Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Bastard Who Invented Homeopathy

Episode Date: October 22, 2019

In Episode 91, Robert is joined by Billy Wayne Davis, to discuss the baby-killing horror of homeopathy.FOOTNOTES: Hundreds of Babies Harmed by Homeopathic Remedies, Families Say Penelope Dingle's letters to Francine Scrayen Cancer victim Penelope Dingle 'in awe of homeopath' - husband Belief in Homeopathy Results in the Death of a 7-Year-Old Italian Child Antibiotic overprescribing: Still a major concern. Anticholinergic Toxicity Secondary to Overuse of Topricin Cream, a Homeopathic Medication Homeopathic Pain Medicine Contains Poison FDA confirms elevated levels of belladonna in certain homeopathic teething products Hyland's FDA warns against the use of homeopathic teething tablets and gels On the ethics of clinical trials of homeopathy in Third World countries Evaluation of healing wound and genotoxicity potentials from extracts hydroalcoholic of Plantago major and Siparuna guianensis. Homeopathy THE BASIS OF HOMEOPATHY Inventing the randomized double-blind trial: the Nuremberg salt test of 1835 Homeopathy And Its Founder: Views Of A British Researcher Samuel Hahnemann : his life and work 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. 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 and 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. 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 Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's absent my machetes?

I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards, the podcast where we talk about the worst people in all of history. And today is a very sad day because we've been kicked out of our regular recording studio by an unnamed person. And we forgot to get the machete out. And I am very sad, as is Sophie, as is my guest today, Mr. Billy Wayne Davis. Hello, it's in the building, so we're okay. It's not like we left it at home, which would be like, that's a bummer. That would be tragic. That's why that's the dedicated podcast, machete. That makes sense. And then you guys, Robert gave me the best gift. It's just, it's a tactical.

Can I say the brand? Yeah, oh yeah. Gerber, I was very excited about that, which is a Portland USA made knife. It just, now describe the thing I've already forgot exactly. Yeah, it's designed as a survival knife. So the hilt is made out of a glass composite, which the purpose of that is so that if you're in a vehicle that crashes, or in an airplane that's crashed, it was originally designed for pilots. You can cut your way out of the plane without electrocuting yourself if you had a live wire.

And there's also a big glass breaking thing on the hilt. It's a solid knife. It just, and it feels good in the hand. Like a lot of these knives like this, they're not. There's a lot of different kinds of knives, and that's a metal stabbing knife, which is a special kind of knife. Yeah. It's a knife that's meant for going into what is essentially other knives. It's got that thing that a good knife has where you're like, I kind of want someone to come at me.

Now, and what I like about that is because I don't want to give someone a nice knife and not give them a reason to use it. So once we get the machete out of the room, I have something else that I found. Well, that was up in... I found a VHS copy of Basic Instinct by Paul Verhoeven, the original director's cut. Oh, wow. With a fake signature by Paul Verhoeven inside the cover of the VHS tape. I found it by a trash pile.

He sincerely wrote that. He sincerely wrote that. That's what it says. And just so people know, this VHS copy is the widescreen letter box edition. That's critical. It includes the theatrical trailer, too hot to be shown in movie houses. And I figured what we do once we get to the show. It's like a criterion collection before the criterion collection.

It really is. See it the way it was meant to be on a VHS tape that's been hanging out near a dump. On a TV that's got a... in a box. Still smells a little bit like trash. But it's in incredible shape. Really incredible shape considering what it is. And did you fly from f***ing with it? Yes, I flew with it because I knew that this was the only acceptable thing for us to use in a game of tennis.

Now, Billy, I don't know how to play tennis, but I know it involves two people with stick-shaped things batting an object in between them. So I figured I'd use the machete, you'd use the knife, and we'd have us a game of tennis over this recording studio. Yeah, this is like a wide-trash version of it. Yes, Sophie can be the ump. Nope, that's not what it's called, but... What is it called in tennis? I think an umpire. Ref.

In tennis? I don't know. Official? I don't think ump is it. Sophie's going to look up what it's actually called as if tennis is played with a copy of Basic Instinct in 2.9. There's like a judge involved, right? Line judge? I don't know. I'm okay with all this.

I don't know about tennis. I think it's umpire. Shit. But it'll be fun to hit. Now, there's going to be a lot of plastic shards, and we don't have eye protection. Well, maybe it's an official. I have sunglasses. I've seen it in three different... they serve as the... oh no, oh no.

