Behind the Bastards - Part One: Gary Young: The Fake Doctor Who Drowned His Own Baby

Episode Date: May 21, 2019

In Episode 62, Robert is joined by comedian Billy Wayne Davis to discuss lunatic fake doctor, D. Gary Young.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.c...om/listener for privacy information.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?
Starting point is 00:01:21 And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We usually introduce a show or something. They're like, do you want some more? I was just saying comedian, but now I fucked up your thing. You can plug anything you want. Just random products.
Starting point is 00:02:15 Just see me live. How about that? See Billy Wayne Davis live. Yeah, bwdtour.com. BwdTour.com. See, there we go. Now that's a plug. There we go. That's a plug. You see why I'm probably not more famous than I am. Maybe the story of the guy we're about to talk about today will teach you how to self-promote
Starting point is 00:02:34 because we are speaking today about one of the great all-time self-promoters who would not give up on his dream of being a doctor without ever getting any sort of training in how to do medicine. Oh, he just wanted respect. No, he just really wanted to try out stuff on people's bodies. Oh, okay. Yeah, we're talking about Gary Young. Have you ever heard of Gary Young? No, I'm excited about this. No, I haven't. Have you ever heard of Young Living Essential Oils?
Starting point is 00:03:04 I've heard of Essential Oils because I live in Los Angeles. Right, right. And the reason you've heard of Essential Oils, the reason they're like a big thing in our culture in this country, is Gary Young. He's generally considered to be the father of Essential Oils. Okay. You know, they obviously go back thousands of years, but he's a guy. Did he come up with that, too? Huh?
Starting point is 00:03:22 Was that his line? But it's accurate, too. He's a scammer, but he did start the first big scam, Essential Oil Company, that they have all descended from. Like, he turned it into a trend. So he is the, okay. Yeah. That's one of the few things. He's like, I'll be damned. I am.
Starting point is 00:03:38 Yeah. I can say this. I am. I am. He's not the father of, well, we'll talk about what happened to his baby in a little bit. Well, on June 19th, 2018, the Christian Broadcasting Network published an obituary for a dude. Most people listening to this have not heard of him until now, Donald Gary Young. Here's how the CBN described his life. Quote, Young spent 35 years studying the benefits and perfecting the extraction of Essential
Starting point is 00:04:04 Oils while building a billion dollar global business designed to share what he deemed the gift of Essential Oils with millions of people. Sharing his gift. Sharing his gift. That's how you get to be a billionaire. Sharing your gift for a nominal fee. Yes, it's that part. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:04:19 I always forget the last part. I'm like, here's my gift. And often by sharing access for people to be able to sell your gift or really what it is, it's about letting people sell access to selling your gift to other people. Yes. Because that's where the real money is. See, he's the father of that. Yeah, but for Essential Oils.
Starting point is 00:04:39 That scam's been going on longer than him. He was like, what if we apply that to things that smell nice? That's not dumb. I'm not mad at him. He's not a dumb guy. He did recognize a market. He did recognize a market. That was his true talent.
Starting point is 00:04:53 And as you will find out, his talent was not medicine. The obituary described Young as a modern pioneer, part inventor, and part historian. In the June episode of The Essential Edge, the magazine for Gary's company, Young Living, his wife wrote, quote, God was his foundation and his word was his bond to let anyone down to disappoint God. And he wasn't about to do that. He called the Bible his owner's manual. What does he mean by owner's manual?
Starting point is 00:05:19 He claimed that God owns him. Yeah, is that what that means? Or is that I'm God and this is my owner's manual? Oh. You know, actually considering what the story we're about to tell, that seems like a little more fitting to the actual life Gary Young lived. But I'm going to guess the literal meaning is that like, you know, I'm a servant of God and this is the book that tells me what he wants me to do.
Starting point is 00:05:41 Well, that's what he's saying, but he's in my head. He's like, I'm the dude. I'm the dude. And this book tells me how to be. Yeah, he definitely believed he was the dude. Now we don't know a tremendous amount about Gary Young's early life. I picked him for this episode because multiple fans on Twitter and Reddit suggested him. They all linked to lurid Reddit threads and personal blogs that alleged to string a fucked up
Starting point is 00:06:00 crimes by Gary Young. I was intrigued, but there was a problem. Most of the evidence about Mr. Young was held in thoroughly disreputable corners of the internet. There was a lot of weird digging on this guy to figure out exactly what I could back up and what I couldn't. And I'm stating that up front because it was a pain in the ass and I hope everybody appreciates. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:06:17 It was frustrating. There was a lot of cool details I couldn't report on because it's like I couldn't find any backup for that. To this day. To this day. I just couldn't find any evidence of. Of like, these are stories, but no one knows if it's true. Exactly.
Starting point is 00:06:32 There's a lot of that. Like the stuff I could verify is fucking crazy. But like there's other stuff that I would love to be able to talk about that we just can't get into. That's kind of impressive. Yeah. Like to be alive and die in 2018 and like most of your past not be available. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:06:48 Some of it may just be that I don't think the state of Washington has done a bang up job digitizing all of their records from the 80s. But yeah, we'll talk about that a little bit later. So Gary was born in 1949 in Idaho. He grew up dirt poor. Early his cabin had a dirt floor and no running water or electricity. He and his parents and his five siblings lived in a 30 by 30 foot cabin. Five?
Starting point is 00:07:12 Five. Okay. Yeah. I'm guessing it was a. Build a mental and mature. Yes. As a young adult, Gary bought a small farm in Spokane and started working the land there. In his early 20s, he was doing some logging when a tree fell on top of him.
Starting point is 00:07:24 It shattered his skull, ruptured his spinal cord and broke 19 bones. He fell into a coma like you do. And when he woke up after a couple of days, the doctors were like, you're never going to walk again, brah. So next Gary did what a lot of people would probably do in his position and he tried to kill himself twice. He failed. So next he did the sort of thing nobody does and decided to go on a fast and consume nothing
Starting point is 00:07:46 but water and lemon juice for a hundred or 243 days. Why 243? That's just how long it took until he started to feel his toes again. No shit. So if you dear listener have been paralyzed from, I don't even know if he was ever had an accident. This is just the story he tells. There's no outside verification of this.
