Bonus: The Bastards of Oprah
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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. Beautiful young women full of life and dreams murdered or vanished without a trace. Their families left with nothing but heartbreak, questions, and memories.

I'm Nancy Grace. This week on Crime Stories, we uncover the truth behind these unsolved cases. We work to bring justice and answers to grieving families. Please don't miss Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, listeners. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco, host of the Murder on Songbird Road podcast. Murder on Songbird Road revisits a controversial 2020 murder that occurred in southern Illinois. It divided a community and pitted families against one another. But questions remain as to whether the mother of four serving time for the crime is actually guilty.

I'm excited to tell you that you can get access to all episodes of Murder on Songbird Road 100% ad-free and one week before anyone else with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus, and subscribe today. ♪

Hey everybody, Robert here. And if you've been paying attention, we just finished six episodes on Oprah Winfrey. And obviously that dealt with a lot of the most toxic things about her career in media and her show. 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 partners of those. Well, we did.

given that all of those were had you know a year or more old in some cases older than that uh we made the decision to run them as one big episode as a bonus you know you're not

Not getting less original content, obviously. But we put clip these together as one big episode so that there's a lot less ads. 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. So take a listen, my friends. And yeah, I love you. Go to hell.

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

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

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. 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. Yeah, I hate it. Back of my neck. It's fucking disgusting. It's terrible.

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. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, we raise money for some charity. I don't know what kind of charity. Like, bombs not food, maybe. Yeah. That sounds like a charity. I mean, it could be, like, sort of an OnlyFans situation. Yeah. I imagine the recording of people cutting it will be useful to somebody. Yeah, that'll be ASMR for some very weird person. Yeah. And, yeah. So, Andrew...

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

That's right. Which is what our friendship has been based on up until this point. 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? And I'd be like, nope. Let's hear it. Today, though, today we have a story that's horrible. Really, really horrible. 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 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. Yeah. 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. This is the tale of John of God. Have you ever heard of John of God?

I've heard of neither John nor God, so no John of God. Now, people might be confused. There's an actual 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. 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 what we're getting into today you're welcome Andrew for booking yeah thanks for having me Jesus Christ yeah

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

Are you ready for this name? You're not ready for this name. Nobody's ready for this fucking name. Hippolyte Leon Dinizard Reveal. That is a fucking name. Hippolyte Leon Dinizard Reveal. That is a fucking name. Reveal is like so... I like going subtle on the final landing. It's just like, yeah, we can do a normal last name.

Fully 50% of his four names sound like Pokemon. I've got a Hippolyte, I've got a Denizard! It fucking rules. So Hippolyte Leon Denizard Reveil was a French educator, and he wrote under the markedly less cool pen name Alan Kardec, which I don't understand. If you're Hippolyte Leon Denizard Reveil, you lean into that shit. This guy did not know what was clickable. Very frustrating.

That's wild. Yeah, that's giving up 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.

So anyway, under the boring name Alan Kardec, he wrote a series of books about spirits. 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. 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. 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. It has something like 3 million adherents there. Damn. Yeah. That is... I guess it's sort of like a French version of sort of like an animist type religion, right? Yeah. I think...

I think 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. 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. And so spiritism felt like this kind of genuine synthesis of these old traditions with the new Christianity. I think it's –

I think you're probably onto something there. I guess that's kind of the shit that happened with like Catholicism in South America where it basically became saints became a pantheon. Yeah. Or the polytheism is like, yeah, it's fine. Just a slight emotion. And they're everyone's the same. Yeah, it's whatever.

So we don't hear a lot about spiritism today in the United States. 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. Like a lot of stuff that was originally part of this spiritualism religion that Kardec cooked up just kind of became things that like people who like crystals all believe. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

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

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. Have you ever seen like spiritual surgery sessions? Oh, shit. Um...

I feel like I can imagine it, but I can't think of one. But yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's kind of like like laying on of hands type shit and laying on of hands. But then they'll like pull their hands away. They'll be like, oh, there's a tumor inside you. The devil's put a tumor around your heart 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 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, right, right, right organs.

Yeah, like that's a big thing in the United States. That's amazing. It's cool. 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. Like most Americans would be like, this isn't a big thing in the United States, but you're wrong. I mean, it is like nice how the state of the art of like 16th century magic has kind of remained the same. If you can palm a chicken heart, you can get away with a lot.

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

So, yeah, spiritual surgery is a thing that happens here in the United States, and it's a thing that happens all over the world. 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. It's like shit like this has been happening for thousands of years, right? But over in Brazil, a combination of spiritism and Christianity has created a thoroughly unique tradition of what is generally called psychic surgery. Right.

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. So that's a cool wrinkle. What? That's fucking crazy.

Oh, God. I mean, I guess it's like on some level, it's got to be a little bit similar to like, you know, an alchemy thing where it's like, you know, sometimes the problem is just a little bloodletting is needed or like, yeah, sure. It's building up and like that will work occasionally. Yeah.

Yeah, and it's kind of like, you know, people who, for, like, whatever reason, because of, like, a depressive disorder, cut themselves. Like, they feel, like, they tend to feel relief for one reason or another, and it's, like, because 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. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, yeah, the Brazilian to first pioneer this technique was Jose Pedro de Feritas or Zé Arrigo. According to his autobiography, an obviously problematic source, he started working at a mine until age 14. Yeah.

In 1950 at age 29, or he started working it on mine at age 14. And in 1950, when he was 29, he began to suffer a series of blinding headaches, followed by hallucinatory trances. 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 of spectral doctors and nurses at his beck and call. So he's got like a whole German surgery team in his head. Yeah.

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

which is cool. It's bizarre that this Brazilian mine worker would choose it's got to be a German field medic, but that's what he picks. And I guess we all consider Germans trustworthy. I can't think of anything in history that would make me not trust German doctors. So yeah, that scans.

So, uh, together, Dr. Fritz and Zé Arrigo had a wildly successful 20-year career performing surgery to adoring audiences of as many as 800 followers at one time. Zé Arrigo 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. He became known as the surgeon of the rusty knife, and this was not, like, uh, nobody was, like, talking shit at him by calling him this. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

That's a that's like that's some shit. That's like a prison nickname. The search. Yeah, that is like a prison nickname. Yeah. 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. That's like the butcher bill motherfucker. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's incredible. Yeah, that's that was a compliment.

Yes, that was a compliment. Yeah, because that's part of the evidence to these people that he's so clearly holy and sacred is that it doesn't even matter that he's using a rusty knife. And again, you'll see this throughout the whole episode and all these guys we talk about. Part of the thing everybody focuses on is that none of his patients feel any pain. None of them get infections, even though he's just cutting them with a dirty knife. That's how holy this is. Yeah. So that's cool and good.

Yeah. You know what? That's just cool. Yeah. You know, blood of Jesus, that works. It's fine. It's antiseptic, largely. Yeah, the blood of Jesus is profoundly antiseptic. Mm-hmm. 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. Okay.

The height of Zé Arrigo's career came when he removed a tumor from a popular senator. He was arrested in 1956 and convicted of practicing medicine without a license, but he was pardoned by the president of Brazil. In 1962, he was arrested and jailed again for the same thing, but the police allowed him to continue healing from his cell. He died wealthy and beloved in 1971 due to an auto accident that his spirits failed to warn him about. So...

This guy would be like an amazing character in like

Batman video game, I feel like. He feels like real final boss energy. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, but he's... We're just getting started with Zay Arrigo. So, Zay Arrigo dies, and in 1990, this guy Rubens Faria, 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. What if I start claiming to channel the spirit of the same dead German guy? So...

Next up, Rubens Feria is like, Dr. Fritz is in my head. 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. 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. Christopher Reeves is reported to have visited Mr. Feria for healing. It didn't work.

Boom. Too soon, but boom. Yeah. I mean, I'm not making a joke. It clearly didn't do the trick. Yeah, seriously. Damn. I mean, that's a bummer. He seemed like a nice guy. But yeah, this was not the treatment.

So in 1995, Mr. 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 nonpayment of taxes. The police confronted him during a surgery in Rio and arrested his bodyguard for possession of an illegal weapon 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 is hacking on their bodies so it turned out like a bunch of people were dying and getting infected and his bodyguard was just throwing them in a hole

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? And I guess it is, you just have to, you have to break a few eggs to make a goblet. 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. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That's...

I guess that's you for most people that I know. I mean, yeah, I'll do a little bit of corpse disposal. You know, it's like a yeah. So a raid on Ruben's Farias compound revealed more than a thousand boxes of conventional prescription medications suggesting that the spiritual healer was actually practicing traditional medicine, but just without a license. He was arrested in jail. But while his district police chief agreed that Farias needed to be locked

up, he still professed a strong belief in the myth of Dr. 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. So I think he's really channeling this German guy, but that doesn't mean he's not committing crimes, too. Oh, my God. Really thread the needle. Thanks, Doc. Yeah. My favorite is that reminds me a little bit of...

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 controls our lives through a series. Shit like that where I'm like, it's just about the practice of it, not the underlying logic of it. It's amazing. I mean, I worship L. Ron Hubbard and

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. Exactly. That's what I celebrate about LRH. Yeah. So, yeah, this all is the background, I think, that's necessary to understand John of God. So.

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. Oh, boy. Joao Tixera de Faria, better known as John of God.

This sparked a visit by Oprah herself and an avalanche of uncritical positive stories about how cool this new John of God guy was. For the first time, a Brazilian psychic surgeon attracted mass interest outside of Brazil. 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.

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. So I'm going to start by reading from that. Uh, 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. So, you know, noted a little bit of salt here, here and there. So, uh,

João Tixera de Faria was born on June 24th, 1942 in the poor village of, oh boy, Cachoeira de Fumacha in the state of Goias in central Brazil. His mother, Dona Luca, was a popular member of the community and a dedicated housewife. 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. The biography of John of God continues, quote,

Wow.

His father was less successful. He was a tailor and owned a laundry business, but money was not great, and young Joao and his four brothers and one sister lived in constant economic anxiety. Young John had to work from an early age, starting as a cloth cutter in his father's shop at age six. 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...

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, 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. But either way, shit was...

Yeah, he had to do some shit. He got up to some shit and did some shit. Yeah, and he... At the age of seven. Yeah, and he had basically no school, and he never learns to read or write. That's the important thing here. Yeah, not a reader, this guy. So his biographers, though, claim that he worked many jobs as a well digger, as a bricklayer, and generally they say that he spent his late childhood and early adolescence in hard manual labor.

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. John's biographer claims that he was a brilliant natural clairvoyant who earned pocket money by actively prophesying events at the pool hall. Yeah. This is very funny. Yeah.

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 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 john just discovered he had a knack for pool hustling and various forms of cheating that required quick hands and charm this is a guy who would go up to spend his life doing sleight of hand stuff to giant crowds you

The fact that he's a pool hustler as a kid makes total sense. So I think that's what's actually going on here is he's like, yeah, he learns how to hustle at a pool hall. Well, it's also like you can the range of predictable items of things that could happen in a pool hall is like finite and like less than 30, I would say. I feel like you could just shoot a lot of shots of the dark and that shit's going to come true eventually pretty quickly. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, he spends a lot of time as a kid in a pool hall. He learns sleight of hand. He learns how to grift. And yeah, so far, the biographical information that we've got from his biography by his follower, Heather Cummings, has been broadly reasonable. 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.

Exactly.

as he had predicted, the thunderstorm appeared seemingly out of nowhere and badly damaged or destroyed about 40 houses in a small town. And depending on where you find this story, he always claims a different number of houses were destroyed. So I don't know. Yeah.

So he predicts a storm. This is his first case of clairvoyance. 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 a city, Campo Grande, to try and make a living. 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.

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

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. Um...

So like, hell yeah. 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. And when he returns to consciousness, 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. And he cured 50 people while possessed by King Solomon. Yeah.

which i remember king solomon is the guy who cuts up babies but yeah i don't know and as far as like the luck of the draw goes hey that's a good get good get yeah name oh yeah king solomon ks that's a big one yeah hey could it happen to anyone could it happen to anyone amazing could it happen to anyone i mean i i would love to i don't know not king solomon which king would i want to

Ooh, Henry VIII. Henry VIII. That's a good... I mean, that's a bad king, but that's a fun king to incorporate. Yeah, to be. Or King Leopold. I could ride a tricycle, take some hands. Yeah. I guess... I guess...

The old dude, the old, old dude from the Bible, he probably got up to some shit. Nebuchadnezzar or whatever. Oh, Nebuchadnezzar. You mean like the Babylonian emperor? Yeah, that's a good one. Right? Those guys got up to some shit. Yeah. Oh, man. And it's so much more impressive to take on Nebuchadnezzar.

that guy's got a way better name than Solomon. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, 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. Um,

Unfortunately, I'm unaware of any serious journalism that exists to actually document what went down with John's early years in the religion. 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.

Uh, this director told him to leave and come back at 2 PM the next day to keep healing people. Since John was homeless, this guy invited him to stay the night at his house. 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, uh,

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, I mean, this is in the retelling welcoming in a new grifter. Like what the fuck was actually happening? Yeah.

Yeah, and it's one of those things. Yeah, it's convenient that, you know, out in the at this period of time, out in the middle of nowhere, Brazil, you know, lifespans aren't enormous. So you're really if you make it old enough, you could just lie about what happened to you when you were a kid because. Right. Yeah. Right, right, right. That makes sense. Yeah. The earlier most people die, the easier it is to be a grifter.

Yes. 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 you that much. Yeah. No corroboration. Oh, I was healing the shit out of people in 11th grade. Makes sense. You want to take an ad, buddy? Yep. You know who else was healing a lot of people when I was in the 11th grade? Okay. So now let's talk about...

Nope. We did that. Now we're back. Okay. So, uh, John of God, he meets this, this spiritist church and they tell him that King Solomon's taken over his brain. Um, and,

And he's like, that's that's good and normal. And yeah, so he he winds up staying the night with like the leader of the center. 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. He was actually terrified because he didn't know like how to he was expected to come back the next day and he didn't know how to do what was expected of him.

But as soon as he gathered it, the spirit ascended the next day. King Solomon took him over again, and he kept healing more sick people.

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. He became known as Medium John and his new teacher said, it is kind of funny, Medium John. It's like the sequel to Big John that's not as good a rhythmic. Medium John. Just Medium John.

Every morning at the mine, you could see him arrive. He stood five foot eight and weighed 135. Kind of medium at the shoulders and medium at the hips. And everyone knew it was okay to give some lip to medium, John. It's so, it is like so juvenile to find confusing medium with medium, but that is so funny to me. It's very funny. Yeah.

So his new teachers told him he needed to devote his whole life to healing other people. And this is his biographer's claim started a five or six year period of traveling throughout Brazil, healing the sick and the suffering.

He became known as Joel Curador or John the Healer. 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. So he makes sure that people know that 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. I'm just a conduit. It's very important to him that you believe both things. Yeah. Yeah.

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. I don't know if you've ever practiced medicine without a license, but you got to be careful with it.

So he's shifting the blame to literal King Solomon, essentially. Yeah, exactly. If somebody dies while he's performing psychic surgery, it's the dead king's fault. That's a hell of a loophole. That's genius. I mean, I am going to start blaming all of my many crimes on King Solomon. I'm not even going to lie to you about that. That seems like a very good idea.

Well, especially the baby chopping thing, because that's he's got a baby chopping. He's got previous ammo on that. Yeah. I mean, yes, officer. I was going one hundred and thirty five miles an hour in a fifty five. But if I didn't, this fucking king ghost in my head was going to chop up some babies. Like, do you want me to go a little faster? You want some chopped up babies? That's all I got to ask you. Yeah. Yeah. It's up to you. Up to you. Up to you. Cop seems reasonable to me. Yeah.

You want me to heal you? Let me pull out some chicken gizzards and pretend to rip them from your chest. 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. 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. 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. His biography says the country suffered a revolution and a military government came into power. The reality is that Brazil's democratically elected socialist president, João Guler, was overthrown by a military coup backed by the U.S. government.

A conservative military dictatorship would rule Brazil for the next 20-ish years. John's biography glosses over all of that because the advent of a military dictatorship worked out really well for him. Medium John traveled to the capital, Brasilia, and offered his services as a tailor to the military. Quote from his biography.

Because he was so young, he was not commissioned to create uniforms, but was given an opportunity to sew a consignment of work pants. His expertise impressed his new employers, and he was soon promoted to full-time tailor and assigned to make uniforms for the army. Medium Joao continued his healing work quietly on the side, but word of his gift soon spread throughout the barracks. One day, he incorporated an entity who operated on the wounded leg of a doctor.

which healed immediately. 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. He was promoted to master tailor and became their protege for nearly nine years. 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. 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. I mean, it's just like keep them in the ranks, I guess. Yeah, keep in the ranks. Keep a paycheck going to the guy while you dictatorship Brazil. Look, I'm not going to backseat dictatorship. You know what?

Yeah, there's a lot of bureaucracy. You can't just insert like which doctor surgeon general. Yeah, you get that's like a year eight of the dictatorship thing at best. You know, you get a Oh my god, I want to be which doctor surgeon general so bad. That's just that sounds even better than Reverend Doctor to be honest. You just have to Yeah, you have to work within the available structures. Yeah. Until such time as you don't. Yeah. Yeah.

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. Yeah. So John claims that the experience of working as a protege healer slash tailor with the dictatorship instilled in him a deep desire to become a successful businessman. His fawning biographers explain that he, quote, needed money making expertise to support his spiritual purpose.

This is so he doesn't sound greedy. 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. This is absolutely a lie, but incredulous white Americans bought it for years. So basically he claims that he became a great businessman and that's how he's able to fund his free healing hospital. The reality is literally the opposite. He makes a bunch of money healing people and he used it to buy ranches full of cattle and stuff.

Makes sense. Whatever. Yeah. 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. But before we do, I want to turn to his biographers for an explanation of exactly who these entities that take over John are. 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. Quote,

Quote, medium Joao can incorporate approximately 37 entities, but only one entity can be incorporated at a time. The specific entity may change, however, depending on the needs of an individual patient. 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. This group is referred to as his phalange. One spirit might specialize in diabetes or heart problems, another in emotional afflictions.

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. That's... Having, like, support staff in this, like, fake, like, spiritual slavery system... 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 guy who 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 cockamamie bullshit, I feel like

It would be it would involve as little true body horror as possible. Like, no, no, people love that shit. Oh, yeah. I guess I 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, so physicality. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 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 believe you could be a cult leader, but, you know, it takes some sacrifice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't 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. They both 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. Yeah.

And it's not happening for me. Yeah. Well, that's that's yeah. Well, you know, choices. Yeah. There's not happening yet. I'll see. We'll see. I wish I takes me. It would be cool to be able to incorporate the spirit that could just give you incredible abs. Like one of them has to know how to do abs. But OK.

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. He wound up being guided to the town of Abadiana in Goyas. 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. Through him, the entities would heal these people. And over time, the numbers increased from dozens to hundreds to thousands per day.

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 Don Ignacio de Loyola. This spiritual hospital, as his followers would come to describe it, eventually received more than 10,000 visitors per month. Since Aberianya has only about 19,000 residents, the huge streams of sick and dying people represented a big infusion into the local economy.

So like half the population of the city is coming in every week just to see this guy. Yeah, that's I mean, I guess you need like desperation tourism sometimes. But Jesus Christ, that's.

That is actually Jesus Christ's business model also. So you know what? Maybe it's just a good one. Yeah, if Jesus Christ had benefited from roadside billboards, I don't think they ever would have gotten to kill him. He would have made too much money. But tragic. Yeah. Render into Caesar about 38% and you're fine. Honestly, yeah. So...

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. I'm going to 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 Abedinanya. 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. There were a number of visibly painted small hotels lined up side by side. Lilac purple, canary yellow, lime green. 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. 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. The man's eyes were closed and he was peaceful and still as rivulets of blood ran down his white shirt.

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. Yeah. This is like some midsummer shit. This is like insanity. Yeah. Imagine like you're just backpacking through Brazil and wind up here on accident. And it's like, oh, no. Yeah. I have. I have aired. I did not want to be here. Yeah. Yeah.

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. 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. 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. 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,

John maintains that, yeah, that's a good trick. Yeah, he's doing the nails up the nose thing. Yeah. He's calling it brain surgery. Classic. Yeah, classic. 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. 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. All that is needed is a surrogate willing to undergo the spiritual surgery.

So that's awesome. That's a good grift. Oh, God. Yeah. 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. Yeah, I guess. Yeah. I mean, that's 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.

