.

Speaker 35 Phil let Herzog appear on air in that he refused to ever have anything to do with the Dr. Phil show again.

Speaker 35 So this was so outrageous that it convinced the head of a treatment program that all of the free advertising the Dr.

Speaker 35 Phil show could provide was not worth the ethical compromise of dealing with that man. I can't, I mean, I can't, you can't really hand it to him for that, but that's, I mean, that's fucking something.

Speaker 35 That's for sure. So bleak.
Yeah. Yeah.
It's just, you have to really

Speaker 35 like you have to really do bad to to convince someone of that, I think. Like that's a, yeah, like that, that's throwing a lot of money out.

Speaker 35 And I don't know, I'm not going to say all people in the rehab facility business are sketchy, but there's a lot of sketchy motherfuckers in that industry, you know?

Speaker 35 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 35 Yeah, it's cool and good, Jamie.

Speaker 35 Wow, I feel really not very good.

Speaker 35 Jamie, that's thank you so much for saying that. You know, here at Behind the Bastards, that's exactly what we go for at all.

Speaker 35 every time i uh convince myself that this is going to be a fun one and every time except the one time i'm dead wrong yeah even worse than i could have conceived all i ever want is for you to feel bad thank you so much that's the whole my whole goal you know you're a successful person you're i'm not a hero i'm just um I'm a hero.

Speaker 35 Okay. I'm a hero, you know?

Speaker 35 I'm not a hero. Period.
Todd Herzog's story does not appear to be an isolated one. No.
Jordan Smith appeared on The Dr. Phil Show in 2012 in an episode titled Young, Reckless, and Enabled.

Speaker 35 Smith's aunt claims she contacted the show to help get her niece off of heroin. When they arrived in LA from out of state, Jordan started going through withdrawal.

Speaker 35 Her aunt told a show producer that her niece needed heroin and something or something else to help with the withdrawal. The producer suggested that they go to Skid Row and buy heroin together.

Speaker 35 She then told them not to say who who made that suggestion later.

Speaker 35 Now, guests like Smith receive free addiction treatment at an expensive center after their appearance on the show, which is why many do it.

Speaker 35 But prior to taping, no medical treatment is provided or offered. Smith and her family were in Los Angeles alone for two nights before taping.

Speaker 35 A less trusting person than me might suggest that the show does this so that these people will be extra fucked up and sad when it comes time for them to be on television. Sure, sure.

Speaker 35 Yeah, it's very ethical.

Speaker 35 That is

Speaker 35 extremely like, you have to be thinking so hard to come up with something like that. It's so innocuous seeming.
Wow. Yeah.
These people's lives are already off the fucking rails.

Speaker 35 How can we make it a little worse? I'm Dr. Phil.

Speaker 35 Joel King Parrish brought her 28-year-old daughter, Caitlin, to Dr. Phil for help kicking a heroin addiction.
Caitlin was six months pregnant at the time.

Speaker 35 Her mother assumed that when they landed, they would receive medical attention, since withdrawal could endanger the fetus.

Speaker 35 But when Caitlin's mom asked the staff for help, they told her to, quote, take care of it. She took her daughter to the hospital, which she left without receiving treatment.

Speaker 35 Next, from Stat News, quote, The producer texted to say she should stay at the hospital, but Caitlin would not, and King Parrish was terrified the baby would die if her daughter did not get medicine or drugs.

Speaker 35 King Parrish and Caitlin went to the Dr. Phil's studio, where another show staffer joined them.
All three got into a cab headed for Skid Row. The staffer shot video, which later aired on the show.

Speaker 35 In it, King Parrish tells the camera, I am scared to death right now. The camera follows Caitlin from behind as she walks towards homeless encampments.

Speaker 35 King Parrish said Cait Millenn was gone for about a half hour while she shot up heroin. So they just like went out to go buy a horse at Skid Row and filmed it.
That's, I mean, and that's like.

Speaker 35 That's good TV is what that is.

Speaker 35 This is genuinely really empathetic.

Speaker 35 I mean, yeah, I mean, on top of the fact that that's an extreme disservice to her, that's also like yet another example of like bullshit, high-rated TV heading into unhoused encampments to just frame people in a completely

Speaker 35 contextless, fucked up way. I hate that shit so much.
That is awful.

