Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
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Welcome to Behind the Oprah's, a podcast about bastards. This is, you know, the Oprah Winfrey show or the Oprah Winfrey show show where we talk about the Oprah Winfrey show. Yeah, that's as good as I could do the intro here. Look, we're on part six. I'm exhausted. You're exhausted. Sophie's exhausted. I'm so tired. Let's exhaust.

Everything we have to say about Oprah. How are we all feeling, Andrew T. and Bridget Todd, at this point in the Oprah Winfrey story? Conflicted, I will say. Conflicted, but ready to hear more. Okay. Yeah. It's starting to feel like the six parts or the five parts have been leading to this. So, yeah, I'm ready. Okay.

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He was a Boy Scout leader, a husband, a father, but he was leading a double life. He was a monster, hiding in plain sight.

Let's talk about Oprah's Angel Network.

Now, this was Oprah's primary vehicle for charitable – I mean she also has her own personal foundation. This was her primary vehicle certainly for educational-focused charitable donations during like the height of her fame. It got its start in 1994 when a little girl named Nora went on the Oprah Winfrey Show to talk about what was called the Penny Harvest Project. Apparently she and some other kids –

had started collecting pennies and eventually raised like $1,000 via taking in pennies to donate to some different charitable organizations. And Oprah says this inspired her to wonder, if you could do that, I wonder what I could do. And like, well, the answer is you have hundreds of millions of dollars, Oprah, much more than some children collecting pennies. I'm glad you think it this way, but obviously the answer is you could raise a lot more money. I do think it's-

I'm loving hearing a kid did something and being like, I'm so much more money than you. Yeah. It's like the way that Oprah.com puts is like Oprah was inspired by this little girl, but there's certainly a read of it. That's like, oh, I could beat the hell out of that little kid. You think a thousand dollars is a lot? She shoves her off the fucking stage. So on September 18th, 1997, Oprah announces the launch of Oprah's Angel Network.

The initial plan for this was to turn people's spare change – basically you donate your spare change, right? She has Hillary Clinton on the show. Hillary puts some change in a piggy bank. Oh, great. And this raises $3.5 million to provide $25,000 college scholarships for 150 deserving students.

Oh, I'm sorry, kid. Is that more than a thousand dollars? Let me, uh, 25 per kid, but no, no, no. Your donation's good. Oh yeah. No, no. Yeah, for sure. For sure. Very impressive. I mean, you know, I raised three and a half million with like the shit in my seat cushions, but you know, you're good. You're good. Yeah.

Oh, did you have the first lady come on to help with your program? Oh, no, you didn't. You don't know the first lady. You don't have her on speed dial, huh? Oh, interesting. Oprah's not doing that. We're just being dicks. I just want to say for the record, I like the version of Oprah that does that better than the version of Oprah that exists.

She would be on Margaret's cool people who did cool stuff. This had just been for 12 straight, like literally like 20 years, just shit talking this like seven year old, like, yeah, you think that's fucking fancy? $80 million. To be that petty. So this is how the angel network starts, right? We're, we're taking people's spare change. We're giving out college student scholarships to deserving students and

But it starts to expand. You know, they get involved with like funding Habitat for Humanity and stuff like that. And in 2000, the Angel Network expands thanks to Paul Newman of Newman's own, as well as Jeff Bezos. They start like expanding it to like donating money to what the website describes as 50 life changing programs.

And it's interesting. She describes as like more than 50 life-changing programs got the money they needed to help their local communities. Well, maybe some taxes from Jeff Bezos could help with that too. But eventually the Angel Network expands, taking in something like $80 million in donations, most of which ultimately go to helping to start 60 schools in 13 countries, including India, Ecuador, and China. So that's nice, right? Yeah.

helping to start schools, funding schools, aspects, again, as is always the case with Oprah, aspects of this are quite positive. But also aspects of this are very toxic because particularly in the United States, the thing that Oprah spends most of her donation money on is not education.

helping school systems, it is establishing specific charter schools. And in fact, the last thing the Angel Network does is it gives $6 million in 2010 to six charter schools in California, Colorado, Chicago, Pennsylvania, New Orleans, and Houston. Now, charter schools are two schools that are not part of the public education system.

A lot of this gets started, the charter school thing, in the Bush years. This is a big part of defunding public schools. We don't need to be spending – we need to have – parents need to have choice. They need to have vouchers that they can put into these different charter schools and magnate schools. All of this kind of like both saps the power of teachers' unions because these schools exist outside of that system, but it's also supposed to like –

prove that the corrupt Department of Education is what's holding kids back, that if we just let rich people establish these – they'll obviously be vastly more successful. So it's this mix of like there are some very good charter schools that are very good for kids. I have friends who went to some of them. But also the larger part of the charter school project is problematic and it continues on past the Bush era.

One of like the biggest roles in this is in 2010, there's a documentary called Waiting for Superman by Davis Guggenheim. This is a documentary about how broken the education system is. And we're all just kind of like waiting for a Superman to fix it. And it winds up being a very pro charter school movie. There's a couple of other documentaries at the same time, the lottery and the cartel with the same basic attitude. But Waiting for Superman is featured twice on the Oprah Winfrey show.

She's not the only person who gives it a lot of media attention, but she gives it a ton of media attention. And that $6 million donation to those six private schools is directly off of the back of this. I found a good write-up in the Brookings Institute on the myth of charter schools. And it summarizes the message of all these documentaries.

American public education is a failed enterprise. The problem is not money. Public schools already spend too much. Test scores are low because there are so many bad teachers whose jobs are protected by powerful unions. Students drop out because the schools fail them, and they could accomplish practically anything if they were saved from bad teachers. They would get higher test scores if schools could fire more bad teachers and pay more to good ones. The only hope for the future of our society, especially for poor black and Hispanic children, is escape from public schools, especially to charter schools, which are mostly funded by the government, but

controlled by private organizations, many of them operating to make a profit. Now that is, again, this is a thing that a lot of people are into. And Oprah is one of the folks who puts her money where her mouth is like, this is the future of like fixing private educate or public education. And it's problematic to say the least to continue with a quote from that Brookings Institute piece that,

And this is talking about Waiting for Superman in particular. Some fact checking is in order. And the place to start is with the film's quiet acknowledgement that only one in five charter schools is able to get the amazing results that it celebrates. Nothing more is said about this astonishing statistic. It is drawn from a national study of charter schools by Stanford economist Margaret Raymond.

Known as the Credo Study, it evaluated student progress on math tests in half of the nation's 5,000 charter schools and concluded that 17% were superior to a matched traditional public school. 37% were worse than the public school, and the remaining 46% had academic gains no different from that of a similar public school. The proportion of charters that got amazing results is far smaller than 17%.

Why did Davis Guggenheim pay no attention to the charter schools that are run by incompetent leaders or corporations mainly concerned to make money? Why propound to an unknowing public the myth that charter schools are the answer to our educational woes when the filmmaker knows there are twice as many failing charters as there are successful ones? Why not give an honest accounting?

Right.

Why did he not report on the charter principals who have been indicted for embezzlement or the charters that blur the line between church and state? Why did he not look into the charter schools whose leaders are paid $300,000 to $400,000 a year to oversee small numbers of students? I don't need to go on. The myth of charter schools from the Brookings Institute is a good piece on this. Yeah. I'm just, I don't actually know anything about this director, but does it have anything to do with his last name? I actually don't know. A journalist would check in on that. Let's do that.

I just have a sinking feeling that maybe the reason one of the incentives has to do with the number of buildings. Yes. His name is I. He's related to the family. At least the AI overview says he's related to the family, but not directly related to the foundation. Okay.

And let's see here. Let's look up his Wikipedia to find a better... Probably just a coincidence. His dad is filmmaker Charles Guggenheim. Oh, he helped make Deadwood. Won four Oscars. No one said rich kids can't make good stuff. Yeah. It's just that they get a lot more chances to do it. Yeah. So anyway, I don't... Like, this is...

A problematic thing that Oprah Winfrey's charity is going to, which is not to say that everything she donates to it, like a lot of good schools I've looked into, I looked into several of the schools that she put money on. They have pretty good academic records, but although they're not unproblematic, as this article-

Yeah, I will just say I feel like this should be said, even if literally every single charter school had better test scores or or even or even a good measure was in the school. Yeah. Again, 37 percent are worse. 17 percent are better. They are still a net negative on the education system. Literally, even I mean, it's the same example with the Oprah school, which is like, yeah, OK, OK.

You can make a good school, but it comes at an immense opportunity cost. And that's what's like the problem here. Exactly that. And like fundamentally, they make public they erode public education there, at least where I live. They're like full of like pretty.

They're basically racist in my mind. The way that they talk about school choice, it's used as a giant dog whistle to be like, you don't really want your kids next to black and brown kids, do you? Right, right. And I think, so even if all of her schools, all of these schools were great, it still contributes to a lot of pretty, I think, messed up things in education. Right.