Yeah, that's basically... I mean, yeah, more... 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. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Make everyone invested in you, and yeah, one way or the other, you've got leverage. It's essentially the same way that, like, the pot industry works in large amounts of the United States. Or...

or yeah like any drug illegal business works where it's like well this is where the money is here so nobody's nobody's gonna start shit yeah don't don't snitch this is yeah 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 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 he was famous for saying that like if you smoked pot you had to like detox for a whole year before he could heal you the entities don't like weed yeah that's can't be true but fair enough entities yeah if there are if there are ghostly entities flying around there's no way those ghostly entities don't like some fucking dank like come on yeah they love they love weed

So that last write-up I read you from the Montreal Gazette was obviously written by a credible journalist who was very critical of John of God. But I want to read another example, another person writing about what his healing sessions look like who actually believed in him and was a member of his cult. So here's his biographer, Heather Cummings, recalling one of his healing sessions. Quote,

So...

See, here it is, he said, as he wiped the knife on the man's shirt. I could see a minute dark sliver. 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 could see. The entity looks into the eye as a representation of the whole body system, not limited to the physical eye. I understand this as a symbolic removal on the physical level, but originating from many levels and involving many different organs.

the son is healed you can take him to the infirmary he said as he wrote the post-op prescription so that's cool shit that's an awesome gig man 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 yeah 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 it's fine this is this is where i'm taking machetes and next

Damn. That's an easy grist. 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 were like before he learned how to scrape people's eyes without blinding them. Like there's like a whole village full of 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.

Yeah, that's really key. A lot of good advice on how to start a medical grift in this episode. Take notes when society collapses. Some of you are going to do very well remembering this stuff.

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. The pills were mostly passion flower. And by some accounts, they've netted John more than $10 million a year. 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.

So you can see why no one in Abedinania had any interest in questioning whether or not John of God was legit. He did face occasional challenges from members of the Brazilian government, particularly folks in the medical establishment who were leery of his psychic surgery. 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.

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

Yeah.

Oz appeared repeatedly in the hour-long show, basically echoing the refrain that science doesn't have all the answers and not all other forms of healing need consideration. Science, of course, doesn't claim to have all the answers, but it does look for evidence before jumping on a bandwagon. 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?

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. So... I mean, this has to also be, like, something... Like, the underlying, like...

you know, uh, 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 wealth. This could be real. This clearly fake shit could be real. It's gotta be real. What else can it be? It's, it's, it's wild, man. Um,

And Dr. Oz is a big part of justifying this guy. Like you can't overstate how much Dr. 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. 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. Like doctors are just like high stakes technicians. Yeah. And, and their engineers are regularly, uh,

engineers and doctors actually are not irregularly like part of like terrorist moves. Like Al Qaeda had a bunch of engineers and doctors. Yeah. Because like, uh, 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. Like the, 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. Um, yeah.

Yeah. And you can be a, but I don't think Dr. Oz is dumb. I actually don't think that's, I think Dr. 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 a Dr. Oz ad comes on during this episode. He's a piece of shit and a monster. I really hope an ad for Dr. Oz comes on right now. Yeah. I think, I think it's just like worth pointing out that the T E M in STEM is

None of those things are indicative of actual knowledge necessarily. No.

No, and this is part of why people talk about, conservatives in particular, talk a lot of shit about the liberal arts and philosophy and all this stuff. And it's like, no, no, no. The reason why engineers and doctors should have some grounding in all that education is to stop Dr. Oz's from coming about. It's to give people a broader understanding. If you get really good at one incredibly narrow technical thing...

Yeah, 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. 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. Yeah. Like, yeah, you watch like any Silicon Valley person make a pronunciation on anything outside of English.

And it's like, oh, you are you are less educated than the average person. You are bad at reasoning. Yeah. 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 happening.

get wildly out of hand and kill tens of thousands of people. But 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 he's he's he's he's history's greatest monster. 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. Yeah.

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. Quote, five years ago, Oz had participated in a primetime live segment focusing on John of God. He examined hours of film footage from the entity's healings. He looked at scans and biopsy reports and the results he couldn't explain. The shrinkage of an aggressive tumor, for instance. This guy has a glioblastoma, which is a very deadly brain tumor, Oz recalled. It was grade four. They biopsied it and proved it.

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

Now, I don't know Dr. Oz's radiologist, but I do know that Dr. Oz himself is a famous charlatan and a liar. I can't speak to the specific case, but it's worth noting that no other doctors got to look at this information. 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. 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 cured her untreatable cancer, which actually was treatable, that she just chose not to get treated. 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. 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. 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. I'm going to read one example. This is a quote from that O Magazine article, which...

You can only find it on the Wayback Machine because once this guy got accused of rape by literally hundreds of people, Oprah pulled the article. But 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 done the job, 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 hole-punching hands ready.

Over a good Chilean red, Edwene, 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. 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. But then I realized, I'm not ready to go just yet. She laughed at the memory. That's all it is now. 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, Edwene traveled to the casa. I was nervous and I was skeptical, she said. But what did I have to lose?

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

Afterwards, she collapsed in exhaustion for 24 hours. Days later, she was told by her guide the stitches 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. I'm so grateful, she said, nodding toward the heavens. 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.

So this is the level of journalistic rigor that we're getting in this article. Mm-hmm. O Magazine, everybody. The mention of the wine is particularly choice. Oh, it's got to be. Yeah, yeah. Revolting. Yeah, Oprah Magazine was definitely like, yeah, it was entirely geared at getting wine moms to believe spiritual nonsense and not get their cancer treated. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Jesus Christ. Robert, you want to take an ad break real quick?

Yeah, you know what else doesn't care if wine moms get cancer treatment? The products and services that support this podcast. They don't give a good goddamn. Great. And that's the behind the bastards guarantee. We're back. Oh my gosh. What a great...

I don't know. Whatever this is. What a great, horrible story. John of God is a monster and a rapist, and we will only hear more about the horrible things that he's done. 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. I think it's because on a global level, the amount of harm that these people do is so much higher. And it's also so much like...

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. 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. 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 yeah.

I'm not going to say they're worse than a rapist, but yeah, they do more damage on a broad scale, right? Like, yeah, it's not good. Well, it's like sort of like... It's like...

It's like whatever the PR version of money laundering is. They clean it. They're the cleaners. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly right. They're like money launderers for dangerous bullshit that gets people killed and molested and stuff.

And 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. 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. And it's fine. And it's just fine.

Because she's a friendly, nice person. I'm sure if I got to hang out with Oprah, I would enjoy her company. And I would forget momentarily the horrors that her brand has brought into the world. And that's very frustrating to think about. Although, to be fair, actually, if she were to graduate to the level of American president, she would once again be in company where, probably relatively speaking, her hands are relatively clean.

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. It's entirely possible. Yeah. 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. So here we go. Like, it's fucking wild. This is so dumb. We shouldn't have presidents or billionaires like Oprah, but whatever. Yeah.

Anyway, that O Magazine article has been scrubbed from the internet because of all the rapes and stuff. But yeah, 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. 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. 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,

like taking your nine-year-old out shooting for the first time and just getting blackout drunk first. I mean, is it like, cause it's like, so generally there's this like a vested interest in promoting like spirituality and Christianity on some level. And like, cause it's like when you, when you encounter these people and you are not at any point like, Hey, this seems fucked up.

It's so wild to me that they don't have that instinct. You know, the key is that all of the people surrounding John of God... Because you don't spend much time with him. You spend a lot of time around these, like... And they're mostly, like, white American ladies who, like, love his shit. And they're all the same kind of... They're all Gwyneth Paltrow kind of people. And they're all...

Like well-heeled and friendly and charming and they know how to speak to a specific segment of the population and those people find them trustworthy. Yeah. Yeah.

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

knowing that he was happy and off living his eternal life allowed her to move on. And that's all fine. 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. I'm not going to blame her for that. What I will blame her for is the utterly uncritical way that she wrote about John of God's bullshit, like his claims of being able to perform surgery without even touching people. So here's another quote.

When you consider the countless unseen things that have undeniable power, sound waves, microwaves, radio waves, emotions like anger or envy, wind, and of course the awesome universal power of love, it seems silly to rely on the naked eye for proof of anything. Yet that is what we do. Numbers on charts and graphs, x-rays, those we believe in, but we leave without documentation. Something we perceive with one of our five senses is considered blind faith. Sweet, but we don't really trust it.

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. The hand wave, 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.

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. This is reinforced by something she writes about her arrival in the hotel at Abedinia. Quote, as I hoisted my luggage up to the second floor, a small sign of the wall caught my attention. Don't believe everything you think, it advised. Which is like that's kind of gaslighting, right? Like gaslighting via decoration.

That's a, yeah, that is exactly, that is what abusers say. That's fucking insane. Yeah. Holy shit. In this same incredulous way, she writes about the entities that John of God channels. Quote, if you spend time at Abedianya, 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. What it actually means, however, is so extraordinary that it defies our sense of what is logical or even possible in this world.

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. 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. Augusto de Almeida, a surgeon and army man with a serious and efficient manner. Dr. Oswaldo Cruz, whose specialties were infectious diseases and bacteriology.

St. Francis Xavier, co-founder of the Jesuit order, along with Casa's patron, St. Ignatius of Loyola, a priest and nobleman from the 16th century. 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.

So, oh, have these guys ever been like sued by the estates of these? This feels a little bit like Mormons, like baptizing people in...

Like post-mortem? 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. They're coming there for things like Susan has, where they're sad. That's a lot of these patients. Sorry, I meant the estates of these spirits. Oh, okay.

Man, yeah, that would be fun to try to sue someone for that. I don't know that there's any legal precedent. I think it's really funny that you're talking about like, okay, we've got this infectious disease doctor, but actually he's calling it a second opinion from the 16th century nobleman. Yeah, exactly. It's like, hey, my grandpa, you know,

Admittedly, my Nazi grandpa probably wouldn't have supported this, I guess, is not the best court case. But, you know. Yeah. Yeah.

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. Many harrumphing empirical scientists had become impassioned John of God advocates after visiting and witnessing him in action. She doesn't go on to quote any of these scientists or give any evidence of this. She just like says it 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. In her recitation of events, these learned men were all bowled over by John's inexplicable healing abilities. As far as I can tell, Susan took no action to determine if any of these men were actual doctors. 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.

Quote, quote, quote, quote.

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. He tipped her head backward, running his hand across her face, and he opened her left eye, holding the eyelid wide. 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. I had a hard time watching this, believing as I do that the words knife and eyeball should never appear in the same sentence. 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. As she had the entire time, the woman appeared to be napping. How on earth could a knife crush your eyeball and not hurt? Later, I would interview another recipient of this treatment. Connie Price, 62, from Jackson, Michigan. There was no pain whatsoever, she said, of the five-minute scraping.

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. 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. 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. Is that, and also it's like,

Aren't there isn't the whole thing that's like, yeah, there aren't other nerves on your eyeball because that's how they do like basic, right? Yep. It's actually really easy to write. It's the same thing with like it's actually very easy to rub a knife and even cut a little bit on an eyeball without somebody being in horrible pain. Right.

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

things in the roof of a building with like hooks in their back and like it feels good to them like there's like a release of endorphins 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 um like there's yeah exactly

The fact that these people don't report pain or anything isn't weird and is part of a long documented history of people experiencing temporary relief from faith healing and stuff like that. There's nothing mysterious about it. 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. 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. Like, it's just...

Sometimes our brains override our experience of pain. It happens. It's a thing that people do. It's like those stories of women lifting cars off their babies. So, 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.

Ha ha ha!

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That feels about right. 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.

So...

At least she said they were told in that one. Yeah. 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. 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 Leinke Maus.

Um, she suffered from sexual trauma and Winfrey's episode. Do you believe in miracles convinced her that medium John could heal her. 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. When those didn't do the trick, she went back and he offered her a spiritual cleansing in a rare private session. Um,

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. That's where Moe says he raped her, all while leading her to believe it was part of her healing.

Now, Moe's was one of hundreds and perhaps thousands of rape victims of John of God. And I want to end on this note to get to the point of like 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 basically like built a spider web for this fucking spider of a man. Mm hmm.

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 pluggables. Oh, shit. You know, just go to the Yo is this racist podcast. I met Andrew T. Last name is spelled T.I. everywhere. Yeah, that's it. That is it.

Well, I'm Robert Evans. You can find me on the Internet, behindthebastards.com. You can find me on Twitter at I write OK. And if you 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 three thousand dollar donations to our our our medical center. So give me three thousand bucks and I'll fucking I'll rub a machete on whatever part of your body you want.

That's the guarantee. That is a guarantee. Absolute guarantee. I also have a podcast called The Women's War. It's upbeat. It tells you about how to...

how to make things that don't suck out of your society when it sucks. So maybe listen to that too. And, um, I don't know, go in Christ and cut up people's eyes. Yep. That's the podcast. Yeah, it is. Dope. Part one of the podcast. Okay.

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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 B.T.K. on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Beautiful young women, full of life and dreams, murdered or vanished without a trace. Their families left with nothing but heartbreak, questions, and memories.

I'm Nancy Grace. This week on Crime Stories, we uncover the truth behind these unsolved cases. We work to bring justice and answers to grieving families. Please don't miss Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, listeners, I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco, host of the Murder on Songbird Road podcast. Murder on Songbird Road revisits a controversial 2020 murder that occurred in southern Illinois. It divided a community and pitted families against one another. But questions remain as to whether the mother of four serving time for the crime is actually guilty.

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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. But the real bastard is also Oprah and Dr. Oz and Susan Casey, the author of that terrible article. So pull up a fine Chilean red and get ready to hear some more. 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? The J-O-G. Ready to hear about the rest of this, motherfucker. Well, before we do that, I just came across something on Twitter. It's a book that's being sold. 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. No.

yeah a piping hot coloring book with America's sexiest moderate Joe Biden Jesus Christ yeah it's it feels like abuse awful it is abuse it is abuse

Yeah, that's, 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. Yeah, I don't want to give this person money.

But I do want to see it inside this terrible, terrible criminal coloring book. The sexy 70-something politicians thing is one of the weirdest aspects of modern politics that, like, you have these two old 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, hunks. And it's like, guys...

They're elderly, dying men. Stop it. Even if you think they're the right person to be president, you don't have to pretend that they're...

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. Yeah. Yeah. They're not doing wind sprints. Like Joe's abs don't exist because he's an old sick man. And yeah, that's okay.

I mean, it's not ideal, but like, whatever. Like, stop it. Stop it, all of you. The flesh on his face is melting day by day. It's what happens as you die. Like,

Which is fine. He's not fucking Popeye, okay? They're dying. Yeah, this is not on them because they're pretty normally aged men for their ages. Yeah, we're talking to you creepy people. What are you doing? Stop it. You don't have to make them sexy. What is wrong with you? If I could just do a tiny poll and just point out that Sophie's idea of a sexy man is Popeye, and we can just...

Live in that for a second. I dare you to find a better example of uncut eroticism than Robin Williams as Popeye in that 1980s Popeye movie that absolutely exists. Look it up. It's fucking something else. Insanity. Yeah. People made that. People made that and no one stopped them. 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. Don't do it to yourself. Never mind. It's great. So, we're all back from... It is Robert Altman. I looked it up. I couldn't help it. All right, 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. And I had to...

I just had to talk about it. So... You hit your world like a cruise missile at your wedding. 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. All right, we really should start the episode now. So, no human being has ever embodied the phrase, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, better than Oprah Winfrey.

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. 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. At least she seemed that way. Um...

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. She regularly hosted Tony Robbins, another sex pest and self-help guru. She is largely responsible for making Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz into household names, and both of those men have gone on to do incalculable harm to society. 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.

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. 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.

Because you went expecting to find what? Well, I went to just gather evidence to see what's true. 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. Is that correct? Yes, and they always are sort of very careful not to ever...

pit themselves against the medical, the mainstream medical profession. They, you know, they're very much like, they're not, he's never going to do a heart transplant up there. 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. Yeah. Okay. I'm back. That's good. Yeah. What'd you think of that, Andrew? What'd you think of that framing?

Um, incredible. Incredible. I mean, the one thing watching the clip is that, um, um, what is it? Sorry. What is the, what is the journalist? The quote unquote journalist name again? Susan Casey. Yeah. Journalist is a strong word for Susan. The one thing watching that is that Susan looks almost exactly as I thought she would.

Yes. Exactly the type of white woman that would promote this shit. Yes. Yeah. And whatever picture you I guarantee you, 100 percent of you, whatever picture you have in your head of Susan Casey is accurate because there's only one wild. Yeah, it's awesome, isn't it?

Yeah. Yeah. It's and then also like this, this thing where she's like, he's not going to do a heart transplant. But yeah, he's like, you might have to go to your regular doctor for that is like, yeah, just like key, like sweeping shit under the rug. It's like, well, of course, you will need real medical care also.

So what's really cool about that is that it is very clearly and obviously an answer of Susan and this other doctor who will talk about a minute whitewashing John of God. So like they know that if they're going to be on Oprah show and talk to like a mainstream audience, they have to put in a they can't just be all like, especially because of this is 2010 and we aren't where we are now. Now you could just say doctors are bullshit. This guy is the only real healer in the world. You can get away with that back.

then you had to be like oh no you still regular doctors are still good great for things he's just helping with other stuff and like that was necessary to get people on board um but john of god's cult produced propaganda too this is why i say that susan casey and this doctor are like

like intentionally whitewashing him. Because for this episode of Oprah's show, they use clips from a documentary that John of God's cult produced. And in the actual documentary, there is no time wasted telling people that they need to consult their doctor. So I'm going to play next, have you play next a clip from that actual, the documentary produced by the cult that shows kind of how internally they talked about his healing powers. And it's very different from how Oprah did. Physical healings that cannot be explained away.

He said to me in reply to my question, can you help me to become healthy again? And he replied, you are already healed. Holy shit. Yeah. So, yeah, you see, like in that there's no talk about like, oh, yeah, you got to you got to fucking heal.

Right. Consult a physician. Yeah. No, he just heals your shit. Yeah. So the doctor guy that Oprah has on there is a fellow named Jeffrey Rediger. 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. 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. People get better from things.

We don't understand why that's a thing that happens. And he is clearly there to inject both credibility and skepticism into the discussions about John of God, kind of like Dr. Oz was earlier. 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.

And Dr. Rettiger is really upfront and clear about the fact that this brain surgery through the nose stuff is slight of hand, that he's not actually performing surgery, that he's that there's there's a ton of space in the navel cavity and nothing inexplicable is going on. So he does make he does state that to the audience. But.

But he does that while he buys into the fact that scientifically inexplicable healing occurs at John of God's center. 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. 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. It doesn't look like he's like sterilizing the knife or the probe or... Well, yeah, as a physician, I have to say you don't try these kinds of things at home and or with your loved ones. And, you know, this guy has a second grade education.

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. But I've seen them happen. Generally, without anesthesia, you see enormous pain. I take care of people every day in pain from surgery and other events.

the risk of infection is typically great and something that we have to take seriously. So have people followed up with these people who've gone through these procedures? Maybe infections came later. Well, I think every situation of spiritual healing is different.

So did you catch what went on there? This is really interesting to me. So Dr. Rettiger 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. 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. You'll notice he doesn't say that that's possible even. He just sort of says that like a bunch of things get – like that's really – yeah. Yeah.

That's amazing. 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. 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. He gives a non-response so that the 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 it's amazing like this is a master class in how to why it's laundering bullshit yeah

Yeah. It's even like the way that like they can claim they've addressed the infection risk by saying, oh, because they brought it up. It's fucking revolting. That's crazy. Yeah, it's awesome. I want to play one more clip from this episode because we just got to.

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. I believe that's an unexplored wilderness in terms of research so you said that since you made that trip as the skeptic and then you were there and the Presence and then had the whole bleeding experience yourself that it turned your life upside down how so? well if you can say

All right.

Yep. So that's interesting. One of Rettiger's claims is that like while he's watching John of God perform these surgeries, he spontaneously started bleeding from a hole in his side, which is like kind of like a stigmata thing. Right. He's introduced as a skeptic who traveled to John of God Center in order to take samples and medically vet whether or not this man was.

was a serious healer. 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. 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. I heard some people use the term spiritual anesthesia. I have no way to understand that.

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. It's like it's like perfectly explicable and like lending essentially the name of your institution and by claiming to be baffled. Yeah. Give it like credence is like.

God, truly pathetic. 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. Yes, psychology is more powerful probably in terms of physiological stuff than we give it credit for. And then pivoting to I want to have a spiritual life is like just an abdication of curiosity. Yep.

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, yeah, incredible. He's, 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. It hurt afterwards, like because just like it fucked up my ability, like my eye was taking in too much light or something like 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, which is part of why it took me a while to realize what had happened.

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. 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. And I actually found a scholarly study of his his surgeries conducted by doctors from a Brazilian medical school. They note that.