Speaker 35 I think it's cool and good, Jamie. Wow.
I think it's cool and good.

Speaker 35 I hate this shit so much.

Speaker 35 Oh, Loftus. We do have fun on this show, though.

Speaker 35 We sure do. We sure do.
We sure do. You know, we tend to bust out the franzia and really dial this up.
Yeah, frands out with our glands out. I don't know.

Speaker 35 I'm stuck making that exact kind of joke repeatedly.

Speaker 35 I'm still

Speaker 35 chilling with my filling. Yeah.

Speaker 35 Wow. That's gross.
No, no, no, I didn't magnet.

Speaker 35 It's all deeply uncomfortable.

Speaker 35 Robert, you know what's not deeply uncomfortable? The products and services that support this podcast? Facts.

Speaker 35 No, every one of them will gently cradle your head or whatever other part of your body you would like

Speaker 35 them to cradle.

Speaker 35 Absolutely. Or wherever.
They'll just kiss you, you know? They're just going to kiss you.

Speaker 35 That's the behind the bastards promise. Random kisses from a product.

Speaker 35 Yep. Here's some ads.

Speaker 35 Okay, so there are a bunch of stories like this, and one of the saddest parts of all these stories is that the people who will like who the people who Dr.

Speaker 35 Phil clearly takes advantage of will still claim that his show helped them because they were able to receive free addiction recovery care that they couldn't have afforded without the Dr. Phil show.

Speaker 35 Almost no aspect of his show works if there's single-payer healthcare that covers addiction treatment. The Dr.

Speaker 35 Phil show profits off of sadness porn, the shock and embarrassment people feel watching the ruined lives of his guests, and the sassy, no bullshit advice Dr. Phil gives them.

Speaker 35 He earns between $60 and $80 million a year. Of course, the Dr.
Phil show, I know, right? That's an obscene number, isn't it? Yeah, fucking. Just makes you want to light some shit on fire, doesn't it?

Speaker 35 Yep. Yeah, it does.

Speaker 35 Yeah, it sure does, Jamie. It sure does.

Speaker 35 So,

Speaker 35 of course, the Dr. Phil show would get boring pretty quick if he only dealt with people suffering from drug addictions and abusive spouses.

Speaker 35 From the beginning, a major source of content for McGraw was so-called troubled teens.

Speaker 35 Kids in crisis are big business for grifty TV therapists because, being children, those kids have no ability to regulate their emotions and no sense of proportion.

Speaker 35 This leads to TV-friendly explosions of rage. In 2016, Dr.

Speaker 35 Phil interviewed Danielle Bregoli for an episode titled, I Want to Give Up My Car-Stealing, Knife-Wielding, Twerking 13-Year-old Daughter Who Tried to Frame Me for a Crime, which is just a title meant to show up on a leg, like throwing twerking in there with fucking car stealing.

Speaker 35 Shameless. The word twerking,

Speaker 35 there was a cultural hatch to it.

Speaker 35 Now, Brigoli, now goes by the stage name Bad Baby, B-H-A-D-B-H-A-B-I-E,

Speaker 35 was a prime time-ready delinquent. She spoke in a ridiculously affected hood accent and pretended to basically be a gangster in the kind of confrontational, like

Speaker 35 nonsense teenage way that gave Dr. Phil a lot of openings to mock her with his witty rejoinders.
I don't want to play much of her appearance because she was a child, and I think what Dr.

Speaker 35 Phil does by having her on is fundamentally abusive. But I do think it's important to play how the episode starts so you can see how he introduces this segment and hear it.
You listening will hear it.

Speaker 35 Jamie, I want you to pay attention to the looks on the faces of the people in his audience. Okay.
She's defiant. I got it.
Oh, who are you? But has she met her match?

Speaker 185 You want to do it again? Sit down. With Dr.
Phil. You can threaten them,

Speaker 185 but I'm your worst nightmare, girl.

Speaker 185 Well, thank you, Megan.

Speaker 185 Well, you know, I've been doing this show for 15 years, and I've met some truly remarkable people, and I have heard thousands of stories. Now, in that time,

Speaker 185 You get to thinking that you've seen and heard just about everything.

Speaker 185 That was until today.