I would like the title of chief umpire, which is apparently a thing. Okay, so Sophie's going to be the chief umpire. Cool. Billy Wayne will be taking on the role of... is Roger Federer a tennis guy? Yes. Nailed it. And I will be taking on the role of... Serena Williams.

Serena Williams. Ooh, that's... Nailed it. That's a big shoes to fill. Those are the only tennis players I can name. And I was not sure about Federer. I thought there was a 50% chance. I always go with Agassi, but he hasn't played me.

Ah, Andre Agassi. You're right. That's a name, then. He's fun. He's bald. He kind of went with it. What was the really angry dude's name? John McEnroe.

John McEnroe. He's pretty funny, too. Don't know any of these people. What I do know is that we're going to have a lot of fun once we get our machete. Yeah, I'm just going to hold the knife the whole show. Now, Billy Wayne, because you're here as the guest, I think everyone can know what that means. And it means that we're going to talk about a fake doctor. Fuck, yeah, we are.

Or in this case, a lot of fake doctors. A lot of them? Oh, yeah. See, today, Billy Wayne, we're not just talking about a fake doctor. Our subject this week might well be the king of all fake doctors. Do you know the name Samuel Hunman? No. I'm excited about that.

Well, he is the man who invented homeopathy. Okay. Yeah, that's where we're going. He's largely responsible for the birth of what's called alternative medicine. And surprisingly, I'm not sure he qualifies as a bastard. So we're going to get into him part one. And then part two, we will definitely be talking about some bastards. Would he be, can I predict, he might be a bastard because he opened a certain door for other bastards.

Yeah. Yeah. I think he meant well. That's like, it's like manslaughter of bastards, if that makes sense. It's like you fucked up, but not on purpose, but it was bad. It's like those in the South, large chunks of the South in Texas and I think also in Louisiana, I know they have a drive-thru liquor stores. Yes.

And you're not supposed to drink and drive. But a lot of people do because it's a drive-thru liquor store. Because you just, he didn't get out of your truck. Yeah. You don't even have to get out of your truck. He's like the drive-thru liquor store of medicine where you can say maybe he just wanted to make the process of buying liquor more convenient. But as a result, a lot of people rammed pedestrians. They had to fix a lot of fences because of that man.

Were a lot of problems gone. Yes. Okay. I got you. I got you. Yeah. He's the, no, you put a piece of tape over the straw. Exactly.

Then it's not an open container because it's taped on the straw. We fixed it. People may not know that, but you can buy margaritas in your car if there's tape over the straw. And daiquiris are the big one in Louisiana. Oh, God. Just a 32 ounce Styrofoam cup full of pure grain alcohol. Like a shot of liquor. Pure grain alcohol and a slushy.

And then they hand it to you with tape over it and they're like, Don't move that tape. Don't do what you're going to do. Yeah. Wink. It has always been my dream. I don't think I'll ever move back to the south because I hate the weather. But if I did, I would love to operate a combination gun store, drive through liquor store.

Oh, I mean. Yeah. Why not just push it? Go all the way. And you're like, well, if you buy two daiquiris, you get a gun. And if you buy two guns, you get four daiquiris. You get four daiquiris. One for your kid.

Because you get two and then your wife gets one and you get one left up. And ideally, we also open a pharmacy. So it's like a pill mill drive through liquor shop gun store. I mean, that's one of like, as my grandpa was on his way out, he said, Well, we were talking one time and he was like, If I had to do it over again, pharmacy. That's what you own a pharmacy. And I was like, that is a good point, grandpa.

That's a solid grandfather. That is. That's a good point. I'm too late for me, but. One day, Billy Wayne, one day you'll start that pharmacy. Open a pharmacy. So I guess we should get into the story now. Christian Friedrich Samuel Hanman was born on April 10th, 1755 in the city of Mison,

which I'm probably mispronouncing. One of his modern day followers says that it was quote, So close to midnight that there is debate as to the date. The church apparently registered his birthday as the 11th, but he celebrated it on the 10th. This website, which is like a homeopathic fan site for Samuel Hanman, notes as the story of his life unfolds, this is a pertinent fact to bear in mind because arguably it sets a pattern that continued throughout.

I actually have no idea what they mean by this. But he's inconsistent. No, I think they're positive. I think they're saying that like, ah, the authorities said that like this is his birthday, but he like said it was a different day. He's like, I know better. I know, but exactly. I think that's what they're getting at, but it's very silly.