Starting point is 00:08:05 But this is the story that Gary Young tells about his life. Okay. Okay. That makes more sense. That makes way more sense. Than me believing everything you were saying just then where I was like, what the fuck? I do know, I know a lot of, like I say, we both did grow up in the south. I'm sure you do too.
Starting point is 00:08:19 I know a lot of people who had farming accidents and mostly they just get addicted to oxy. Yeah, now. Back then it was just like, just that old, it was just cigarettes and beer. Yeah. Cigarettes and beer. Never ran into anyone who drank nothing but water and lemon juice and regained feeling in their toes. It does sound like it.
Starting point is 00:08:37 Also I believed it. I was like fucking Northwest. Yeah. Yeah. Then they're like, yeah, well if you eat this plant for 48 days, you, you grow a new nose. That is a very Washington thing to hear. Yeah. Now, according to Gary Young's incredibly humble biography, D. Gary Young, the world
Starting point is 00:08:54 leader in essential oils, quote, that he walks today is a miracle that defies his medical prognosis. Now, the book D. Gary Young, the world leader in essential oils was written by his wife and published by the company he founded. This is what we in the journalism biz call a conflict of interest. Tragically, heartbreakingly, I was not able to find a copy of this book on Kindle or as an e-book. Can I interrupt real quick?
Starting point is 00:09:16 Yeah, absolutely. That's your job. I just want to say, I don't feel like the focus should have been on him walking as much as what happened inside that shattered skull. Shouldn't that be what we're watching? Yeah. It's like, how you do it though? I'm really less concerned about your toes than what's going on up there.
Starting point is 00:09:36 How do you see everything? Yeah. What has that convinced you of, Gary? Yeah. How motivated are you right now about anything? I feel like the shattered skull and deciding not to consume anything but water and lemon juice for 243 days, I feel like there's a straight line between those two. Where he's like, I figured out a solution, hold on, we should listen to what he thinks
Starting point is 00:09:54 the solution is. Yeah. Maybe he shouldn't be making decisions for a little while. You know, his brain got bigger, but his skull got bigger too, so now he can walk. Now yeah, I haven't been able to find copies of this book that I could access. There are some copies on eBay for like 60 bucks, so fuck that. I did find a mom MLM saleswoman's blog review of the book and that review is quite the treasure, but we'll get to it later.
Starting point is 00:10:20 I also found a summary on Goodreads that provided some context. I'm going to read a selection from that. Quote, as the pages unfold, you will be amazed to read about the devastation he felt when told he would be confined to a wheelchair for life and then how with sheer determination he defied all medical prognosis and 13 years later ran a half marathon, finishing 60 second out of 960 participants. During this crucial time, he was introduced to essential oils, which changed his life forever.
Starting point is 00:10:47 Working on the farm with his family, growing and cultivating crops for survival enabled him to make an easy and exciting transition to growing and cultivating aromatic crops. His desire to learn mechanics and the art of distillation have taken him all over the world and have driven him to develop and expand his farms and eventually build the largest privately owned distilleries of aromatic crops around the world. So that is the company line on Gary Young. Sounds impressive. Sounds impressive.
Starting point is 00:11:11 So you want to hear about how he drowned his baby in a hot tub? I mean, yeah. Kind of. So in the early 1980s, Gary Young moved to Spokane, Washington as I stated and started operating a small and unregulated medical practice in addition to his farm. Now his medical practice was focused on aiding people and delivering their babies. Gary had no training in medicine or obstetrics. He was not a midwife either and had not gone through any of the grueling apprenticeships
Starting point is 00:11:37 that those people go through. What he did have was a bold dream of delivering infant human beings into hot tubs and then holding them underwater for extended periods of time, trusting that the umbilical cord would deliver them oxygen. This was in order to gain them vague and unclear health benefits. So that. You don't think that's a good idea? I just believe that we're going to go back to the crux of the problem is when the tree
Starting point is 00:11:59 fell on his head, you guys. Yeah, I believe the head injury. I think something happened. I don't know that I believe he broke his legs, but I believe the head injury. Do think it fell on his head. He's like, no, hot tubs. Hot tubs. I got it.
Starting point is 00:12:16 The problem with. Modern medicine is we don't drown the babies enough. We both grew up around farm, like my grandpa had a farm down the street, so I grew up on a farm more or less and there's like a community with farms. Absolutely. So there had to be like some other farmers when he was like, I'm a doctor now. Everybody was like, no, I don't think you're a doctor. I don't think this is going to end well.
Starting point is 00:12:43 Hey, old tree head said he's a doctor. Yeah, I'm going to guess the people who he was convincing that he was a doctor were like people in the city who were like kind of the woo-woo types in Spokane rather than. Yes. All the farmers are like, they're going to let that dude deliver. No, sir. Okay. I'd like to read from an October 17th, 1982 Spokane Spokesman Review article titled,
Starting point is 00:13:09 Babies, Homestyle Birthing Continues to Generate Controversy Here, quote. It's because he's killing them. Four infant deaths over the past year have infuriated some Spokane doctors and raised questions about the wisdom of homestyle birthing. Why forsake the safety of hospitals for a homey atmosphere? Is it prudent to do so? If it isn't, is there any way to stop people from having babies at home? Or is there a place for medical safeguards and homespun aesthetics to meet midway?
Starting point is 00:13:36 One of the births in question occurred in a Spokane Valley hot tub. Another took place in a South Hill home. The most recent was the most unusual. Gary and Donna Young's daughter was born September 4th in a hot tub at their health club in the Spokane Valley. They used a Russian method designed to make birth less traumatic by letting infants swim from the mother's amniotic fluid into a warm saline solution before surfacing into the world.
Starting point is 00:13:56 While underwater, oxygen is supplied through the umbilical cord, but the cord's oxygen flow evidently stopped before the young's newborn surface. The infant died of oxygen deprivation. Spokesman, county coroner Lois Shank said, the young baby was born normal and healthy and would have breezed through a hospital delivery, according to Shanks and others. When contacted by phone last week, Gary Young's only comment was, there are more damn hazards in the hospital than out of the hospital and there are enough damn statistics to prove it.
Starting point is 00:14:21 Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, Gary Young. No. So, I do like that it took four deaths. For there to be an article? Like, well, back then, back then, like even doctors were like, listen, some of them are gonna die.