Speaker 185 Meet Danielle.

Speaker 185 Now Danielle's mom, Barbara Ann, has written to me every year for the past three years about her daughter, who has stole thousands of dollars, framed her mother as a drug user, and then called 911 to report her,

Speaker 185 and is currently facing grand theft charges.

Speaker 185 Now I answered her call for help and I sent my film crew across the country to capture what was going on inside this home.

Speaker 185 Needless to say, while my team was there, something shocking and unexpected happened.

Speaker 185 Shortly after they had finished filming, one of my crew members noticed that Danielle had vanished with the keys to my crew member's car.

Speaker 185 Now, sure enough, when Danielle's grandmother, Barbara, went outside, she found out that Danielle had stolen the car,

Speaker 185 which had the crew members' handbag, wallet, ID, and cash inside.

Speaker 185 Now, that's not bad enough. Danielle's only 13 years old.

Speaker 35 So, you see, the thing that's most interesting to me about that is the faces of the women in the audience.

Speaker 35 Because they are particularly the glee, right? Like, that's the thing that's most unsettling to me is like how excited they are with every new aspect of this story that Dr.

Speaker 35 dr phil reveals well and i also think that those reactions may not even be i mean those reactions in themselves are extremely coached where yes i like i used to do like audience work when i first had moved here and had like no money to my name and you're so extremely coached and like before the show even starts you're told to do a series of facial expressions for the editors to work with and so it's it's like manipulation top to bottom with how it's handled because it's like not only is he obviously not has no vested interest in the well-being of this kid like he also like i i would argue probably that editing is completely doctored as well yeah i have no idea if that's the if those if those face expressions match like what was actually going down but like it's all i guess specifically the idea that they wanted to show those reactions because i think they're trying to coach a response they're trying to coach a response from the people watching at home too right this like this the voyeurism like it makes it clear none of this is about helping anyone.

Speaker 35 It's about laughing at quote-unquote low-class people and their problems, you know? That's that's what Dr. Phil really makes his bread doing.
For sure. Yeah.

Speaker 35 But fuck him. Like, she went on to like have a successful, like, she's 18.

Speaker 35 She was nominated for an American Music Award. Oh, she was? I didn't know that.
Yeah. Well, good.
I'm glad there's a happy ending. I don't know much about Bad Baby.
She's 18 now. And like,

Speaker 35 she's, you know, signed a record label. I mean, yeah,

Speaker 35 and she is standing up for what happened to her, which is a lot of people. Yeah, we're about to get into that.
Yeah,

Speaker 35 so Brigoli went viral. Uh, and within the confines of the episode, Dr.
Phil positions himself as the dispenser of tough love.

Speaker 35 His prescription was to send Brigoli to one of his favorite therapeutic boarding schools, Turnabout Ranch in Utah.

Speaker 35 This is an actual working ranch where troubled teens are sent under the impression that working in the country and riding horses will get them off of drugs, premarital sex, and petty crime.

Speaker 35 In subsequent episodes, Bergoli filmed an update from the ranch, where she dropped her fake accent and claimed to feel okay with who I am now. But she was not being honest, understandably so.

Speaker 35 In 2018, she released an original song and gave a different view of her experience at Turnabout. Quote,

Speaker 35 it was pretty miserable. I did not know what was going on in the real world.
This place was far away from anything. There wasn't even service there, she says in the song.

Speaker 35 A couple weeks after being home, I finally decided that I wanted to meet up with my best friend again, somebody who was not good for me at all.

Speaker 35 Instantly, I'd say it was the next day, we got back to doing our old shit again, smoking, trying to finesse people for money, just doing really, really dumb shit.

Speaker 35 Her reintegration into society was made all the more difficult by the fact that, when she returned to school and the internet, she realized rather suddenly that she'd gone viral for being a ridiculous train wreck of a person on a nationally syndicated TV program.

Speaker 35 She claims that this basically made her decide to, quote, lean in to the bad behavior that had made her famous.

Speaker 35 Once you become a meme, there aren't a lot of ways to get a clean slate.

Speaker 35 There's no right to be forgotten in the US, so why wouldn't Bergoli just keep being the person everyone already thought she was? Yeah. This gets to one of the things I think is worst about the Dr.