They're like, no, you're born here. He's like, no, as I remember. And they're like, okay. You really fucked that up. I would celebrate both days. Oh, yeah. I mean, I don't think people got presents back then. I think they just got cholera.

It's your birthday. Shit yourself to death. Yeah. Classic German 1700s birthday. Samuel was a weak and sickly child. He was christened on the 13th of the month, like two days after his birth, out of the expectation that he would die soon. And so he needed a name before he went to heaven or hell.

I think babies went to hell at that point. But alas, Samuel grew stronger and gradually it became clear that he would in fact survive being a baby. Samuel was one year old when the seven year war broke out, a slap fight between Prussia and Austria for Silesia, all of which is basically considered Germany to Americans today. This war had a disastrous impact on the porcelain and cloth trades. And since Samuel's dad made his living as a porcelain painter, the family finances took a real hit.

He was educated at home, which was not particularly uncommon, or any kind of statement at the time. That homeopathic fangirl website I found on this notes that Samuel's father, Christian, quote, sometimes locked his son up with a problem when he went to work, expecting him to have solved it or to have some insight into it by the time he got back. No. Ah, that's a frugal babysitter right there. Yeah, just get a problem and lock him in a room.

What's the answer? Hell, I don't know. Yeah, her depiction of it makes it seem like, ah, this is like how you raise a genius baby. No. Yeah, I found another depiction of this parenting practice in a 1900 biography of Samuel that does make it sound a lot shadier. Yeah, it sounds like, yeah, it's like a hillbilly would be like, well, you got a TV, don't you?

We're gonna go watch it and we're gonna go. Yeah, turn it up. Yeah. You hear noises, turn it up. Put him in front of the shiny box. It'll be good. Hanman's father, before going to the factory, used frequently to lock his son in a room,

close the shutters and give him a difficult sentence to ponder over, of which he had to give an account on his father's return. This contributed to making the son an original thinker. I think that's what Trump does every morning with Twitter, is he just gives us a difficult sentence and all day we're like, what does that mean? What does that mean? Why did he capitalize the letters he capitalized?

That doesn't make any sense. Yeah, he's just trying to raise us like Samuel Hanman's father. Now, once he was older and the family fortunes had recovered somewhat, Samuel was allowed to go to the local elementary school. His teacher, Johann Muller, recognized him as a uniquely brilliant pupil. Alas for Samuel, his father pulled him out of school at age 15, reasoning that he'd spent more than enough time learning and it was well past time for him to get a full-time gig.

In fairness to Christian, you were legally an adult at 14 in that part of the world at that time. So Samuel really got a whole extra year of childhood, kind of luxury childhood there. So that's good for him. Christian set his son up with a job at a grocery store in Leipzig. Samuel did the job for a while, but he grew tired of it quickly and was convinced that the world had something greater in store for him.

So he ran away from home, sort of. He actually just ran away from his dad and his job and had his mom hide him while he worked up the courage to confront his father about the fact that he wanted to go back to school. Where does she hide him? I don't know. I'm not really specific about that. I'm guessing a closet. Just like in the house still.

I think so, or maybe, yeah. They had some money, so she might have like rented him a room or something. Yeah, like a storage place. It just says that his mom hid him. What an inner, like told the dad that he ran away? Yeah, I think it was an issue of the way it's, I've read it, is that like she hid him because she wasn't going to go to bat for her kid against her father

because you don't do that. I understand that. 1700s Germany. Yeah. Basically Germany, essentially Germany. But at the same time, he didn't, like, he had to work up the courage to like tell his dad, I don't want to work at a grocery store. I want to finish school and be an educated man.

I understand now it was more of like, neither of us want to get whacked by dad yet. Because, yeah. Okay, gotcha. So, eventually Samuel did confront his father and he was apparently successful in convincing him that he should be allowed to go to grammar school. He just sit him to a box and run.

He's like, just learn to take a punch and then you can tell him. You're going to have to let your dad hit you. He's going to hit you. He's going to hit you a lot. So, just get used to, just learn how to take that. You talk to dad, he's going to throw a couple of punches. Just to keep him at himself. He enjoys it.

Mm-hmm. It's, you know, he gets back from work, he's been punched all day, he's going to throw a couple of punches. Watch his left, it's better than you think. Oh. So, yeah, Samuel went to grammar school. He studied science and languages and he wrote a dissertation on the structure of the human hand.