Starting point is 00:14:35 That's just how it is, but this seems like more than normal. Yeah, this seems like a lot of babies are dying in Spokane. You're gonna lose a baby or two. That's just part of the business, but you can't, you can't, hot tubs are for fucking, not for, hot tubs are for fucking for smoking cigars and watching the sunset for cocaine, not for babies, not for having a baby, not for having a baby. That's a hard line for me. You have that baby before prom, then you go to the after part.
Starting point is 00:15:02 Exactly. Now, that article sounds pretty bad, but additional reading into the subject of Gary Young's dead baby makes it seem even worse, because he didn't just try to do some weird rutchin birthing ritual that got fucked up due to like an oxygen flow defect in the umbilical cord that occurred over a few seconds. Gary Young kept his newborn infant child submerged in a hot tub for nearly an hour, because he was just that sure that his alternative birthing nonsense was the way to go. An hour.
Starting point is 00:15:28 Was there somebody else there going like, I don't, can we, and he's like, hold on. I think it was just him and his wife. Now Gary Young didn't go to prison after this, for reasons which baffle and infuriate me. He was arrested the next year though, for practicing medicine without a license. The next year. The next year. He kept right on being a doctor, a fake doctor. He was like, I think for a lot of men, getting your own baby killed, you would reevaluate
Starting point is 00:15:55 a number of things about your life. I think so. I think if I killed my own baby, even if it was a total accident, I would reevaluate most of my life. Maybe it's 58 minutes and not 60. 58 minutes. That's where I went wrong. 45.
Starting point is 00:16:09 Yeah. 40. Start the first baby at 20. Or just pull it out. You okay? Put it back in. You're doing good. Get like a consent check from the baby.
Starting point is 00:16:17 Just do the science. Pull it out. Put it back in. Do what I say. Start with 10 minutes for the first baby, 20 for the second. By the time you get up to five or six, maybe try an hour. But if we're being honest, he doesn't have the patience for the scientific method. No, he wouldn't become a real doctor.
Starting point is 00:16:31 He would have done it. So he's just like, no, just do it. We'll see. Just do it. I think this will work. If it doesn't, I know how to make another one. There's one Russian, if there's one country that knows how to keep babies alive. It's Russia.
Starting point is 00:16:42 Yeah. There's like one Russian dude in town. He's like, that's not, no, it's not our thing. No. Now, so Young was arrested the next year, according to the New Yorker, quote, Young said in the presence of undercover detectives that he could detect cancer with a blood test. He was arrested for practicing medicine without a license, according to the Spokesman Sports, Spokane Spokesman Review, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge.
Starting point is 00:17:08 What Gary Young did would all good American accidental baby murderers slash quack medical practitioners do. He moved to Mexico and started operating an unlicensed clinic to treat cancer patients with a drug called Latryl, according to Dr. Eva F. Briggs, a Fulton, New York family medicine doctor with 35 years of experience, quote, Latryl is a useless and dangerous drug that can harm or kill people because it forms cyanide in the body. It is illegal and it's something which Young should be ashamed rather than proud. Jesus.
Starting point is 00:17:35 That's, I think, kills his baby, gets arrested for practicing medicine without a license, moves to Mexico and starts giving people cyanide for their cancer. But they didn't send him to jail, they're like, hey, stop. And he was like, no. No. I'm going to go do it somewhere else. I'm going to go do it somewhere else. So Dr. Briggs wrote the first credible article I could find in Gary Young's life.
Starting point is 00:17:58 She evaluated some of the writings from his company and his wife about his life and provided good medical context about exactly why he's a scammer. After Young's Latryl business tapered off, probably because it's poison, because he kept killing people, probably because more people died. We don't have a body count on that one, but I guess it ain't zero. Not everybody's good at what they do. There's a learning curve with being a doctor, you know. You got to learn by doing.
Starting point is 00:18:24 Just, I'm apprenticing right now. I'm going to apprentice doctor to myself. God damn. I like that he just keeps going. He really, he's a confident man. What years are this though? This is like 1983, 84 right now. See, more.
Starting point is 00:18:41 I feel like up until like 20 years ago, you could get away with a lot more. You really could. The 80s were a golden age to just have confidence and nothing else. I was, as a standup, when I started doing standup was like the beginning of my space. So I saw this old guard of comedian, not like well-known comedian, but like road comedian that had been doing it in the 80s and 90s. They lived a certain terrible lifestyle in awful people and then the internet happened and it was like, they all disappeared because people were like, hey, you're under arrest
Starting point is 00:19:14 now. It was fascinating to watch. You hear him talking, you're like, you know, that's not how the world works anymore. So that's so fascinating. That's so recent he's doing this. Yeah. Yeah. After Young's lateral business tapered off, he moved to California and opened another
Starting point is 00:19:31 cancer clinic. He started claiming he was an MD again at this point. He was not and I found another article about Young on the Skeptical Inquirer written by William London, a professor of public health at Cal State. He noted, quote, according to his personal achievements page on his website in 2017, DeGarry Young studied various science subjects and the historical significance of essential oils in various countries and universities. The page indicated that he attended Bernadian University between 1982 and 1985 and entered
Starting point is 00:19:58 a doctorate in naturopathy. Where'd you go to call it? Bernadium? Bernadian? Well, Bernadian University is a male order diploma mill, which has never been authorized to operate or to grant degrees. That's where he got his, he did get a fake degree this time. That's a step better.
Starting point is 00:20:14 So he ordered it. He's like, I'm tired of people calling me on them as bullshit. I want to have a piece of paper. Feels like a technicality. Yeah. Now, in 1986, while still operating in California, doctor, not a doctor, Gary Young opened another clinic in Baja, Mexico, the Rosarita Beach Clinic. Here's how the Spokane Chronicle covered one of their native sons expanding his business,
Starting point is 00:20:34 quote, title is, does he relieve people of pain or of their wallets? It's the second one. Should Donald Gary Young be half the healer, he claims there is someday maybe a market for little plastic statues of the guy to stick on automobile dashboards. That's exactly what happened to the last great physician. Gary Young, founder of the Rosarita Beach Clinic in Tijuana, Mexico, his blood crystallization test and orthomolecular cell therapy are the long-awaited remedies for most pains. He claims $6,000 will bring a cancer patient into remission.
