Behind the Bastards - Part One: John of God: Oprah's Favorite Ghost-Channeling Rapist Surgeon

Episode Date: July 7, 2020

Robert is joined by Andrew Ti to discuss Brazilian 'healer' John of God.FOOTNOTES: Impression on Observing Psychic Surgery and Healing in Brazil Which Appear to Incorporate (+) Qi Gong Energy & the Use of Acupuncture Points Spiritual Surgery: An Investigation SPIRITS WITH SCALPELS: THE CULTURAL BIOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS HEALING IN BRAZIL Brazil 'spiritual healer' known as John of God jailed for 19 years for raping four women An Oprah Winfrey Scandal Timeline: It's Not The First Time She's Weathered A Storm Like This Slaves to religion: Brazil raids expose dark side of cults Notorious celebrity faith healer John of God 'sold babies' to Australians Faith healer with millions of followers ran a "sex slave farm and sold babies to highest bidder" ‘John of God’ cult leader allegedly ran child sex slave farm Brazilian activist’s alleged suicide sparks coverage controversy Leap of Faith: Meet John of God John of God: my encounter with Brazil’s accused faith healer I Found Healing With A Famed Spiritualist. Then He Was Arrested As A Sexual Predator. Celebrity Brazilian healer ‘John of God,’ once featured by Oprah, surrenders on sexual abuse charges John of God – the Brazilian psychic surgeon He is Brazil's favourite faith healer, but did he spirit away £1million? The Science of Faith Healing John of God: Miracle worker or charlatan? The Right Chemistry: Brazilian 'healer' John of God leads cancer patients by the nose Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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. 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 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. Ay, ugh, ugh, ugh, ugh. 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. It's 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. Yok no. Can't so you have made it through the rona so far, Andrew. 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 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. Yeah, we could do what if we did like a locks of love thing, but instead of for people who need hair It's for like weird horny people on the internet. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we raised money for some charity I don't know what kind of charity like Bombs not food maybe That sounds like a charity. I mean it could be like sort of an only-fan situation. Yeah, the recording of cutting it will be will be Useful to somebody. Yeah, that'll be a 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

Um, which is what our friendship has been based on up until this point Even before the podcast, that's yeah up hard. 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 reversal 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. Mm-hmm. 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, okay, no John of God now people might be confused There's an actual like Jesusy 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 That's what we're getting into today. You're welcome Andrew for booking Yeah, thanks for having me Jesus Christ. Yeah Yep, it's it's gonna 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 right this name

Nobody's ready for this fucking name Hippolyte Leon Denizard Reveille That is a fucking name Hippolyte Leon Denizard Reveille, that is a fucking name like So what I like like going like subtle on the on the final landing it's just like yeah, we could do it normal I like that's fully 50% of his four names sound like Pokemon I've got a hippolyte. I've got a Denizard. It's fucking rules So Hippolyte Leon Denizard Reveille was a French educator

And he wrote under the markedly less cool pin name Alan Kardec, which I don't understand if you're hippolyte Denizard Reveille 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 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 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 three million adherents there damn, yeah, that is I guess it it's sort of like a French version of sort of like an animist type religion, right? There's yeah, I I think I Think you're you're 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 animus 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 you know, the new Christianity. I think you're probably on to something there I guess that's kind of the shit that happened with like Catholicism Yes, 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

sizeable number of what were originally the religions 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, um, 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 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 They do have you ever seen like spiritual surgery sessions? Oh shit, um, I Feel like I 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 god the devils 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 slight of hand like magician Yeah, make it look like they're kind of like that guy in Temple of Doom pulling out, you know, right, right organs Yeah, like that's that's a big thing in the United States and It's it's cool. Yeah, it's a big thing in the parts of the United States that I'm gonna 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 Yeah, I mean it is it is like nice how the state of the art of like 16th century magic has kind of remained the same It's yeah, 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 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 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 it the problem is just a little bloodletting is needed or like yeah

She's building up and like that will work occasionally 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 they 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, so anyway, yeah, the Brazilian to first pioneer this technique was Jose Pedro de Ferretas or Ze Arigo According to his autobiography an obviously problematic source