He was quite successful during this period and he earned himself admission into Leipzig University to pursue a medical degree. But his course of studies was exhausting and he would later write that it convinced him young people should not be allowed to go to school. Quote from Samuel. Mental exertion and study are a natural occupations

for young people whose bodily development is not yet complete, especially for those who are endowed with sensitive feelings. This nearly cost me my life during the period from 15 to 20 years old. I can't. Sounds like a pretty progressive thinking man. Bored with that? I mean, that's just, yeah, he's like,

yeah, 15 to 20, just throw him in the woods. We should, yeah, have a big field for him. Mm-hmm. I kind of like that idea. I've always been a big advocate of, like, once kids get old enough to talk back, just driving them into a field and leaving them there. I think they get feral and then we'd have,

they're smarter than we think, though. Yeah, you're right, it would be like a hog problem and they'd just be breathing in the woods. Lord of the fly would happen way quicker than we want to think it would. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's like the wild boars. That's what would happen, they'd grow tusk. You'd have to kill them with drones.

I guess there's no perfect solution to teenagers. No. No, you just watch them and hope they don't team up. Yeah, hope they don't team up. The good thing is they'll throw each other under the bus because they're so horny. Yeah. They're so trying to fuck the bus.

It is weird to think like that. Oh, thank God they're horny. Thank God they're too horny to be smart. Yes. We'd have a problem with all that energy they got. Yeah, we'd have to be like, well, we do wars. Yeah. That's, we just do a war every couple years.

It is, that was a nicer era in warfare. Back when like most of them were just like, we got to do something with all these fucking teenagers. Yeah. Give them guns. Put the dumbest ones in the front. And then let them walk towards each other. Let them walk towards each other until they're tired.

Until we got the best ones. The smart ones. Duh. At age 19 in 1774, a penniless Samuel Hanman left Meissen to go to Leipzig. He worked as a translator to make ends meet. Depending on which source you read, he was either incredibly good at this, a brilliant linguist in great demand, or he was completely mediocre and he barely succeeded in avoiding abject poverty.

I found like five different variations of how this period of his life went. I don't know which is accurate. Maybe none of them. One thing they all seem to agree on is that during his years studying theoretical medicine, which was the degree program track he was on, he became disillusioned with the medical establishment, which is understandable of the medical establishment in 1774. Yeah.

A lot of leeches. A lot of leeches. A lot of poison. Yeah. Yeah. He tried cocaine. That's a real medicine, Billy. I have some friends that will agree with you, too.

It's good for what I'll see. Now, the prohomiopathy biography of Hanman, I found, is written by someone called Sheila. That's the only name she's given on the site. And she's a British homeopath whose website links back to a website about how autism isn't real. Just so we're aware of this particular source. Yeah.

What is it? Autism? If it's not real. I think it's a bacterial infection. I don't know. There's a bunch of crazy theories about that. It's like the bleach people. Gotcha.

I do feel like she's one of the bleach people. That makes sense. Yeah. No, that's the thing where I know better. Yeah. Yeah. Quote from Sheila, the homeopath. He paid for his studies by teaching German and French

and by translating Greek and English into German for better off students. Help came from an anonymous benefactor in Meissen who paid for some of the lectures. It is in Leipzig that the seeds of Samuel's discontent with the medical profession of the time were sown because he was not satisfied with some of the lectures and attended them only selectively.

He was also unhappy with the lack of practical facilities. So that's the positive homeopathy version of this is that he realizes that medicine at the time is flawed and he doesn't like attending all of his lectures. What you could also write is just like him being a bad student. That's what I was going to say. Sometimes it's hard to listen and stuff like that. It is.

And then to be justified with like, I just, you guys are wrong. I'm going to fix medicine. I mean, I will say even a stop clock is right every couple of centuries. And in this case, ignoring mainstream medical lectures was a good idea. Yes.

Yeah. But at the same time, like, don't you have to learn what's wrong? But if you're learning what's wrong and they're telling you what's right, that might not be good either. I don't know. That's a weird. This is a weird story.

Yeah. It's got to get confusing. Yeah. Morally. The second part is just going to be bastards all the way down. So, but first we got to get this muddy water. Muddy waters. And not the good kind of muddy waters.

He just feels like, I understand that feeling. I mean, in college, because there was a part of me that like, a lot of this feels like a scam. Yeah. Like, why do I have to take bowling? Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Like, I was like, and then the business side of my major, mostly was communications. But the business side was like, just prepping everyone to work at a corporation. And I was already like, oh, I don't want to do that. Yeah. And all my teachers are like, what do you mean? That's where the money, that's how you make money.