Starting point is 00:21:04 A cure can be affected for $10,000. He claims a 90% cure rate for lupus and says only 63 have died out of the 1,000 patients treated in the last four years. If you know my history, that's pretty good. That's pretty good. I'm doing good. Used to be a one-one. It used to be real bad, you guys.
Starting point is 00:21:19 Now, if he was really, if these people were coming to him with actual diseases, 63 out of 1,000 wouldn't be a bad death rate. But there's some reason not to believe that any of those 1,000 people had anything wrong with them. Many might just have killed 63 healthy people. I just killed some idiots. Yeah. See, Gary Young and his clinic catered to Americans, mostly wealthier people who were
Starting point is 00:21:41 into alternative medicine and lived in Southern California. Now I feel no empathy for anything. No, I'm fine with them dying. Well now that our empathy has been boiled out, it's time for ads. Yay. Not my smoothest transition. I thought it was pretty good. Thank you.
Starting point is 00:21:59 Thank you. Thank you. I thrive on praise. Products. Services. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what?
Starting point is 00:22:15 They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. Standing inside his hearse with like a lot of guns.
Starting point is 00:22:49 He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC.
Starting point is 00:23:11 What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.
Starting point is 00:23:52 This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.
Starting point is 00:24:27 And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus, it's all made up? Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
Starting point is 00:25:06 your podcasts. We're back. Hey. You know what I'm about to pop into? We're looking for, we've been trying to get Doritos sponsorships for a while now. And you know, I think I'm just giving up the ghost, you know, there's a couple of reasons for that. I love the flavor of Doritos.
Starting point is 00:25:22 I hate the multiple civil wars that they've helped back in order to lower food prices to make cheaper chips. So what? Well, I'm not a great fan of that. Yeah. That's maybe that's a little bit extreme. Yeah. But I think there's a lot of room in the world to enjoy chips that are made by people
Starting point is 00:25:40 that, you know, push the government to institute regime change in the global south in order to, but, you know, delicious, but I think I found a new snack. But we got to make profits. We do still have to make profits every day. And so if the Doritos people come back in, I will take back everything that I've said and pretend that they didn't do what they did in Latin America, but up until that point, I think I have a new, I think I have a new brand of chip that I want to plug because I just had these yesterday.
Starting point is 00:26:11 I got them at a 365, which is one of the whole food stores. Their lesser evil is the brand, which is pretty, pretty good brand for behind the bastards. I don't trust it immediately. You're not, you're not going to lie. I'm just going to ask. I'm going to, I'm going to put all my credibility on the line as the host of this show that I've gained. They're called grain free paleo puffs and they've got, they're vegan.
Starting point is 00:26:30 So there's no cheese in them, but they taste exactly like, like an aged cheddar. I don't know. They're really fucking good. Like they're legitimately some of the best. Is it the one in Silver Lake? Cause that's all my way home. No. Silver Lake is two.
Starting point is 00:26:44 I mean, I assume they have them too. Okay. I live a little bit further west. Yeah, it is. Okay. But they're fucking delicious cause they've got like their puff based so that you expect kind of like a Cheetos puff, but there's crunchy is crunchy Cheetos that they're like a little like nugget of, of crunchy, cheesy goodness.
Starting point is 00:27:01 They're so fucking tasty. Can I ask a follow up question? Yes. Absolutely. Sativa or indica? I don't smoke anymore, but when I did, I just chain smoked marijuana and never just whatever. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:27:14 Just whatever. Yeah. No, it is a, it's fun. Sophie is walking around with a laptop showing it to, to our, our audio guy, Dan. That's a terrible logo. I'm sorry. Don't attack the logo. So they might give us money.
Starting point is 00:27:24 It's like a bear has a boner. I think it's a good logo. You wouldn't, you wouldn't want a bear. We're talking about it. You don't, a bear with an erection doesn't make you think of chips because when I, when I think of the crunchy goodness of a delightful happy time snack, I think of a bear with a massive heart on. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:27:43 That cheesy bear dick. That's what everybody says about bear dicks. It's cheesier than you think they're going to be. You're hurting our chances of a sponsor sip, Sophie. This is off the rails. I'm trying to do a nice ad plug. For the people at lesser evil. Backdoor your way into Doritos ad Doritos like, here's money.
Starting point is 00:28:03 Keep talking. This is a disaster. Speaking of disasters, Gary Young had a clinic in Rosarita Beach. Well, it was in Tijuana, but it was called the Rosarita Beach Clinic. Tijuana and Rosarita are separate towns. Rosarita is a lovely place. Yeah. You can buy a tram at all there.
Starting point is 00:28:18 It's great. So he has this clinic and you know, he bragged that's only 63 out of a thousand of his cancer and lupus patients died, which would be a pretty good rate of success if any of those people were actually sick. See, the reason that he says that they had cancer and lupus is because he performed blood tests all of them. And those blood tests came back positive for cancer or whatever it was he was treating them for.
Starting point is 00:28:40 Now, the LA Times tasked John Hurst, a great journalist with investigating the clinic in 1987. What Hurst and his team did next is one of my favorite stories in all of journalism. So Hurst sent away for a blood testing kit from the clinic. He's glowing right now. I'm so excited to tell you this. His whole demeanor changed as soon as he got to this paragraph. I'll just have to say it was very, it was like, you could see it happen.
Starting point is 00:29:06 It was great. I'm excited. This is a frustrating time in the history of journalism. No, I understand. But I love to run into stories like this that just remind you of how powerful the medium can be. And this is a great one. So you didn't have to go to Tijuana, to the clinic itself to get your blood tested.
Starting point is 00:29:21 You could send away for a kit. And so Hurst did that. He sent for a blood testing kit from the clinic and Gary Young sent him a kit, which included several sharp pins and two glass slides. The patient was supposed to puncture their own finger and basically make blood slides out of it. And then put it in the mail? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:29:37 And then mail it back. Got you. Sounds scientific, right? Yep. That's super scientific. Check it out. So Hurst and his colleagues went ahead with the process. Quote.
Starting point is 00:29:45 That's a fun conversation. Just fucking do it. All right. Yeah. So there are two slides using blood from a healthy seven-year-old, 20-pound Tabbycat named Boomer that belongs to Glendale veterinarian Ahmed Khalik. The slides were presented at the clinic by the reporter who identified himself as a prospective client.