Speaker 35 Phil show. It's one thing to shamelessly milk the worst moments and the greatest shames in the life of an adult.

Speaker 35 It's another thing entirely to do that to a child who has no real way to understand the long-term consequences.

Speaker 35 Yeah. No way that she could have possibly understood the long-term consequences of becoming that kind of famous.

Speaker 35 It's completely, yeah, it's like vile on every level. And it's like, whatever.
I mean, clearly Dr. Phil does not give a fuck.
No, no, not a, not a third of a fuck. Yeah.
But it is.

Speaker 35 And it also, I think, like speaks to how,

Speaker 35 especially for a kid, which is like, that should doing what he does to children should be illegal. It should be a crime.
Yes.

Speaker 35 You should not be allowed to do shit like that.

Speaker 35 And on top of that, it speaks to like how, I don't know, it's like, I remember that clip when it first came out and there was no popular conversation about like the well-being of the child who's clearly being exploited by a multi-millionaire.

Speaker 35 Yeah. And it's all, and I see.

Speaker 35 That I mean, it's when you're introduced into the public that way and you are coming from a place of poverty and you are not being empowered at all or protected.

Speaker 35 Like, Like, what are you supposed to do? Like, that is such a miserable, cruel situation to be put in. It's, oh, man.
It's fucked up. Yeah.
Now, Jamie, that's all pretty bad, right?

Speaker 35 Everything we've talked about happening to Bergoli is bad. But to make matters worse, the ranch Dr.
Phil sent her and a bunch of other kids to was about as ethical as, oh, I don't know, the drug.

Speaker 35 rehabilitation treatment programs he was also sending kids to. I'm going to quote again from BuzzFeed.

Speaker 35 It's not clear if Turnabout is actually helpful to the kids who go or if it's just another facility that takes advantage of the minors who are sent there to get better.

Speaker 35 Just last week, 19-year-old Hannah Archuletta sued the school for an alleged sexual assault that she said happened to her while she was staying at Turnabout at just 17.

Speaker 35 This is likely to be a high-profile profile case too, with Gloria Allred representing her.

Speaker 35 Turnabout administrators provided a statement to me saying they took immediate action after Archuletta claimed she had been assaulted, but that her father removed her from the facility before we could conduct a full inquiry.

Speaker 35 The statement continued, We would never take lightly an allegation of mistreatment to any of our students.

Speaker 35 Now that this incident is the subject of litigation, we must withhold our full response for a later date.

Speaker 35 Now, the owner of this ranch is Aspen Education Group, which was then bought by CRC, which is now owned by Acadia Healthcare.

Speaker 35 In an email statement to BuzzFeed News, Acadia's director of investor relations, Gretchen Homerick, said, It is my understanding that Turnabout Ranch and Aspen Educational Group were closed or sold prior prior to Acadia's acquisition of CRC Health.

Speaker 35 In any event, Acadia never operated either of the facilities. Turnabout has gone through multiple owners and since 2014 has been owned by current and former employees of the ranch.

Speaker 35 But Aspen Education has been accused of multiple infractions by former attendees, including lawsuits that claimed psychological torture, abuse, sexual assault, and human trafficking.

Speaker 35 The torture suit was dismissed, but CRC, the owner of Aspen Education at the time, declined to address specific allegations. Arcadia did not answer our questions about these allegations either.

Speaker 35 So just not only like a bunch of people involved in this have been alleged of things, including human trafficking, there's been sexual assault allegations at the ranch, but it like goes to this revolving carousel of owners because it's like a shady fucking...

Speaker 35 It's just like they're pumping a quick amount of cash out and then selling it to somebody else. It's so fucking shady.

Speaker 35 I'm sure that that's, yeah, I'm sure that that's like integral to it being able to survive at all. Like it needs to be constantly changing hands.
That's

Speaker 35 I mean, the whole teen treatment industry, like I've done a number of artists, back when I was at Cracked, I did a number of articles with survivors of these facilities.

Speaker 35 Like all of these facilities are basically child molestation factories and like child abuse factories in general. Not always molestation.
Sometimes they just kill them from neglect, you know?

Speaker 35 There was, there was a good ones. That reached the point where, like, Paris Hilton made a documentary about it last year.
Yeah. Yeah.
It's interesting.