Oh, we're resegregating the education system? Cool. Yes. And it's also not all of these schools are – and again, because they abide by different rules, there's a lot of problematic aspects to some of them, including one of the schools that Oprah gave a shitload of money to, this one particularly in New Orleans. I'm going to quote from BET here.

Okay.

The Loop 21 reports Lawrence Melrose, 16, needed counseling and speech therapy, which wouldn't be provided by the New Orleans Charter Science and Math Charter School that was made popular through its association with Oprah Winfrey. Instead, he was frequently suspended and not allowed to ride the bus. The lawsuit says the school kept him from attending a celebration where students watched Oprah Winfrey hand the principal a check for $1 million. Wow.

The exclusion of children with serious learning and emotional disabilities occur often, says the lawsuit, at charter schools, which comprise the majority of public schools in New Orleans. The exclusion of special needs kids also helps charter schools test scores, since children with disabilities typically do not do well. He couldn't even watch the assembly with Oprah? No, no, they literally locked him out of it. Jesus.

It's also like these fucks will like, I mean, you see it on so many other places where they're trying to reinvent the wheel where they like, I feel like transportation is such a clear one where it's like they're going to try to do self-driving cars before they try. Oh, yeah. Properly funding a subway system in Los Angeles. Oh, yeah. And it's like.

I'm sorry, guys. All the solutions for these ills were invented in like fucking whatever, 1800. We're just electing not to do them because you're a billionaire. Yeah. I mean, at this point, I support Musk building a rich people tunnel under LA just because we'll have a quake and the people who pay to access that tunnel will all learn a lesson very quickly at the same time. Listen.

If he had even like an ounce of like self-belief, his ass should be on Mars right now. Yeah. Yeah. Get yourself there, man. So.

I wanted to talk a little bit about Oprah and charter schools, but really when we talk about Oprah's direct bastardism, there's no better thing to discuss than the bevy of con men that she helped to introduce to the world. She is responsible for making John of God, the Brazilian faith healer who sexually assaulted at least 600 women internationally famous. There are numerous cases of women who visited his compound and were raped or assaulted and say that they went there because they saw him on the Oprah Winfrey show.

And specifically, they saw Dr. Oz tell Oprah Winfrey that he couldn't explain the miraculous healings this man was responsible for. Now, I'm not going to say more about John of God or Dr. Oz or Dr. Phil because we have done two part episodes on all three of these guys.

None of whom would have obviously there's specifically John of God was like in in Brazil, a famous faith healer and assaulting people. He would not have become an international star without Oprah. And I don't think Dr. Like Dr. Oz probably just stays a surgeon. Dr. Phil probably dies in a ditch. That's my guess for Dr. Phil is he dies in a ditch somewhere in rural Texas. At least Oprah doesn't pick him up.

Some kind of charisma. Dr. Oz, it's like he's the most he's so repellent. You're just like, oh, my God, without Oprah's cosign, he is. There's no way this man is a star. That's how that's the star power she has. Look, just listen to Dr. Oz speak. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing stuff.

So we're not going to go into more detail on them, but I should note, we have never ever had a bastard who is responsible for three different two-parter episodes on other bastards, or at least largely responsible.

That should be a mark in the column. This, I think is, is the place where I'll try to drop my, my, uh, my quote, which is, I mean, it does seem like, like Oprah is, she's like the enzyme for bastards. Like she just makes, she takes, she finds the worst people or the worst people get into her orbit and she makes them a million times stronger than they ever had any right to be. Yes. Yes. And I think that really is the way to look at it. And,

And it's funny because I would peg Oprah as somebody that I would assume would be a good judge of character. And she's a terrible judge of character. It's like it truly is like the worst people who come into her orbit. She's like, let's make you a star. What's up with that? I mean, on some level, she has to be following what she believes the audience wants. But why pick those specific people? It is a little baffling.

I think there's a back. I'm sure there's a degree to which both of those people, particularly Dr. Phil being as – Dr. Phil is a pretty manipulative person, I would argue. And I think he just understood how to make her like him and manipulate her. Dr. Oz has a legitimate thing that would make you like him and want to put him in front of people. It is not unreasonable at the start of things that you would be like, this guy is literally one of the best heart surgeons who's ever lived. Maybe he'd be a good person to talk about public health. Turns out, no. Yeah.

Turns out absolutely not. But I understand how that process starts. Now, obviously, there was ample evidence, especially during the shot of God shit, that he was not, in fact, a good person to be doing that with. But I don't think the evil is not in that she initially was like, well, maybe the world's best heart surgeon is a good guy to talk about health. Right. I get I get how that starts.

With Dr. Phil, it's more like this guy made me feel good about myself during a lawsuit. Let's let him abuse teenagers on television for 20 years. But again, we're not going to say any more about these guys because we've said so much about them. But I did feel like we have to go into detail about one of Oprah's toxic bastards, right? One of the con men that she elevated to the public eye who we haven't done episodes on. And that's going to bring us to James Ray.

Born in 1957, Ray was a former telemarketer who got into the business of teaching motivational seminars to corporations. He was not an original dude and instead worked for Stephen Covey, the author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, teaching Stephen Covey's particular flavor of self-help bullshit to car salesmen and the like. Or, at least, Ray...

claims that he worked for Stephen Covey. There is no actual evidence of this, and Ray is a serial liar. So it's entirely possible he just made that up for clout. Ray started his own motivational speaking business, and it did okay. It's not huge. It's not really overwhelmingly successful, probably because he's not super successful himself. He is not rich and famous. So he's like telling people how to get rich, but like he didn't do it. Um...

Ray is like a lot of these guys. There's very little to separate him from the herd at this point. He's an advocate of the law of attraction, which we've talked about a few times in these episodes. This is the bullshit belief underpinning the secret. Whatever good or bad things happen to you happen because you drew them to yourself. Like a lot of guys in this space, he mixed in buzzwords from quantum physics because, of course, he's like a big also a big masculine guy. Right. So as a masculine guy, you can't just be like.

You know, you can't just be like this is the, you know, you can't do the wooey version of this, right? You have to say this is quantum physics, right? I'm talking about science to you, you know? And so he would rope in buzzwords from quantum physics to try to convince mild skeptics that what he was selling was in fact science. In one interview, he said this about personal responsibility.

I fully know for me that there is no blame. Every single thing is your responsibility and nothing is your fault because every single thing that comes to you is a gift, a lesson. Now, you think that could like be bad? I mean, I love the nothing is my fault angle. Like that part, I really connect with that. Um,

Yeah, there's going to be a very interesting thing that becomes his fault in the near future here. So yeah, I think that's probably a good idea for him to be selling at this point, given where he winds up.

His motivational seminars involved board breaking and trust falls, all of which was done without proper medical staff present, which is why prior to him getting famous, several people were badly injured during his events, at least one time at Walt Disney World. In 2005, a 42-year-old man was hospitalized after Ray made him exercise in a poorly built sweat lodge.

So this is all happening before he winds up on the Oprah Winfrey show. Now, what gets him on the show is that he is one of several narrators for the 2006 documentary The Secret, which is what gets him on the Oprah Winfrey show. Oprah lavished praise on Ray and urged her viewers to sign up for his courses and listen to his wisdom.

Many did. And he goes in short order from a failing motivational speaker with several lawsuits against him to the hottest thing in town. This is what I'm talking about with her. He just was the I am a voice artist, right? Like I've narrated plenty of things. This like guy who already had a pretty problematic history just was a narrator. And she's like, oh, let's elevate you. Let's make you a star. Yeah, must be like.

I don't know. I don't know where I'm going with this, but it just, it baffles me why she would want to be further mixed up with this person like this, just based on him being a narrator of the secret. I mean, we'll, we'll never know. Cause it's, it's not like there's like whistleblowers from the Oprah camp, but like, surely there were, there had to be discussions.

Yeah. Like Oprah, why these guys? You know, I think some of it is just that at this point, he's just another motivational speaker and it looks like he's attached to the successful project. He probably had a good rapport with Oprah. Yeah.

All you really assume at that point is like, okay, well maybe this will work. Right. Like, yeah, this guy's probably someone smart to have on. I mean, I guess that's the other side of Oprah is like, because she's gotten so far on gut. I mean, maybe it's just a charming five minutes at a fucking cocktail party or a meeting. I think a lot of the, a lot of cases it is like literally they charmed me for like five minutes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Man, that's... It's wild to have a vibes-based empire. Yes. I mean, I guess we are living in one, so what do I know? That's not 0% of Cool Zone's business, right? That's just the way entertainment works now, you know? Take of that what you will. So let's go to ads, and then we'll come back and talk about what happens next in the James Ray story.

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He was a Boy Scout leader, a church deacon, a husband, a father. He went to a local church. He was going to the grocery store with us. He was the guy next door. But he was leading a double life. He was certainly a peeping Tom, looking through the windows, looking at people, fantasizing about what he could do.