That's what you're here for. I'm going to make my money. Yeah. Like, I don't want people giving me, I don't want to have to depend on that. And you're making robots. Yeah. Yeah, it just made me, so I understand what he's thinking.

We're like, oh yeah. Sometimes it's like, if I was going to be like a scientist, this makes sense. Or a lawyer. But I learned more about business at the UPS store than any of you fuckers have taught me. I learned more about business hanging out with my friends who sold weed than I ever learned in college.

And more practical stuff about business, like how to replace the airbag in your car's steering wheel with a bag of marijuana. That's a good place to hide it. That's a free tip for everybody out there still living in one of the states where it's illegal. Sophie, are we allowed to give people tips on drug smuggling? Sophie is making a gesture

that I cannot interpret. Do it. I'm just going to plug my ears. Oh, she's just going to plug her ears. Okay. Okay. Also hide drugs up your butt. Both work.

Now, back to Samuel Hahnemann. So I just read kind of the pro Samuel Hahnemann as the founder of the most valuable medical revelation in the history of the world. That's that angle on it. I've had a very different account of this period in his life and an article written for the American Council on Science and Health. A 501c3 established in 1978

to promote evidence-based science and medicine. Here's what they say. Although he tried to earn money as a translator, making Inns meat was very difficult for him. On the brink of starvation, he was introduced to an opulent Transylvanian baron, Samuel Brookenthal, the head of the Madsburg Freemasons Lodge.

Hahnemann was initiated into the lodge in Hermannstadt, Transylvania in October 1777. He quickly came to esteem the many itinerant teachers of mysteries who were indoctrinating the lodges in such matters as alchemy and spiritism. In Samuel Hahnemann, his life and work, Richard Hale hinted at the depth of Hahnemann's involvement in the lodge. He advanced beyond vitalism and the naturalism of Shelling and Hegel to spiritism and for a while lost his way in occultism.

In life and letters of Samuel Hahnemann, Thomas Bradford gave a much less guarded account of the time Hahnemann spent in the service of Herr Brookenthal. He was in these quiet scholarly days that Hahnemann acquired that extensive and diverse knowledge of ancient literature and of occult sciences, which he afterwards proved himself to be a master. So he learned magic. Yeah.

He learned magic. The homeopaths like to be like, no, he just spent so much time in lectures that he realized what was wrong with the medical establishment. And then the other version of that is, nah, he went to work for a wizard and learned magic. Yeah, he went to like a secret society for the powerful dudes who also believed in some bullshit,

because they were blessed with certain opportunities that other people weren't, instead of realizing that they thought they were fucking special and knew magic. And they like to dress up in costumes. Rituals are fun because they didn't have TV or a lot of books. Rituals are fun, like the ritual of batting this copy of basic instinct and tearing it with the knives. That's why you were supposed to find it.

Magic. Magic. It is. You know what else is magic, Billy Wayne? Capitalism. Capitalism is like magic. It is magic. Like magic, it transmutes a podcast that is free into money for me.

It's good. It's good. See? Nobody can explain that. Nobody knows how that works. Product services. During the summer of 2020, 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 were like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not on the gun badass 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. 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 Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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, and we're furious. I want the machete. We want the machete.

Sophie's even on board. Adding suspense to this episode. It just feels like our episode is like it could be one thing and it's going to be another thing if we don't have the machete. If we don't have the machete. If we don't have the machete, the machete. This is like a wall. You brought that VHS from...

I brought that from the city's name that we will bleep out. Oh, we don't want people to know where you live. Well, it's a little... We can be coy about it a little bit. Yeah, let's not tell people where he lives. It's a good solid point. You brought that. Let's take that back.

Across the country. You crossed the country with that. I crossed the nation with this old VHS copy of Basic Instinct. It's in great shape. It's in great shape. It does have an odor, but that's fine. And it has a fake Paul Verhoeven signature. That might be me.

The odor might be me. That's funny. Yeah, there's no way to know. We're still... I smell like sulfur. We're still waiting for the podcast. Yeah, I'm going to go get it. Machete.

You're going to try this for me. Sophie's going to break in to... ...room. Do you need two knives? Fuck yeah. You got it. We got it. We're back.

And we have just... We have liberated the podcasting Machete. God damn it. We are a fucking duo. We are a fucking duo. We did it. We liberated the podcasting Machete. That was great.