He started working at a mine until age 14 In 1950 at age 29 or he started working at a mine at age 14 and in 1950 when he was 29 He began to suffer a series of blinding headaches followed by hallucinatory trances This all culminated in his body being taken over by the spirit of a bald German man and 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 Now this 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 like this Brazilian mine worker would choose like it's got to be a German field medic That's that but that's that's what he picks And I guess we all considered Germans trustworthy. I can't think of anything in history that would make me not trust German doctors So yeah, that scans so together dr. Fritz and Ze Arigo had a wildly successful 20-year career Performing surgery to adoring audiences of as many as 800 followers at one time Ze Arigo would go into trances and become so Taken with the spirit of dr. Fritz that he would grab random kitchen knives and use them to cut out tumors and the like from his patients He became known as the surgeon of the rusty knife and this was not like a nobody was like talking shit at him by calling him this That's

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 like that's that's part of the evidence to these people that he's like so clearly holy and sacred is that it doesn't even matter that He's using a rusty knife because and again You'll see this throughout the whole episode and all these guys we talk about Like part of the thing everybody focuses on is that like none of his patients feel any pain none of them get infections

Even though, you know, he's just cutting them with a dirty knife. Like that's how holy this is. Yeah So that's cool, and yeah, you know, it's cool. Yeah, you know, blood of Jesus that works. It's fine Antiseptic, antiseptic largely. Yeah, the blood of Jesus is profoundly antiseptic 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 The height of Zea Rigo'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 Yeah, this guy would be like an amazing character in like a Batman video game. I feel like he feels like real final boss energy. Yeah Yeah, yeah, but he's we're just getting started with Zea Rigo So Zea Rigo dies in a 1990 this guy Rubens Feria who's a 44 year old engineer and software salesman Kind of looks back in history 19 years and is like this guy made a fuckload of money What if I start claiming to channel the spirit of the same dead German guy?

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 and 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, it's just I'm not making a joke. It's just it clearly didn't do the trick Yeah, it's seriously damn. Yeah, I mean, that's a bummer. He seemed like a nice guy But yeah, this was not the not the treatment. So in 1995

Mr. Feria married Rita Costa at age 34. He dumped her a few years later for a 19 year old friend of his daughters 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. Feria's 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 gonna 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 gumlet

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 I'll do a little bit of corpse disposal, you know It's like a yeah So a raid on Rubens Feria's 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 Feria's needed to be locked up He still professed a strong belief in the myth of Dr. Fritz telling the Guardian and my opinion I think that Dr. Fritz does exist, but that Rubens Feria 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 Thanks, Doc. Yeah, my favorite is that fit that reminds me a little bit of I 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 Zeno is real and you know controls our lives who was here, you know shit like that where I'm like, you know It's it's like it's just about the practice of it. Not like the underlying like yeah, it's amazing Hey, I mean, you know, I I I worship El Ron Hubbard not for his spiritual teachings or 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 that's 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 a

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 Tiexera 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 coming 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 our best source on the early life of John of God

So I'm gonna start by reading from that and I'm gonna 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 and there so Joao Tiexera de Faria was born on June 24th 1942 in the poor village of oh boy Cachoeira do defumacha in the state of Goya's in central Brazil his mother Donna 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 in the 1940s and 50s There were no paved roads or infrastructure in this part of Brazil the roads connecting the towns were dirt Studded with cattle grids and wound their way through farms and villages when construction of paved roads began in the late 1950s Joao's mother ran a small hotel and cooked the for the road workers to augment the family's meager income Joao often says that his mother became famous for her delicious cooking. His father was less successful He was a tailor and known to 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. Yeah, but probably either way

Yeah, shit shit was Yeah, he had to he had to do some shit. He got up to some shit and did some shit. Yeah, and he age of seven Yeah, and he had basically no school and he never learns to read or write. That's that's that's the important thing here Yeah, never not a not a reader this guy. So His biographers though claim that he worked many jobs as a well-digger as a bricklayer and you know Generally, they say that he spent his late childhood and early adolescence in a hard manual labor He learned how 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 prophesizing events at the pool hall Yeah Yeah This is very funny Because she notes that quote after being given money who would return to the pool hall He is an excellent pool player to this day and I can't prove what I'm gonna 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 The fact that he's 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, 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