He then began entering the houses. He could get into their home, take something and get out and not be caught. He felt very powerful. He was a monster, hiding in plain sight. Someone killed four members of a family. It just didn't happen here. Journey inside the mind of one of history's most notorious killers, B.T.K., through the voices of the people who know him best.

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So I want to read a quote from the New York Times about kind of the explosion in Ray's business after this, because he goes from, again, a middling figure, not a ton of money, not super successful to for a while, like the biggest name in self-help or at least like the biggest new name in self-help.

Quote, he offered a hierarchy of courses, each more expensive than the last, culminating in Spiritual Warrior, a $10,000 retreat near Sedona, Arizona. After a series of endurance exercises, including extended fasting, participants spent hours in a sweat lodge where temperatures soared above 150 degrees. Mr. Ray presented Spiritual Warrior several times, and some past participants had raised questions about whether he or his staff members had sufficient training to run a sweat lodge.

They probably didn't, right? Oh, no, they didn't, Bridget. I'm going to tell you right now, if there's a fucking white guy running a sweat lodge, he does not have sufficient training. That's just a rule in sweat lodges or white lady. Let's be fair. 150 degrees. When when the room gets closer, it goes like that's closer to my oven controls than my thermostat controls. Yes. Which is real bad.

When you are in the able to cook meat spectrum, people. Yeah. And again, sweat lodges, and I'm not competent to talk about this exhaustively, but there's a long history in several Native American traditions of use of sweat lodges. And they can be, have been part of like therapeutic treatments run by people who know what they are doing. I'm not saying there's

Sweat lodges are inherently bad. James does not know what he's doing, and he is not utilizing this as part of an actual therapeutic process.

He is sticking people in a hot room because it's unpleasant and he wants to make them do something incredibly unpleasant and physically straining because that when you get out of when you do that with a group of people and you have like this dangerous, painful physical experience and then you get out of it on the other side of it, you feel bonded to those people and to the program. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. That's why he's doing this. And when you use a thing like that, that way, your concern is that they suffer. Right. And not that we're doing this in a way that is safe or going to like have a therapeutic benefit. It's that this is as intense an experience as possible. And in fact, he would brag about it when he does his big sweat lodge event on October 8th, 2009 for a group of people, each paying 10 grand for the spiritual warrior seminar. The guy, he brags to the group,

That he just talked to the guy stoking the fire, setting it with good intentions. Part of it is he's got to really think about positive intentions for your experience to help make sure it is a good one. And this is the hottest fire we've ever had. Make them feel special, right? Make them feel like they're getting this uniquely intense, life-changing experience. Yeah.

They did get that. You know, I got to say it is a uniquely intense, life changing experience for all of them. Twenty one of the people in that sweat lodge are hospitalized and three of them die. When first responders show up, one compares what he saw to, quote, the site of a mass suicide. I just double check. Yeah. One fifty is medium is north of medium rare. Yeah. You're like if your meat is cooked to one fifty in the center, you're pretty little dry. Pretty much good. Yeah. Yeah.

So this is very bad. You're not supposed to kill multiple people in a single sweat lodge. You're not supposed to ever kill people in your sweat lodge. These are overwhelmingly not old people. There's a podcast called Guru on Wondery that is just about Rey and goes into detail about this. One of the women who dies is I think like 39 years old. And it's like the story you hear a lot is,

this is a woman who's like career ambitions hadn't really worked out and she didn't really have a clear idea of like what she wanted to do. And so she gets into a lot of this self-help type stuff. She sees James on the Oprah Winfrey show. She has the same attitude of a lot of people that like, well, if Oprah says this guy's good, he must be. She gets his books. She drops tens of thousands of dollars on courses. And then eventually all of her savings on this spiritual warrior weekend that fucking kills her. Um,

I do think we're in this... I mean, today, I think we are in a weird golden age of, like, entrepreneurism and tech and, like, bullshit, grisdy spirituality kind of coming together. Like, I feel like this was on the, like...

This guy was sort of on the early days of what is definitely here because I have heard so many people in tech who are sort of like that woman describes, like not sure what they should do. Maybe they've been laid off. They're not sure what's next for them. And there are so many people

that will take their money and offer them something that is meant to be like a spiritual, whether it's psychedelics, that's like a thing that's really taking off right now in that space. It makes me so sad that people who probably could have used like therapy or a career coach would turn to somebody who would so callously exploit them and put them at such danger that they would die and like die paying for the pleasure. It's just so disgusting. And it like, it just...

Yeah, it's as if these people have no values and they are such hucksters. Yeah, yeah. And Ray is the epitome of that. And of course, as soon as he kills a bunch of people, Oprah distances herself from him. He does not show back up. And by God, at least last time I checked, I couldn't find good clips of him on Oprah's show. A lot of that stuff gets, let's get this shit out of here. Yeah.

It's impressive that she's able to scrub so much shit off the Internet. I will say. Yeah, I mean, it's all rights claims and stuff, you know? Yeah. So he is charged and convicted. He spends some time in prison. Oprah, obviously, nothing happens to her. She does not stop putting self-help gurus on her show or stop encouraging new age experimental alternative medicine.

I do want to listen to something that I didn't have in the script, but I just came across it. And maybe we'll try seeing this video. This is something that James Ray posted after getting out of prison called Be Careful What You Wish For. So I'm just going to I'm going to I'm going to take the wheel here. Sophie insights into success. Be the best you can be. I love that. Be the best you can be. This man killed three people.

I like the website. It's just isintosuccess.com. Also, I have to say before we start this, James Arthur Ray, it is one of those like three word names. Like that's a very serial killer. Yeah. He was definitely going to kill somebody for sure. Yeah. He was always doomed to it. Although not a bad fit on the suit. Anyway. And I thought I'd finally arrived. Well, that's a dangerous place to be. And I would say this to any entrepreneur. If you believe you've arrived,

you may have likely arrived, most likely have arrived at a very, very dangerous place because nothing stays the same. It just doesn't. And I don't know how much you know, Paul, about my history, but in 2009, I was at the top of my game. I was worth north of $20 million. I had built an Inc. 500, $10 million company.

you know, I had all these other accolades going on and then I was involved in a horrible, horrible accident in 2009 in a five day retreat in the desert of Sedona. And I'll shorten the story, but it was quite a lengthy journey. And I talk about this in great depth and detail in my book, The Business of Redemption, because it was

I went from the pinnacle to the pit. I literally, you know, we had at the end of this five-day event, which is a very intensive week of hard work and diving deep into those psychological issues that drive behavior and bringing those to the forefront of our minds so we can heal them, release them, and move forward in life and integrate those things. And so,

It was a very emotional week. It was an arduous week. And at the end, we had this experiential learning opportunity called a sweat lodge. I love how long it takes him to get to like, so we had a sweat lodge and I killed three people. Oh, my God. It's also there's a master class here. And like this guy hospitalized almost two dozen people and killed three people.

And he immediately is like, as soon as I get out, I'm going to write a book about redemption. Right. I'm going to have like this is I'm just going to pivot this to being about my my success journey. And like, I thought I was at the top, but, you know.

I didn't realize what fate had around the corner when I accidentally killed three people at a sweat lodge. This is just one of those curveballs life senses sometimes, right? Sometimes you're just out there living your life, trying to do your best, and you get three people killed in a sweat lodge. It happens.

If anyone's just listening to this also, I didn't realize he was such a Timu-ass, Wolf Blitzer-looking motherfucker. He is a really, really Wolf Blitzer-looking motherfucker. Yeah. That's how I would describe him. Yeah.

I also like how he describes it as like, I was involved in an accident out in Sedona. I was involved in an accident. You might think that he means like a dirt bike. He was involved in a dirt bike accident or something. I crashed my car. I hit a kid with my, you know, total accident. They darted into traffic. No, no, no. No, no, no.

You engineered a situation that was definitely going to kill people because you didn't know what the fuck you were doing and had lost your mind with arrogance and belief in your own power.

So this does not stop Oprah from putting self-help gurus on her show or encouraging new experimental alternative medicine. Again, she puts Ray on in 2006. He kills people in 2009. The John of God episodes air, I think, after that.

Jesus. So it's good stuff. In my research, I came across an article by Jean Brown, the sister of Kirby Brown, who died in that sweat lodge. Jean and her family started a nonprofit, SEEK, S-E-E-K, all caps, SAFELY, focused on trying to establish protections and guardrails for the self-help industry. She wrote this in an open letter to Winfrey.

...

I remember Kirby telling me that I had to read this book, that it was amazing, that James Ray was amazing, that he'd been on Oprah, and that she was looking forward to the Ray event she'd be attending a few months later. That's right. She mentioned you by name. And Brown is begging Oprah in this to speak up and use her incredibly powerful, unique platform to advocate for regulations to protect people from the predatory aspects of the self-help industry. To my knowledge, Oprah never took her up on this strident plea.

And yeah, that's a bummer. It's a little though also like, I mean...