Starting point is 00:30:00 Sharon Reynolds, a health educator at the clinic who also casts horoscopes for patients at $50 each, examined the slides under a microscope that projects an image on a television monitor. She said she found evidence of aggressive cancer in the cell as well as liver problems. The cancer, she said, had been in the reporter's system for four or five years. Oh shit. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
Starting point is 00:30:22 You must have suspected something, she said, gazing up with sorrowful eyes. I did. I definitely suspected something. I did. Next the reporter had another blood test performed that day at the clinic using his own actual blood this time. And this time Sharon Reynolds claimed to have found latent cancer, but thankfully not aggressive cancer.
Starting point is 00:30:44 This one's a seizure cat. This one's a seizure cat. She also stated that the liver dysfunction she'd found evidence of in the cat's blood was still present in his human blood. Well, he'd been fucking that cat. He'd been fucking that cat. Did you fuck a cat? He was like, okay, well now we're getting weird.
Starting point is 00:31:02 Now you're asking questions, I didn't want to answer it. She suggested another test. In the report she provided the journalist, she wrote, quote, elevated level of toxicity must be reduced in order to promote assimilation, increase oxygenation, and prevent degeneration. We recommend a supervised program of cleansing, detox, and rebuilding. It sounds like a lot of their advice is based on that Adam Sandler character, the Cajun man. It's just, say, Asian after a lot of fancy words and people are like, oh, okay, shit.
Starting point is 00:31:29 Oh yeah, that sounds about right. That sounds like a doctor thing you'd say. I do feel like that at the doctor sometimes when they say something like, I just realized you can tell me anything. Because I don't know anything. That's why you really rely on the fact that medical schools have their shit together? It is. Ospreys are flying past us right now.
Starting point is 00:31:50 I saw those at the, they're out by the Burbank airport. I flew out the other day. Yeah. A bunch of fucking crayon eaters in the sky. But those are, those have the presidential seal on it. Oh, oh, uh, Pinsas? Or Trumpas? Oh, okay, yeah, because I saw them the other day, Tuesday, I guess, I flew out of Burbank.
Starting point is 00:32:10 I guess. Those are presidential seal ones, and then they had Marine one over on this barrack. I'll always remember when fucking every time Obama would come to town and take the motor cade, it was just a nightmare on the roads. You couldn't do anything. No. Oh, I don't want to drive home. That's going to suck.
Starting point is 00:32:28 Presidents stop, stop visiting cities. Just stay. Go to the sticks. Just like. Yeah. I'm going to Duluth. And they're like, I don't want to go to Duluth. We know.
Starting point is 00:32:39 We know, but don't come here. That's why no one lives here. There's enough people. Don't put that like Duluth. It's fine. It's fine. I'm sure your traffic's great right now. Oh, yes.
Starting point is 00:32:47 I'm sure what you call traffic is wonderful. So the detoxification program that they suggested is not cheap. It cost $2,000 a week and payment was required in advance. There was, however, a less intense at home version for $90 plus 400 in vitamins and supplements sold by the vitamin company that Young had founded in California. So the early times took that route and had the vitamins sent to them. They pretended to do the treatment and when it came time for a follow up blood test to see if the treatment had worked, they mailed in the third set of blood slides.
Starting point is 00:33:20 This time, the blood came from a chicken they bought from a Chinatown poultry shop. Yes. Yes. Really, really putting that bit just a little further. I like there was a conversation like, where do we get, what do we do this time? Well, we do this time. And there's someone's like, I was in Chinatown and you can go buy a chicken. You can buy chicken.
Starting point is 00:33:36 Let's do that. Let's get some chicken blood. This is the funnest day at work ever. Now as the Times noted, quote, red cells in chicken blood are oval shaped and have no nuclei distinct from the round, non-nucleated red cells in the blood of mammals when viewed under a microscope, experts say. Nevertheless, the Rosarita Beach Clinic diagnosed the chicken blood as if it were from a human. There's inflammation in the liver, the clinic's report said.
Starting point is 00:33:59 Your blood is indicating the possibility of pre lymphomate condition. It appears as though you've recently undergone a high upset in your life, which has weakened your immune response considerably. Did you eat a bunch of feathers? Were you slaughtered to provide nuggets? What's the kind of stress we're seeing in your blood? It feels like someone chopped your head off. Is that what happened?
Starting point is 00:34:19 Is that what happened? I did lose my head. The report closed with the identical prescription for their detox treatment. These people didn't even bother to type it out differently. Next, the LA Times went to a real doctor, the head of hematopathology at UCLA, and asked her to look at the blood. Without being told, she immediately recognized the chicken blood as chicken blood. She immediately said, hey, go fuck yourself.
Starting point is 00:34:42 This is a chicken. I have stuff to do. Because that's what happens when you're a doctor. Sharon Reynolds, the health educator at Gary Young's Clinic, was eventually confronted about the fact that she'd been analyzing chicken blood as if it were human blood. Her response is one of the funniest things I've ever read. Quote, I have never seen chicken blood before, so I wouldn't know. If that had been human blood, that would have been an accurate analysis of the blood.
Starting point is 00:35:11 I mean, it's a solid argument. Solid argument. No, that chicken had cancer, yo. Yo, if that was a human, fucked up. That chicken was a human. I would be good at my job. I would have nailed that, right? Do I understand science?
Starting point is 00:35:26 Do I understand science or what? She went on to complain that she'd analyzed the blood in good faith and that her diagnosis of the cat's blood was still legit. Quote, it was not a healthy cat. The cat probably has leukemia. If the cat is acting healthy, the cat could be a carrier of leukemia. So the LA Times went to a vet to get the cat tested for leukemia. The cat was fine.
Starting point is 00:35:46 This concludes one of the greatest examples of journalistic shade throwing in the history of the profession. Kudos to John Hurst. I love you. I would nominate you for a Pulitzer if it was not 1987. That was beautiful. We're going to the vet. We're going to the vet.
Starting point is 00:35:59 I'm going to see if this cat has cancer. If she's still science shit, you guys. She's just science shit. Now the year after this article was published in 1988, Gary Young was arrested in California on numerous charges, including selling bogus medical equipment and, of course, pretending to be a doctor. He was fined $10,000 and his clinic was set down. It's a wheelchair.
Starting point is 00:36:22 That's a chair. That is just a chair, sir. No, it's a wheelchair. It's a wheelchair. It's a wheelchair. You push it. Go places. You don't have the education to know.