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

Incisions were performed with either sterilized scalpels or kitchen knives, and surgeries were performed in rapid succession. The cleanliness of the instruments contrasted to reports of other mediumistic surgeries performed by dirty or even rusty implements. So you 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. When actual scientists studied it like they know his knives are always sterilized and he's not cutting open people deeply and removing organs. He is scraping their skin in their eyes. 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? You've probably gotten a lot.

Because your body is reasonably good at not dying from random scrapes. Otherwise, there wouldn't be people. Yeah. Like, it's very frustrating. Another frustrating thing is that this study goes on to note that, like,

They don't know, like 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 like a lot of them like we're traveling in from elsewhere. So like the paper is a proper scientific paper and it concludes that like 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.

Dr. Rettiger, 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. Like you didn't even try. And I hate it. 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. Rettiger's performance on the blog Science Based Medicine. I'm going to quote from that now.

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

Personally, I'd have loved to see an ophthalmologist or even just a surgeon rather than a psychiatrist, because Dr. Rettiger is a psychiatrist, allowed to have a close-up view of John's activities. Rettiger is also shown in a video clip apparently bleeding from the chest, apparently after having viewed John do his cornea scraping bit. 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. Rediger is 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 psychiatrists specialize in. Yeah.

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

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

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. 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. Which is...

Great nonsense. Beautiful, beautiful nonsense.

So Dr. Rettiger's initiative appears to be defunct now. I don't think it exists anymore. I can't find evidence of that, but I didn't look super hard. So maybe I'm wrong. He does have a book out, however, called Cured with an exclamation point. And it's about people going into spontaneous remission. I don't know enough about Rettiger 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.

So I'm going to say it's probably fair to call him a grifter. You don't go on coast-to-coast AM if you're a credible person. Well, it's also like not acknowledging that spontaneous remission is 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 people want to read about it. People love reading books about magical healing and shit. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So, yeah, Dr. Rettiger 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. 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. 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. Quote,

The belief in the effectiveness of prayer is as old as civilization. The results are tough to pin down. Bernard Grad, PhD, a Canadian biologist from McGill University, worked with a spiritual healer named Oscar Estebané, conducting controlled studies in the late 1950s and 60s. Using mice that had been uniformly wounded, Estebané would place his hands upon the wire covers of certain cages, willing those animals to heal. The results were dramatic.

In one experiment, the wounds on Estebanis treated mice were very significantly smaller after two weeks than those of mice that had been left to heal on their own. 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. What that force was, however, no one could say for sure. Now, these studies happened. They're a real thing that happened. You can read them. 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.

What you won't find is any clear follow-up to this study. 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. This makes it difficult to refute because there really aren't direct refutations of Dr. Grad's work. What we do have, however, is almost a century of additional research into quote-unquote energy healing because, again, this stuff was done in the 50s and 60s. It wasn't a big study. It was conducted a long time ago

there's, we, you can't say that it was conduct, like we can't prove to a point of certainty that these people were actually conducting it well or, or abiding by all the rules they said they were. 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. She ignores, for example,

The fact that in 1999, three psychiatrists with the Lancet evaluated multiple studies, several hundred of them, that showed links between religious faith, faith healing, and energy healing and health benefits. Here's how Science Magazine reported on their findings. 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. 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. Many of them, he says, focused on such groups as Roman Catholic priests or Benedictine monks, which forbid certain risky behaviors. 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.

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. Overall, Sloan says, the evidence is very unconventional and weak, much weaker, for example, than the link between marital status and health. So again, 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. 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. If you look at the mass body of research, it doesn't look so good, but Susan Casey doesn't do that. Um, yeah, so that's cool. Um,

Following that 2010 episode of The Oprah Show, Oprah herself visited John of God in 2012. 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.

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

Yeah. But something else. Especially like all the other shit. It's like, who the fuck knows what's happening there? Yeah. Yeah. But something else also cropped up over the years. Allegations of sexual misconduct by John of God. 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. So that's good.

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, oh, I don't know. He just you know, he was just interested in heart surgery. 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. Yeah.

The mask of capitalism. And that means it's time for us to take our mask off and put some products and services on. Yeah. Hell yeah. We're back. Okay. So...

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

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. 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. 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. Quote,

Coppola was born in Peru but spent most of his life in California, where he worked as a computer engineer. After visiting the Casa in 2001, just to check it out, he married a Brazilian and moved to Abadiana. 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. 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. 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. So that's good. Yeah. Yeah. 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. It just seems like on the face, like...

Get the fuck out of there. Yeah. Yeah. 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 Casa since 2011, during which time she has sought treatment for her liver, kidney, and heart, as well as female problems. She also had lots of psychic surgeries, which is when the entities operate on patients remotely. 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.

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. She estimated she had spent $50,000 all up in airfare donations. I always donate to the Casa because John of God doesn't charge anything. And medications, such as healing herbs, which are sold at the Casa's pharmacy. I used my inheritance, $20,000 from my grandmother, to pay for a lot of it. But it's worth it. 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. Yeah. Yeah. First off, 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, I mean, I guess to that end, that's not that different than any religion. But no. Yeah. Or then actually getting medical treatment in the legal way if you don't have health insurance or if you do have health insurance. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, 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. And there's nothing in that that you can track pathologically. She vaguely says gynecological problems but also says like it's really my heart and like my emotional problems that he healed. Yeah.

And Susan Casey, the O Magazine author, was in the same boat. She was grieving, not physically ill. 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. 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. I'm going to quote now from a woman who wrote a story about her own treatment by John of God. This is what she described it as. Quote,

Meeting the medium was a solemn process. 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. 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. 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. It felt special, purposeful. I napped, hiked, and stood under that freezing holy waterfall. I prayed in front of the Kasa's triangle, a big wooden wall hanging whose three sides represented faith, love, and charity. And then I went home.

And, like, yeah, if you're fucked up and grieving and, like, in a lot of pain and you go to 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. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, of course it will. And having someone confidently say this is helping with your grief. This is helping. You will get better. 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.

There's nothing magical about it. It just is. It's good to go. 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. There's nothing controversial or inexplicable about that. Yeah. Yeah.

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

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

Yeah, that's going to help. Yeah. I mean, honestly, just like I could prescribe just don't be in Australia. Come on. Yeah. Get out of Australia is a general rule. Get out of Australia. We all know. We all know what you people get up to. Yeah. But of course, John, I've gotten his adherence. 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. That's where the real money's at. Yeah.

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

awesome smart yeah yeah yeah and and the uniform like starts to take away your identity and makes you more easy to manipulate and all that shit 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. Patients paid $60 an hour for the right to lie around a bunch of rocks. They also opened up a gift shop. 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. There are John of God pendants, postcards, and travel pillows, even glow-in-the-dark John of God wall stickers.

I really like imagining like the fucking like entity sweatshop where the guy just has to like or the spirit just has to. Oh, yeah. Like just, you know, for 40 gross 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. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Both the 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. 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. 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, a lot of religions have fancy water.

Now, the heart of the whole grift is the pharmacy, though. 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. Here's Tim. Quote,

I had assumed that the pharmacy would stock a range of different herbs to treat a variety of different conditions. But no, there is only one herb for sale here. Passiflora, the flower of the passion fruit plant. 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. 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. 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. And again, all of the people who see John, he is 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 by $50, some by $10 worth, 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 Christ. Great grift. A fucking plus grift, John of God. Like, very smart. So, Abediania is a small town. It is not located in a nice part of Brazil. 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. The way Tim describes it, John of God's financial leverage turned Abediania into his own personal fiefdom. Quote,

The biggest industry by far is medium Jiao. 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. These tours cost many thousands of dollars and must be approved by Jiao, or rather the entity. There are rumors that he also demands a percentage from the tour operators, but Coppola denies this. Medium Jiao 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. He also is definitely getting that kickback. Yeah. My my friends in the pot industry got into the wrong business. Just convince people that any random plant cures every year and start selling that shit like that. Yeah. Money. You don't even need real plants. They could just be putting grass in those bills and people wouldn't notice. Yeah. Or nothing. Yeah. Or nothing. Just sawdust. It's brilliant. Yeah.

So it soon becomes apparent just how much the town has been molded in the Joao the Entity's image. Photos of him are everywhere, on street poles, 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. He is the brand here, one visitor told me. The locals are now worried about how long he's going to live. The Entity oversees everything here, from new businesses, which must be Entity-approved, to new construction. One Australian CASA staff member told me that before building a house here, she ran the plans past the Entity. 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. The center made him interview all of John's regulars, men and women who claim he healed them. 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. 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. Quote, if one more person tells me about their amazing recovery, I'll kill them.

I'm a fan of Tim. 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. John's response? I thought you came to talk about me, not other people. Ha ha ha ha ha!

That's fucking awesome. I mean, I guess if you're going to pass the buck, 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. 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. The person making the allegations was a thief. So, like, very credible guy here. Yeah.

Then the interview ended. And for a while, that was about all anyone had on the allegations against John of God. 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. When asked if this was hypocritical, John of God responded, what barber cut

his own hair and went right back to fleecing thousands of people per year which is just great like I'll cure your cancer but if I get cancer I'm going to get some fucking chemo yeah 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? Oh, God. Please don't. We are FDA-backed to say that all 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, they can come after me. Come on, you fucking FDA cowards. Bring it on. Bring it on. Anyway, here's healing.

We're back. And I am just waiting for the FDA to try and take me on. Let's do it. Come on.

They'll take this cancer from your cold, dead hands. Yeah. Yeah. Fucking. I don't know. I don't know. Who knows what's happening anymore? Yeah. Doesn't matter. 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. 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. 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.

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. By the time the 300th allegation hit, the chief lawman in Goyas was forced to issue a preventative incarceration request against John of God. And

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. I'm still a brother in God. I want to comply with Brazilian law. I am in its hands. João de Deus is still alive, he told his followers. When he left only 10 minutes later, he told reporters that he was innocent of all accusations. 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. Respect my father, one of the volunteers asked.

Now, I included that quote about that John of God cult member saying, respect my father, which is because I think it's really interesting. And it's interesting because John's actual daughter accused him of sexual assault. 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. Oh, God.

True.

Now, eventually more than 600 women came forward to level accusations against John of God. Like it is hard to overstand that. I'm sure it's thousands. 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. But we know 600 women leveled accusations against.

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. 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.

Police who interrogated him started to report bizarre incidents, including their computer spontaneously typing the letters. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. A bunch of times the printer printing spontaneously and a mini fridge exploding. These reports are almost certainly untrue. 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. You know, we started this episode talking about like the police tend to be on these guys sides because they believe the bullshit. Yeah. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

So,

Sabrina wrote, quote, or stated, quote, hundreds of girls were enslaved over the years, lived on farms in Goya, served as wombs to get pregnant for their babies to be sold. These girls were murdered after 10 years of giving birth. We've got a number of testimonies. We have 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. Now, those are some wild-ass allegations. Yeah. And, uh,

Unfortunately, I don't know if any of this really happened. Sabrina was absolutely right about John of God's career of sexual abuse. Hundreds of women came forward, including his own daughter. Like, and there's so much testimony. It's very clear what happened. But the baby smuggling stuff...

There's not hard evidence of this. An investigation is ongoing into it. And Sabrina Bittencourt, like she got hounded out of her home and deluged in death threats and suffered a mental breakdown. She came out with these allegations days before committing suicide. She was a sexual abuse survivor herself, clearly traumatized by that, as well as the ocean of death rates. This doesn't mean that her allegations weren't accurate because there's actually a long history in Brazil that includes to the present day of like

particularly Christian cults that have farming communes abducting people, basically, and forcing them into slavery to grow plants and shit. 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. And you won't find any credible publications that have gone into the matter in detail, because really all we have are the allegations and the fact that they're being investigated. And

And unfortunately, it is unlikely we will ever know the truth, because if Bittencourt's allegations are accurate, it is highly unlikely that the Bolsonaro administration would allow the truth to get out. Because Jair Bolsonaro has connections to John of God, and a lot of members of his political party were backers of John of God. 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. And the truth's just not going to fucking get out. So...

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. But there's just a lot that's unclear about this story that will be up in the air for years. Hopefully, good investigations will kind of come to a more concrete conclusion about some of this stuff in the future. 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. 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. And at age 77, he is very likely to die in prison. So that's something. Yeah. Something, I guess, resembling justice. Jesus Christ. Yeah. If you like squint. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, 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 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. Is is but why it always feels like it follows like such a similar blueprint. It's like, you know.

It like every cult feels the same. Yeah. I mean, cause they, cause 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 because the same sort of tactics, the same sort of promises, um, a,

tracked and work on the same sort of people and the same kinds of folks are able to successfully carry out these grifts because being able to do the work that these kind of people do, like John of God, isn't all that different from, um,

A guy like L. Ron Hubbard, like they all have more more more alike than different or all that different from Sarah Paula White Kane, Donald Trump's spiritual advisor. They're all they just pick different kind of ways to do the same thing. Right. 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 just leaves a huge amount of human shrapnel in its wake.

which sucks. Yeah. Jesus Christ. This is fucking dark as shit, man. Yeah, man. This one's a rough story. Yeah. Yeah. And like, I just, I wish we knew more about the baby farming stuff. There just doesn't seem to be,

solid information. And also just like Sabrina bitten court 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. Yeah. Yeah. Which is also tragic. And 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. God, yeah.

God, that's fucking horrible. Yeah, it's not great.

Yeah, another successful episode of Behind the Bastards. Yep, we really nailed it today. Just grim shit. How often does it end in anything resembling justice? Can't be that often. Yeah, not all that often. Most of them don't wind up in prison. I guess everyone dies, but still. Yeah, about 15% of the time, something that resembles justice happens to these guys.

Yeah. About 15% of the time, I'll say. I feel like that's high, Robert. I feel like it's probably lower. Maybe. Look, if you the fan want to go through and run the numbers, please do. I hate numbers and don't trust them. Yeah, I don't do math. Yeah.

Someone run the stats. Run the stats on the bastards. Let us know. Run the stats or just listen to Run the Jewels. It's better than statistics. But only one. Only one. You can't do both. Yeah, no, absolutely.

That's the key. Andrew, do you have anything you want to plug after that really just uplifting conversation you just had? Yeah, God. I guess, I mean, look, this is probably the only podcast that I can comfortably say that, yo, is this racist? Where we take some of the worst, you know, just situations and shit in the news. People's, like, questions on racism. It's horrible often. Not horrible, horrible, but...

I can definitively say we're less depressing than this. Word. Check it out. You can find us on BehindTheBastards.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. Check it out. The Women's War is uplifting and it's hopeful. Yeah. I'm more hopeful than this bullshit. 100%.

Damn. Have a good day, everyone. Yeah. Thanks for having me. This is, I mean, I can't say it was fun, but it was certainly something. Yep. It was certainly something. So, yep, we're done. I'm going to stop recording now. Yeah.

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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 B.T.K. on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Beautiful young women, full of life and dreams, murdered or vanished without a trace. Their families left with nothing but heartbreak, questions, and memories.

I'm Nancy Grace. This week on Crime Stories, we uncover the truth behind these unsolved cases. We work to bring justice and answers to grieving families. Please don't miss Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, listeners. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco, host of the Murder on Songbird Road podcast. Murder on Songbird Road revisits a controversial 2020 murder that occurred in southern Illinois. It divided a community and pitted families against one another. But questions remain as to whether the mother of four serving time for the crime is actually guilty.

I'm excited to tell you that you can get access to all episodes of Murder on Songbird Road 100% ad-free and one week before anyone else with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus, and subscribe today.

What's lighting my dumpster fires? I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards. 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. And we'll probably be lighting some dumpsters on fire tonight. 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. Hey, what's going on? Matt Lieb.

How are you doing? I'm doing well. I'm excited to be here. 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. Yep, we're 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. A niche TV show that only people who really like art

And that's that's why we talk about it. We talk about the art. 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. You bought a gun. I did. I did. I did buy a gun this morning. Yeah.

Not for Sopranos like uses, 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. 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 and it's great.

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... Look, we Italians are not a subtle people. No, they spend that whole episode literally dying of 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. It's the most...

Italian thing in the world. But I want to hear about this gun. Oh, it's just a gun. But today we have something much more exciting than a gun. We have a bastard. And our bastard... Are you ready for this? I'm so excited. Are you settling in? Yes. Dr. Mehmet Oz!

I never introduced them like that. We're talking about Dr. fucking Oz today. Yes, that's right. Who would have thought he'd be a bastard? A TV doctor? Who would have thought a TV doctor could be a bad man? No, they take an oath. TV doctors, they say do no harm and get good ratings. That's the Hippocratic Oath. Do they also oath to be bad guest hosts on Jeopardy because he sucked and I didn't enjoy it?

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. Yeah, straight up. Immediately. I'm not going to compete with LeVar Burton. Respectfully fuck off, sir. Fighting Geordi? Fighting Kunta Kinte? Fighting whatever the Reading Rainbow guy's name was? No, sir. I think it was just LeVar. LeVar! Yeah.

Yeah, no, I did not watch him on Jeopardy, but I have seen the show and had no idea he was a bastard.

Yes, he's a piece of shit. 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. Dr. 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 will have us a nice talk about at the end of this episode. Do tell.

So I've always said that one of the great tragedies of American public life is 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. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I agree. Yeah.

They're not hot. I've always said doctors. They're not hot enough. They're not hot. I look at them. I'm like, oh, like 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 health care in America. It won't be universal health care, 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. It's more the fact that they're not necessarily even the ones who are 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. This has led to a thriving industry, well documented in the show of grifter health influencers and scam artists selling people poison with honeyed words and practice smiles.

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. The guy we're talking about today exists to give them credibility and launder them into the public consciousness. And his name is...

is Mehmet Oz. 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

Even 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. 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.

And that's that's a bad thing to do. It's kind of made worse. We'll talk about this a lot by the fact that he is he's a he's a 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 I felt when Ben Ben Carson turned out to be a Trump guy. I was like, but you're so good.

The brain surgery. It's always surgeons. Which, you talk to doctors, they'll be like, yeah, of course it's always surgeons. Yeah. They're the ones who think they're gods, right? 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 politics and shit like that. I think good surgeons are...

so prone to being also like nonsense, like so many of our nonsense public doctors or surgeons for the same reason that so many of our terrorists are engineers. 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 great. It just makes me glad that I never...

you know, got really proficient in any one skill. Never gain skills. I never, never ever learned 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. And you know what? We wouldn't have salesman. Oh yeah. Or that.

We would have very little at all. Mimit Sengez 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. We have to assume his parents fucked in October. You don't know that. Yeah, he could be immaculate conception. Yeah. You know, possible. I would say right now the most likely theory is that they fucked sometime in October.

Oh, all right. 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. And obviously, you know, Great Depression, bad time everywhere. Real bad time if you're like in rural Turkey, you know, you're dealing with a different kind of poverty than even like our grandparents dealt with here. Yeah. Yeah.

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. So this is a hardworking man.

and a man who has to struggle I'm going to guess in ways that are kind of difficult to imagine for most of us even as difficult as our present times are he's like a true lift yourself up by your bootstraps kind of guy yeah came from the middle of like nowhere rural Turkey and worked himself into becoming a good enough doctor that he got you know he was able to get over the racism of the fucking 1950s immigration system you know

That's an achievement. Yeah, good for him. Started from the bottom and now he's on TV selling fake cures. That's his dad. Oh, that's his dad. That's not Mehmet. Yeah, that's Mustafa.

So we're talking about his dad and his mom right now. His mom, Suna, came from a much wealthier background. 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. She grew up

with a lot of money. As befits his more modest upbringing, Mustafa was an observant traditional Muslim. Suna's family was more moderate and secular. 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.

Mehmet was 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. In one interview, he noted of this, quote, "'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?' 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? That's way too much stock into the year of what animal you were born into.

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. You really got to just shove your face into food as hard as you can. You roll around in the shit and then you hope that someday you'll find another piggy to fuck. And then you have little piglets. 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. Yeah.

Well, that's a it's a nice take on year of the rat for him. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. Yeah. 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? That was always the question he asked. Cool dad. Sounds like a fun guy would hang. Yeah. I mean, this.

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. And so you had a lot of kids who would talk that way about their parents. Right. 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 one in one case seizing as a result of stress. Like, Jesus. Yeah.

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. It's not worth it. Don't 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 gotta fucking... He won't love you no matter what. Yeah, exactly. Stop caring about your dad, you know? Just coast. Find some dirt

Eat some grubs. You'll be fine. Yeah. Start a Sopranos podcast. Yeah.

That's all you've got to do, dude. Really bringing it back there. 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. 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 a doctor.

Mamet, go kill that kid. Fuck!

Murder that loser kid and tell me what you want to do with your life. God damn. That is way too much pressure. Way, way too much pressure to put on a kid. 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, I didn't get to do what I wanted to do with my life. And now I'm miserable.