Yeah finite and like less than 30. I would say I feel like you could just shoot shoot a lot of shots of the dark And that shit's gonna come through eventually Yeah, pretty quickly Yeah, yeah, so yeah, he he spends a lot of time as a kid in a pool hall He learns sleight of hand. He learns how to had a grift um, and yeah the the the yeah So so far the biographical information that we've got from his uh his biography by his follower heather comings

Has been broadly reasonable. Um, 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 The first recorded occasion of joao's Paranormal abilities took place when he was nine years old while he was visiting family in the town of nova ponte with his mother It was a beautiful cloudless day But joao had a premonition that a huge storm was coming He began pointing out houses including the houses of his brother and saying that they would be blown down or lose their roofs He urged his mother to leave before the storm although she was not convinced

She humored her son and they sought refuge in a friend's home nearby 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 he predicts the storm. This is his first his first case of of clairvoyance um, but despite being clairvoyance and able to Read storms in the sky He found himself still forced to labor in order to get by at age 16

He moved to his city campo grande and 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 that's that's 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 So like hell yeah Yeah, he arrives and the director of the center like knows his name already and It says they've been waiting for him and then john immediately like collapses He like passes out and when he returns to consciousness Um, 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 you're taken over by a spirit

The entity king solomon, uh, and he cured 50 people while possessed by king solomon 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 drago's Hey, that's a good get good get a name. Oh, yeah king solomon Ks That's a big one. Yeah Hey, hey, could have happened to anyone could have happened Amazing

Could have happened to anyone. I mean I I would love to I don't know not king solomon. Which king would I want to? Uh, Henry the 8th, Henry the 8th. That's a good that's a bad. I mean, that's a bad king, but that's a fun king to Yeah, to be or king. I could write a tricycle Take some hands. Yeah, I guess uh, I guess uh The old dude the old old dude from the bible. He probably got up to some shit nebuchadnezzar or whatever Oh nebuchadnezzar. Yep. You mean like the the babelonian emperor. Yeah, that's a good one, right? Those guys 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, 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 down 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 p.m 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 live with his entire life. He was given his own room with an electric fan

So that's a big deal Nice electric fan It is like so weird to think about like the band of grifters welcoming in and I mean this is in the retelling Welcoming in a new grifter like what the fuck was actually happening 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 um You know lifespans aren't enormous, uh, 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 that yeah the 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 gonna have some stories. I start telling. I'll tell you that much Yeah, yeah, no problem. Oh, I was healing the shit out of people in 11th grade Makes sense add buddy. Yep. You know who else was healing a lot of people when I was in the 11th grade During the summer of 2020 some americans suspected that the fbi had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations

And you know what? They were right I'm trevor erenson 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 And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and not in the good bad ass way And nasty sharks 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 podcast or wherever you get your podcast 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 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 your podcasts I'm lance bass and you may know me from a little band called in sync 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 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 Okay, so uh, uh now let's talk about, um Products nope, we did that now. We're back. Okay, so uh jenna god He meets this the spiritist church and they tell him that king Solomon's taken over his brain And he's like that's that's good and normal um

And yeah, so he he winds up staying the night with like the leader of the center Uh, and he 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 at the spiritist center the next day, uh 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 It is kind of funny medium john It's like the sequel to big john. That's not as as good a rhythmic medium john It's just 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 I know it's funny. It's very funny So, uh, his his new teachers told him he needed to devote his whole life to healing other people Um, and this is by his biographers 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 all always firmly rejects being called a healer So he makes sure that people knows that like he everyone started calling me john the healer

But i'm not a healer the entity is the channel through my body or the ones doing the healing I'm just a conduit. So it's very important to him that you believe both things um Yeah So, uh, this has a nice side benefit of allowing him to argue that he isn't practicing medicine without a license Which is 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 That is so he's shifting the blame to literal king solomon essentially

Yeah, he's yeah exactly if somebody dies while he's performing psychic surgery. It's the dead king's fault Mm-hmm. That's a that's a hell of a loophole. That's genius I mean, I am going to start blaming all of my mini crimes on king solomon I'm not I'm not gonna I'm not even gonna lie to you about that like I that seems like a very good idea Well, especially the baby chopping thing because that's he's got the baby chopping. He's got a previous mo on that Yeah, I mean yes officer. I was going 135 miles an hour in a 55 But if I didn't this fucking king ghost in my head was gonna chop up some babies like Do you want me to go a little faster? You want some chopped up babies? That's all I gotta ask you

Yeah, yeah, it's up to you up to you up to you cop seems reasonable to me You want me to heal you? Let me pull out some chicken gizzards and pretend to rip them from your chest So uh his biographers next note that he did that while he did his uh 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 via 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 joao gulair 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 all over over all of that because the advent of a military dictatorship worked out really well for him Medium john traveled to the capital brazilia 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 site 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 tailor 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 Well, you dictatorship brazil Look, i'm not gonna backseat dictatorship You know what?