Starting point is 00:36:30 That is a chair, sir. Nope. He was fined $10,000 and his clinic was shut down. So Gary moved back to Washington and started practicing medicine without a license again. He was arrested in Fife and sentenced to 60 days a day. In Fife? In Fife, Washington. I've been there.
Starting point is 00:36:45 Okay. I've lived in Seattle for six years. So I'm aware of these areas, which makes it even funnier because I could see, yeah. He was straight from California to Fife two times in the same year, busted for pretending to be a doctor. You got to keep working. You got to respect the hustle. But do you think at one point he's like, I don't know what else I can do at this point?
Starting point is 00:37:03 Pretending a doctor to be a doctor is all I have. That's all I know. In 1993, Gary Young founded Young Living, an essential oil business aimed at turning his passion for healing and plants into a profitable international enterprise. On January 10th, 1994, Gary Young was arrested for assaulting several family members or employees or both with an ax. It is very hard to tell if this one actually happened. Oh man, I thought they were that tree and it was coming back to finish me off.
Starting point is 00:37:30 That tree that cracked my skull? And I ain't going to let that tree win. Now that one may not have happened. It's in all of the different posts I find about it, but I have not been able to find any records of it in the Washington Superior Court, but it's possible I'm using the wrong term or some records from that far back got fucked up. Or there's just so many ax-wielding things in the Northwest that are like, it's just don't even bring it up.
Starting point is 00:37:55 It's a misdemeanor here to try to kill someone with an ax. I did look through back issues with the Spokane Chronicle, but their 94 issues weren't digitized. So I don't know if that's true. The only reputable source who repeats the story is Dr. Eva Briggs, and she doesn't link to any outside confirmation that it hasn't happened. So that's all the detail I'll go into, but it's possible he assaulted a bunch of his family members with an ax in 1994. It didn't kill them.
Starting point is 00:38:20 Definitely didn't kill anybody. No allegations of that. Just an ax assault. Sort of like a shining thing hitting the door. But it's hard. Oh, I guess. Yeah. He was just trying to get at them with the ax.
Starting point is 00:38:30 Okay. Yeah. I guess if you swing that is assault, even if you don't hit them. I would say it's fair. If someone was coming at me and I closed the door and they start hacking the door down with an ax, even if they don't hit me with an ax, I would sue them for assault. I would report them. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:38:44 Yeah. I'd like to press charges. It felt like he was trying to hurt me. I feel like I was assaulted. Yeah. I feel like he was really trying to get at me. Yeah. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:38:52 Now, just for legal ends, there's no verification for that. Haven't run into evidence that it's true, but you'll hear it repeated a lot. I felt like we had to address it just because it's like one of the more lurid stories you run into. Now. You just don't want those tweets. What about the ax? What about the ax?
Starting point is 00:39:05 I don't know, man. I couldn't find any. If you find evidence of the ax thing, let me know. I would love to learn that it's true. We can remove it from allegedly axed and just axed. Just tried to hit people with an ax. Now, the next part of the approved Gary Young story goes like this. In the early 1990s, he traveled to France to study distillation.
Starting point is 00:39:23 He bought 160 acres of farmland in Idaho and filled it with peppermint. Where does he get money? I mean, he's been conning all these $2,000 a week to do your whet stuff. Oh, I forget. And he was only fine like 10 grand. You're right. Yeah. And if like 1,000 people paid two grand a week for presumably, like that's some good
Starting point is 00:39:38 money. Yeah. He's doing pretty well. Yeah. And he sounds like he's probably decent at keeping his money. Yeah. He's a good scammer. There's no overhead in the business.
Starting point is 00:39:47 No, because you don't have to pay off any medical school bills. No. Or actually do any tests. Or do any tests. Yeah. It's a good business. Yeah. It's actually really great.
Starting point is 00:39:57 Yeah. It's way cheaper to be a fake doctor than a real one. He just looked at college. He's like, that's a scam too. Kind of what you're doing. 100 grand. Mm-mm. You can just be a doctor.
Starting point is 00:40:05 You can just be a say you're a doctor. For a while. For a while. They catch you eventually, but then you just move. Yeah. You just fake doctor. For a while. There's the time limit.
Starting point is 00:40:13 Yeah. And then you got to move on. God, the world was so different before the internet. It was, yes. And you're like, hey, you can't fake doctor anymore. Yeah. Like, why? Because I'm Tom from MySpace?
Starting point is 00:40:22 Because it's fucking Tom. And those goddamn Google sons of bitches. Now, yeah, he bought 160 acres of farmland in Idaho, filled it with peppermint, tansy and lavender. In 1994, he married his third wife, Mary, an opera singer and businesswoman with experience in the world of multi-level marketing. She seems to have basically said, well, what if instead of getting constantly arrested for impersonating a doctor, we just create a company that impersonates a pharmacy but
Starting point is 00:40:46 with plants? And he was like, I knew I married you for a reason. Take my axe. You know what? You tell me when it's time to hit stuff with the axe. This head injury. We just got some brains to this operation. I left a lot of mine on the tree.
Starting point is 00:41:04 Yes. We'll go back and get it. Here's how the New Yorker describes how the Young Living Company got its start. The couple renovated a rundown building in Riverton, Utah to use the headquarters of Young Living Essential Oils. Young mixed his abundance oil blend into the paint he used on the walls. Now the abundance oil does seem to have worked. Over the next few years, Young Living expanded over the nation and became one of the premium
Starting point is 00:41:27 essential oil producers in the United States. In fact, Young Living deserves most of the credit for sparking our current national obsession with essential oils. They claim to produce the highest quality products, maintaining a strict chain of custody from farm to bottle. We will evaluate that claim in part two. But of course, Young Living was not just selling lavender oil to people and leaving it at that. They were selling cures and treatments for serious diseases.