Yeah, yeah, it's a real bummer.

Yeah. It's not just don't put pressure on people. There's plenty of grubs. Yeah. 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. Jesus, that sounds horrible. I know. It sounds like a fucking nightmare. The fancy boy. Yeah. Uniforms, ties. Yeah.

Yeah, probably like lots of bullying during the summer. Yeah. 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. 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.

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, I just look back now at my own childhood and I'm like,

God damn it, if I can think of one friend 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. It was mostly just like, how's your hip hop album working out? And they're like, good. And you're like, cool. And that was the whole thing. That's interesting. 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. I didn't go to a private school, but I went to a public school in, uh,

My early schooling years was in a dirt poor farming town called Idabel, Oklahoma. And the school was as good as it could be in a place like that. Like they paddled us and stuff like it was not not a high end educational way. But once I do in a public school. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, damn. They still did that in Oklahoma back in them days. Yeah. You got to sign the paddle afterwards, too. Nice. Yeah.

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. 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.

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. I was in ROTC. 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. And I think most of my friends, um,

either wanted to they were either going to go into the army or they were 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 that. He's my older brother, too, from the time that he was like seven. So like and I and I'm like, no idea. Yeah.

I'm just saying, 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's just... They always have that, like, sense where they're trying to get... You're some sort of stepping stone into their... Whatever their career path is. And I don't like it. So...

Oz took only one break during his relentless progress through medical school, and 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. Other than that, straight forward.

on to like becoming a doctor. That's the only kind of break. So I guess that's his gap year is being in the Turkish army. I'm just going to take a break, have a gap year and join the military of a foreign country. Yeah, help suppress, you know, Kurdish liberatory movements and stuff, whatever. Yeah.

They got to stop trying to have their own thing. Yeah. He got a four year degree in biology and then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he doubled up working on both an M.D. and an M.B.A. He succeeded in earning both. So that's interesting to me. He gets both. He gets at the same time as he's getting his M.D. He also gets a business degree.

Yeah, this is very there's a lot of foreshadowing going on. There's some foreshadowing. 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. 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. In 1985, at age 25, he married Lisa Limol, who was the daughter of a cardiothoracic surgeon who worked with his father. They met at like a party or something. 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. We'll talk about that more in a little bit.

For the next decade and change, Dr. Oz's career zoomed forward. 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. Yeah, I got zero boards under my belt. Not a one. Not a single board between the three of us.

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, hit us up. If you're a board out there, please. Well, actually, you know what? The state of New Jersey has certified me as a reverend doctor. So I'm one board certified. I assume that counts. 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? I put, you know, I know a guy. That sounds legal enough. 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. Over time, he authors hundreds of peer reviewed articles and he's awarded 11 patent

One of them is for a solution to preserve transplanted organs. Another is for an aortic valve that can be implanted without open heart surgery. Like he's he's not just really good at the mechanics of surgery. He's an excellent scientist. Yeah. Eleven patents is pretty good. Seriously.

One might say he's the wizard of Oz. I think I read like six articles with variations of that title on the guy. All right. Well, I got to go then. Bye, guys. 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. Got to call him a wizard.

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. 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. Yeah. 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 fucking resume. Like, that's a hell of an achievement. Yeah. 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.

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. I mean, I don't know any other heart surgeons by name. So, fuck. Yeah. He's the guy. Yeah.

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. 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. Quote,

Thank you.

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.

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. In this ultimate theater of scientific medicine, the women were using their hands as kings once did to treat subjects with scrupula. And as Jesus is said to have done, and as shamans and mothers and Chinese Qui Gong practitioners still do, 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? Yeah, you got to get that meridian. That's the best part of the kidney is the meridian. That's the most delicious part of the kidney is the meridian. Oh, man. With fucking on a Ritz cracker sliced thin. I love me some. A little bit of. You just want to get. You want to get like some duck fat or some butter. 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. That's all you fucking with. Just a little bit of little bit of char, you know? Yeah.

I mean, this all feels like he's going to start turning his patients into foie gras. And I'm very excited for what's to come. This heel turn that he's going to take. So, yeah, that's silly. I think that's silly. But...

At the other hand, it's in a hospital. These people are clearly following sanitation guidelines. They're not getting paid. The patient's not getting charged extra. 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. So...

I'm going to let him fuck with my kidney meridian. 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? 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. And it seems like, from what I can tell, that sounded...

non-invasive. It's not. Yeah, they were just doing energy work or whatever. They were throwing, you know, crystals and doing fucking pendulums over over him. It falls into the category of it couldn't possibly hurt. So why not give it a shot? Right. Yeah. We'll talk about this more later. But that's kind of what they were going for. You know what else can't hurt?

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, you know, spend all your money and gain immortality.

We're back. We're talking about Dr. Oz, who in the mid-90s has started some weird alternative medicine stuff. Now, he's not the person who starts the alternative medicine program at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, which is also like a teaching hospital, whatever. 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. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Doctors fucking 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. 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.

It was not started at the behest of anyone at the top of the school. 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. Just gifted money and just said, start a magic doctor in school. And they're like, OK, yeah.

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. Mm hmm.

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. 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 even like, like she went through chemo and it did nothing, you know, I get it. You go through something, I think, okay, well, let's try other shit, you know? Yeah. Um,

So I can't I can't even blame Richard for like it seems like he was motivated out of grief to do this. You know, 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 will blame the snake oil salesman. I'm never going to blame someone who's like, well, doctor said they can't cure me. So I'm going to eat this root, you know, why not go for it? Who gives a shit? Like, I can't hurt.

If you're definitely going to die. Yeah. 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 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 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 because they're dead.

shock the shit out of them 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 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 gonna get out of that is a really cool tiktok video of electrocuting a dead body absolutely and then you get a fuckload of followers and then you start selling brain pills it's a perfect plan uh so yeah um

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. 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?

That said, a lot of medical professionals were really angry about the idea. Dr. 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. 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. I call practitioners a fraud, practitioners a fraud. It's my feeling that the Rosenthal Center has been promoting fraudulent alternatives is genuine.

And I get his critiques. You know, 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. And maybe some of those people do that. Not the way Dr. Oz is doing it, where we're going to do the normal medical procedure. We'll have this done. Maybe some people decide I just want to have the energy work done. And then they dropped out of a heart attack because it doesn't replace a valve. You know, I'd like to think that even at a.

hospital or research facility with Western medicine that they still peer review and try out different

you know, like alternative medicines, right? You know, like some of them, some of them work, some of them work. 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 was,

swore by it for his Parkinson's. And even if it was, I don't know, you could say it's like fucking whatever placebo, but he experienced relief. So I don't care. Like, yeah, yeah. 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. 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 benefits. Not that that's the norm, but it has happened in history, you know, different kind of traditional or whatever treatments.

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. Oz from participating in it. His explanation as to why he embraced alternative medicine was, to be quite honest,

Kind of brilliant. He said that his, by this point, vast experience as a real doctor had really informed him of the limits of medical science. Specifically, he said that while he could sew 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.

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, that can help with depression and that can help with healing. And he's right about that. That's not a bad point to make.

Yeah.

Dr. 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. 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.

Mehmet Oz is one of those rare beings who seem incapable of sloth. 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. And then at three, he's supposed to fly to Boston to deliver a lecture. 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.

He runs down lobs, sizes 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 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. I'd be like, you think you could maybe take your time with this, bro? Like, could you please? I do. It is a matter. We'll talk about the ZN2. We don't have enough of these guys. It's actually a major health problem. How few people there are that can do this. Yeah. Yeah.

But it is exhausting. Everything you read about this guy's daily... You're just one of those people who... I think...

I kind of get the feeling, I don't want to psychoanalyze someone, but you get the feeling he can't be alone and still like he, he, he has to always be moving towards something. Yeah. He's got his dad in the back of his head, 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. It's just like, yeah. I mean, I imagine that, uh, would, uh, create a bit of a problem later in life with, uh, stillness. Yeah. Yeah.

I feel for him a little bit in that. Sure. Now, the article also goes into more detail about how Dr. Oz's wife's family piqued his interest in alternative medicine. 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. 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. She once refused surgery for her own inflamed gallbladder and handled it instead by altering her diet. She taught her son-in-law, Dr. Oz about using Arnica for sore muscles and herbal tea for stomach aches.

So he gets brought in, in part, 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. You know, music, I think there's some data now on how music can help with certain aspects of the healing process. Right. Mother-in-law seemed to be on the cutting edge of that. When you said the rock doc, I got concerned. I thought he was going to, like, replace people's hearts with crystals and shit. And I was like, oh, no. Oh, no. Yeah.

They all die, but my God, their hearts are pretty. So this is how Mehmet gets introduced to the wide world of quack cures. And it makes sense. 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. 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. 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 realize.

like think to disagree with that it didn't used to be common um 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 and i think that kind of opens his eye to like well maybe all this other shit works yeah yeah maybe everything in my head is correct yeah 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. Oz's love of energy work, particularly his work with a lady named Motz, who believed she could sense the energy of heart transplant patients. The Times article certainly does not portray this woman in a particularly positive light. Quote,

She now has her surgical sea legs under her, but the first time Motts observed open-heart surgery, she had a shaky debut. 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. The patient was obviously not awake, but probably had some awareness, most likely smell and perhaps hearing. 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.

For the bypass team, it was quite a novelty to hear Motz 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. At one point, seeing that Motz 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. It's a tenseness. No, it's a growling. No, wait a minute. I'm just hungry. Laughter

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 heart. But yeah, it's it's one of those things. I'm not sure exactly what type of energy work this person is doing because there's a few different kind of categories of it. Yeah.

I should check in the vibes, dude. She's checking the vibes, just making sure, you know, the vibe dipstick is filled with oil. I should note if I'm going to be totally fair that Reiki, 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. And I have some friends who swear by it for kind of physical and emotional pain in particular. Yeah.

I don't know what Ricky is. I've heard of it. Is it like when Mr. Miyagi rubs his hands together and then he puts his warm hand? It's like energy work, I guess. I don't know. 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 I don't know.

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 Reiki practitioners to their stable of available of 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.

And it's worth noting that a number of the positive studies about Reiki and other similar things were conducted by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. 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. 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. Their results are therefore untrustworthy. The two studies that were well-designed failed to demonstrate effects from energy and healing.

The odds of generating a useful result of a clinical trial of energy medicine are small. Moreover, what impact would negative studies have? Scientists will simply say, we could have told you so, and proponents are unlikely to change their mind. Proponents may then claim that the negative study must have been flawed or that energy medicine cannot be investigated by the tools of science. Or they might rely on the NCCAM, that organization I talked about, funded...

studies that generated biased but apparently positive results. 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.

Man, we are just veering into anti-vax territory and like anti-mask territory. People who just they Google stuff and then they go, this article right here says that mass actually. They can't analyze. And it's from a government science organization. You know, these guys like and there's a study that's and it's like, well, OK, 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.

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. Oz 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.

You can draw a direct line. I don't know if we would have an NCCA and without Dr. Oz, I don't know. You can't say that for certain. Um, but he is someone who, before his embrace of alternative medicine starts to be well known as an exceptional doctor and scientists, he embraces this stuff. Columbia, uh,

starts studying this stuff. 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. The organization is filled with people who already believe in it, carrying out tests that are flawed. And it helps prepare this culture of believing that

too much in this stuff. My God, it's just like it's a real life Facebook group. You know, it's just like everyone already believes in all the stuff and they just keep like just co-signing each other's bullshit. And it's one of those things like I again, I know people who swear by Reiki who gain, you know, emotional benefits from it, who think it helps with, you know, a number of things, including like physical, including emotional pain. And like if you find something that helps you

alleviate your emotional pain more fucking power to you you know you're never gonna 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 shit oh my god morphing there's no downsides to morphine that's the 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. My issue is not so much with any particular treatment, not that not not even an issue that people would like. 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, I, I, I, I'm trying to be as fair as I can. Ricky 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. Plavix is a lot better. Um, and it's, it's, it's more to the point, even more than that, is it, it gets us on this, uh,

This 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. 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. And he plays a major role in legitimizing that.

He's he he helps put it. 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. You know, exactly. Exactly. So, yeah.

At this point, though, we're talking still in the mid-90s, everything Dr. Oz is saying is reasonable from a certain point of view. He's not claiming that Reiki is going to cure cancer. 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...

It's possible he's right. Yeah, 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. OK, yeah. 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.

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. You know, that's 250 lives a year. Yeah. Extended. Yeah. That's great. He's not a bastard yet. Yeah. He's doing great work so far. Yes. Despite the little weird heart stuff. Fine. A little bit of energy, a little bit of heart surgery. It works out. And the thing, though, that is interesting.

I think is happening during this period. And I don't know how conscious a choice this is by Dr. Oz. 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. I think he is at this point crafting his career to make himself into an ideal candidate for famous TV doctor. I think he is building a background that will allow him to establish his celebrity career later.

Um, 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. He almost built himself perfectly for that to happen.

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. But he succeeds. 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. And he eventually succeeds in 2004 in getting invited to Oprah Winfrey show.

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. 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. 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. Man, that is, I mean, I'm low-key impressed that he impressed Oprah with the doo-doo shapes. It's mom stuff, you know? Moms love poop. They do. They love talking about doo-doo. That's the thing.

And that's what Oz does exactly the right things to endear himself to millions of middle class moms. Which is...

the best market in the country. It's an incredible market. 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 digital, 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. And I would watch her stuff and I was like, this is, you know, maybe the most awesome,

shit I've ever seen. It was just a lady in a car yelling at people about kids. Yeah. And but the she was a famous mom. 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 it's the power of of

particularly middle class moms can't be exaggerated. Like in Portland, the cops and the feds were able to fuck over as many people as they wanted until they started gassing moms. Right. Exactly. The whole country's pissed. Yeah. They're like, like, hey, listen, you can do that to people of color, but those are moms. Those are white moms. Those are white moms. That could be my mother. Yeah. Yeah. You know what else?

Where are you going with that? 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.

We're back. So we've all just agreed that Matt is very funny. That was the discussion over the break. 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 want to blame him, Matt's home address is...

Oh, we love to dox our guests. Dox me, baby. 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. And although I'm not saying this in a positive sense, is unfortunately accurate.

He's definitely America's doctor. Just appealing to the lowest common denominator, the stupidest human being on Earth. America's doctor. And if you look at the health of the average American, you can tell the quality of job he's done. Eat more bread. 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. I'm not going to defend. I just love to be fair. You know, I know you know, you're very fair. Look, say what you will about Hitler. No, you will. He was a vegetarian and that's good for the environment. The man cared about animal rights. Yeah.

By 2009, it was clear that Dr. Oz had more than enough star power to justify a shot at his own show. 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. 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. Moving personal stories and extraordinary surprises are featured throughout the hour as Dr. Oz meets viewers who share how his advice saved their lives. From those who noticed life-threatening diseases their doctors missed to those who lost weight thanks to his diet tips from Dr. Oz. 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 fucking 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, but years of mostly dangerous health based content. Oh, yeah. No, I mean, it's awful content. But the fact is, it's it's quantity over quality in America. And, you know, but an hour of just thanking Dr. Oz and having people come up to him like you save me. It's fucking wild. Worth noting in terms of his bastardry that in kind of the acceleration from, hey, maybe energy healing works to become.

Becoming a monster. 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. Yeah. Oh, of the of the Brazilian of gods. Yeah. Cool.

And on the episode in which she introduces John of God to America, Dr. 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, basically giving a real doctor's opinion that this guy's got to be legit.

Yeah. 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. It's a fucking nightmare. Wow. This guy never gets half the following that he has if it's not for Oprah and Dr. Oz. So. Wow. Holy shit. Oh, it's good shit. Good.

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. Oz had to spice up his act 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.

His show tackles topics as diverse and diversely weighty as skin cancer, kitchen burns, sleep eating, and pubic hair loss, returning constantly to the same television motherlode 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.

He explains that transition as the product of frustration. 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. With his TV show, he can exhort Americans to tend to all aspects of their health, head to toe, before they reach a point of no return.

Lose weight, go to Brazil and get sexually assaulted by a con man. Oh, God.

Oh, wow. You know, there's always that point. 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. There's no other comment. But what? Oh, that's crazy. But, you know, hey, John of God, Dr. Oz, they're they all sound like great people.

Yeah, yeah. And it's going to get worse. You know, 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. 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? Telling people to eat healthier is a good idea. America's diet sucks. His diet advice, I think, is, well...

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. And in America, that is the ultimate marker of doing the right thing. That's the only thing that tells you whether or not you're doing the right thing. Yeah. 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. Yeah.

Morally righteous. Righteous wealth. Yes. You know what else is righteous, Matt? Is it the products and services? No, my man. It's you. Because the episode's over. Part one is over. And 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 back. Yeah, that's very nice. Here I thought you were just trying to get me to talk about products and services.

Well, thank you for having me on. I have a product and or service called Pod Yourself a Gun. It's a Sopranos podcast. And 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. All right. Yeah. Well.

This is the show 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 screaming.

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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 B.T.K. on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Beautiful young women full of life and dreams murdered or vanished without a trace. Their families left with nothing but heartbreak, questions, and memories.

I'm Nancy Grace. This week on Crime Stories, we uncover the truth behind these unsolved cases. We work to bring justice and answers to grieving families. Please don't miss Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, listeners. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco, host of the Murder on Songbird Road podcast. Murder on Songbird Road revisits a controversial 2020 murder that occurred in southern Illinois. It divided a community and pitted families against one another. But questions remain as to whether the mother of four serving time for the crime is actually guilty.

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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 from pickup artists. From pickup artists, yes. Really, this whole show is based on the lessons I learned as a pickup artist. You can't see it, but I'm wearing an enormous hat with ostrich plumes coming off. 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. Sophie said that that means nothing and no one will listen to it. So we always put lies on my name and saying that I turned down his ideas. That's just not the case. So 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.

I agree with it. Thank you. On to the show. We're talking about Dr. Oz. And as we left the last episode off, he had just, you know, gotten Oprah, right? Started his TV career. Got an Oprah hard.

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. Never a 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. I, you know, and this is an opinion that's pretty controversial within iHeartRadio. I think radio should be illegal.

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, I think the only form of entertainment that should be legal is specifically my podcast. Yeah, yeah. One podcast. Yes. Yeah. And and there should legally only be one Sopranos podcast allowed, which, as it turns out, is the case. So I think if we if we could get Chuck Schumer's ear, we can make this happen.

We'll tack this onto the pot, Bill. No one will notice. So 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. Now, 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. 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.

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 famous series, colon, whatever. And he co-writes these books with another doctor. I can't tell you how much of the writing was a lot of times. I'm not saying this is the case with Dr. 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. I don't know if that's the case here. There's always one Matt Damon who's writing most of Good Will Hunting and then there's a Ben Affleck who gets top booking. And I do believe Matt Damon writes most of his books. Oh, 100%.

Yeah. So nine million copies of his various titles are in print by this point, like the first year of his show. So he is he is a very wealthy and successful man, pretty much out the gate, like money machine. 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. I just should have spent my youth trying to get on Oprah. We all should have. So, Dr. Oz gets a semi-regular column for Time Magazine because, again, they see this guy get famous and they're like, we gotta get some of that Oprah money too. We get this guy on Time, people will start reading Time again. Yeah.

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. 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 100 most influential people on the planet, Dr. Oz calls his dad, right? Like, finally, this has got to be the thing. How could 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? How high are you on the list? 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 listicle, bro. Yeah, it's not a listicle.

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. 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. Yeah.

Oh, God. But but like but like what number, though? Because you wonder what how high are you, motherfucker? Yeah, come on. How are you? You're basically me. Yeah. 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. Over the years, he did numerous columns, which were often just recycled from other columns or chunks of his books. He provided the same list of skin moisturizing or metabolism boosting tips in different magazines or online articles.

Even so, his workload was enormous. The Dr. Oz 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. And the man continued to practice as a surgeon, albeit at a reduced rate.

The New York Times interviewer who visited him in 2010 seemed to find his behavior and kind of his compulsive workaholism somewhat unsettling. 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. 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. His portions assiduously regulated like an intravenous drip of nutrition. It was the most efficient, joyless eating I have ever seen. That is so weird. I'm sorry. That's so weird. That made me so uncomfortable.

to just listen to. He's cool, dude. He's living life in the most drab way possible. Just trying to make TV shows and do heart surgeries. Who has time to enjoy anything when you're dead? Joyless, efficient eating. He's like, I don't eat or drink anything that I would enjoy.

Yeah. You're welcome. 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. 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. And I guess, like, I mean, yeah, fine. It's like, it's whatever. It's your life. If you want to eat monkey food, eat monkey food. But don't, you know, be surprised when I judge you, you know? Yeah.