Listen, I'm coming at this from a place of utter non-belief in this. And I do understand that parts of this industry have helped people in certain ways. But the idea of like advocating for regulations on... I guess this is like the same as the FDA technically has to, you know, have a handle on the supplements industry or like casinos have some guardrails. But it is so dark because it's like this shit is fake. Right.

So like what regulation other than this should not be, these should not be claims that you can make because they are lies. Can there possibly be, I guess, I guess you shouldn't kill people. You can lie to them, but you can lie to them, take their money, but you shouldn't kill them.

I don't know. It's very dark. Yeah, it's pretty bleak. Now, I can't conclude a series on Oprah Winfrey without at some point discussing her infamous book club. And so that's what we're going to do now. You get to talk about it. We're not going to keep doing that joke. I should say something about the car thing, probably. So she does this episode where she has like three people on who can't afford cars and, you know, the problems that causes in their life. And then they all find out they're getting brand new Pontiacs.

And then gradually becomes clear. Everyone in the audience is getting a free new Pontiac. Now, two things. Number one, the specific. If you know anything about Pontiac, you know that that's a curse more than it's a blessing. And in fact, the sunfire. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had a cousin with a firebird and boy, howdy, was that thing a piece of shit? But also like this.

These are this was an advertising ploy in part Pontiac pays for the cars. That's why they're free, right? But also the Oprah win free show does not remember to like give the people money in addition to the cars because when you get given a car There's like tax implications and everyone wound up owing like six grand as a result each for that car Which was like a big problem for a lot of people because these are folks who couldn't afford cars now

In terms of the bastard column, this was more of like a thing they just didn't because in the future, when she would give expensive gifts to people, the show would also give them checks to account for the tax burden. So I think this probably lands on just like you weren't thinking about. This was like an ill thought out advertising ploy that worked pretty well for Pontiac, although look at where Pontiac is today. It's still Pontiac. It's still Pontiac. Honestly, there's a part of me that's like the bigger thing is like.

That will never be in an era where any media is consolidated enough that it's worth that level of outlay. Like, what is it like 100 cars? Yeah. 50 cars, something like that. Yeah. Like as an advertising stunt, like it's just not, you know, in addition to all the other shit.

like whatever Oprah got or like I'm just like yeah I just don't think that's gonna happen anymore I mean what's most funny to me is that the specific model of Pontiac has gone down as like one of the very worst cars ever made so it really was like you get a shitty car you get a shitty car and

And you owe six K. And you owe six grand. Anyway, that's not really a bastard thing. It's just kind of funny. Let's talk about the book club. In September 1996, Oprah launched her book club as a regular feature on her show, making monthly picks and discussing them on air. Instantly, it became the largest and most influential book club on earth. Every single book club pageant

pick that she would make for like 15 years or something became a bestseller, every one of them. Some sold many millions of copies. I read a paper analyzing Oprah's literary choices by Alana Cullen of Salve Regina University and

And Colin quotes a scholar named Loftin as saying,

though on the whole not entirely happy with the way her life is resolved. Obviously, Oprah believes this paradigmic plotline will not only resonate with her viewers, but also expresses a universal truth critical to her spiritual work. The suffering of women is universal, unabated, and endured only through solidarity with other women.

And I don't read that because that's like evil or anything. That's just an analysis of the fiction picks. It's interesting to me that like, oh, okay. The fiction that you are drawn to is very much a mirror of your own life. Yeah, just an interesting thing. And Oprah does, in fact, pick a lot of good books, including some great works of classic literature that she helps to spread to a wider audience. Her book club is an extreme positive for the publishing industry as a whole, but

Now, when it comes to what is this net positive or negative for society, that's a little harder because in addition to some very good works of classic literature and just books that are fine, that more people read and more people are reading because Oprah is a good example.

There's also shit like a lot of poisonous stuff gets very famous. And I'm speaking here about The Secret, which we have, I think, discussed adequately, but also the infamous nonfiction book that turned out to be a fiction book, A Million Little Pieces by James Frey. We all know this story. Maybe not you at home, but everyone sitting here does, right?

Yeah. Did anyone read this fucker before it came out? I did too. My mom made me, she wanted to scare me away from drugs. And this is a book about this guy, like, and it's his crazy drug and alcohol life. And he's goes to prison, loses all his teeth. It's like this fucked up addiction memoir of, you know, addiction and redemption. And it is just horseshit. Um,

It's complete lies. When you don't know it's lies, I mean, I remember the opening, it opens with him like coming to on a plane and he doesn't know where he's going. And it turns out he was on a bender and they're sending him to rehab. Like, yeah, it opens and you're like, I'm locked and loaded, like lock in. And when you find out it's bullshit, you realize like, oh, I like it really questioned my bullshit detector because I was like, how did I not realize that this was fiction? Going back and reading it, knowing it's it's

Lies like it really reads like bad fiction. Yep. Yeah. And it is like very, very like bad fiction is a good way to to look at it. Anthony Bourdain described it as an obvious, transparent and steaming heap of falsehood. From the first page, I was enraged that anyone on Earth would believe a word. As a former addict, I found this fake redemption memoir to be morally repugnant.

You know, I remember thinking it sounded kind of cool. Like, oh man, this guy had some fun adventures being on drugs and alcohol. Maybe I should be an addict as an adult. Didn't have a positive impact on me, you could say. While Frey's book spent... He spends... This is such a hit. Like, it's hard to over... Like, books almost don't go viral the way A Million Little Pieces did. He spends 15 weeks on the bestseller list, which...

is huge for any author, especially one coming out of nowhere. And as soon as Ray is the top of the literary game, this guy goes mad with power. He starts, you can find like writings of his and like public comments he made attacking other authors like David Edgar, Dave Edgars and David Foster Wallace, calling them hacks and bragging that he was the best writer of his generation. Just immediately loses his mind. Yeah.

Journalists start after this book is on the market a while, like looking into some of the obvious provable lies in his book and pointing out stuff that like, well, you talk a lot about the time you spent in prison and like you didn't like you never got arrested or sentenced for a thing like you didn't. You didn't do the thing that's like the centerpiece of your book. Is it possible other things are lies if this obvious provable thing is a lie? Um,

Now, when the allegations come out, Oprah initially defends him. And in fact, Oprah even calls into Larry King live to describe the allegations against Frey as much ado about nothing, which is like a unique and in part because like she's put her ego into backing this guy. Right. Yeah. She called him brilliant and said his book was wonderful. If she got conned, that doesn't look good for the Oprah brand.

Journalists kept pointing out inconvenient details and eventually the whole edifice of lies came crumbling down. Frey eventually admits like I fictionalized large portions of this. Oprah was furious and so she does the logical thing and has him back on her show.

There's like three times she has him on after this. One of them is like extremely hostile where she is clearly like, oh, you are pissed. Like this guy made you look bad. But she also lets him like explain at length. Like he goes on a rant at one point where he's like, well, all memoirs are kind of lies, right? Because people don't remember things. He's saying like the stuff we were saying at the start. We're like, well –

Your past is to some extent like fiction, right? Like because we all remember things that didn't happen or didn't happen that way. Or our memory is different from the memory of other people who were there. He interprets that as so it's fine if I just lie about my entire backstory and call it nonfiction, right? Like which is a leap maybe I would say.

Speaking of the publishing industry, though, is there no fact-checking? What the fuck is happening? Actually, today there is no fact-checking. There still was a little bit back then. It's very, very rare in publishing to get functional fact-checking these days. Those are some of the first jobs you eliminate when you're cutting costs. Goospapers are unfortunately the same thing.

There is some minimal fat, at least the last time I did a nonfiction book, which was 15 years ago, there was minimal fact checking, but it is mostly on the author. Yeah. And I don't think they thought to fact check something like a memoir by this guy about his own experiences, even though there's stuff like his time in jail that would have been very easy to check.

More to the point, Oprah continuing to have Frey on after he's exposed sells more copies of the book like it benefits him financially that she keeps having him on because people keep buying the goddamn thing.

I remember reading a piece about how other memoirists who genuinely lived experiences that Frey kind of like made up or fabricated, like people who genuinely struggled with addiction or like had rough circumstances, that they had a hard time selling their books because of him. And like the impact that it made on people who were trying to write about those tough experiences. Really? Yeah. Cool stuff, Oprah. Cool stuff.

Now, there were near calamities, too. In 2008, Oprah picked a Holocaust memoir as her book of the month. The book was called Misha, and it was the purported true story of the life of the author, Misha DiFonseca, who was a little Jewish girl during World War II, had to search Europe for her parents in the midst of the Holocaust, and was adopted and saved by Nazi murder by a pack of wolves. That is literally the claim that she makes in this memoir. Now-

You guys want to hear something shocking? Ha!

Didn't happen. Little Jewish girl was not, in fact, saved by a family of wolves during the Holocaust. In fact, Misha was not a little Jewish girl. She was raised Roman Catholic. She was not caught up in the Holocaust. This is just nonsense. Thankfully, Oprah was saved from plugging her novel because the truth came out at the 11th hour before the episode could air. So they had time to scrap the fucker, but very nearly got brought in on that one.