Starting point is 00:41:53 The company engaged in a constant game of brinksmanship with the FDA, trying to make their products sound as much like medicine as possible without breaking the law. 1994, one year after Young Living was founded, Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah passed the Dietary Supplement and Health Education Act, or D'Shea, D'Sha, D-S-H-E-H, D'Sha, they use the acronym, which it's not like an acronym I think you'd use, D'Shea, D'Shia, sounds like diarrhea. I'm just going to say it makes me think of diarrhea. Yeah, somebody came up with it and they giggled, make Hatch say this. It is kind of his equivalent, like the political equivalent of Orrin Hatch having diarrhea over
Starting point is 00:42:33 the country because the consequences of this law have been terrible. Oh, that makes sense. Yeah. Because the way we were going, I was like, wait, did he do something good? Because it seems out of the ordinary for him. No, he did something the opposite of good. That, yeah. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:42:49 And we will get into exactly what he did. But first, you know what's not like diarrhea? That's a bad ad pivot. So if he's saying that's not okay, that's a good product. Diarrhea? Not diarrhea. Diarrhea? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:43:04 You know what nobody likes, diarrhea. Try not diarrhea. I'll go with that. If those are the options. So you're giving me a choice? Okay. Product service. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated
Starting point is 00:43:24 the racial justice demonstrations, and you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. But the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse.
Starting point is 00:44:00 And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way, he's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC.
Starting point is 00:44:24 What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.
Starting point is 00:45:05 This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.
Starting point is 00:45:40 The wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus?
Starting point is 00:46:11 It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back and we're talking about Daxia, Oregon Hatch's... Bowls. Bowls. Yeah. ...regulated dietary supplements, but when I say regulated, I don't mean it in the sense
Starting point is 00:46:35 is that it introduced stronger controls over their quality. It's one of those things where you say you're regulating something, but you deregulate it. Because of Daxia, the people who make dietary supplements and natural health aids and stuff are essentially allowed to make vague health claims about what their products did without getting FDA approval to show that they worked or are even safe. That's helpful for money. Yeah, for money. That's why a bazillion different shady companies can sell turmeric and vaguely suggest that
Starting point is 00:47:04 it cures cancer. It's also why if you analyze the turmeric pills that these people claim cure cancer, those pills might just be sawdust and lyes with no actual turmeric in them. No one is responsible for making sure that you get what you pay for because that's what Daxia does. Thank you, Oregon Hatch. Thank you, Oregon Hatch. I actually have that written right there.
Starting point is 00:47:22 Thank you, Oregon Hatch. You're welcome. As a result of Daxia, the supplement industry agreed to become the number one economic force in the state of Utah. Natural remedies currently account for something like $10 billion a year in state revenue. Really? Really? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:47:37 10 billion? 10 billion? Out of you. So that's where you do it. There's a couple of things that Utah's the center of. If you're going to sell natural remedies and vaguely claim that they help with cancer, Utah's where your company's going to be based. And if you're going to run a business where you abduct people's misbehaving teenagers
Starting point is 00:47:52 and put them in a work camp that some kids die at, Utah's where you're going to do that too. This is Oregon Hatch. I know how to do two things. Deregulate fake medicine and let people torture teenagers. Get them. You gotta give them before they get older. Oregon Hatch.
Starting point is 00:48:10 I'll vote for him. I know his name. He's been around forever. He's here. That can't be good. In 2000, Gary was- Utah. It's worse than you thought.
Starting point is 00:48:23 Utah. Really, dark stuff happens here. You just thought the Mormon stuff was bad. Utah. Our capitals filled with gay and trans kids who have been abandoned by their families and live on the streets. Not a joke. Just a serious problem Utah has.
Starting point is 00:48:38 Utah. Thanks, Robert Redford. Wait what? The Sundance is in Utah. Oh, right. Right. That's the only thing. Weird to hold a major film industry event in a place where you can't get liquor.
Starting point is 00:48:52 It is. And then the beer's like 2%. Yeah. It's a fucking near beer shit. We had an Oklahoma. Yes. It ought to be a crime. I remember when I first went there on tour and I was like, I've got a serious problem.
Starting point is 00:49:05 What is happening here? And they're like, no, no, no. It's just half. I was like, why? What is the point? No one could explain it. Yeah. It's nonsense.
Starting point is 00:49:15 In 2000, Gary Young opened the Young Life Research Clinic in Springville, Utah. The clinic's goal was to administer essential oils and other alternative medicine to patients suffering from cancer, heart disease, depression, and other life-threatening conditions that should not be treated with oregano oil. According to the New Yorker, quote, the clinic employed a pediatrician named Sherman Johnson who had recently had his medical license reinstated. About a decade later, Johnson had been investigated by the state medical board after a woman had died while he was treating her for cancer.
Starting point is 00:49:41 According to the Salt Lake Tribune, after a nurse raised questions about the woman's death, the body was exhumed. In a subsequent probe, it was determined that she had multiple personality disorder but not cancer. But Johnson believed her story that she had been injected with cancer by a group of witches and gay doctors and that she had died from an overdose of dimmerol administered by Johnson. Johnson pleaded guilty to manslaughter. So.
Starting point is 00:50:01 Manslaughter. Gary Young, when he starts his clinic, does hire a real doctor to run it, but it's this doctor. Oh, man. I like the way your mind works. I like the way your mind works. What was it? A oak or a redwood that fell on you?
Starting point is 00:50:18 I think it might have been a gay witch doctor now that you say it. You got me that dimmerol? Which nothing against dimmerol. That's not the fault here. We're not blaming dimmerol. Now, I took a look at your test results. I got one question. Have you ever been around any gay witch doctors?
Starting point is 00:50:33 Because that's what they're revealing, that you've been. You've been infected with cancer. Because you get injected with cancer. Injected with cancer. Sometimes I let people just syringe me, but I usually ask, but one time I didn't. One time I didn't say, is this cancer? It's not cancer, right? I don't want any cancer.
Starting point is 00:50:55 Oh, that's not new I should have asked. Those witch doctors, they're tricksy. I was at Sundance, around all those Hollywoods. Drinking some near bear with orange hatch. This is crazy. Oh, boy. I'm not going to get to tour of Utah. That's a mixed blessing.
Starting point is 00:51:20 I've been there, but it's actually nicer than it is. It's a lovely state. It's very nice. Geographically beautiful. Yeah, every part of the United States, it's beautiful. You start talking to people and you're like, what is happening? What the hell is going on? They're like, it's pretty, ain't it?
Starting point is 00:51:34 You're like, okay. Are you married to three of your sisters? Yes. Oh, no. Yes. Here, you want 78 beer? There's a Reginald while in it, in case a witch doctor gave you cancer. There's gay witch doctors down in that park down there, be careful.