Like, it's weird. At the start, the Dr. Oz show was broadly inoffensive from a medical perspective. He gave a lot of fairly good common sense 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. But

But Oz's fascination with alternative medicine was present from the beginning. 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. 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? Yeah. Yeah.

punching people in the dick could it improve your bowels why not try it I mean you know we have to do I don't know how much content we have to do per year 52 weeks 2 hours a week 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

175 hours of video content is huge. Like, you can't. There's not that much good and also entertaining medical advice that you can give in a year, let alone every single year. I mean, just like, there's only so many organs to talk about. You know? After a while, you just gotta invent shit. Yeah, and it's this thing. It's this kind of, this inevitable churn of capitalism leading us all into this specific kind of nonsense because you can't

not have content legally you're contracted to but also you have this whole team of people whose ability to pay their rent whose ability to to afford their homes to keep their kids in school is dependent upon you doing this show outside of just the fact that he's rich like he's fine but he like 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 right so you start

In his case, doing nonsense about mediums and shit...

And in our case, doing episodes about Dr. Oz. 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. I needed an off week, you know? God. We all need off weeks. That is one of my favorite, absolutely real documents to read. Yeah. Yeah.

That's why we brought you on, actually. Yeah. I'm actually one of the elders of Zion, and I got some protocols for you. Oh, good times. Good times.

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 vs. Medicine. 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. Energy healing was, you know, on the fringe, obviously.

Certainly. But at least it was something that when he started doing it, there were scientific studies saying there might be something to it. Those studies have since been to 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. 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. Yeah.

You know, it depends how they're taught. 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. Oz breaks into morgues and talks to corpses. Yeah. Hey, how'd you die? Just just just having his bodyguards, mace police officers rolling into a crime scene. Be like, who did this? How'd this go down?

Are you okay? Hey, I am a doctor. Do you want some almonds? They're soaked in water for more nutrition.

All right, someone get me a crystal. So, yeah, he had. Yeah. Dr. Oz had among his psychic guests, famous grifter King John Edwards on his show. Not the politician. No, no. The talks to dead TV show guy. Yeah. Yeah.

And he praised the reading that he received from John Edwards saying, quote, 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. Right.

which is almost exactly what he said about John of God, the guy who raped hundreds of people. Yeah. That's how, you know, like to stay far away from anything when he's just like, man, this is a, this is a brand new groundbreaking territory. And you can go, all right, guys, it's a rapist. Ron. It's one of those things. 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. One of those things is the nature of consciousness and what happens to it after, uh,

you know, vital sciences. We don't know. There's not an objective answer to that. But going this way is kind of like being like, yeah, you know, we can't explain like science

the slit box experiment 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 yeah how do they work how do they work it's this is this jump from yes there are things we can't explain to so let's listen to this man talk to the dead millions of people gather around gather around he's going to channel your dead aunt yes um

Maybe not not a reasonable way to take a reasonable starting point. Yeah, especially when you're a doctor on TV. Yeah. 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. Mossaraf Ali, a miracle healer to Sylvester Stallone, Prince Charles of England, and others regarding his use of iridology. 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. After expressing his amazement at Dr. Ali's diagnostic abilities, Oz stated, I want to

applaud Dr. Mossaraf Ali because these are ancient traditions and they have been around for centuries. So who am I to dismiss them?

Other than a very well-educated man. A doctor. You're a doctor, Mehmet. You had me at Prince Charles. Yeah. It's like, you know, there's a lot of cultures who say that you should remove the clitoris surgically because 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's wrong? Yeah.

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. How did he know? How did he know? It does bring me joy that Prince Charles got fucked with. Cause fuck Prince Charles. I wonder what his eyes said. It's funny. It 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. Your dad will never love you. Thank you so much. There's this, this,

one of the big aspects of this guy's success and of the success of the things he pushes is, is Orientalism, right? Right. Um, like this idea of like the forbidden and strange and wondrous and magical East and all of the, we don't understand all of these, like, Oh, India is so mysterious. Yada, yada, yada. Um, it,

What if you were to say like, well, for centuries, tobacco companies have said that tobacco can cure like 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.

I mean, yeah, just the idea. And I've always found this in general to be the biggest load of horse shit is when people have have said, you know, this is like an ancient healing technique. And it's like, you mean like bleeding people with leeches? You know, you mean like cutting off someone's leg because he got a fucking a small infection on his toe? Ancient. It's this fucking thing with Dr. Oz. Like.

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 to say anything about it? 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. You're the guy. You're the person. You are, in fact, the person who should say something about who am I? You're you.

He's the most famous doctor in America. Yeah, and that's what that write-up in the Journal of Missouri State Medical Association notes. Quote, who? Dr. Oz is a trained clinician and scientist. Someone who can read a scientific article with a critical eye. 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. I mean, it's, 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, to the network for ratings. You know, you know who else has a responsibility to the show sponsors? Wow. I know. That was, I think that's gotta be the first time. That's gotta be the first time it's ever actually been a relevant segue. So fucking good. So good. Anyway,

Anyway, here's products. Ah, we're back. Talking about Dr. Oz. Having just a great time. So, obviously, the fact that Dr. Oz... I mean, probably the fact that most of his audience couldn't discern whether or not any of these nonsense treatments were real is a big part of why the Dr. Oz show became an overnight success. Before very long, it was being watched by 4 million viewers every single day. True.

Jesus.

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? I mean, I'm sure he found some way to, like, make the claim or whatever. But it's very... I don't know. Maybe. It is one of the things that he does that is... We'll talk about. There's problems with some of the diet tips he gives people, actually. Significant ones. But telling, like, inspiring people to lose weight is not...

usually bad for their health, although it can be. Sometimes people take it too far and it causes significant health problems. It's a mixed bag, I guess we'd say. But the other stuff isn't a mixed bag, so I guess we'll call that his great success. So,

Yeah, it is good. I will say it is unequivocally good that Dr. Oz continually pressed his audience of millions of people to eat more fruits and vegetables, fruits and vegetables to get better sleep, to exercise regularly and to get their flu vaccinations. That's all rad, right? Yeah.

but shit, I could have told you that. Give me a TV show. You don't have to, you don't have to be a doctor to say that. No, that shit. Yeah. Eat better piggies. I mean, he's charismatic. People like him. It's good that he, he does that at least. Yeah. I don't trust me. So they won't give me the show, but they should. Cause yeah. The unfortunate part is that this guy gained because he's, he's handsome. A lot of, a lot of, a lot of ladies out there think Dr. Oz is hot. Uh,

He's a doctor. He's very charismatic. 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. 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. And

and suggested that green coffee is a miracle cure for obesity. Federal regulators discovered altered data in hyped coffee bean evidence. The Food and Drug Administration tested for arsenic in apple juice and found the vast majority of apple juice tested to contain low levels of arsenic, and given these levels, was confident in the overall safety of apple juice consumed in this country.

Dr. 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.

Man, I mean, he's getting there. I'm watching him slowly go from Mehmet to Mengele. Come on, let him be Mengele. It is too good a pun to skip. 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 turn into a snake oil salesman, and it's very exciting.

Yeah. 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.

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. 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 website.

products yes i've seen this yeah i've seen this this is where we get to the big harm 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 he just puts a can of colt 45 on the table billy d williams walks out

it's a steel reserve trust me you'll be relaxed you'll be calm as shit you might yell at your mom but it'll be fun afterwards yeah you will very calmly put your hand through a taxi cab window

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. 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.

Mulberry. Laudanum. I remember the eye chill. That turned into like an entire thing. There's so many drinks like that now. We're about to talk about it. Yeah. And also, if there was a laudanum drink, I would be buying it. Oh, yeah. So the problem with this is that all of these different relaxation drinks are filled with a variety of chemicals like melatonin and theanine and taurine.

These drinks are unregulated as they are not medicines or dietary supplements, but the chemicals they include all have actual impacts on the central nervous system. Pregnant women and children are often advised to avoid products with some of these chemicals. Pregnant women and children are advised to avoid products with some of these chemicals.

But the beverages in question rarely note this. No data exists on how these chemicals might impact people in 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. Responsible doctors, writing for the journal Nature Neuroscience, wrote a warning about these beverages that specifically called out iChill by name. Quote,

Existing research on the potential benefits and harms of some components of relaxation drinks suggests that they may not always be safe. 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.

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. 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?

Yeah, buddy. What the fuck? Like, I want to eat and just get tired immediately. Like, that is very strange. Like, here's the thing about brownies. 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, a sleepy time brownie.

delightful. I would be very down. Listen, pot brownies are very different. It's not the same as relaxation brownies. One is like an ambient brownie and the other one is like a brownie that makes you hungry for more brownies.

Pot brownies make sense. Ambien brownies exist. I would love one. Thank you. I mean, I guess I'd rather do that than just swallow an Ambien. But man, that is 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? But wasn't the I show like like the bottle and the marketing like similar 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. But like 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. Which is crazy that like literally a relaxation drink could be contraindicated for your prescription medication. OK, so everything Dr. Oz recommends, I guess, outside of like death psychics comes with this caveat that

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. Oz does not bring this up when he shotguns half-assed advice out to an audience of millions. That article in Nature Neuroscience that I referenced, warning about the relaxation drinks Oz recommended?

It's been read 10,000 times. 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. Oz's episode suggesting these drinks listened, watched 4 million times. God damn. Yeah.

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. 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. Dude, I'm about to live to 200 years old. I ain't never dying, motherfucker. I ain't never dying. I get one out at least once a day.

365. 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. He bases the number on a study done at Duke University that surveyed people on the amount and quality of sex they had. They looked at what happened to folks that are receiving a lot of intercourse over time, and the fact is, it correlated.

Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait. Is it sex? Because he didn't say nothing about sex. He said orgasms. And I do that on my own. He talked to him about the amount and quality of sex they had. But it's correlated. So again, he's basically lying here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Number one...

what is the possibility that people who are having a lot of good sex are in better health? And 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, yeah,

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. 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, is, is exaggerating this. He's, he's taking an actual study that showed some interesting stuff and he's turning it into a lie.

Yeah, he's turning it into like pretending he has quantifiable data and that like correlation and correlation is causation like that. Yeah, that's that's what he's trying to do. 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. 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 if they have a heart attack someone's going to be there to call like there's a lot of reasons why this is the case yeah they're not dying alone you know 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 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 not coming enough i'm gonna die we gotta do this more 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 exactly dr oz said i should fuck more

Now, on its own, recommending that people get more sex is, you know, fine. I'm very pro-sex, but I am anti-encouraging people to misunderstand health science. The nature of Dr. 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. 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. The man got second and third degree burns on his feet.

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. 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. I'm worried you might burn yourself. Dr. Oz is just saying, hey, this will help you sleep. Do it, whoever you are. Do it, idiots! You're talking to four million people. It would be bad advice for some of them. I mean...

It's like, yeah, this all feels very much like when Trump was telling everyone about the wonders of hydro hydroxychloroquine. Oh, yeah. We're going to talk about that later. And then people are eating fucking fish food or like fish tank cleaner and dying. And people like, how could how could people be so stupid? And it's like, people are stupid. You can't tell them to eat the fucking fishbowl cleaner. Yeah, they'll do it. It's.

They'll fucking do it. So this 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. 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 not

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. God.

I mean, it is medical malpractice whether or not he's legally liable for it or not. I would agree. And I'm going to continue that quote from Vox. Not everyone agrees with the judge's reasoning. Rochester, New York medical student and blogger Benjamin Mazur has been publishing anonymous stories sent to him from health professionals about the impact Oz has had on patient care.

One reported that her dad had a heart attack and five stents placed in his heart, which required him to take aspirin and Plavix to prevent blood clots. He was watching Dr. Oz, who said Plavix was not necessary, so he stopped taking it. About a month later, he had another massive heart attack, encoded, and had to be shocked back to life. She continued, my dad admitted to following Dr. Oz's advice and not asking his own cardiologist.

Man, that's really bad. Did he have like an alternative or was he just like decided one day that Plavix was going to be the thing? I'm sure it was. If I know my Dr. Oz, I'm sure it was. You don't need to take Plavix. 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.

I suspect it was dietary advice that if you're someone who doesn't really need Plavix is fine or might even help you to not need it later in life if you adopt healthier habits. 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. 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. I mean, you will be talking to ghosts faster if you follow all of Dr. Oz's advice. I want to talk to ghosts. I'm going to stop taking my Plavix and die of a stroke.

Now, on his show, Dr. Oz claims that the trust of his audience is the entire reason for his relevance. 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.

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 health care, which is an expensive and often inhumane labyrinthine bureaucracy. True is true. Yeah, absolutely. One hundred percent true. Yeah. How you exploit it.

is a very different thing. But the thing he is replacing it with is by and large nonsense. And I'm going to quote from that write up in the Journal of Ethics again.

When it comes to epistemic boundaries, Dr. Oz admits he applies different standards of evidence compared to those accepted in the medical establishment. When challenged by a reporter for The New Yorker about his questionable evidentiary standards, he replied that all data could be differentially interpreted. 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. 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. 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%.

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. If your doctor said, hey, you know, 46% of the time I get pretty good advice. Yeah. You would be like, I think I'm going to get another doctor. But he would reframe it to be like, I'm batting 500 here. And you'd be like, ooh, 500. That's a good batting average. If you assume medicine is like baseball.

I'm a great doctor. No, he's crushing it. Yeah. 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 companies and

Mm-hmm. Yeah. 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. 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. It all...

to the fact that a lot of people who are not idiots, I'm not saying as you can be, I'm sure 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.

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, Kava Hoda. 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? 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

My my ex a while ago had a non-cancerous brain tumor and it was a fucking nightmare figuring out. It took a series of different doctors and tests to figure out what kind of doctor she needed to go to to get medication that would help. 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. Right. Change my diet. If I do this, if I do that.

He's giving us alternatives to dealing with the bureaucracy of medical institutions in this country. I have Kaiser and

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. 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 now 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? I might as well turn this into content because this is fucking ridiculous. You know, there's like 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, it fucking sucks. Um, it's just really fucking sucks. Um,

And it fucking sucks because there's a lot of wonderful people who are part of the medical system, like the fucking doctors in the ER who were with my mom in her last days. Like, incredibly competent and compassionate and like...

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. It's a bummer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know what's not a bummer? Wow. Capitalism is actually a bummer, but it's the water we swim in, so here's some fucking ads. We're back.

So in 2014, Mehmet Oz was called before a Senate subcommittee to answer questions about his unfounded claims about dietary supplements. 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. Why, when you have this amazing megaphone and this amazing ability to communicate, would you cheapen your show by saying things like this?

And then he just pulled out a wad of money and he just started making it rain all over Congress. Do you know how many houses I have? 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. Recent research has suggested that long-term use of green coffee extract causes bone density loss in animals. So,

But you are, in fairness, you're losing weight. Your bones are lighter. That's weight. Bones are heavy as hell. It was everywhere when that came out. It was literally not just like bed, bath, and be everywhere. Get light bones. You can fly like a bird. Mm-hmm.

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 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. 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. This is a fun one. First of all, it's all gasoline. Part of why people well, actually, part of why 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. 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. 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. 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. Um...

I love when people say things like it's natural. It's like I think cyanide is natural. There's a lot of like natural poisons out there. Fucking snake venom is natural. The fucking arsenic in the apple juice that he's worried about is natural. Yeah. 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. There have been reports that they increase blood pressure and heart rate in humans. Dr. Oz does not warn about this.

Likewise, when Dr. Oz told his viewers that Garcinia 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. Oh my God. Why would you need to warn people that? Yeah.

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. What are the odds that a middle class American is addicted to painkillers? Zero. 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. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. In the wake of this, which was a fairly bad day on Capitol Hill for him, Dr. 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. We're good so far. Yeah. Pretty good. Pretty good so far. Okay.

Oz added in his statement, to not have the conversation about supplements at all, however, would be a disservice to the viewer. 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.

God, I... Yeah, it's amazing. I'm just talking about it. I'm just asking the question. 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 worried. That's a conversation. That's a conversation.

well, you and I have had about these things as a conversation. Yeah. I love it. I love people are like, I'm just asking the question. I mean, I'm not a doctor. I'm a guy who's addicted to an unregulated plant. Oh my God. Which I just took more of while standing next to my unregulated gun. Oh,

Yeah, dude, you're living the unregulated dream right now. So Dr. 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 or

which had provided room for a wide industry of shysters to stick his name on their website. So like, oh, I was just saying green coffee extract and a bunch of companies I couldn't verify started selling with my name on it. I should have recommended a specific brand. Yeah. 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.

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? Why is this guy still on your faculty? 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. Hell yeah, dude. That's like fucking rad. Yeah.

of the like anti-cancel culture letter. You know, they're just like, stop trying to cancel Dr. Oz. It's freedom of speech. Yeah. Freedom of speech.

Yeah. I mean, doctors also are held to different standards than the rest of us. They take an oath. Come on. If like your uncle Jimbo says, hey, you know, take some green coffee extract. 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. It's on you if you listen to your crazy uncle Jimbo. It is definitely on the doctor if...

If he recommends you lose some bone density so that you look better in that dress. It's, it's, it's fucked up. Yeah.

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. The only change wrought by the congressional inquiry and the flood of condemnation from the medical community seems to be that Dr. Oz started endorsing specific supplements and pseudo medicines.

God, he's Alex Jones-ing it. He's doing it. He's Jones-ing it hard. He's so much smarter than Alex, though. Yeah. You focus it just on the health. None of this nonsense, like political shit. Everybody is going to love you and you'll make way more money. Mm hmm.

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. 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.

They also found that 78% of the medical statements made on the Dr. Oz show did not align with quote evidence-based medical guidelines. So if those guidelines mattered, they'd make more money dog half a decade earlier, 46% of his statements are more or less fine. Uh, now it's down to what Jesus 22%. Wow.

So we're seeing again, he met the quality of the because again, you're running out of good content. 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.

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. 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 health care decision. No, no. But you know it. And you can, you know, fucking you don't need a Dr. Oz to tell you that, you know, you just know.

you know, just get a physical. I know that the fact that I bought the hundred dollar entire smoked leg of, of, of pig from Costco, the giant prosciutto leg that you can get. Wow. I know, I know buying that and not also purchasing, I don't know, salad.

in order to have sufficient fiber. A little bit of kale. 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 healthcare move. It's smoked. What could be so bad with smoking ham? It's smoked. It's good for my Q-zone. Yeah.

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. 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?

The Dr. Oz show is still on the air. In 2018, President Trump appointed Dr. Oz to a council on sports, fitness, and nutrition as part of the Department of Health and Human Services. He is still on that council under Joe Biden. Bipartisan, baby. God damn it.

Two years later, no politician is dumb enough to want to piss off Dr. Oz. You're never going to hear Joe Biden throw it. Well, except for Claire McCaskill. God bless her. She was the only one who had the guts to stand up to Dr. Oz. I think other people did. I'm not an expert on what went down in that congressional thing, but she seems to be the main one who was really angry at him, which good on you, Claire. I love that a bipartisan decision is just like, let's share...

this grifter, you know, between administrations like good, you know, got to all agree that you should be able to lie about health care as an MD. That's that's so 2018 is when he gets appointed to this council. Two years later, during the COVID-19 pandemic, he and he endorsed hydroxychloroquine. Later that year, he endorsed reopening schools, saying,

I tell you, schools are a very appetizing opportunity. I just saw a nice piece in The Lancet arguing the opening of schools may only cost us 2-3% in terms of total mortality. What the fuck? 2-3% of the crowd? That's barely anybody dying. That's barely hundreds of thousands of deaths. He said 2-3% as if that's not a huge number of people. He's losing his goddamn mind. 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. You are a dangerous person. 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 oopsie daisied it.

He claimed regret that his comments had confused and upset people and basically pointed out the Lancet wasn't saying two to three percent of the country was going to die. It was, I think, more like two or three percent of like school children or something like would get sick. And like it was he he it

but the way he phrased it was it's only going to cost us 2-3% of the country 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. Yeah. That's an evil thing to say. Yeah. It's it's it's it's pretty wild to just look at two to three percent 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. And listen, I get it. People with kids, they want their kids to go back to school.

but you, you, that's easy. You don't say the quiet part out loud, you know, it's one thing to say, Hey, look, living in a society, there's all, all kinds of, of, of cost benefit sort of analysis. Sure. 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, you know, um,

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, to be like, that's just living in a society, right? There's no, we, our society is not angled around absolutely more reducing mortality in every way. 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. Cause I'm not, I'm thinking, 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, yeah. But that's a way you could make that argument and not sound like a gibbering sociopath. And it's weird to 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 you're rich. You don't need to do this. You're choosing to. So go fuck yourself with that explanation. 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. His daughter seems to be getting in on the grift, too, with books like The Dorm Room Diet, which she wrote when she was in college, I think.