There's a lot of bureaucracy. You can't just insert like witch doctor surgeon general Yeah, you get that's like a year eight of the dictatorship thing at best, you know, you gotta Oh my god, I want to be witch doctor surgeon general so bad That's that sounds even better than reverend doctor to be honest You just have to yeah, you have to work within the available structures until until such time as you don't 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 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 explained 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 Uh, but incredulous white americans bought it for years So basically he like he claims that he became a great businessman and that's how he's able to fund his

Free healing hospital. The reality is like literally the opposite He makes a bunch of money healing people and he used it to buy like ranches full of cattle and stuff Um, but whatever. Yeah. 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 Uh, they describe the entities as transcendent spirits Who are who are quote able to use medium joao's body to produce cures by performing visible and invisible spiritual surgeries Quote medium joao can incorporate approximately 37 entities

But only one entity can be incorporated at a time This 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 having like support staff in this like fake Like spiritual slavery like 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 kakamemi bullshit I feel like It would be it would involve as little true body horror as possible like no no they let people love that shit Oh, I guess that's 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 cold shit going on You got to get gross with it, man. Yeah, it's part of it. It's part of it. But oh 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 I believe you could be a cult leader, but you're 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, 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 what life 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 okay

So john claims that after a few years of making money and getting in good with a 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 Abidiania 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 In 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 dom Ignacio de loyola This spiritual hospital as his followers would come to describe it eventually received more than 10,000 visitors per month Since Abidiania 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 Oh Yeah That's I mean, I guess you need like desperation tourism sometimes but jesus christ that's That is actually jesus christ business model also. So you know what maybe maybe it's just a good one

Yeah, if jesus christ had benefited from like roadside billboards, I don't think they ever would have gotten to kill him He would have made too much money, but Yeah, yeah render a deceaser about 38 percent and you're fine. Yeah, honestly. Yeah, so, uh 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 gonna quote now from an o magazine profile by susan casey, uh, just a terrible article from 2010 that none of the less Revealed some important details about the economic impact of this guru on the small town of abidiania quote

Several businesses had displays of white clothing the casso 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 Lylac 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 So

Yeah, that's awesome. That sounds like the kind of It's charming small brazilian town. I want a vacation and 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 yeah insanity Yeah, imagine like you're just backpacking through brazil and wind up here on accident. That'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 once the diagnosis has been made the healing procedure begins It may be visible or invisible spiritual surgery if the patient chooses invisible

They are directed to a room to meditate while the spirits do their work Visible surgery can involve sticking a surgical clamp up the patient's nose It looks very impressive, but it is nothing but an old carney trick Usually performed with a long nail in a hammer Any anatomical text will reveal that there is a roughly four inch long passage up the nasal cavity that is quite ready to accommodate A foreign object without any harm John maintains that yeah, that's 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 God, yeah Well, I mean, I guess it's like if you're gonna 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, kind 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

Yeah, it's got leverage. It's essentially the same way that like the pot industry works in large amounts of the united states um 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 this is the fucking godfather. Don't snitch. This is good for all of us. Yeah. Yeah That's kind of what's going on here 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

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

The entity dr. Jose Valdivino called for his and that's the the guy he's channeling is this dr. Jose Valdivino Called for his instruments again. I opened the special drawer and carefully removed the tray and took the instrument tray to him He chose a paring knife a regular kitchen serrated edged knife He passed his hand over the man's eye and told him to relax He opened the eye wide and pressed down hard and scraped see here it is He said as he wiped the 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 can see the eye looks the entity looks into the eye is a