That said, in 1996, she was conned by the author of a different Holocaust novel. Authors Herman and Roma Rosenblatt wrote a book titled Angel at the Fence about how Roman had saved Herman's life while he was interned at Buchenwald by throwing apples over the fence. Or Roma had saved his life by throwing apples over the fence. And that's how they'd met and fallen in love. And they'd been together ever since. Oprah called it the single greatest love story she'd ever heard. It was also total bullshit.

Now, this was not revealed for more than a decade. So like this book goes out as her book of the month. A decade later, it comes out like they just lied. None of this happened. Oprah's response was basically a fart noise. She said she was disappointed, but refused to admit that she had been tricked. And I don't know how much deeper to get into the weeds with this stuff, right? Like when it comes to most of the harms of her book club, they kind of boil down to like

I don't think that her taste in books was always great, but that's a personal opinion. And then number two, and this is the big one. She doesn't nobody really does. Very few people read enough that every month for like 20 years, you can recommend your favorite book of the month that you have actually read cover to cover. Some people do read them. I read that much.

Because I have to. But it's like you're being pitched. Yeah. Yeah. Oprah's not reading that much. She's got too much to do. And so she's not actually like reading multiple books every month and picking her favorite because that's very hard to do. She's got a team of people who are picking books.

And that leads to them making some very lazy picks that can elevate literature, especially when she's focusing on literature from other countries. There's an element of that that could be problematic. And this is not something I would have picked up on on my own, but I had the good fortune during my research to come across an article by Rob Spillman, the editor of Tin House Magazine and the author of an anthology of contemporary African fiction titled Gods and Soldiers.

And he made a complaint about Oprah's elevation of a book called Say You Are One of Them by Nigerian author Uwem Akpan. Quote,

The stories in Say You Are One of Them are drawn directly from the well-known African headlines, but with little added imagination. They have nothing of the power of Akpan's countrymen, Uzodinma Iweala's searing novel about a child soldier, Beasts of No Nation, or Senegalese author Bobokar Boris Diop's novel about the Rwandan genocide, Murambi, The Book of Bones.

Akpan's writing is pedestrian and plodding, but that has never stopped Oprah before. I am sure Akpan, who is by all accounts a very nice person who is dedicated to doing good work in the world, will make for compelling daytime TV. It is just a shame that this one mediocre book is going to be put forward to stand for all of African fiction. This doesn't surprise me at all because this was certainly a well-worn, um,

about Oprah that she was really interested in mining like the trauma specifically of the black community and sort of packaging it and turning it into a commodity. And yeah, I mean, I can't help but see reflections of this and how she might have been thinking about some of those school girls when she was coming up with the idea to launch that school, right? Like I think that our experiences do often have traumatic repercussions

and, like, baggage and all of that. But that's not the only story that there is. And so I wonder if, like, maybe she does have a preoccupation with, you know, kind of the...

kind of traumatic, not just traumatic, but like traumatic in a very specific, recognizable way that this author is calling her out for. Yeah. Yeah. There's also a thing that like white audiences, like white Americans assume black Americans know, have special insight into Africa or Africans. Right. But why would they? No, they're Americans. Yeah. Yeah.

Like, they don't need to know anything at all about Nigeria. Yeah. What do you know? Like, okay, what's your last name? O'Malley? How much do you know about contemporary Irish politics? Oh, is it just St. Patrick's Day? Is that all you really know? Yeah. Okay, okay. And I wonder, like, Robert, to your point about, like, certainly Oprah's not reading these books, you know, on her compound and then handpicking them. Someone's picking them for her. So, like, why not consult, like, a Nigerian? Like, why, like...

She has infinite resources. It wouldn't be that hard to find somebody who knows what a good pick would be. Yeah, there's a way you could still be doing good as her by saying like, hey, I'm going to pick this month. I've got this expert on Nigerian literature who put together this compilation of books and he's going to talk about some Nigerian literature that you should read and recommend it to you. Again, that kind of takes the focus off of Oprah. Yeah, she doesn't pass the mic. I think...

I feel like that is like really the theme here is that she wants it to be about her. She won't pass the mic. Yeah. Well, and the other thing is like just knowing anything about the media and entertainment industry, those readers were two to three white people who were just doing their best speed reading like 80% of the books. This really is such a revealing novel about modern Nigeria, a place I've never been or read anything about other than this novel. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Anyway, that's a thoughtful and complex critique. I don't know that you would – again, is this a bastard call? Yeah, probably a little bit here. But it's also – it's more than anything. It's a reflection of the fact that even when someone as famous as Oprah tries to use fame in a good way to encourage reading, which is generally positive, there will always be negative externalities precisely because fame is a brute force.

And it is very hard to use in a way that doesn't cause spillover harm, right? That's the nature of fame. I've quoted a couple of times in these episodes from a paper by Alana Mullen of Salve Regina University. And that paper's title is salient to this point. Quote, despair disguised as entertainment. Does Oprah Winfrey sensationalize human suffering in order to fuel her media empire and encourage other media to follow?

So the argument here is essentially that Oprah's content largely consists of a mix of horrific, heart-rending stories of suffering meant to generate emotion that usually ends on an uplifting note where the subject somehow pulls themselves up by their bootstraps. This is augmented by segments on self-help featuring gurus and fitness experts who offer a mix of mental and physical exercises through which the individual might fix their problems. Quote,

Under the advice section of O, the Oprah magazine, after the reader reads The Panic Button, Martha Beck on the only rational way to weather life's big and little snafus, Dr. Phil on getting along with a surly son-in-law and tips on raising a grandchild, and Suze Orman on an oppressive load of debt, a cramped house, and a money-squandering husband, the reader finally comes to the journaling portion. Here, the reader is encouraged to write down her feelings about fear. It begins...

At times, we all fear we're not good enough. Before you can convince yourself otherwise, you have to simply admit to yourself and no one else what you want. Then tell yourself, I am good enough. Say it until you believe it.

The reader is given five questions and is asked to reflect on such things like, "How does your self-talk change when you're fearful?" We must keep in mind who here who Oprah's readers are. These are not children. These are middle-class women with families and careers. I would argue that the childlike dialogue Oprah exploits presents her audience with a simplistic discourse on suffering.

Suffering is a powerful source of lessons and moral knowledge, and it should guide the individual. But what Oprah ends up doing is making suffering and the exploitation of your own suffering into a desirable and commonplace experience.

I mean, I think that's, I mean, I hate to make, like, I hate to brand that as a positive, but I do feel like today, like she was ahead of her time, whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. Look how popular things like true crime are, like the idea of packaging suffering as entertainment. That's all, I feel like sometimes that's all media is right now. And I feel like I can't,

I can't not see the ways that she was onto something before it had really become like that much of a thing. And to an extent, it becomes that much of a thing because she does prove the market, right? Like, which isn't to say that she's morally responsible for everything that media has done since, but you do have to look at like the evolution that these things follow. Yeah. I mean, it's sort of like the question is like, do you create the market or does the market create you? Because it's like...

Yeah. Even from the early stories, it's like it also it was also clear she was just trying a bunch of shit. And the thing that worked was the thing she gravitated towards and more and more and more and more, which is just like, you know, how you do it. Yeah. And this sort of I mean, like there's yeah, I think we've we've gone into that enough for these episodes. I just kind of.

It's something I think about a lot because the nature of this podcast is talking about awful things and these stories that are often very terrible and horrible. And part of the popularity of this show is that people are drawn to that sort of thing. And there's not 0% Oprah in the background of what I do. Now, I don't ever...

For one thing, we don't end our episodes on a high note, usually. There's not like an inspiring moral journey that makes you think, don't worry, just by changing my opinions and attitudes, I can fix the problem like Hitler, because you can't. The thing that fixes a problem like Hitler or any other major problem in our society is like collective action. And when that action is absent, there's often just nothing but terror, right? Yeah. But like, you know, it's still...

It's this kind of thing like reading about these critiques of Oprah. I have certainly thought about like what I do, you know, it's hard not to like in part because there's so much of how influencer and media stuff works today. That's downstream of Oprah. You kind of have to. But speaking of downstream of Oprah, let's sell some fucking products.

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He was a Boy Scout leader, a church deacon, a husband, a father. He went to a local church. He was going to the grocery store with us. He was the guy next door. But he was leading a double life. He was certainly a peeping Tom, looking through the windows, looking at people, fantasizing about what he could do.

He then began entering the houses. He could get into their home, take something and get out and not be caught. He felt very powerful. He was a monster, hiding in plain sight. Someone killed four members of a family. It just didn't happen here. Journey inside the mind of one of history's most notorious killers, B.T.K. Through the voices of the people who know him best.

Listen to Monster BTK on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Do you want to understand an invisible force that's shaping your life? I'm Osvald Ossian, one of the new hosts of the long-running podcast Tech Stuff. I'm slightly skeptical, but obsessively intrigued. And I'm Cara Price, the other new host. And I'm ready to adopt early and often.