Starting point is 00:51:51 As young living expanded, bringing in tens of millions of dollars in revenue, Gary Young built a farm in Mona, Utah to act as a beautiful, living, growing ad for his company. He also built other stuff on his farm, including a replica Wild West town and a literal castle. He started calling himself Sir Gary and hosting jousting tournament, which he would compete in, wearing full plate armor. Just like the owner's manual said. Just like the owner's manual said. As he lowers his visor and charges someone, this is what God wants.
Starting point is 00:52:21 I'll be right back. Following the owner's manual. Sorry, I got to do Leviticus real quick. Oh, God. As the money rolled in. As the money rolled in. Yes. Gary Young's ambitions expanded well beyond the fake doctoring that had initially started
Starting point is 00:52:39 him off. He began planning a $250 million theme park called Mount Youngmore. It would be a place where families could relax in five star hotels, joust, and gaze upon a mountain with his face carved onto it. Young himself would later deny any of this was ever planned, but the New Yorker interviewed David Sterling, who was Young Living's COO at the time. Sterling confirmed that all these were real plans at one point, saying, quote, it was just crazy what they were trying to build out there.
Starting point is 00:53:03 So they had nothing to do with it. He's definitely clearly trying to dissociate himself with it. Listen, yes, they paid me a lot of money. Yeah. I had nothing to do with that. His claim is to the New Yorker is that he was trying to really just switch the company to focusing on just selling the essential oils rather than running a ridiculous vanity theme park slash unregistered surgery empire like Gary Young wanted.
Starting point is 00:53:28 So he didn't see a future in the adult jousting. He did not think that was a great idea. It wasn't in Mount Youngmore. Honey, do you want to go to a joust resort? We can see a guy's face carved on the mountain. He's a fake doctor. I don't know who he is, but we get to ram each other on horses. I'm going to be honest.
Starting point is 00:53:48 If when I was like nine, someone had said, you want to go hit your family with like lances, I would have been like, fuck yes. Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Well, that's the thing. If you did it, there would be like way, like Thanksgiving would be like, well, it's a good, it's a good business.
Starting point is 00:54:02 We just go jousting on Thanksgiving. I feel like enough jousting could heal this country's political divisions. Just legalize. Legalize jousting. And hemp and jousting. Yeah. That will take care of a lot of angst and essential oils. And essential oils.
Starting point is 00:54:21 God. So. His mind is fast. Like where he goes is fascinating. He really has the mind of a man who was badly injured by a tree. A giant tree fell on his head. Yes. That is what, yes.
Starting point is 00:54:34 You know, when I wrote this, I didn't think that much about the head injury, but you're right. It really ties a lot together. It ties a lot of the decisions we're like, well, this makes, you know what? It does make a little sense when you consider. It's something I think about as I read through more and more of the stories of these terrible people, how many of the worst people in history explainable by like, you got hit in the head like Hitler and the fucking trenches in World War One, you got some brain damage.
Starting point is 00:54:59 Like the more that we learn about just like any of our soldiers who spend a lot of time around heavy artillery, there's like these little micro like fucking things to your brain where you get like CTE and stuff from it. And it's like, oh yeah, he was like just hanging out next to artillery for four years. Of course that did something. Yeah. It didn't help. If you're a baseball fan, you know, Don Zimmer is used to play for the old Yankees coach.
Starting point is 00:55:23 He just looks like that kind of damage is like putting him in charge where he's just like, what? Yeah. It's just bad for you. Yes. Yeah. Well, and then we're like, he's the strongest from the war. Yeah, but I don't think he should be saying what to do.
Starting point is 00:55:39 Yeah. Maybe we shouldn't be listening to him that much because he's in the corner hitting stuff right now. He's slamming his head into the wall real hard. So this guy Sterling claims that, yeah, he wanted to switch the company's focus to just essential oils rather than ridiculous vanity in the unregistered surgery and stuff that Gary Young was into. This did not work out and Young fired Sterling.
Starting point is 00:55:59 The company claims for performance reasons, but in an email Sterling gave to the New Yorker, Young gave this explanation, quote, Satan exercised dominion over you to the point where you started thinking that you had knowledge and ability greater than anyone else, including me, the creator of the company. It does sound like some head injury talk in there. It sounds like to sum up what he said, he was like, you didn't share my blurry vision. You did not share my very blurry and distinct vision from the company. When the New Yorker reached out to Young Living about this distinctly non-standard response
Starting point is 00:56:32 from a CEO, the company spokesperson told them, quote, successful company founders are often cut from a different cloth than the rest of us, which is true of Gary Young and his pioneering cowboy spirit. That is not technically incorrect. A lot of people want to be doctors. A lot of people say you shouldn't drown a baby in a hot tub. Those people don't know everything that tree taught me. They say it will stop your medical career, but they don't know about Mexico.
Starting point is 00:56:56 They've never been to Rosarita. They've never heard of a little thing called Mexico. Now we're going to have a lot more to say about Gary Young's pioneering spirit and its impact on the world, but that's all going to have to wait until Thursday. Part two of our epic series, Gary Young, the Fake Doctor Who Killed His Own Baby. Well, you got any pluggables to plug? I will be on tour for the next couple months. I'm going to Austin for the Moontower Festival.
Starting point is 00:57:23 I'll be in Colorado next week all over. If you just go to bwdtour.com all that shit comes up. Check out bwdtour.com, see him at the Moontower, which sounds like something Gary Young would build. Yes. Absolutely does. He cures blindness. Cures blindness.
Starting point is 00:57:43 I'm Robert Evans. This podcast cures blindness, and you can find it on our website behindthebastards.com. You can find us on Instagram and on the twits at atbastardspod. You can find me on the twiter at IWriteOK. I have a new podcast called It Could Happen Here. It's depressing. It is. Yes.
Starting point is 00:58:04 That's the podcast. Listen to it. It's good. Oh, you can buy shirts. Oh, you could buy them on T-Public, behind the bastard shirts. You can also just buy shirts to hide your nakedness from God's angry vision. But if you want those shirts to have things that we've written on them, go to T-Public behind the bastards.
Starting point is 00:58:25 Check it out. Budcasts! Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying
Starting point is 00:58:57 to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass, and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself
Starting point is 00:59:26 stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole.
Starting point is 01:00:02 My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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