Representation of the whole body system not limited to the physical eye. I understand this is a symbolic removal on the physical level But originating from many levels and involving many different organ organs The Sun 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 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 ghost's out of your eye, man It's it's fine. This is this is where I'm taking machetes and next Damn Man, that's a 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 yeah, there's like a whole village full of his uh, his his first draft

Healings. Yeah, Jesus Christ. I guess some of those people are dead, huh? Yeah, I mean, you know the good thing is if you're actually like if you're doing this kind of grift I think you definitely want to start out only trying to heal people with serious Terminal illness is like cancer because then once you fuck up, they're not around very long Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's really key. Um, yeah a lot of good advice on how to start a medical grift in this episode So take notes when society collapses. Some of you are going to do very well remembering this stuff So, um, 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 dollars a year

He also gets a cut of the sales of the white clothes. They also get a cut of the white clothes 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 Abediania had any interest in questioning whether or not John of God was legit He did face occasional challenges for 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 Abediania 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 gonna quote from this write-up in the Montreal Gazette quote And in an attempt to provide a critical review of view of john's antics the producers invited two experts cardiac surgeon memet os and james randy the world's leading investigator of paranormal phenomena Oz was probably chosen because he was a proponent of various alternative therapies such as therapeutic touch and refluxology

And would be likely to be somewhat sympathetic to faith healing and perhaps at an air of legitimacy Randy was invited as the token skeptic 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 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 now this this has to also be like something like the underlying like You know Faith in Christianity like you know, it's like oh you gotta you know can't question religion can't question religion Takes you all the way to Well, this could be real this clearly fake shit could be real

It's gotta be real. What else could 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 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 and 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 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 that dr. Oz ad comes on during this episode. He's a piece of shit and a monster But I 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 Um, none of those things are indicative of actual Knowledge necessarily No, and this is part of why like this is uh, people talk about like you know

Conservatives in particularly like talk a lot of shit about the liberal arts and like 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 Like yeah, like it's to give people like a broader understanding than just like if you get really good at one incredibly narrow technical thing Yeah, you can convince yourself to believe all sorts of 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 Business 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 get wildly out of hand and kill tens of thousands of people, but 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 Um, you know, he was also cited repeatedly in that 2010 Oh magazine article because of course Oprah

gave Mehmet Oz life and nursed him at her metaphorical breast of publicity Um, and I'm gonna quote from that next. So this is the write-up in Oh 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 entities healings He'd 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 improved 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 Uh, I can't speak to the specific case, but it's worth noting that no other doctors got to look at this information Um, 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 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 Um, I'm gonna 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 by of rape by literally hundreds of people um opropole the article, but uh I found it on the wayback machine And if you want to be really angry at an unspeakably shitty journalist and in Susan Casey is one of the very worst who's ever ever done the job Uh, read that article because it will make you want to punch holes in your wall So i'm gonna read a quote from it now. So get your whole punch in hands ready Over a good Chilean red Edwine an ordained minister motivational speaker and author of the four spiritual laws of prosperity

recounted the story of her brain aneurysm deemed inoperable by five neurosurgeons 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 Edwine traveled to the cassa. 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 Edwine remembers. I could feel things moving around in my head It didn't hurt, but it was different Afterward she collapsed in exhaustion for 24 hours days later She was told by her guide the stitches would could 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 cassa 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. Oh magazine everybody the mention of the wine is particularly choice. Oh, it's gotta be yeah, yeah revolting Yeah, opera magazine was definitely like It was yeah, it was it was it was entirely geared at getting wine moms to believe Spiritual nonsense and not get their cancer treated Jesus Christ, I mean Robert you want to take an ad break real quick? Yeah, you know what else doesn't care of wine moms get cancer treatment The products and services that support this podcast they don't they don't give a good goddamn great

And that's the Garrett. That's the behind the bastards guarantee. During the summer of 2020 Some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated 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 At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse And inside his hearse was like a lot of goods. He's a shark and on the good bad ass way It'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 podcast or wherever you get your podcast What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like csi isn't based on actual science

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Listen to csi on trial on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC 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

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 We're back oh my gosh what a great I don't know I don't know whatever this is what a great you know 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 oh magazine grifters and dr Oz and I don't know I think it's because on like a on like a global level the amount of harm that these people do is so much higher

and it's also so much like This is gonna 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, like I'm not gonna say they're worse than a rapist, but yeah in a way they do more damage on a broad scale right Yeah, it's not good. Well, it's like it's like sort of like it's like um It's like whatever the the PR version of money laundering is they clean they clean it. They're the clean yeah, yeah, exactly