On Tech Stuff, we travel all the way from the mines of Congo to the surface of Mars to the dark corners of TikTok to ask and attempt to answer burning questions about technology. One of the kind of tricks for surviving Mars is to live there long enough so that people evolve into Martians. Like data is a very rough proxy for a complex reality. How is it possible that

Consider this is a daily news podcast, and lately, the news is about a big question.

How much can one guy change? They want change. What will change look like for energy? Drill, baby, drill. Schools? Take the Department of Education, close it. Healthcare? Better and less expensive. Follow coverage of a changing country. Promises made, promises kept. We're going to keep our promises. On Consider This from NPR. Listen on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're... So I want to read a quote that kind of gets into the fact that Oprah...

She primarily understands the world through the things that happened to her. And that's kind of what her journey, the possibility that you can have no matter how bad things are for you, you can wind up like Oprah, rich and famous and beloved, like by changing your attitude. In fact, like that's what she is selling her viewers and readers is.

And there's an extent to which it's kind of dangerous to get people thinking about mass problems that way. And this is a point that's made very well in the book The Age of Oprah by Janice Peck. Quote,

Inspired by a New York Times series from 2005 titled Class Matters, the show's opening segment suggested a serious treatment of issues of class inequality. Clips of experts citing the growing gap between rich and poor, shots of Hurricane Katrina victims crying for help, and Winfrey's own statement that nearly 40% of all the country's wealth is being held by the richest 1%.

The fact that one of the guests was Robert Reich, U.S. Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton, underscored the solemn tone as he spoke of declining manufacturing jobs, a shrinking middle class, mounting economic anxiety, and millions of Americans who are working very hard but still not making it in what some are now calling the new Gilded Age. But

But even as Reich called into question the viability of the American dream, Winfrey reaffirmed it. She referred to a New York Times poll where 80% of those surveyed said they believe you can go from rags to riches in America. Followed it up with a video clip of a young woman convinced she would acquire the big house, fantasy engagement ring, and nice cars because if you work hard, you can achieve anything.

Oprah finally declared herself not only a believer in the American dream of rags to riches, but living proof of its veracity. Although Reich dutifully decreed his host a great model for America, he pressed on with his argument that success and failure are not simply matters of individual effort. Part of it is luck, he said. Part of it is connection. Part of it is education. Winfrey replied tersely, I don't believe in luck, Bob.

I think luck is preparation meeting the moment of opportunity. I don't consider myself lucky at all. Wow.

Oprah, Oprah, Oprah, Oprah. No, no, no. But also like just on its face, how stupid is that statement? Like, what do you think the fucking moment of opportunity is, you dummy? That's luck. Yeah, that's luck. And like your dad may not be your biological dad. The fact that he chose to take that responsibility for you is luck.

You know, like the fact that your grandma, you know, you have credited aspects of her with like instilling in you some of these values that like led you being a success. That's also luck. You didn't have to have that grandma. And it's this thing of like, if my life is hard and a lot of bad shit happens to me, I'm not a lucky person. Both happen. Like.

And there are so many things from her story that you've told us that were just pure luck. Like the reaction to her higher ups when she, you know, took the gamble and took the risk on like, I'm going to berate this woman on the show. And like, luckily it's going to be a hit. That's luck because her higher ups could have fired her for that. Like that could have, her story could have ended there. Luckily it didn't. And they had a different reaction, but like to say like, oh, that was a calculated choice. Obviously,

Obviously not. Like, I just can't believe that someone would discount sort of like right place, right time, luck, like, oh, just luckily it worked out that way to their success story. Everybody has that in their success story. Everybody. Yeah. And it's this problem of like conflating I benefited from luck to saying like, I'm lucky. And like, especially if you've had as nightmarish an upbringing as she has, I get why there's some offense to that. But like, you know,

There's buildings that were airstruck and like one member of a family in Gaza survives. They survived due to luck. They're not lucky. Their family got killed by an airstrike. Right. But it's just luck that they lived through that thing. Right. Like.

But I don't know. I think people, a lot of people, especially particularly Oprah, doesn't like thinking about it that way. Like maybe it's better to say because luck has a positive connotation. Blind fortune might be better. You know, it's the kind of blind fortune of the guy next to me took a bullet through the head, but I didn't. You know, that didn't happen to me. I'm just making an example. Yeah.

But it's the, like, everyone's grandpa survived the landing in Normandy. Like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Through luck. Other guys died because their luck was shitty. Yeah. You know, that doesn't mean you didn't also, like, grow up fucking poor in the Dust Bowl, right? Yeah. Like...

I wonder for Oprah, if there's some aspect to where she thinks that like her success was, I don't want to say predetermined, but like, I know a lot of people who believe that they are where they are because it was like, like divinely written that way. And like, it doesn't matter what choices they make because it's all going to work out for them in the end. Like that's definitely a mindset of people that I, that I know. And I wonder if she feels that way. Yeah. I, I,

She talks sometimes that way as terms of like, does she actually believe that like God picked her specifically? I actually don't. She said stuff that you can interpret that way. I don't really get the vibe. That's how she thinks about it. I think her attitude is like I succeeded because of my attitude and my hard work. Right. That's it. You know, anyway.

Since this is behind the bastards, I think it's prudent for us to end these episodes. And by God, they're finally fucking ending with a very clear because this is all a lot of this is murky. The bookstub like not, you know, the luck thing. We can talk about the harms there and like how that perpetuates capitalism and makes it harder to get people behind, you know, solutions to the problems of capitalism. But like, it's not bastardry to just.

feel differently about to have that kind of reaction. You're not like evil. I just think you're wrong. So we're going to end on a real clear bit of evil.

In 2007, Oprah had Ginny McCarthy on her show as a guest. McCarthy was at that point an actress and a former playboy model turned anti-vaccine advocate. McCarthy is largely responsible for making Andrew Wakefield famous in the United States. Ginny believes, with no evidence, that vaccines gave her son Evan autism and that she cured his autism with dieting and pills she got from the internet. Now,

McCarthy had a degree of fame in her own right, which is why people listened to her in the first place, but she would never, ever, ever, ever have reached more than a fraction of the people that she ultimately reached if Oprah had not had her on as a guest that fateful day in 2007. This turns her into the kind of person who...

thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people, you know, were aware of. And, you know, some chunk of that probably in the tens of thousands at this point took her very seriously. Oprah puts her in front of like 30 million people, you know, and the, the, this is, uh,

You talk about her as like an enzyme. Yeah, this is that moment for the anti-vax movement, which is at this point one of the most dangerous and dominant social forces in the United States, pushing back against all of the gains of the last 150 years of medical science. It's a real nightmarish problem. And

And this is one of the single most important moments in the growth of the anti-vaccine movement. Very little equals this in its toxicity. And I'm going to quote from an article in Vox here.

Science journalist Seth Mnookin, who covered this meeting of the minds in his book The Panic Virus, reported that Winfrey praised McCarthy's unwillingness to bow to authority, her faith in herself, and her use of the internet as a tool for bypassing society's traditional gatekeepers. Here's an excerpt from the interview transcript.

McCarthy, first thing I did, Google. I put in autism and I started my research. Winfrey, thank God for Google. McCarthy, I'm telling you. Winfrey, thank God for Google. McCarthy, the University of Google is where I got my degree from. And I put in autism and something came up that changed my life that led me on this road to recovery, which said autism, it was in a corner of the screen, is reversible and treatable. And I said, what?

That has to be an ad for a Hocus Pocus thing, because if autism is reversible and treatable, well, then it would be on Oprah. I love that the specific things that she was praising her for are the most like Karen conspiracy theorist attributes. Like, oh, way to know the Internet. Way to not trust authority. Way to like. Yeah, this is this is an moment. This is.

In Lord of the Rings terms, this is Sauron forging the rings of power, right? That's Oprah's involvement in the anti-vax movement, right? So days after that Oprah appearance, and this is continuing that quote from Vox,

McCarthy was invited on Larry King Live and Good Morning America to spread her anti-vaccine message even further. Between the three shows, she reached between 15 million and 20 million viewers with her anti-vaccine message. Mnookin estimated, I think there's actually a good cause to suggest that it was more than that substantially. I think her most was like 26 something million viewers, somewhere along those lines. But anyway.

Oprah ended McCarthy's bit by calling her a mother warrior, which incidentally helped to set off one of my least favorite linguistic trends. I really fucking hate people using the word war here for basically anything outside of war. It's just irritating to me. Not a moral thing, but like fucking like it's always alarm. But I mean, the sweat lodge that killed three people was the spiritual warrior seminar, right? Like.

You're not a warrior because you want to meditate and sit in a hot room. You're not a warrior because you got on Google because you don't think your kid is worth loving because they have autism. You know, you shouldn't want to have to be a warrior.

It's well, I mean, that's what McCarthy would say. I had to be one for my son to cure him of the horrible specter of autism, which is actually like deeply hateful to your kid that like you're going to move heaven and earth to like change them as opposed to just being like, yeah, this is my kid. This is how they are. Yeah.