The dorm room diet. It's just free pizza and dick. I'm sorry. The dorm room diet. Hey, you know if you pour coffee into instant ramen? Yeah, right. Exactly. Two birds, one stone. I've done that, by the way. Not proud of it. We've all been there. Kind of proud of it. It's real good if you add in vodka. He is worth tens of millions of dollars and is not in any danger of being worthless anytime soon.

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. 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. His first column for Time magazine, Living Long and Living Well, ran in a section called

How to Live 100 Years. 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. 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. Ha ha ha!

That is a fucking bonkers way of looking at being on TV. Holy shit. That is out of its goddamn mind. He's 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. Yeah. I'm going to continue the quote.

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. 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. Those are actual human beings. Those are human beings. It's not about how better it is. You're already great at it. It's about saving additional lives. My God.

That it's 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. He used to do a lot more and he's 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. Yeah.

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, we are looking at a projected shortage of 1500 cardiothoracic surgeons or 25% of the workforce by 2025. Four years. Fuck.

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. And he has stopped doing that in order to give people bad medical advice that will hurt some of them on TV. And 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. I, you can, 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. And I don't think there's anything immoral. You do not owe the world doing just because it's valuable and there are enough people doing it forever. 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, but he didn't quit to be with his family. He,

He quit to give people bad health advice. He quit to do crimes. Yeah, he is. He is doing something that should be illegal instead of performing an additional 5000 life saving surgeries. Right? Yeah, that's evil. Yeah, no, that is bad. That is that is definitely immoral to like have

the ability. 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. It's going to get me more. Yeah, but I'm going to sell people pills instead. Lex Luthor can suck it. You know, I got pills to move. And 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? 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. Like the, 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 that's amazing. That's,

Tens of thousands of cumulative years added to the lives of people who are loved and who do things themselves, who have their own ways of contributing to society, who have children. It's such a sick way of looking at it, too. It's really fucked up. I'm already really good at it, so I decided... I want to go get into TV now. If he'd been like, I did my part, I performed 5,000 surgeries, now I want to become an actor.

Like, yeah, you have that right. Absolutely. I'm never going to say that. I mean, it depends on the movie. But yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah. If you're in Michael Bay movies, we might have another talk. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But that's again what 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.

I mean, I guess he got tired of helping people and was like, you know, time to make some fucking bank. Yeah. It's I mean, it's not just make some bank, but he's like, man, I saved 10,000 lives. I'm going to have to kill 10,000 just to fucking net neutral this shit. You know? Yeah. You know, he's just trying to he's trying to balance the scales of his good and evil. It's so fucking frustrating. I really dislike this man. Yeah.

He's so handsome, though, dude. I mean, he's very handsome. He's very handsome. He made a lot of money. So that's good. And, you know, he's he's he's out there every day given given hope to people who are currently dying of a very, very treatable ailment and saying, no, dog, put your feet in some hot rice. Put your feet in some hot rice. 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. Oz problem and the part of it that he is leaning into but it's not his fault is this thing that's a broader problem that I've gotten trapped in that everyone who's a public figure is at risk of getting trapped in.

which is the fact that if you're good at something and also have some measure of fame or popularity, 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.

and since I'm vaccinated and you know everyone wears a mask but I've been going to a gym yeah and my family's vaccinated it's like it's the thing we get to do now okay yeah you're allowed yeah I've been going to a gym and the gyms have like news programs on right and I saw Dr. Oz on and it was Dr. Oz true crime because I guess Dr. 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

doing this thing he's 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 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

I just hate it. Yeah, especially since it's, again, he has the God-given skills to actually do good and help people. And he chooses, you know, this shit. And I got to say, I blame his dad.

I blame his dad, too. Fuck you, Mustafa. Yeah, Mustafa. Son of a bitch. You fucked up, dude. I mean, you did a great job by pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and yada yada. 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. I will say, at least with the true crime stuff that like.

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, but I'm glad I don't have a true crime podcast that he's currently cannibalizing. If he starts a Sopranos one.

I will lose my fucking mind. If Dr. Oz decides one day, like I want to do a prestige TV rewatch show for CNN, 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. That's 2019. Well, I mean, he's doing a true crime show. That's as close as you get to the podcast business. Yeah.

You know what I'm saying? Those are the number one pods out there, dude. Pisses me off. Casts my pods. All right, guys. That's the episode. Do you have any plugs? Yeah. Plug the plugs?

My name is Matt Lieb and, you know, I'm on Instagram. Matt Lieb jokes. Graham. Yeah, I'm on the gram. I'm also on Twitter at Matt Lieb. But follow me on Instagram. And yeah. And if you like the Sopranos, pod yourself a gun. It's yourself a gun, baby. Well, get out there and again, find Dr. Oz in the street. And Sophie, what is the legal definition of incitement?

I'm not, for legal reasons, I'm not going to answer that question. All right. Just go out and wander the streets angry and agitated. Yeah. Without any clear goal. Yeah. Angrily wander the streets agitated with an unclear goal. That's what I want all of my listeners to do.

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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 B.T.K. on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Beautiful young women, full of life and dreams, murdered or vanished without a trace. Their families left with nothing but heartbreak, questions, and memories.

I'm Nancy Grace. This week on Crime Stories, we uncover the truth behind these unsolved cases. We work to bring justice and answers to grieving families. Please don't miss Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, listeners, I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco, host of the Murder on Songbird Road podcast. Murder on Songbird Road revisits a controversial 2020 murder that occurred in southern Illinois. It divided a community and pitted families against one another. But questions remain as to whether the mother of four serving time for the crime is actually guilty.

Fuck you! That's the introduction.

Just fuck you, people who listen and give us an income. Allow us to live a comfortable life. Not you, Jamie. Just the audience. 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 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. And don't investigate otherwise. No, please don't search podcasts on Spotify. I feel like what you just said all could have come out of Dr. Phil's mouth at some point.

One point the second the cameras turn off for his show. Well, Jamie, the orca is out of the tank because that is the subject of today's episode. And also your Jamie Loftus, my guest on the show that this is behind the bastards. Yes, it is behind the bastards. And I'm I'm here. I'm mainly here to bring the Dr. 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, and I can't figure out which it's going to be. I can't imagine loving them because they involve Dr. Phil. I think he's going to love them. You know, it's one of those things. Hot take.

We just did the Dr. Oz episodes and Dr. Oz also bad. Obviously, he was on the show, but you have to respect him because he is a brilliant doctor. Like he's a man who for all of the harm he's done by spreading pseudoscience has performed like 5000 successful open heart surgeries, which is an achievement, you know, and has patented a bunch of useful medical devices and stuff. Yeah.

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. Dr. Phil is just a piece of shit. Dr. Phil is just straight up trash. 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 like persevered and Dr. Drew was like nominated to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority like board. And what is okay I don't know Dr. Drew what is what is 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. I'm not totally sure. 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 damage to lots and lots of young minds all the time.

He technically does have, he is a doctor. I don't know if he's currently licensed, but I know him from VH1 in like middle school where he had celebrity rehab with Dr. Drew, sex rehab with Dr. Drew, celebrity rehab presents Sober House and on and on. Oh, that sounds like my nightmare. Like that sounds, that sounds like the hell that I would go to is Sober House. Oh no. Yeah.

I could have shortened my description and said he's Adam Carolla's best friend, which is also true. Wait, really? Oh, yeah, no.

Yeah, he hosted like a famous radio show called Loveline Forever. And Adam Carolla was also on the show. And they're close. And so, yeah, he was nominated to serve on the Homeless Authority Board. And it only took about a day where activists just bullied people into withdrawing the nomination pretty quickly. And he had a few spicy little comments about it.

He was like, I can't like he basically was like, these online bullies are trying to cancel me for not being a good doctor and irrelevant for this job. So, you know.

Sometimes bad doctors fall. 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 time to get into the... It's time to have us a Philgasm. Okay. A McGraw-sum. A McGraw-sum. A McGraw-sum. A McGraw-gasm. Yeah. Yeah.

So, Philip Calvin McGraw was born on September 1st, 1950 in Veneta, Oklahoma, about four hours from where I grew up. 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. 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, really.

You don't want to, as a general rule, stay away from oil fields. Not nice places. So his kind of like southern desolation is Phil McGraw's early childhood, which, you know, I can tell you from experience what that does to a kid. And it makes you either a washout or ambitious and angry. One of the two.

Whether wind up an alcoholic working on an oil derrick or you do everything possible to escape the desolate South. Anyway, Phil's going to take that second one. I like where you went with it. Yeah. I have strong feelings about that part of Texas and that part of Oklahoma.

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. 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. 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. By age 12, he was flying planes illegally without a license as he traveled with. Oh, my God. OK. I mean, the 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 odd at age 11. That is a shark jump. And then unlicensed driving.

driving a plane unlicensed pilot at age 12 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 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. 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 Phil goes with him and flies the plane sometime. My guess is that his dad is just like, I'm taking a nap. You're flying this oil field equipment across Texas. Phil, I trust you. Land the bastard. I love you, kid.

Okay, dad. Child Dr. Phil looks like adult Chris Cuomo. 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 is a pretty decent premise. I've heard worse. 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. Yeah.

Hold on. 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. You know, like that's basically how it's set. And so Joe leaves his wife and three daughters behind. I think they 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 it.

Because every time we go over stories like this, you're like, it can't be daddy issues. Everything can't be just daddy issues. But then it always is. Yeah, it's interesting. One of the things that's interesting to me is the ways in which Dr. 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 a couple of years 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 weird. Grew up in the same area, moved around a bunch when we were little.

Our dad leaves, you know, but in Phil's case, he goes with his dad and they just abandoned all the women. Right, right, right. Like Dr. Phil's dad is like, you're my wife now. You're my wife now, boy. My wife pilot. Fly the plane, Phil. You're my wife now. Dr. Phil, child wife pilot.

The pitch is getting better and better and better. It's going to be sold by the end of the episode. I actually just got an email from Netflix and it's a check for $112 million. So we are now contractually obligated to make this show, Jamie. I would honestly rather do that more than anything else. I know. That would be a dream. Let's leave this life behind.

Okay, so we're abandoning podcasts to do that. To do Dr. Phil, Child Wife Pilot, yes. I think that would put a lot of positivity back into the world. So they just bail. And it's not for financial reasons. I mean, it is. They're poor as shit. His dad wants to go to school and is like, I can't take care of this family anymore. Bye. The way it's been described in the articles I've read. Now, maybe Dr. Phil...

could give us a more detailed story, but I have not run across it yet. Okay. Yeah. Most of the info I have on his childhood comes from a Dallas Observer article, and they explain the whole abandoning of Phil's mom and sisters as a financial move. Okay. Phil apparently told the Dallas Observer, quote, there just wasn't enough money to do otherwise. Okay. We can only feed two members of this family, so girls, you're on your own. Phil and I are going to Kansas.

Okay. Yeah. Extremely, very, very, sounds like a really healthy family dynamic so far. You get the feeling he grew up in a healthy environment. That's true. Healthy families are all alike. They allow 12 year olds to fly planes. That is how the famous quote goes. That's, that's how Anna Karenina starts. I love that book so much. And it turns out that's the thesis statement of the whole thing. How did you just pronounce that, Robert? I,

I don't know. Anna Karenina? What is it? I was going to let it fly. Yeah, I wasn't. 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 Stad's child wife.

I actually don't know what happens in that book. I pretended to read it when I was like 11. I just stared at every page really hard over a course of months. Per the results of a 2006 court case, I am not allowed to read Russian literature. 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...

I think is less a true statement, not that I'm saying they weren't poor. I think he just said that because he knows it was a pithy thing, and he makes his whole living off of saying stupid Dr. Phil witticisms. We couldn't even pay attention. And I've heard that a thousand times. I have heard a thousand different people explain their origins that way. So I don't know. Fuck you, Dr. Phil. Be original. But does it make the moms absolutely lose it?

I bet it does. I absolutely bet it makes the moms lose it. Um, and someone, someone on Reddit during the Dr. Oz episode, you know, I noted a couple of times that his, his audience and the people that he makes money off of is like middle-aged moms. Um, and that that's a great business because they have all the money, um, or at least control all the money. Like middle-aged moms are, are one of the most profitable demographics to get in your corner in the entire world. Right. Um,

And someone was like, you're being unfairly negative towards middle-aged moms. It's just a statement of fact. Look in the audience of a Dr. Oz show. It's not 16 to 30-year-old men. It's a bunch of moms. My mom loved Dr. Oz. That's who his audience is. It's not a negative statement.

My mom loves Dr. Phil. No, I, yeah, I don't think that that's a negative state. So if anyone's hearing that, and that's not like what they're intending to say, just who the audience is. Yeah. It'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, 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. Yeah. Fuck you. So Rogan,

As someone who was raised by Dr. Phil moms, I am fully, and it's like not, 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. Look, I've been honest about the fact that there was a period of time in my life when I liked John McAfee, um, before I knew about, you know, the murder and the rape and stuff. Right. Um,

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. I think the grifter that really got me was Lou Pearlman, who made all the boy bands that made me...

Oh, my God. I mean, one of my not my favorite, but one of the most legendary. Incredible. Absolutely amazing person like Mr. Blunt himself. No, without any sort of joking, like a genius, but.

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 not smart, but we were clearly targeted by that. Yes. Yeah. We all have a thing we're vulnerable to. Anyway, we're getting off topic, 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. Sorry.

Robert Evans exposed.

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. But in the interview with Dallas Observer, the details he actually gives make it seem like the issue for Phil was less a matter of crushing poverty. 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. It's just there's no money for anything but the basics, you know, but the basics are covered. You're absolutely breaking even, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. But you're not like you're not like in an absolute destitution, you know, like not to exaggerate it, but like you're poor. Like that's kind of what I think is is is 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. 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.

So I think that's more the big thing for him, right? Like, you're not that poor. You just don't have enough money to impress girls with possessions. Right. Okay. Yeah. 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. There were kids in my school who drove BMWs and like I had a beat to shit Ford Taurus and

I'm not complaining. I had a Ford Taurus. Like, I'm not complaining. I had a car. But like, 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. That's, I think, the kind of poor he is. Yeah. Our school is like the kid with the Ford Taurus was like, oh my God.

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. So thankfully, the young Dr. Phil was huge, quickly crossing six feet. He's a massive man. If you've ever seen him next to normal sized people, he's a very large person. I forget that. But yes. Yeah. Is he like six feet?

He's like an inch or two taller than me and I think quite a bit broader. He's a big motherfucker. But most of that's mustache, Robert. A lot of it's mustache now, but when he was younger, he was in good shape and he was very muscular. And as a result of how big and strong he was, he was a shoe-in for the high school's football team. Cool.

Classic. 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? 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 on the football team. He was tall. He was tall. 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. Not yet a doctor, Phil spent his entire senior year living alone. He didn't go with his dad this time. He supported himself and he played football because he was like he 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.

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, and he had it seems like he had a real chance of getting at least picked to play college ball. 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. So he gets a college scholarship to the University of Tulsa. He becomes the captain of the freshman football team. And

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, like not just, 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. No,

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. That was his Hitler's art school. Right. Right. Right. Like, and you just know that parties, he doesn't let people forget it. Like, yeah, I'm looking up celebrities who played high school sports.

Matthew McConaughey. It just seems like not making it big in college sports is potentially a villainous origin story. I mean, I never had any chance. I was on the high school. I did one year of football in junior high. I never had any chance of going pro, and I didn't like football. There was a period of time where I might have been able to like

do well at fencing. I was in like a special program. I was pretty good at fencing. That's cool. But no, I got bored eventually. I love that for you. I could see that for you. I was going to say take it back though.

If you're really tall, it helps. Yeah. But never like never, never at the college level or anything. I ran track in junior high, but then I threw up one time and I quit permanently. And to this day, I do not run. I was captain of the varsity basketball team and I'm really, really short. So I had no. So I'm the most athletic of our bunch. Sophie is the most successful athlete in, in, in this call. Amazing.

Yeah. Send pics. Oh, there are. That's great. There are pics, Jamie. I will personally send them to you. You know, I will say, having watched the video of that guy shot putting a fucking bobcat, I think that should be an Olympic sport. That was the most amazing.

amazing thing I've seen in such a long time. That was, that was, you know what that was, is the greatest example of like quality husbanding that I think I've seen on Twitter. Like, that's, that's, that's a, that's a, you did, you did good, man. That's exactly what you're supposed to do. Like, that's,

That's that's wholesome masculinity right there is shot putting a wild cat away from your wife. 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. Yeah.

Thank you for that fine forensic analysis. That's my opinion on the by now weeks old video of a guy hugging a bobcat across a yard. To be fair, he chose violence.

Yeah, the cat shows violence. That's my end statement here. So, yeah. Anyway, Dr. Phil, a lot of interviews, you'll see he was very, very good. Maybe could have gone pro. I don't know how accurate that is. 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.

Yeah. 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. Quote,

The team...

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. 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. So this game is a fucking disaster from the beginning. I love this shit.

so much oh it's so good finally a sports movie for me yeah everyone's just puking shit into death also someone named glenn the third is involved like just the funniest fucking thing

Passing out before the game starts. Oh, that is just... And kudos to the Grantland writer. It's a very entertaining article. Grantland, I miss Grantland. Yeah. By the end of the first quarter, Phil's team was down 14 to 0, which is a significant... Like, they're getting... It's not a great start to a game, but it's not insurmountable. However, by the end of the game, they were down by a record-breaking 100 points to 6. Oh, my God.

Did Phil get any of the points? No, I don't believe so. Not at all. I think it's one of the greatest ass kickings in college ball history. 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. 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. It's incredibly funny. So Dr. Phil brags about this great 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.

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. 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.

But the doubt thrown onto it by this investigation might mean that as a grown ass multimillionaire, Dr. Phil lied to David Letterman about playing in one of the worst ass kickings in sports history. And I have no idea what this says about him. Like, I don't even know how to analyze that. There's so many levels there.

Because if he did play in it, you're like, oh, what a... Yeah, okay, that's fun. Yeah, I can see, like, if I was, if I played in, if I partook in a famous ass-kicking in sports history, I would brag about that as an adult. It would be funny, you know? That's fun. You get enough distance from it, sure. Lying about it, though. Lying about it is baffling. What is...

That's like a game of 4D chess I can barely conceive of. I have no idea what's going on with Dr. Phil. 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? To lie about one of the greatest failures. Yeah, to lie about just getting fame historically wrecked. Anything for clout, baby.

anything for fucking clout. Speaking of clout, you know who has all of my clout, Jamie? Does it happen to be a product or maybe even a service? It is the products and services that support this podcast. I sacrifice all of my clout to them like members of the ancient cult of the old ones sacrifice virgin babies to Nyarlathotep, the crawling chaos. Much like that, here's some ads for dick pills.

All right. We're back. We're back. We're back. Worshipping the old gods. I don't know. Might deliver up some of my bodily fluids to a Shoggoth later. Who knows? Who knows? We're talking about Dr. Phil. Anything can happen. 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. 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. Oh, my God. The kind of head injury where when you come to your eyes don't work, which is medically speaking bad. No, it shouldn't be allowed. Scary.

It absolutely, like, I don't know. 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. Yeah. Yeah, sure. So, uh,

He's still... Yeah, it was... The head injury was bad enough. His eyesight came back, obviously. But it was a serious head injury. And it ended... There was no chance of him continuing his career after that, right? 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? Yeah.

Right. Once his eyesight, yeah, and he still suffers. Like, there's after effects of this today. Like, it's a lifelong injury. He got really messed up. I hate football. It's a bad thing to do. Yeah.

Yeah, it's bad. 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. And he decided, you know, the thing you 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. Which is not an unreasonable call to make in the situation. 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 half dozen others. 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. 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. 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. 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 maybe 20 at the most, like 19 or 20. And very quickly, he's a part earned, becomes a part owner in the sports club he's working at, becomes part owner in like a half dozen other clubs like he's. So he doesn't have he doesn't have a degree yet of any kind. No, but he's clearly very good at it. Specifically, the thing that Phil is objectively one of the best people in the world at is negotiating.

Yeah. He is a terrifying negotiator. I haven't run into any disagreement about that. He's got all the grift. He's got all the like the strong grifters. Yeah. Yeah. And he's he's very good at 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. If he's willing to go into this game that young, that's so.

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. 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. 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. Phil over the course of decades, you tend to get two very different pictures of the man.

One from the people who like him is of an incredibly gifted expert in practical psychology who has a passion for helping people. The other picture you get of Dr. Phil is a, quote, charismatic opportunist who achieved great things by betraying the people closest to him in order to make a quick buck.