Speaker 35 Paris Hilton and actually Danielle Bergoli, Bad Baby, are involved right now with going against Dr.

Speaker 85 Phil about this exact place.

Speaker 35 So it's very interesting that you mentioned Girlfield.

Speaker 35 It does. I don't know much about her.
I'm always mentioning her.

Speaker 35 But besides the stuff that was like famous about how shitty she was 15, 20 years ago, but it seems like she's been doing some like good, socially responsible stuff lately. Paris, yeah.
I don't know.

Speaker 35 Yeah. Yeah.
It seems like it seems like she has,

Speaker 35 I mean, also, I'm like, I'm not, I'm not about to

Speaker 35 go to bat for the stop being poor lady, but yeah. Right, right, right, right.
But, but yeah, that, that specific instance, I'm glad she's.

Speaker 35 If you have wealth and prominence and you use it to take a swing at the teen treatment industry, that gets you a couple of points in my book. Absolutely.
Because it's a fucking nightmare.

Speaker 35 Maybe we'll do a deeper episode about it at some point. But a lot of the allegations that we just listed about this facility and its many owners predate the episodes of Dr.

Speaker 35 Phil, where he gave free advertisements to the ranch. This means that McGraw and his staff were well aware of the allegations against Aspen and the ranch when they sent children there.

Speaker 35 When questioned about this, a spokesperson for the show said, we're aware and we're monitoring things.

Speaker 35 Since Archuletta went public with her allegations, Bergoli has come forward with more detail about her own experience.

Speaker 35 She now says she was denied food at times and that camp administrators often refuse to let inmates change their clothes for days on end. Inmates.

Speaker 35 Yeah,

Speaker 35 that's my framing, but yes. You're helpless.
You can't call your parent. You can't email your parent.

Speaker 35 If the state says they have to give you two pebbles, they're going to find the smallest fucking pebbles to give you. That's supposed to help kids get over trauma.
I would have rather went to jail.

Speaker 35 Like, I, one of the girls I talked to who did this when she was like 14 or 15, like, one of the punishments they gave her was she had to dig up the stump of a mature tree on her own.

Speaker 35 Which, if you've never had to remove a stump, it's something like three to four large adult men usually do with a fucking truck and power tools.

Speaker 35 She just spent days in 120-degree heat, like slowly dying as she tried to force the stump out as a child. Like, these places are all nightmares.
Horrible.

Speaker 35 Brigoli is, of course, not the only teenager featured on the Dr. Phil show.
BuzzFeed writer Scotchi Cowell announces, announced, sorry, Scotchie, I don't know if I'm getting that right.

Speaker 35 Alleges that while McGraw is healthy, is happy to feature children of all genders, he gets particularly aggressive with teenage girls.

Speaker 35 Quote, their most vulnerable private moments, screaming and crying at home, are used on the show until the very end when their parents decide to send them to turnabout.

Speaker 35 Every episode of the Dr. Phil show ends with an after-the-taping segment where the kids find out they're going to a ranch in the middle of nowhere and usually cry, which is of course great television.

Speaker 35 Most kids featured in this way do not get any updates on the Dr. Phil show or are at most mentioned briefly once more.

Speaker 35 Daytime TV moves too fast for the doctor to actually check back in with most of his patients. In 2008, Dr.
Phil spun off and created a new show, The Doctors.

Speaker 35 Every episode of this show features a plastic surgeon, an obstetrician, and an ER doc who talk about different health topics.

Speaker 35 This sounds like it might be.

Speaker 35 We're not going to go into a lot of detail about this, but a 2014 study of the show determined that about 37% of their recommendations were not credible, which honestly means they're doing better than I

Speaker 35 expected worse. This is a better report card than I expected.
If your doctor, for example, said 37% of the time, I'm going to give you bad advice, you would find a new doctor. That's fair.

Speaker 35 I was was like, oh, wow, D plus, that's not the worst thing. Yeah, imagine a mechanic saying that, yeah, 37% of the time, the brakes I put in work.
You know, your odds are pretty good.

Speaker 35 Okay, fair enough.

Speaker 35 I thought I was like, there's no way they're somewhat correct. 63% of the time.
Why? Yes. And again, somewhat being the operative word.
Sure.