Now, the only slight nod to reality was when Oprah read a brief statement from the CDC, which pointed out that vaccines save lives. Even then, McCarthy got the last word, insisting, my science is named Evan and he's at home. That's my science. Jenny McCarthy. Jenny McCarthy.

Oh, man. The episode with McCarthy is still featured. I think the actual clips of it aren't. I mean, you can still find some of them, but like the episode is still featured on the Oprah.com website. Like there's a write up about it on there. Winfrey has never retracted or apologized for her role in the anti-vaccine epidemic. In fact, she had her production company sign McCarthy for a TV show that eventually fell through because Jenny McCarthy is...

Bad? We'll say bad because that's not legally actionable. I think she's really bad and the show didn't happen, thank God. But Winfrey made her a recurrent guest. She keeps on coming on and Winfrey does not limit herself to just McCarthy as an anti-vax figure. In fact, I found a Mother Jones article that informed me that Jenny McCarthy was not even the first person with anti-vax views on the Oprah Winfrey show. Quote,

Months before McCarthy's appearance, Katie Wright, whose son has autism, said on the show, the vaccine connection has not been refuted at all. In fact, we give 37 vaccines to babies under the age of 18 months. Nobody has shown that safe. A wise idea. The multiple vaccines at once. I would say that the fact that most kids who are born survive to be adults shows that that's a good idea. Look at where things were there in 1850 with kids who were born surviving to adulthood. That, I would say, is pretty good evidence.

Anyway. Yeah. The next year. Oh, sorry. Please. I just really bummed out now. Uh-huh. It's also though, like, I mean, so much of like what's wrong with America is like, can, can just, we make everyone learn basic statistics just once. No, absolutely. Never going to do that. Oh, Andrew, we can't even teach people how to read anymore. No. Okay.

The next year, Oprah had Christiane Northrup on. Northrup is a physician, or at least a former physician, who started making the switch to new age health disinformation grifter on Oprah's program. Her initial target was the HPV vaccine, which she suggested should be replaced by a healthy diet. What? Look, just eat right and you can't get HPV. Everyone knows that. Okay.

Of all the things I thought you were, where you thought you were going to go, if you had said prayer, that would be the only thing like more ridiculous. No, this is why, like, you know, in my own personal life, I don't use any kind of protection. We just eat a salad first. You know, that makes it safe. If you're both eating a salad, nobody can pass anything to anybody else. It's like, hey, do you have a condom? Like, no, I've got some tomatoes. But I got this excellent Caesar. Oh, my God. It's.

so good and it's spinach. None of that fucking like lettuce bullshit, right? Like the good stuff. Mixed greens. Protection by kale. Fucking hysterical. So Northrop added, I'm a little against my own profession. My own profession feels that everyone should be vaccinated.

Nothing you need to say about that. You won't be surprised, but should be saddened to hear that Northrop is still with us. She pivoted to COVID-19 denial. This is particularly a problem because in 2013, Reader's Digest declared her one of the hundred most trusted people in the country. I want to read a quote from a McGill University article on Christiane for the Office of Science and Safety, which calls her the Dr. Carl Sagan warned us about.

And she's specifically talking about a Carl Sagan quote about like his fear that anti-science attitudes will lead to a return, a new dark ages is like this. People start to believe in a demon haunted world rather than a world of like problems and solutions that can both be understood scientifically. And yeah, I think that's both a damning and accurate way to describe Northrup quote from

from McGill University. She does not believe vaccines are necessary if your body is healthy and has spread unsubstantiated fears about safe vaccines throughout her career. She claimed that the COVID-19 vaccines will target specific chromosomes that act as the seat of our empathy, an utterly absurd and unscientific statement.

She believes that artificial intelligence has somehow been incorporated into these vaccines. Absolutely nonsense. And that this AI will integrate itself into our DNA. She warns her viewers that the injection of patented vaccines inside our body will turn us into the property of the patent holders. Thanks for that one, Oprah. Let me just check. Bill Gates. Yeah.

A lot of people don't know this. Bill Gates actually moved into your house and because you're legally his property, you couldn't say anything about it. The good news is super clean roommate, super clean roommate. God, why? That is nonsense. That is complete and utter bullshit. Thanks, Ops. Great that she's in the discourse forever now.

And that's part of the thing is like Oprah kind of takes a step back in like 2010, 11. She's on less. She's clearly like partially retired, but like,

All of these fuckers are still with us. You didn't take them with you, Oprah. If she'd just been like a pharaoh and been buried with them all, I'd be fine. But like, alas, no. And like the harm they do, like she's going to be fine. It's like she unleashed this chaos to all of us and she's going to be fine.

She's going to be, yeah, she's doing great. What government job does Dr. Oz have now? Not yet, not yet, but probably by the time people listen to this, like there's a good chance he might've been confirmed. I think it's health and human services. No, it's Medicaid for him, right? Yeah, Medicaid. Oh God.

Great shit. So the good news is that in recent years, the world has slowly started catching up to the many, many harms that Oprah and her celebrity have caused. I found a good article about this in The Root, which noted that after the catastrophic Maui fires in 2023, she and The Rock asked random working people to donate to rebuild the island. They put in $10 million themselves, even though they didn't.

Both of them are worth substantially more than that, shall we say. In earlier years, I think they both would have been praised for giving $10 million. But in 2023, coming from a woman with more than $2 billion in the bank, especially considering she was clearly talking about the parts of Maui where the rich people lived, it was taken widely as insulting.

Speaking of insulting, and I'm getting a little petty here, but I'm going to tell this story anyway. In 2014, Oprah went on tour with her mystic buddy, Deepak Chopra, selling tickets for $1,000 for a motivational presentation called The Life You Want. Because there would be long lines to get in and the whole event would be something of a spectacle, Oprah and her organizers decided to hire local talent to play on stages around and outside the weekend-long event.

Oh, did I say hire? No, no, no. Sorry. I meant they begged local artists to work for free for exposure. A page from the Amanda Palmer playbook. Yeah. Yeah. Now what's interesting about this to me, I started this by talking about that. Uh, it was like in 2000, she did her first like big tour. Uh, I think it was called the life you want. Uh,

Or is that? Oh, no, this one's the life you want. I forget what the first tour was. We talk about it at the start of episode five. But she did a tour. And in that one, she made a real point. Tickets were like 20 or 30 bucks. And all of the proceeds were donated to the Angel Foundation. So whatever you want to say about like,

you know, this is the thing that the LA times was like calling her a, basically a God for putting on, but at least it was an extremely affordable event made for like working people to be able to attend. And she didn't profit directly off of it. All of the money went to her charity. Although foundations come on. Yes. Yes.

By 2014, but there's pretense. No pretense by 2014. How much is she charging for this one? $1,000. Okay. Or at least those are some of, like, ranging from $100 to $1,000, right? And these are the venue in the town where she's, because this specific person

article comes from a performer named Revolva, R-E-V-O-L-V-A, or at least that's her stage name, obviously. And Revolva is one of the people who Oprah's team reaches out to

asking her to work for free at this event. And Revolva points out that the venue in her town had an 18,000 person capacity. And if tickets are ranging from 100 to $1,000 with 18,000 seats, that adds up to what I think doctors know as a shitload of money. Enough to pay someone like Revolva, I don't know, a couple thousand bucks, something like that, you know? It wouldn't be any money.

Literally anything? What if the life that I want involves being paid for my labor? Yeah, I'm sure if they really hate it, it's like 500 bucks. I know that's lower than standard, but you'll get exposure. At least you're offering money, right? Yeah. So the producer she talked to framed it as a favor that Oprah and the crew were doing the local arts community. People started calling us asking to perform, so we thought we'd add a stage for local acts. Look at how good we are. Like, motherfucker. Yeah.

Now I've got, again, I'm criticizing this because it is shitty and bad. I have no idea how much Oprah was aware, if at all, about the specifics of this. I highly doubt she was like, send Revolva an offer, right? Like there's a good chance though that like someone said, hey, should we have a bunch of local actors perform on a stage where you aren't for free? And she was like, yeah, sure. Sounds great. They'll get exposure. Yeah, I think that's probably somewhere close to the case.

Or even less, to be fair. Like, hey, we should get some local artists. Great, make it happen. Yeah, make it happen, right? End of story as far as Oprah's concerned. End of story. That said, I suspect if...

Honestly, Oprah would consider getting to perform on a stage kind of near her to be worth much more than money. And I do want to note, we'll have a link and link in our source notes to revolve his website where she writes this up. But I'm going to have Sophie show you the little the little image infographic that she put together about the different people involved in this.

It shows Oprah Winfrey net worth 2.9 billion. Deepak Chopra net worth 80 million. Elizabeth Gilbert net worth 25 million. Revolva net worth negative $20,000. She's like a fire spinner. Awesome spinning fire. She looks dope. She looks great. It's a great graphic. Hire Revolva. Give her money if she's still doing this. I don't know. This was 10 years ago. Best of luck, Revolva. Thanks for writing about this.