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. Phil is a smart, smart, smart son of a bitch, but he's only out for one thing, and that's Phil.

Now, 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. He's not even just one of two, but we're going to get to that story in due time. So he's also involved in oil fields down the line? Yeah, in anything that'll make him money. Like, this is like kind of all happening over a period of a couple of years. He's just, he starts making money and he immediately reinvests that money. He's in a bunch of businesses.

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. And...

I don't know how they do it, but they just are able to keep track of like the fact that like 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. 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, 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 work all of that. Some people have a brain that allows them to just

you know, I respect people who use it for good, but holy shit, what an exhausting sounding. It sounds like a nightmare. I keep all of my money in a pile and I will never have investments. 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. Yeah.

I spent my, all my savings on Dilbert NFTs. Well, that's going to, that's going to appreciate, you know, Jamie. I've got a good feeling. It's the only thing they're not making any more of. That's a real thing. They, the, the, you know, the Sashi Dilbert guy, um,

made Dilbert NFTs. And the only difference from a regular Dilbert is that he says, fuck in this one. And so too much money. Anyways, I would pay good money for a Dilbert NFT where he admits responsibility for the Oklahoma city bombing. Oh my God. I,

I think that would be a good NFT. If you're listening, Scott Adams, I'll invest in that one. Dilbert admits to making a 6,000 pound fertilizer bomb and parking it out in front of the Murrah building. That's the NFT I want.

I can guarantee that Kathy Geisweig, creator of Kathy Comics, does not know nor care what an NFT is. And that's why she is. She is really she is. She's my strength in this world. Stan Kathy. Stan Kathy. Stan Kathy. You know who else I stan, Jamie? Who?

No one. That was like, it's not time for an ad pivot. He loves to do the like fake ad thing. And then he thinks I can't help it. 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 affection for and can't be convinced otherwise. No, no, I think I think I have a reasonable love of LeVar Burton, as everyone does. Right. It's like a copy bar. Right.

It's like loving a capybara. It's LeVar Burton, of course. No, Werner Herzog. Herzog is my unreasonable love. Robert, I would love... You should start making Werner Herzog fancams. I don't know what that means, Jamie. I'm going to make one of you and you're going to be horrified. I wonder if Robert fancams exist. What the fuck is a fancam? How do I describe a fancam? It's usually like

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 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. 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, all...

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.

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. 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. Wow. Okay, Werner. Oh, Werner Herzog. Watch Aguirre, The Wrath of God. So Dr. Phil, Robert? Dr. Phil. Yeah, sorry. We're...

Whew, 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. 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.

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 5-MeO-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

do stupid shit. Anyway. Yeah, Dr. Phil's not fucking punk enough. No, he's not. 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. 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. Phil, quote, by far the most brilliant psychologist I ever worked with, which is meaningful praise. But also we are talking UNT here. You know, we're not talking like one of the famous psychologists.

psychology schools in the country. So not, not, not a nothing compliment, but not like a doctor, not like people saying Dr. Oz is the best heart surgeon ever, you know, because that motherfuckers working at Columbia, right? They know from heart surgery, right?

Right. Okay. I don't know. 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. I haven't gotten past the fact that Frank Lawless sounds like a made-up person. That sounds like a cartoon character. I'm assuming he's Xena's father. So, McGraw got his doctorate in 1979 and returned to Wichita Falls for reasons that are impossible to explain. Any person who returns to Kansas, I just don't

I don't understand. Uh, 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. Uh,

One of Dr. Phil's Phil's friends later claimed, quote, Phil moved right into the money circles. If there wasn't a buck in it, he wasn't much interested. So, you know, that's that's the that's the field he gets into is is dealing with like rich people who are neurotic or whatever. So he comes to being a charlatan early. Yeah. I mean, you know.

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? 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. Quote, people would come in and say, I had a hard childhood. Therefore, I am not doing well as an adult. Okay.

A Freudian would say, let's work through your childhood. I would say, that's fine, but right now, you are an adult. You have a choice to stop yelling at your kids. I've done CBT. Yeah, that doesn't sound bad, right? 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. Reasonable statement. Past trauma doesn't excuse current bad behavior. Perfectly valid statement. Absolutely. 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. 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.

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. And I should note here as an aside that during this period, Dr. Phil got married and was briefly with a woman before cheating on her repeatedly and then leaving her. Oh. Yeah, so.

Anyway, maybe he should have been a little more patient. Maybe he should have taken some of his own medicine. Yeah, I mean, he he does. I mean, to be fair, he admits he was a bad marriage therapist. So I can't call him like a hypocrite. If you're saying I was I was a shitty husband and a shitty marriage therapist. That all scans. Right. Yeah.

That's, yeah, he's being honest here, so we won't belabor the point. Okay. Yeah, he started holding pain clinics, weight loss clinics, and giving executive recruiting advice and even expert legal testimony for court cases. He was like an expert witness. Yeah, and this is like for court cases, right? Like you need someone to come and-

You know, you have like somebody who's claiming like, oh, you know, I can't be held responsible for this because I'm, you know, like mentally ill or whatever. Like, you know, 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 question.

Yeah, yeah, it's the kind of we just we just finished the Chauvin trial. You know, we had all these kind of use of force experts. There's a bunch of people in different fields whose main job is to take that that expertise in another field and testify about it in court.

because it's relevant, right? 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, whatever. Like that's a whole, there's a whole industry. Dr. Phil gets into the providing expert. There's a lot of money in that industry. There's a fuckload of, you can get real goddamn rich doing that. Yeah. Well, yeah, especially if you're willing to lie of

Oh, yeah. 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. So, you know what? Twelve grand an hour.

The podcast is just going to disappear one day and it's because you're in court 25 days. Oh, the instant. I'm fucking done. Fuck this podcast. I'm going to go lie under oath about, I don't know, whatever. Anyway, Dr. Phil started holding, so he gets into 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

thing to do. I'm going to do a bunch of clinics on like dealing with pain, dealing with weight loss, you know, recruiting people. 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. 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,

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. For two to five days, several 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 cathartic experiences and thinking they've learned something. That's the whole idea. Have people get...

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. Yeah. 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. 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. Some people are just like, they're like, yeah, I know Tony. Well, Tony Robbins is maybe not the best example. But again, this person's like basically full of shit. But, you know, I had a couple hundred dollars to burn and a weekend to burn. It made me feel good. You know, I don't care, I guess, if that's your thing. We all have. Take joy where you can get it.

Yeah, there's a lot of people who like to climb the ice-filled sides of mountains with crampons and fucking like pythons and stuff, and a lot of them die. 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. 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's the problem with it.

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, you know, there's varying degrees. 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. And I guess that's kind of less problematic where it's like, okay, like whatever, you know, it's basically expensive church. Okay. Yeah. Like you will not make me not hate myself, friend better men than you have tried. Yeah.

So Thelma Box, who 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. You can find his books at any given estate sale. Dale Carnegie, you can also find his books at any given estate sale. Tony Robbins, you can also find his books at any given estate sale. All the estate sale greats. She does their seminars.

With like boogers on the side of the books, yeah. Most of her classes had been focused on 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. So there'd been conferences to help real estate and insurance salesmen sell better. 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. 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. Quote, he has a God-given gift, a combination of charm and charisma that can mesmerize a room full of people. And again, people disagree about a lot of stuff about Dr. Phil. Nobody disagrees about this part. He's apparently just an incredible negotiator. So she decides he's going to be a great front man for this life improvement seminar she wants to host.

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, the plan that he made was for instead he was like, we should do like a general like life improvement for everybody. 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.

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, Dr. Phil demanded that he was going to walk if she didn't bring his dad in as an equal shareholder.

Yeah. Bringing daddy into it? Yeah. And 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, yeah, he'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 plagiarism. 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 want to take that negotiation tactic and apply it to the stand-up comedy world and i'm like all right i know that you're supposed to be featuring for me but actually my dad is going to be opening now and so you're actually 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 uh yeah

I'm excited for that for you, Jamie. Thank you. But you know what isn't exciting? What isn't exciting? Life without the products and services that support this podcast. Absolutely. 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. We're back.

I hope you all spent money because this whole fucking 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. Fine. 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 vulnerability, stripping away self-deception, which all just means like making people cry in a big room surrounded by other people. You know, that's the goal. That's the goal. Yeah. With no connection to the outside world and gaslight them into believing something that they don't.

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. Good timing. Before Waco. I just, 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 keep a cult going. Like it just doesn't seem worth it. Where to begin with that sentence? 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. Yeah. It's a juicing of the spirit. You're just left. Like you feel like you're better off. You're probably not. It doesn't matter. Cause you can sleep for three days. Yeah. Sophie take out, take down a podcast idea. Uh, the 40 minute Waco. I think we can make a lot of money with this. Um, anyway, uh,

Back to Dr. Phil. So what made 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, it's 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. Oh, yes. Yeah, he knows how to manipulate people, right? He's a great manipulator in that you could make a lot of money doing that.

That's the most like dangerous trade in the world is understanding people, but just not caring what happens to them. Yes. Yes. Yeah. I understand people, but care about what happens to them, which is why I tell them to buy machetes and bolt cutters.

You're saving lives. Claymore anti-personnel mines. Yes, definitely saving lives. 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, fuck anyone in front of you. What? No. Sophie. Robert, Dr. Phil. Okay, yeah. So,

So this seminar series was called Pathways, and it became hugely popular. For a while, they were making fucking bank. And the whole process of doing this awoke in Phil, or at least accelerated, a deep desire to get on TV. He started pushing for his own talk show, schmoozing with a Hollywood producer who made the mistake of attending one of his seminars.

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. The show sounds incredibly boring and clearly it was not picked up.

Now, over his years with Pathways, McGraw developed into a talented showman. 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. The only reason it didn't become a cult is because Thelma wouldn't let it. Yeah. Wow. Okay. He really does sound like chaos, Frazier. Yeah. Yeah.

Chaos Frazier. Yes. Yeah. Dr. Phil was on Frazier for all you Frazier heads. Oh, God, you're right. He was the show that episode The Devil and Dr. Phil. I mean, the thing is, if you actually Frazier was a big show for my family growing up. And so like while my mom was was dying, we watched a lot of episodes because, you know, there wasn't a lot that she could do. And it was kind of a thing.

that was nostalgic for all of us. Um, but one of the through lines of the series is that Frazier's not a good psychologist, like not a good psychiatrist. Like he's bad. It's like, that's why he's on the radio. Yeah. He's a bit of a drifter too. 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, but,

Nobody on that show is a good person but John Mahoney, the only good cop, Frasier's dad. That's absolutely true. And not even Eddie is safe from... No, no, from cancellation. And honestly, 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.

He's just such a damn charismatic actor. I can't stay mad at the man. So by the late 1980s, Pathways had moved to Dallas, where each year more than a thousand people would pay a thousand dollars each to attend a single weekend event with McGraw. That's a million bucks in a weekend. So she's again, great money in this. 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.

Now, he unfortunately, like his dad is involved in the whole thing. And Dr. Phil never had a great relationship with his father. 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. McGraw was basically just kind of spying.

like there to cash a check. Like when he would show up on stage, you'd be like erratic and kind of say nonsense and not really help the business at all. So worse than nothing. Worse than nothing. The two men started to hate each other, which a number of employees noted as somewhat hypocritical. 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.

That is a fair hypocritical criticism. Fair point. That's hilarious, though. And while Dr. Phil's relationship with his dad 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. The Dallas Observer writes, "...the 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." On November 16, 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.

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. 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. Woo!

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. Phil and I hadn't been getting along. He stopped talking to me, and I knew we couldn't go on that way.

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. On October 15th, 1991, he signed an agreement for the sale of his Pathways stock for $325,000. I absolutely told her I was selling, McGraw says. What she didn't like was who I was selling to.

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 sit to the buyer of his stock in which he agreed. The buyer agreed that the sale would be kept confident, confidential from everyone, including box. So I'm going to go ahead and say that Phil is the liar here. He basically knew like he wanted to sell out early when his stuff was worth more than hers would be like with, with only a third of it left or like, she's not going to get as much money for it. Um,

And he lies. She keeps, she's trying to buy it from him for a year after he's already sold it. And he's just stonewalling her. Like, yeah, it's, it's, it's a shitty way to treat a business partner. It absolutely is. 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 brought her.

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. And they definitely didn't mention whoever Thelma Box stole it from. No, no. Again, that's the thing. The point is that he is a con man, not that she is particularly a victim here. He's like, I don't care about Thelma Box.

In 1989, Dr. Phil was living and working in Wichita. He keeps going back to fucking Kansas, enjoying his Pathways money and working as a psychologist. One of his patients was a young woman who he started and maintained a, quote, inappropriate dual relationship with.

Again, that means dual. Yeah, he is her. He is her doctor and he is fucking her. 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. Kind of a no, no.

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. No, that is. Yeah. You got to give the man credit for really going out of his way to, to,

to do the most unethical version of that thing he could. You're right, Robert. I do gotta 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 not. My spirit is worn down. I'll hand it to him. Dr. Phil considers this transgression to just have been a misdemeanor.

But the journalist who wrote that Dallas Observer article looked into the situation. He found the woman Dr. Phil had the relationship with, and he found out a lot more besides, and it's pretty fucking sketchy. Quote,

Right.

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. He kept me totally dependent on him, she says. So that's textbook abuse. Like, that's just, like, literally textbook abuse. Yeah. Yeah. Couldn't be clearer. Hate it.

I hate it so much. On so many levels, too. Like, on multiple levels. God, that's fucking terrible. It's really bad. It's really... He's a bad person, Jamie. He's just a real bad person. And 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. Phil, they're both grifters. Dr. Phil never does a single good thing, like 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. 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. I don't know. He's a useful comparison. I just really hate Dr. Phil. So the formal complaint this woman filed led to a decision from the psychology board that Dr. Phil's practice would have to be supervised for a year. 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.

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. Phil's company was a hit, and his clients soon included every major airline on Earth, three TV networks, and dozens of Fortune 500 companies. Before long, it came to include Oprah Winfrey as well. Goddammit, Oprah! No!

Yeah. I mean, like, you know, it's coming, but I know it's coming longer. Why Oprah and airline? Yeah. The two, the two sacred things in our society, Oprah and the airlines. I want to know every single time Oprah comes into the discussion. I, I am like, where is,

Was Stedman on all of this? Where does he get Stedman? What were you fucking doing? Stedman writes books that are alleging to be about something, but are actually about nothing. But he's but he's nice. So I don't care.

Yeah. I hope that Stedman was like, something's not right, Oprah. And she was like, 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, Stedman. Stedman,

quiet. We're getting a yawn. I will be able to clone you when you die, Stedman. That's how much money I'm going to make off this man. Maybe that's what sold him. I used to do little fan drawings of Stedman, Graham, and the barefoot Contessa's husband hanging out.

That's very unsettling, Jamie. 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. 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. The case looked like to be going badly for Oprah until she brought in Dr. Phil to be a part of her trial team. He instantly recognized her as someone he could make money off of, and he set to work charming her. Phil did his job. 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.

She said she wanted to share his brilliance with the world. Yeah. This hyperbole is gonna get you. And we are going to talk about where this hyperbole gets all of us in part two of our epic series, Dr. Phil. What a dick. Is that the subtitle of this? Yep. Perfect. Fucking A, Dr. Phil. Fucking hell. Come on. You're a dick. Sir, could you not? 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. That's the thing. It's like that every single time you're like, well, God damn, I bet that if this whole football thing had gone different, the world would be a lot less Dr. Phil. Yeah. I don't even necessarily want his football career to have gone well. If he'd just gotten hit 20% harder, you know, that, that would have been enough for me. Okay. Okay. You know what? I see. I see your point of view. Yeah. Anyway,

Jamie, you got any pluggables you want to drop? Yeah, just the usuals. You can listen to Bechdel, Castle, Beta podcast and My Urine Mensa on iHeartRadio. And then I have a new podcast coming up about Kathy comics in June that Sophie's producing. I'm excited. Check out Jamie's erotic Kathy podcast. I assume it's erotic. Is that correct? No. I mean, I...

It's very, you know what? I wish that Kathy was having a lot of sex, but you can't do that in the newspapers. Not then. I mean, she doesn't need to be having sex for the podcast about Kathy to just be like the fundamental eros of Kathy is so overwhelming, you know? Yeah. You just hear that last name Gus White and oof.

There's still time. There's still time. I'll let her know. Fix it in post. It's going to be an erotic podcast. Can you make it hornier, Kathy? Just like 12%. Anyway, I hope the rest of you have a day that's 12% hornier. We'll be back Thursday.

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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 B.T.K. on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Beautiful young women, full of life and dreams, murdered or vanished without a trace. Their families left with nothing but heartbreak, questions, and memories.

I'm Nancy Grace. This week on Crime Stories, we uncover the truth behind these unsolved cases. We work to bring justice and answers to grieving families. Please don't miss Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, listeners. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco, host of the Murder on Songbird Road podcast. Murder on Songbird Road revisits a controversial 2020 murder that occurred in southern Illinois. It divided a community and pitted families against one another. But questions remain as to whether the mother of four serving time for the crime is actually guilty.

I'm excited to tell you that you can get access to all episodes of Murder on Songbird Road 100% ad-free and one week before anyone else with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus, and subscribe today. Hello? This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast...

Robert, you just sounded like a haunted house. Yeah, I 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 consistently just completely fuck the introductions. Um...

I think it's nice. I think it's fun brand consistency. That's our Robert, people are thinking. That's our Robert. It's easy to have a consistent brand when your brand is being like a...

brain-damaged drug addict who is incapable of doing anything but writing long essays about bad people. Simple brand. I think that's you're being reductive, but also when people hear you say things like that about yourself, they go, that's our Robert. I go, oh, my son. So pure. So humble. Mm-hmm.

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. Dr. Phil. Oh, okay. I thought that was you introducing me. I was like, this is really mean. 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. Yeah. Well,

Good for you, Jamie. I can probably get a driver's license if I really want to do. I just don't want to. That's not true. 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, you know? 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. Yeah. I like it. They're just not going to be ready. And anyway, we should probably talk about Dr. Phil some, huh? Sure. Yeah, let's do it. Probably chill out with our Phil out. For sure.

I need to go, actually. Okay, that's fair. What if I just log out of this? This has been the final episode of Behind the Bastards. I'm so sorry. All right. Yeah, let's chill out with our Phil out. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Just a big old pudgy, pudgy, bald-headed Phil just flopping around. With a nice mustache. Mm-hmm. Not even flopping around. Like a skink on a hot rock. Okay. Oh, God.

Later that year. So Dr. Phil helps Oprah out and saves her bacon. And she brings him on her show and does her verdict episode. What is her bacon in that statement? Money? She was getting sued for a lot of money and defamation and shit. It was potentially something that would have really damaged her

her 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. Um, and this was part of a pivot in Oprah show where she went from like doing a normal talk show, um, to what she called change your life TV. Um,

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. Mostly, this involved Dr. Phil confronting people aggressively about their flaws so they would cry and say they learned something. Quote,

This is Dr. Phil explaining his methodology. Yeah. In order for people to change, there has to be a dramatic event. I think coming on the Oprah show as an event in itself is a watershed occurrence in people's lives. 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. I mean, that's...

You know, that's not untrue. That's not untrue. Okay. Okay. Accurate. Dr. Phil. Accurate. Jesus. Okay.

Yeah. So he's really like heading into the villain years. Yeah. Yeah. He's he's. I mean, he's been in villain territory this whole time. 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. One early case was a husband who was verbally abusive to his wife.

calling her obscene names. Phil could not just condemn the man, but he didn't just condemn the man. He made the man's wife tearfully recount everything he said to her on TV. 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. The classic air out the worst thing that's ever happened.

Yeah. Or ratings for someone else. Love that. Which I don't think is great. You know? No, that's awful. I don't think that's great behavior would be my take on it. Not a psychologist, but Phil isn't really a psychologist either. So, Phil then, after making this woman laboriously explain the horrible things her husband said to her, got to help provide some of his own homespun wisdom. In this case, he told the wife, you taught him how to treat you. Now,

This is a variation of one of Dr. Phil's life laws for people to follow, which he published in his plagiarized bestselling book, Life Strategies. Quote, No. We teach people how to treat us, own, rather than complain about how people treat us. My mom has that book, Robert. Did she blame herself for people being shitty to her? Yes.

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 the 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. Yeah. Well, I don't know. Did it, did it rescue your relationships? Absolutely not. I think what we got, we got more out of John Edwards. Do you remember him?

Or John Edwards. Oh, yeah. The talk to the dead guy? Yeah, the one who would record people in the audience talking about the dead people they wanted to hear from and then walking out and being like, aha! I know exactly. That was a fun grift. But also a traumatizing one. They're all traumatizing. They are all traumatizing grifts. That's what makes them so satisfying. Wow. We all learned a lesson, didn't we?