Speaker 35 We could go into a lot of other case studies of particularly egregious guest choices, but going over all these sad people and the way Phil exploits them, ad nauseum kind of runs the risk of being sorrow-porn itself.

Speaker 35 I do think it behooves us to look at one last case study, perhaps the most nauseating guest choice of the whole series. 24-year-old Gabby came on the Dr.
Phil show in February of 2020.

Speaker 35 She had promised to act as a surrogate womb for two different couples. Gabby had not taken any money from them, and she could not bear children.
She is infertile and chronically ill.

Speaker 35 Her father claims she has psychosis, bipolar disorder, and learning disabilities.

Speaker 35 In the show, it's revealed that Gabby's mom died right around the time she started pretending to be a surrogate, which was also a period where she was the victim of constant bullying at school.

Speaker 35 From BuzzFeed, quote, Her scam wasn't illegal because Gabby never asked for money or items from the couple she lied to.

Speaker 35 It's just tragic, hurtful behavior from someone deeply isolated and in dire need of mental health care from multiple past traumas.

Speaker 35 Most of the episode focuses on the producers following Gabby around backstage, begging her to come on stage when she clearly doesn't want to.

Speaker 35 They call her difficult and volatile, and though she signed an appearance release, it's not clear to the audience that she has read and understood it.

Speaker 35 When a producer asks her on camera to confirm she understands the waiver, she doesn't respond and covers her face with the pages of the release.

Speaker 35 But she's certainly remorseful and seems to feel guilty. In a pre-taped interview, Gabby cries to the producers, I just want to say sorry to everyone that I've hurt.

Speaker 35 When she walks off the stage in anguish, McGraw merely sips his water and sighs the episode is near unwatchable yeah i mean that that doesn't sound like consent was gained at all i mean there were so many red flags yeah it doesn't sound like she's capable of consenting to that yeah

Speaker 35 i i don't even know what to think i mean that entire though i because i don't trust any of the information that anyone is presenting in this in in this way but that's just i mean

Speaker 35 very clear this is not an issue that should be handed handled on television

Speaker 35 Yeah,

Speaker 35 to say the very fucking least. That is, yeah, that is just fucking despicable.
So, Dr. Jeff Sugar, an assistant professor of clinical psychology at USC, provided a description of the Dr.

Speaker 35 Phil show that I think acts as good a coda to this episode as anything. Quote, it's a callous and inexcusable exploitation.
These people are barely hanging on.

Speaker 35 It's like if one of them was drowning and approaching a lifeboat, and instead of throwing them an inflatable doughnut, you throw them an anchor. And that's Dr.
Phil, baby d phil

Speaker 35 i am

Speaker 35 so upset about like i just this was like one of my like the toughest listens of all time maybe because he's just still such a real present public disgrace and danger but like yeah holy i i can't even enjoy dr phil meemes i was gonna show you dr phil meames i'm not gonna not worth it

Speaker 35 Fuck it. Fuck him.
Put him through a shredder. Put him through a shredder.
And you at home, put yourself through a shredder, but a good kind of shredder that makes you healthy.

Speaker 35 It's a little life-affirming kind of shredder. Yeah.
You know, in a way, in a way, every day.

Speaker 35 It's not just capitalism. Put yourself through a shredder.

Speaker 35 Well, with that, Jamie. I think it's time for you to plug a pluggable and get the fuck out of this Zoom call and go live your goddamn life, Jamie.
Go live your fucking life.

Speaker 35 You know, I'm dying to live my life. So, you can just, you can, you can listen to the podcast.
You can listen to Backfield Pass. You can listen to the Lolita podcast.

Speaker 35 You can listen to my year in Mensa, and you can listen to my new show about Kathy Comics that comes out in June. God damn it.
God damn it. And all of you at home.
Robert, this was miserable.

Speaker 35 Damn God yourself. Yeah.
It was, Jamie.

Speaker 35 It really was. All right.
Well, fuck

Speaker 35 the internet. And fuck life.

Speaker 35 Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.

Speaker 35 For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Hapa Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 155 Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube.

Speaker 186 New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com/slash at behind the bastards.

Speaker 127 Hey guys, it's Aaron Andrews from Calm Down with Aaron and Carissa.

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