Yeah, that's exactly right. They're they're like money launderers for like dangerous bullshit that gets people killed and molested and stuff and they they they are responsible in this case for sending thousands of potential victims to this guy who again turns out to rape hundreds of people and like they're being sent there by Oprah 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 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

Yeah She would once again be in company where probably relatively speaking her hands are relatively clean I in like I hate to say it but I suspect she would not be the worst president of my lifetime Oh my god, she might be the best. Yeah, it's entirely possible Yeah, both things are true. You can be the friendly face of a lot of horror Yeah And still be the best president Yeah, I would still vote for her over the current guy or even Joe Biden to be honest

Here we go, it's fucking wild. This is so dumb we shouldn't have presidents or billionaires like Oprah But whatever 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 and 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 a journalistic equivalent of like taking your nine-year-old out shooting for the first time and just getting blackout drunk first I mean, is it like, because it's like, so generally there's this like a vested interest in promoting like spirituality and Christianity on some level And like, because it's like when you encounter these people, are you 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 So Susan felt the need to visit John of God, the author of that O Magazine article, so she could write a terrible article But the ailment that sent her there was the fact that her father had tragically died very young 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 gotta do to get by, I'm not gonna 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 So she's saying that it's silly to believe in radio waves but not the power of ghosts to heal people's cancer

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 Abediania 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 gas, like that's kinda gaslighting, right? Like it's like gaslighting via decoration Yeah, that is exactly what abusers say

That's fucking insane Holy shit In this same incredulous way, she writes about the entities that John of God channels Quote, if you spend time at Abediania, 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 D'Almiera, 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 have these guys ever been sued by the estates of these? This feels a little bit like Mormons, like baptizing people in post-mortem

Most of the poor people who come to John of God are too poor to sue if they're 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, you know? That's a lot of these patients Sorry, I meant the estates of these spirits Oh! 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 like 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 And he'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 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 harrumping 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, for my vantage point only, and this is Susan, for my vantage point only 10 feet away, the change in his body and demeanor was easily visible

Now his eyes were more intense and they flashed noticeably darker, his gait became stiffer, his movements more deliberate He turned to the three women standing against the wall, took the one closest to him by the hand and gently sat her in a wheelchair Her eyes fluttered wide as she meditated, 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 it 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 cross her 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 minutes 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, are there nerves on your eyeball? Cause that's how they do like basic, right? Yep, it's actually really easy to, 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 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 the fucking 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 Like, there's, yeah, exact, like the fact that these people don't report pain or anything isn't weird and is part of like a long documented history of people experiencing temporary relief from faith healing and stuff like that 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 John of God is not a surgeon, he is not a trained doctor, yet he is presented with a tray of medical instruments, scalpels and all sorts of scissors, he takes a scalpel and scrapes eyes, he sticks knives and scalpels of some sort down the back of people's throats and he claims he is getting to tumors, he claims he is getting to the root of people's illnesses, he claims he is getting to what makes people ill or sick, none of it is done with an anesthetic and you don't even know if what he's using is sterile 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 John tells them that they can all help fuel his work and heal themselves by sitting in the current and basically meditating for hours while he does his thing. As Susan Casey writes, on any given day, maybe 400 people form the current, spelunking so deeply into their interior realms that they might well be a sleeper and anesthetized, while doing so they were afraid from opening their eyes or crossing their arms or legs, these things they are told, cut off the flow of energy is surely as would kinking a hose. So, at least she said they were told in that one. 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 Lienke Maus. 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. 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 Maus says he raped her all while leading her to believe it was part of her healing. Now, Maus 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 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 built a spider web for this fucking spider of a man. 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 plugables. Oh, shit. You know, just go to the Yozus racist podcast. I'm at Andrew T. His 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, find the bastards.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 $3,000 donations to our medical center. So give me $3,000 and all 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 make things that don't suck out of your society when it sucks. So maybe listen to that, too. And I don't know, go in Christ and cut up people's eyes. That's the podcast. Yeah, it is. Part one of the podcast. OK. We're moving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was 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 Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. 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. 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 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 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.