No. No, we didn't. So what's he up to? What's he doing? All right. So Dr. Fucking Phil. 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. 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. Mm-hmm.

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. 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. The toxic ways. Hey, you taught him to be 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 put it. Yeah, that's one of the most 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 die. I want to try this logic again.

with like crimes, like the next time I'm caught speeding, like, look, officer, you taught me how to drive this car that way. Like by, by having the road be this straight and me be this drunk, you kind of taught me to speed. You know, I will say that every time I tried to teach my dog something, that is a, it's a very low stakes version of that. They're like, well, didn't you teach him? He gets cuckoo on your floor when you don't feel like, um, standing up. And I was like, yes, I guess I did. Yeah.

Christ in heaven. Okay, so here's how he introduces the concept of life laws in his book. Quote,

Life laws are the rules of the game. 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. You can ignore them and stumble along, wondering why you never seem to succeed. Or you can learn them, adapt to them, mold your choices and behavior to them, and live effectively. 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.

What kind of... He went from zero to being like, my laws, much like the law of gravity. That is like... That is galaxy brain. That are as unavoidable and... As unchanging as the tides. As gravity. Oh, God. You have to appreciate the flagrancy on 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. 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. Pilgrim through a gigantic shredder. If we just put him through a shredder, yeah. People would watch.

Like that scene in Fargo. That's kind of like that's where his story is building to. Oh, fuck. We get Steve Buscemi in to present. That's a fucking 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. 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. So most of these laws are pretty self-explanatory stuff like life rewards action and you cannot change what you do not acknowledge.

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. 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? 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. Yeah. 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 food. Like, that strategy isn't going to help, you know? It's so frustrating, too, because it's like the way they're worded is so deliberate that it's like, oh, I understand why people fell for this, too. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's just all...

It's just very, very transparent nonsense for the most part. Yeah. It's words in a certain sequence and charging you, you know, 1895 for a hardcover. You got to give the man credit. It is words in a sequence. That's.

That is undeniable that Dr. Phil. That was a sentence. That's a sentence. The man uses sentences, you know, you got to give that to him. 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. 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, 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, I mean...

He sounds like a fucking Catholic priest. He's like, well, push your emotions down, okay? It's just such bad. It's particularly all bad advice for like abuse victims. Because 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. Absolutely. Like 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 just because he was beating you.

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. 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. Quote, you either teach people to treat you with dignity and respect or

or you don't. This means you are partly responsible for the mistreatment that you get at the hands of someone else. You shape others' behavior when you teach them what they can get away with and what they cannot. This is like, ugh, God, you're just like, oh God, okay, so what did you do that you need to believe this in order to live with yourself? Yeah, right. Jesus fucking Christ. Yeah, he's really a bad person. I don't like him. We had this at my house. Wow, it was next to, I like clearly remember it being next to my mom's bed.

Yeah, it's the good book. Gotta keep it close to you. We didn't own the Bible. 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. There's a lot of dead people. 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. Phil show. Like he spun off pretty quickly and he's been on the air ever since. 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. 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. 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!

That is a very well-crafted insult. That's beautiful. Yeah. It's like...

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. 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.

He did. I do. He isn't. He's still doing it on national television. I mean, yes, yes, yes. He does this all the time. Yes. Yes. From a write up by BuzzFeed quote,

Dr. 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. 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. Phil at 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. It all rings like semi-familiar. It is kind of like interesting to think about how 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.

I love how from the beginning... Yeah, I was like, oh, that wasn't an escalation. It was just always that. 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. And it's never made him less money, it doesn't seem like. This is so fucking 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...

Dr. Phil stopped renewing his license to practice as a psychologist in 2006. He has never held a valid license in California, where his show is filmed. 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, 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. 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, like,

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. Phil's Path to Recovery in 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. From BuzzFeed, quote,

Users don virtual reality goggles and are placed in scenarios with Dr. Phil. 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. 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.

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. 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. So that sounds helpful. That's yeah. That would thank you for that clarifying statement. Now,

Now, obviously, there's absolutely no evidence that this program helps with addiction in any way. 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. 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. You want to guess why they bought it? Why? Because Dr. Phil gave them free advertising on their show if they bought it.

Oh, he's a business boy. He's a business boy. He's a business boy. He's a really good business boy. Yeah. Dr. Phil offered Addiction Treatment Center's free endorsements on both The Dr. Phil Show and his spinoff series, The Doctors, if they first bought his program. BuzzFeed managed to get a hold of audio of one of these pitch sessions where McGraw's salesman told a customer, quote, 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. Oh, my fucking God. Okay, so we've arrived at cartoon villainy. We sure have, Jamie Loftus. Oh, right. We sure as shit have. Okay. Wait, does Oprah ever...

Because they forget. Because over the years, Oprah has endorsed a number of questionable people. And sometimes... Shout out John of God. And shout out... What's his name? Who wrote A Million Little Pieces? Oh, yeah. Jonathan Frey, right? Yeah. Yeah. She's had to apologize for having endorsed a lot of fucked up people over the years. Has that...

that moment has never happened for Dr. Phil right she's never backed off did she ever back off from him at any point 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 Stedman how are you okay well that was the question I wanted a better answer to except the truth the truth is that why would she care she's doing just fine laughing

Yeah, she has plenty of money. So, like, what do you expect her to do, Jamie? 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. Yeah, you're just asking to be sad because they... Just asking to be whack-a-mole right now. Yeah, they never will be 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? Chilling the products and services that support this podcast. Oh, we're back. And I am just having a great time talking with my friend J-Loft about Dr. Dr. Philomar? Philomar.

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 phil has this vr addiction treatment thing and he he's he basically gives people gives like treatment centers free advertising if they buy it um i hate it okay you want to guess the quality of the facilities that that uh that take dr phil up on this offer only the best right who is it

Is it worse than nothing? Oh, Jamie, it's a lot worse than nothing in some cases. One facility that took Dr. Phil up on this 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. 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. BuzzFeed actually investigated the facility and found that it had a well-documented history of children escaping and getting into danger. Stephen Sarduy, 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. Obviously, there's a gap somewhere, a loophole somewhere in the system where they're just leaving."

In the last two years, Inspiration staff members made 180 reports to police about children in their care going missing. Sometimes the teens left for days or even escaped the state. One escapee wound up prostituting herself for drugs. 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.

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.

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. 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, that's I that that that it wouldn't stop getting worse. That is so bad.

fucking awful it's like I mean it's pretty bad it's pretty pretty bad Jamie it speaks to like yeah just the level of clout he but he's he still upholds 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 that is so evil oh my god yep

It is evil, Jamie. Sure it is. But you know what's not evil? What?

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. And I can't stop. I can't stop pivoting to ads. You know, you're just, you've been, I mean, I'm, you know what, Jamie? I'm an, I'm an addict. Oh my God. Get it. Oh yeah. Can you explain that to me? I hated it. That one's a good one. That one's a, that's a keeper.

You know what? We're done with the episode. Go home. I nailed it. Wow. Wow. We got to end with Dr. Phil ruining the lives of children. I mean, I guess that that is where the story is going to end no matter what. It's where it began and it's where it'll end. Yeah. It's where it's how it will continue. Dr. Phil.

Just kill me now. I got, okay. I am going to, I am going to continue to advocate for put Dr. Phil through a gigantic human size shredder on live TV. I think that that is the kind of dystopian television. Like we're already at Masked Singer. 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.

Yeah. Is a shredder. Anyway, Jamie, J-Loft, J-Loftus, J-Loft. J-Loft? Sure. Oh, God. Yeah. We're actually still talking about inspirations. 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.

And boy, howdy, does it ever get worse? Let's talk about Todd Herzog. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's the end of the inspiration stuff. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. So,

This guy... Who handed him the Xanax. Managed to sober himself up enough to 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. Just because, you know, I think the reasoning is the more of a disaster you seem like on air, the more marketable you are. Right, right. Which is a proven model given the star of the show. That is like...

bachelor levels of like fuck upery oh no Jamie Jamie Jamie Jamie let's get as close as we can to killing people dear sweet Jamie Loftus we are not even at the worst part yet oh no okay keep going keep going yeah

So by the time Herzog got on stage, he was so wasted that he could barely talk or function. Dr. Phil and his assistant walked them out 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 I want everyone at home.

or in your car or pooping or whatever it is you're doing. 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. Hi, I'm Todd. Nice to meet you. How are you feeling, man? Can you walk? Barely. I have to have help. Sorry, I'm very... That's all right. Brandon, why don't you get over there and take Debbie's spot?

Yeah, I'll go. I'm sorry I'm crying because I just can't believe this is happening. Just come turn around. One, two, three. Here we go. So that's all I want to play of that. He can barely move. It is fundamentally unethical to...

have someone in that state on your television show. Even if they had been inebriated of their own volition and not being fed drugs, that is... Even if they had consented earlier, I don't think you can consent to that. No, absolutely not. That is the worst situation imaginable. That is fucking evil. Yeah, it's not...

It's not good, Jamie. It's just not a good thing to do, I would say. I would recommend not doing that. If someone asked me, should I take someone who has a problem with addiction and give them drugs and then film them disastrously wrecked, I would say, no, that sounds like an evil thing to do. That is absolutely

cruel it's cruel and good Jamie cruel and good and they just had that on in waiting rooms that was just what you watched while you were waiting to see the dentist yeah

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. And then they pointed out that they weren't a medical facility and couldn't watch their guests at all times.

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. Phil let Herzog appear on air in that he refused to ever have anything to do with the Dr. Phil show again. So this was so outrageous that it convinced the head of a treatment program that all of the free advertising the Dr. Phil show could provide was not worth the ethical compromise of dealing with that man. Yeah.

I can't, I mean, you can't really hand it to him for that, but that's, I mean, that's fucking something. That's so bleak, yeah. Yeah, it's just, you have to really...

Like you have to really do bad to to to convince someone of that. I think like that's a yeah, like that's throwing a lot of money out. 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? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's cool and good, Jamie.

Wow, I feel really not very good. I feel quite bad. Thank you so much for saying that. You know, here at Behind the Bastards, that's exactly what we go for at all times. Every time I 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 my whole goal. You know, you're a successful person. You're not a hero. I'm just I'm a hero. OK, I'm a hero. You know, I'm not a hero. Todd Herzog story does not appear to be an isolated one.

No.

She then told them not to say who made that suggestion later. Now, guests like Smith receive free addiction treatment at an expensive center after their appearance on the show, which is why many do it. 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.

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. Yeah, it's very ethical. That is extremely like you have to be thinking so hard to come up with something like that. It's so innocuous. Wow. Yeah. These people's lives are already off the fucking rails. How can we make it a little worse? I'm Dr. Phil.

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. Her mother assumed that when they landed, they would receive medical attention since withdrawal could endanger the fetus. 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. Next, from Stat News, quote,

The producer texted to say she should stay at the hospital, but Caitlin would not, and King Parish was terrified the baby would die if her daughter did not get medicine or drugs. King Parish and Caitlin went to the Dr. Phil 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. In it, King Parish tells the camera, I am scared to death right now. The camera follows Caitlin from behind as she walks towards homeless encampments.

King Paris said Kate Midland 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 that's good TV is what that is. This is genuinely really upsetting. 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 contextless fucked up way I hate that shit so much that is awful I think it's cool and good Jamie

Wow. I think it's cool and good. What? I hate this shit so much. Oh, Loftus. We do have fun on this show, though. We sure do. We sure do. We sure do. You know, time to bust out the franzia and really dial this up. Yeah, franz out with our glands out. I don't know. I'm stuck. I'm stuck making...

that exact kind of joke repeatedly. I'm still chilling. Chilling with my fill in. Yeah. Wow. That's gross. No, no, no. It's all deeply uncomfortable. Oh, Robert, you know what's not deeply uncomfortable?

The products and services that support this podcast? Facts. No, every one of them will gently cradle your head or whatever other part of your body you would like them to cradle. Absolutely, or wherever. They'll just kiss you, you know? They're just gonna kiss you. That's the behind the bastards promise. Random kisses from a product. Yep. Here's some ads.

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 Dr. 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. Almost no aspect of his show works if there's single-payer health care that covers addiction treatment.

The Dr. 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. 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. Just makes you want to light some shit on fire, doesn't it? Yeah, it does. Yeah, it sure does, Jamie. It sure does. So...

Of course, the Dr. Phil show would get boring pretty quick if he only dealt with people suffering from drug addictions and abusive spouses. From the beginning, a major source of content for McGraw was so-called troubled teens.

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. This leads to TV-friendly explosions of rage. In 2016, Dr. 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 like, like throwing twerking in there with fucking car stealing. Shameless. The word twerking there was that there was a cultural hat to it. Now, Bregoli now goes by the stage name Bad Baby, B-H-A-D, B-H-A-B-I-E, was a primetime ready delinquent. She spoke in a ridiculously affected hood accent and pretended to basically be a gangster in the kind of confrontational, like,

...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. 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. Jamie, I want you to pay attention to the looks on the faces of the people in his audience. Okay. She's defiant. Hi! Stop it. Oh, who is you? But has she met her match? You want to do it again? Sit down. With Dr. Phil. You can threaten them. Good. But I'm your worst nightmare, girl. Well, thank you, thank you.

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, you get to thinking that you've seen and heard just about everything. That was until today. Meet Danielle. Now, Danielle's mom, Barbara Ann, has written to me every year for the past three years about her daughter.

who has sold thousands of dollars, framed her mother as a drug user, and then called 911 to report her, and is currently facing grand theft charges. 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. Needless to say, while my team was there, something shocking and unexpected happened.

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. Now, sure enough, when Danielle's grandmother Barbara went outside, she found out that Danielle had stolen the car, which had the crew member's handbag, wallet, ID, and cash inside.

Now, that's not bad enough. Danielle's only 13 years old. So you see, the thing that's most interesting to me about that is the faces of the women in the audience, 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. Phil reveals.

Well, and I also think that those reactions may not even be, I mean, those reactions in themselves are extremely coached where 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 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 fucking 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. 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. That's great. But fuck him. Like she went on to like have a successful, like she's 18. She's, she was nominated for an American music award. Oh, she was, I didn't know that. Well, good. I'm glad there's a happy ending. I don't know much about bad baby. She's 18 now. And like, she's, you know, signed a record label. I mean, yeah.

And she is standing up for what happened to her, which I think we're going to get into.

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. In subsequent episodes, Bregoli 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. In 2018, she released an original song and gave a different view of her experience at Turnabout. Quote,

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. 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. 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.

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.

She claims that this basically made her decide to, quote, lean in to the bad behavior that had made her famous. Once you become a meme, there aren't a lot of ways to get a clean slate. There's no right to be forgotten in the U.S., so why wouldn't Bregoli 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. Phil show. It's one thing to shamelessly milk the worst moments and the greatest shames in the life of an adult. It's another thing entirely to do that to a child who has no real way to understand the long term. Yeah. No way that she could have possibly understood the long term consequences of being coming that kind of famous. It's completely. Yeah. It's like violent every level. And it's like, whatever. I mean, clearly, Dr. Phil does not give up.

No, no, not a not a third of a fuck. Yeah, but it is. And it also, I think, like speaks to how especially for a kid, which is like that doing what he does to children should be illegal. It should be a crime. Yes. You should not be allowed to do shit like that. 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 yeah and and it's all and and i i see that i mean it's when you're introduced in the public that way and you are coming from a place of poverty and you are not being empowered at all or protected like what are you supposed to do like that miserable cruel situation to be put in it's oh it's fucked up

Yeah. Now, Jamie, that's all pretty bad, right? Everything we've talked about happening to Bregoli 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 rehabilitation treatment programs he was also sending kids to. I'm going to quote again from BuzzFeed.

Turnabout.

Turnabout administrators provided a statement to me saying they took immediate action after Archuleta claimed she had been assaulted, but that her father removed her from the facility before we could conduct a full inquiry. The statement continued, We would never take lightly an allegation of mistreatment to any of our students. Now that this incident is the subject of litigation, we must withhold our full response for a later date.

Now, the owner of this ranch is Aspen Education Group, which was then bought by CRC, which is now owned by Acadia Healthcare. In an email statement to BuzzFeed News, Acadia's Director of Investor Relations, Gretchen Hommerick, said,

Turnabout has gone through multiple owners and since 2014 has been owned by current and former employees of the ranch. But Aspen Education has been accused of multiple infractions by former attendees, including lawsuits that claimed psychological torture, abuse, sexual assault, and human trafficking. 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. 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, 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. I'm sure that that's, yeah, I'm sure that that's integral to it being able to survive at all. Like it needs to be constantly changing hands. That's, ugh.

I mean, the whole teen treatment industry, like I've done a number of art back when I was at Cracked. I did a number of articles with survivors of these facilities. 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, there was there was a good one that reached the point where like Paris Hilton made a documentary about it last year. Yes.

Yeah, Paris Hilton and actually Danielle Bregoli by Baby are involved right now with going against Dr. Phil about this exact place. So it's very interesting that you mentioned Paris Hilton. I don't know much about her. I'm always mentioning her. 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

like good socially responsible stuff lately. Paris. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. It seems like, it seems like she has, uh, I mean, also I'm like, I'm not, I'm not about to, I'm not going to go to bat for the stop being poor lady, but yeah. Right. Right. Right. Right. Uh, but, but yeah, that, that specific instance, I'm glad 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 because it's a fucking nightmare. Um,

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. 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. When questioned about this, a spokesperson for the show said, we're aware and we're monitoring things.

Since Archuleta went public with her allegations, Bregoli has come forward with more detail about her own experience. 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. Yeah. That's my framing. But yes.

Mm-hmm.

One of the girls I talked to who did this when she was like 14 or 15, one of the punishments they gave her was she had to dig up the stump of a mature tree on her own, 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. She just spent days in 120 degree heat digging

slowly dying as she tried to force the stump out as a child. Like these places are all nightmares. Horrible. Um, Bregoli is of course not the only teenager featured on the Dr. Phil show. Buzzfeed writers, Scotchie Cowell announces announced, uh, sorry, Scotchie. I don't know if I'm getting that right. Um, alleges that while McGraw is healthy, is happy to feature children of all genders, he gets particularly aggressive with teenage girls. 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.

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. Most kids featured in this way do not get any updates on the Dr. Phil show or at most mentioned briefly once more. 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. Every episode of this show features a plastic surgeon, an obstetrician, and an ER doc who talk about different health topics. Yeah. This sounds like it might be, yeah. It's another, like, sub shop waiting room classic. Yeah.

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... Yeah, I expected worse. That is a better report card than I expected. But 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. I 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. Okay. Fair enough. I was like, there's no way they're somewhat correct. Yeah. 63% of the time. Why? Yes. And again, somewhat being the operative word.

We could go into a lot of other case studies of particularly egregious guest choices, but going over all these sad people in the way Phil exploits them ad nauseum kind of runs the risk of being sorrow porn itself. 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. 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. Her father claims she has psychosis, bipolar disorder, and learning disabilities.

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. From BuzzFeed, quote,

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. They call her difficult and volatile, and though she's signed an appearance release, it's not clear to the audience that she has read and understood it. 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. 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. When she walks off the stage in anguish, McGraw merely sips his water and sighs. The episode is near unwatchable. Yeah, I mean, that doesn't sound like consent was gained at all. I mean, there were so many red flags. It doesn't sound like she's capable of consenting to that. Yeah.

I don't even know what to think. I mean, that entire... Because I don't trust any of the information that anyone is presenting in this way. But that's just... I mean, very clear, there's not an issue that should be handled on television with an unlicensed doctor. To say the very fucking least. Yeah, that is just fucking despicable. So...

Dr. Jeff Sugar, an assistant professor of clinical psychology at USC, provided a description of the Dr. 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. It's like if one of them was drowning and approaching a lifeboat, and instead of throwing them an inflatable donut, you throw them an anchor. And that's Dr. Phil, baby! D-Phil!

I am so upset about it. 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 shit. I can't even enjoy Dr. Phil means I was going to show you Dr. Phil means I'm not gonna not worth it. Fuck it. 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. A cool life-affirming kind of shredder. Yeah. In a way, in a way, isn't that just capitalism? Put yourself through a shredder? 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.

You know, I'm dying to live my life. So you can just, you can listen to the podcast. You can listen to VectoCast. You can listen to Lolita Podcast. 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. This was miserable. Damn God yourself. Yeah, it was, Jamie. It really was. All right. Well, fuck. Bye.

the internet and fuck life behind the bastards is a production of cool zone media for more from cool zone media visit our website cool zone media.com or check us out on the iheart radio 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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