From an unnamed other podcast that was recording, which is very bad to do normally. But when you... It was an emergency. We needed the Machete. Now we have both the Machete and the Billy Wayne Davis dagger on the table. This thing is fucking dope. We're ready to play. Thank you again.

By the way, that sheath has a sharpener in it right in the middle there. I mean... So you take that... You take that strap out. You're in the field. Get off the land. I used my little Gerber. No, I used my little Spyderco last night when we were eating steak.

But this would have... I immediately was like, oh, shit. There's a wild cow. You could kill a wild cow with that. There were wild cows all over the cairn. That could have been you. Robert, I'm so proud of us. I'm very proud of us.

That was a beautiful, like... Teamwork. ...charity mother-son mission that just went really well. It went really well. We liberated our machete from the fearsome named Bleeped. And, yeah, it was great. Very fearsome. Very fearsome.

Named Bleeped. Very fearsome named Bleeped. Anyway. Machete... Welcome, welcome, welcome. Back to this podcast. Welcome, welcome, welcome. So, yeah.

Good mission, you guys. Yeah. So, the evidence I found makes it seem that, like, Samuel Hahnman's, the kind of ideas that would eventually turn into homeopathy were more rooted in the occult stuff he learned when he was with the Masons than the stuff he learned in actual medical school. And the ironic thing is that this wasn't really a bad thing. That's what I was going to say, like, there is that part...

Like, he's like, he's learned the placebo effect of medicine... Yeah. ...and people's mental capacities of stuff. Yeah. Yeah, in the 1700s, medicine was mostly dangerous nonsense. Yeah. As this 1970 write-up on homeopathy from the University of Washington makes pretty clear. It's people dumber than Granny from the Beverly Hillbillies.

We're pretending to be doctors. Granny knew some shit. Granny could go into the woods and grab a couple herbs that did some things. That's the point I'm making, is that people dumber than Granny. People dumber than Granny. Yeah. Yeah. Granny was a drunk.

Granny was a drunk. In the first decades of the 19th century, medical therapy consisted mainly in bleeding, purging, vomiting, the application of leeches in the ingestion of an array of powerful chemical drugs. Their combined effect was often greatly debilitating and toxic to patients. The prevailing therapeutical confusion alternated in action, doing little while waiting for the so-called healing powers of nature to take over with aggressiveness, plunging patients into acute anemias, and loss of bodily fluids through the use of so-called depleting methods inherited from earlier times.

So that's medicine. Inherited. Inherited. Yeah. Yeah. After four semesters in medical school in 1777, Samuel moved to Vienna and spent three months working with a Dr. Quaran, the personal doctor for Empress Maria Theresia. The good doctor did not charge Samuel for his tutelage, but Sam was still chronically short of cash.

Thankfully, Dr. Quaran introduced him to the governor of Transylvania. He offered him a gig as his family physician. At least that's what Sheila, the homeopath, says. The University of Washington, by contrast, claims his main job was working as the governor's library assistant and organizing his coin collection. So again, the homeopath's like, ah, he worked as the personal doctor to the governor of Transylvania, and the more historical sources I found say that, like, no, he organized a coin collection. So she is taking his whole...

She takes him very seriously. She's a homeopath. Well, she's doing what he's doing, which is like, ah, I know what you said, but I know a little better. I know a little bit better. Yeah. She gets the gig, actually. She gets the gig. She has some interesting takes on autism, too, for you, Billy.

I don't want to know those. In 1779, Samuel grew tired of organizing coins. He moved to Erlangen and attended that university, where he finished his medical degree. After his graduation. Hey! Hey! Step ahead of most. Step ahead of...

He did it. ...most of the doctors that we talk about. He got a medical degree. He got the degree. So we're... Okay. Let's see where this is getting murky. Time for him to move to Mexico.

We'll start jerking off in the vials. After his graduation, Samuel spent the years between 1779 and 1785 as a nomadic wanderer, moving more than a dozen times to different towns and cities in Germany. He grew interested in chemistry in Dessau, largely because he started fucking the town of Apothecary's daughter. According to the University of Washington... Her name was chemistry. Her name was chemistry. According to the University of Washington, quote,

His gradual alienation from contemporary medicine and medical practices emerged during his stay in the town of Ganearn. He was severely critical of the deplorable conditions in a nearby asylum for the insane. In 1785, he became a health officer for the city of Dresden, where for long years he aroused only hostility and contempt from physicians and apothecaries. He's got a way. Yeah. And again, he's kind of in the right. He sees how fucked up medicine is and he gets pissed at it. That does seem to be true, that at this point, as a working doctor, he's like, things are wrong.