Now, those of you who are in your 30s will remember that fun year or so where large numbers of people thought the world was going to end in 2012 because of the Mayans. The Mayans did not, in fact, predict the world was going to end in 2012, but there was a lot of money and lying about that for a little while. You may be surprised to hear that Oprah had a big part in that panic, too, from an article by Kurt Anderson of Slate.

Right around the time The Secret came out, habitus of its general vicinity started buzzing about the year 2012. Ancient Mesoamericans, people were saying, had predicted that in 2012, specifically December 21st, humankind's present existence would transition when the current 5,125-year-long period ends. New Age religion makers like American Protestants now had their own ancient prophecy for their dreams of something like a near-future Armageddon and supernaturally wonderful aftermath.

Winfrey ended the Daily Oprah broadcast in 2011, a month before the final episode. She interviewed Shirley MacLaine for the millionth time and asked about 2012, "'What's gonna happen to us as a species?'

"'We're coming into an alignment,' McLean explained. "'It is the first time in 26,000 years, 36,000 years, 26,000 years, I'm sorry, that this has occurred. You have an alignment where this solar system is on a direct alignment with the center of the galaxy. That carries with it a very profound electromagnetic frequency. Vibration,' Winfrey interjected. "'Vibration,' McLean agreed. And gravitational pull, hence the weather. What does that do to consciousness?'

What does that do to our sense of reality? It's why people feel stressed and rushed, she said.

Sometimes I think Oprah should have just been like me in college doing psychedelics and looking at black light posters and just like, like if she had just kept this in like the common area of the dorm, we all might've been a little better off. It's remarkable how many transcripts of her show sound like stuff that like 15 years ago, like a pot dealer told me when we played PlayStation. Cause I like, I really just wanted to get out of there with my eighth, but like, you kind of got to hang with the guy a little bit. He's cutting me a deal, you know?

These are the experiences legal weed is making kids miss out on now. That's why they need Joe Rogan. God, it's so deeply idiotic. I mean, the thing that's coalescing now is like Oprah has like a professional credulity verging on idiocy that is just what audiences want because that's what everyone is. Wanted. Yeah. Yeah.

And that's kind of dumb. That brings us to the end because the worm has sort of turned for Oprah here. You know, the Oprah Winfrey show ended after 25 years on the air in 2011. She still does specials. O Magazine continued until 2020 when it stopped publicizing. Oprah still has a sizable production company. Her current show, she has a current show that's called Life Class.

So she still does shows and stuff, but the Oprah Winfrey show is like an everyday thing ended in 2011. And her cultural influence has faded substantially from its peak 13 years ago. Perhaps Oprah might've been able to reign in the legions of new age, curious fans before they fell into the abyss of QAnon or flat earth or whatever kind of white supremacist shit is currently going viral with like a weird number of like,

Gen X people who spent 20 years watching Oprah. But not anymore. She doesn't have that juice anymore. It's one of those things. She came out big for Kamala Harris during the election and it didn't do shit. Ten years ago, Oprah and me have been able to... Bummed me out. Yeah. Might have been able to swing an election, but not anymore. You know, Oprah's well past her peak. But...

it's also too one late to undo the damage, right? The, this march into unreality that she helped to lead and organize. We're still going down that road, even though I think she herself sees how dangerous a lot of it is. Like there's no, there's no turning the wheel anymore. There's no jerking us back. We've gone too far. Um, so thanks. Oops. Yeah.

So is she a bastard? Yeah. I mean, that's kind of where I'm landing now. I mean. Where are y'all? I'm interested. I think. I don't think she wanted the evil things. Yeah. Is the tough thing. Right. She's not malicious generally. Yeah. But I guess neither do most of the bastards, at least from their point of view.

I think most of the bastards have their malicious moments. Yeah. Right? Even if they would argue that what I'm doing is the best thing. They have moments where you're just acting out of petty hatred or anger. Yeah. Oprah's bad shit is never that. Yeah. Well, like, that's what I'm... Like, the credulity, the, like... I mean, look, at least as far as, like, all this anti-vax and, like, anti-science and anti-reality stuff goes, it's like...

you know, while she is like an enzyme for, for this stuff, like she herself is also just like down the line from like, if there wasn't medical racism, it's unlikely that she would have a foot to stand on or, you know, would have even delved into this, like anti-vax and tell you, you know, or like any other number of structural things that exist. So it's like the bastards are still the people that set up all the inequality in the first place, but,

she has really done some part to intensify it, but I do think if it weren't her, it would have been someone else. Like, it's just a niche that exists. Uh,

And like someone would have fallen into it. I think there are pieces of that that are accurate and pieces that aren't. It's this, it's the great man versus trends and forces, right? I think reality TV happens without Oprah. I think this, this movement to like, as long as social media is coming out, I think this movement towards like authenticity and like the weird parasocial bonds that are being built. That was inevitable. Well, before we were on that road, right?

But I also think the characteristics of Oprah herself, particularly her credulity for a lot of this anti-reality woo from Deepak Chopra, the secret Marianne Williamson stuff, I don't think that was inevitable. And I don't think the role and seriousness that she gave like anti-vaccine stuff was necessarily inevitable, right? Well –

I think it's a mix. I guess to me, the pushback on that is that is what the audience likes. And like someone would have filled that role if it wasn't her. Yeah. I mean, I guess that's the thing that we'll never know. Right. Yeah. Yeah. But I'm just like,

I mean, we as a society species, I don't fucking know, are inclined to believe this stuff because it is the path of least resistance on how you perceive reality and solve problems. I,

I guess where I go with that is, but also like our, our inclination towards it is why it's good business. Yeah. It is not necessarily written that we are going like, because people have not always bought into as much of this shit. There were periods of time where that was less common, certainly less common to talk about publicly with the position that she had. Right. And I do think that leaning into it,

was not necessarily going, that was a choice that she and other people made and more resistance to it could have ensured that we were in a better position now vis-a-vis the existence of reality as a thing. Yeah.

consensus reality. I don't know. Yeah. I think the choice to like lean into it is what is the thing for me. Like that wasn't happenstance. She made a clear editorial decision about what it was, what kind of work she was going to prioritize, what kind of voices she was going to amplify. It's kind of hard to come back from that for me. But I do take your point, Andrew. I do think that a lot of this is like,

She really held a mirror up to our worst base instincts and desires and impulses. And like, I mean, I kind of, you know, sorry, please. I like part of her calculus of amplifying this stuff is on some level. I don't even know who the competitors would be, but she was like, if it's not me, I'm just going to pull an analogous, I think talk show host, like fucking, yeah.

It's not Jenny Jones, but Kelly Clarkson will do it. Sally Jessie Raphael. Yeah. It's like someone is going to put these people on and this message is going to make waves because the fucking idiots who watch my show crave this. You know, that's the version where at least she's kind of an aware person.

Are you saying that the real bastard is us? Yeah. Well, white people, but yeah. Not me, y'all. Yeah. Robert, Sophie. We're not disagreeing. No, I mean, like, this is... Yeah, like, this is why, I mean...

The show, the fact that this is behind the bastards to show about the worst people in all of history would seem to always kind of lean into the great man stuff. I do try. I try to like pull back from that as often as I can. Right. And that.

You could say the same thing about Hitler too, right? All of these monsters are both individuals and the bad things they do are what they are because of their individual choices and also the product of trends and forces. Like if there's not a Hitler, there is another guy who finds a way to take advantage of

of German anger and fury at the way the war had ended and the peace and whatnot and turn that into political power. Now that guy's not necessarily the Holocaust guy, right? Yeah. But there's some, the, the, the energy would have been, has to be harnessed almost because it exists. You know, I don't know. Like this is,

We're getting a little bit. We had our bong hits in the commercial break. So now we're going for it. That's right. You're getting effectively three parters worth of episodes today because this week alone is three hours. So, yep. You're welcome. You're welcome. Anybody got anything they want to plug? Not anymore. Fuck. Yeah. Now I'm like questioning my whole media career. Am I just like pumping out?

Stuff that it's I don't realize is going to have it like down the line is gonna have a bad effect on society I don't even realize it yet. Am I early Oprah? God, I hope so Yeah, I mean doing you know Three billion dollars who gives a fuck not me baby

Everyone gets Pontiac Sunfires and that's that. I am going to go out of my way to buy up all of the surviving or find the scrapped remains of all of the Pontiacs that Oprah gave out and give them back out to our audience.

Whatever it is, it's got to be doable. Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah. This is my new quest. Well, I'll plug for Bridget. Listen to There Are No Girls On The Internet. Oh. I'll plug for Andrew. Listen to Yo, Is This Racist? That's right. And, you know, until next time, fucking...

light your television on fire. I don't know. I don't know what to tell you to do. I already did. Step your phone in half and throw in the seat. What a mess. What a fucking mess. What a mess. Good God.

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards.

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