Yeah. You're not... They keep coming back. That's not what we want. Yeah. That's not what we want. The lucky ones come back. The unlucky ones just die in the hole that we put them in.

That is true, yeah. In the sick person hole. He's like, well, I'm also the undertaker, so I'm doing all right. Yeah. There were a lot of those. Doctor Undertaker? Doctor Undertaker and Doctor Barber were probably the two most common doctor mashup jobs. That's a...

My goal was to be a doctor bartender. I think that's a good goal. It's a golf pro doctor. Golf pro doctor. That'd be a good one. The reason for Hanman's ostracization from the medical mainstream community had a lot to do with his frustration over how patients were treated by doctors. The physicians of his day focused entirely on understanding the nature of illness. Patients were treated more as collections of symptoms than human beings.

And Samuel became an advocate of a more whole person focused approach to treating patients, which he believed would yield better results. And he's not wrong. He's not wrong. It's interesting because he's not wrong in that that makes for a better experience for the patient and that can have a positive impact on treating them. There's also an argument to be made that all these years of doctors just focusing on the symptoms and basically just trying to figure out why people were dying and then cutting them up after they died was necessary to figure out how to perform medicine more effectively. You kind of needed those kind of crappy centuries. So it's complicated.

Well, all we know about pregnant ladies and pregnancy, the Nazis did all the experimentations. Like when we went in and we're like, hey, we found those files and we're like, hey, you shouldn't have done this, but we're going to take them right here. That's a bit of a myth. There were a couple of things that were found out by it. Of course, he does. Our doctor told us this. There was some useful stuff that was discovered in the horrible experiments that were carried out in concentration camps, but the vast majority of it was nonsense. It was just like injecting dyes into twins eyeballs to see if it changed the other twins eye.

For every legitimate thing they discovered, there were like 10 things that were like, yeah, we didn't need to even test this. We all could have told you, you're not going to change one twin by shooting poison into the other. Yeah, but now we know. But now we know. You guys are bad guys. Yeah, yeah, we are. But we found a group of us. We'll have you here for the episode of Nazi Doctors.

That's going to be a fun episode of the show. Good God. Sophie's going to love it. Why? Because we get to make a lot of Sophie's Choice jokes. Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah, sure.

So in 1790, while working in Dresden, Hanman got up to some work translating an old manuscript about Chinchonabark, also called Chinabark, which was known to be an effective treatment for malaria fever. Unlike most treatments at the time, Chinchonabark absolutely did work. The leading theory as to why was that the substance was an astringent. But this reasoning didn't smell right to Hanman. He had tried out substances far more astringent than Chinchonabark on fever patients and seen it not have any effect. The actual reason that Chinchonabark worked on fevers is that it had quinine in it, which is like an actual medicine. It's one of the things that get people from malaria.

So obviously Chinchonabark helps with malaria fever. So they knew that this thing worked and they were right that it helped with fevers. They just didn't know why. Well, the thing in it did, yeah. And Hanman was right in that when he was like, no, no, no, y'all's reasoning for why this works is wrong. And then he tried to figure out the real reason why it worked and became even more wrong. But in a weird way. To try and figure out why Chinchonabark helped with malaria fever.

Hanman started experimenting on himself. He had a sizable dose of the bark and noted its effect on him as he wrote in his notes, quote, quote, one after the other. Yet without the peculiar chili shivering rigor briefly, even though symptoms which are of regular occurrence and especially characteristic as the dullness of mind, the kind of rigidity in all the limbs, but above all the numb disagreeable sensation, which seems to have its seed in the perosteum over every bone in the body. All these made their appearance. This paroxysm lasted two or three hours each time and recurred if I repeated this dose.

Not otherwise. I discontinued it and was in good health. So he has like a really bad reaction to this shit, kind of like a fever. That's his interpretation of it. It's like, oh, this taking this fever treatment feels like a fever to me. Yeah. So Hanman was struck by a revelation as a result of this. If this bark cured fevers, but also gave him a fever when he took it while he was healthy, maybe that meant sicknesses were cured by substances that acted similarly to the illness they were treating.

I can see the logic. You can see the logic in that. You can see like it's not, he's not a dumb person at this stage in medical development for being like, oh, maybe this is what's going on. Well, that's the steps you would take, I guess, just to figure stuff out. I can see how a smart person would be like, oh, shit, I think I figured something out. And I think I'm saying that because that's what I would do. That's what I, and there's, there actually is some met, not in his particular conclusion of it, but like vaccines essentially work that way. Yes, you're getting a little small, so you're being the body's been in.

He's wrong for the right reasons, I guess you could say, or like he's, there are some things in medicine that work like what Hanman realizes here. His main problem is that he generalizes way too much. That's humans. Yeah, that's humans. Exactly. Yes. But again, you see, I have trouble, this guy's an imperfect person and we'll get to some of his character flaws a little later too. But he's not a bastard.

No, he's not a bastard. He's doing his best in an era where nobody knows anything about medicine. But he, yeah, and he's one of the few people raising his eyebrow to everything being like, I don't know you guys. I think y'all are wrong. And he's right. But he's wrong too. I don't know the answer. Yeah.

Yeah, but that ain't it. But he does eventually get to the point where he feels like he knows the answer. So, yeah, Hanman, based on this single experiment, worked up a bold new theory of medical science, which he summarized with the now infamous line, like cures like. That's one of the poor facts of homeopathy. To get your thing going, you do need something catchy. It's like, in order to beat Donald Trump, a doddering ill old man, we need another doddering ill old man, whose eye fills with blood at random intervals. I don't think we need that one.

Nope. That's what's going to happen, Billy Wayne. Fucking hope you're so wrong. We've all decided. Glad you gave me that knife. I think that that is no. No? I hope not.

But if you travel it all, you're like, damn it. Cures like. It's like when Mitt Romney and a violent Christian extremist ran for president, the only person to beat them was Barack Obama, who was essentially, oh, not Mitt Romney. Jesus, I fucked this up entirely. What are you doing? I don't know. It's like how Barack Obama and John McCain are the same person. Yeah, see, it doesn't make any sense.

This didn't work at all. Vote for a woman. Okay, continue. A woman? That's not like curing like, Sophie. That's love curing like. That's not homeopathy. That's cool.

Kind of is homeopathy. It is very homeopathy, I think. So, Hanman's basic idea was that medicines treated illness by causing similar symptoms in the patient. And thus, when you had, when you dosed someone with something that made them sick and they were already sick, the two sick as this was canceled each other out. You may recognize this as the same medical reasoning in that one episode where Mr. Burns goes to the doctor and they realize that he has all of the diseases in the guy. Oh, yeah. Your illnesses are in perfect balance. That's literally Hanman's like, like revelation as a result of making himself sick on Chinchona Bark.

Oh, yeah. You just kill it. It's like, his thing is like, you fire with fire. It's kind of like that. So, if you came to him and you're on fire, he was like, just give him some more fire. Give him a little bit more fire. That's going to give him. I mean, that is kind of how you deal with wildfires, but not in the same way.

But not a human. But not a human fire. I do understand you do fire. I understand how that works. It's kind of like the vaccine versus, yeah. Yeah. No, it is a vaccine. For fires.

Yes. A little bit of fire will cure this fire. Yeah. Well, we control it before it does it itself. Yeah. This problem with overgeneralizing. Yeah, it is. Yeah.

Because I did try to stop a kitchen fire once by just lighting other parts of the kitchen on fire, and that did not work the same way. No, that doesn't work. That doesn't work. Or putting like water on a grease fire. Do you know that? Nope. But if you put grease on a water fire.

That, if you've got water on fire. Then you are. You are the city of Cleveland. Yes. Yes, you are. You guys caught your river on fire. Every time I make fun of Cleveland for their river being on fire that like five times that it caught on fire, they point out how clean it is today.

And I'm like, I'm sorry. Yeah, because all the stuff burned up. Because the poison burned out of the river. Yes. You cleaned it. Oh, I'm never going to let Cleveland live that one down. They don't care. They don't care.

They've been drunk the whole time. I love Cleveland. It's fun. You can mess anything up. They don't notice. She got mad. Sophie's is a Cleveland stan. No.

I was just thinking about the only thing that they got mad about is when LeBron left. Well, I'd be mad about that too. That's the only thing they have. Yeah. Well, he left. He's ours now. Well, he's no one's. That's what's beautiful.

LeBron James belongs to the world. He is a precious gem. He is a precious gem. Possibly one of the people least fit for this podcast. Yeah. He's so nice. I mean, every move he makes is great. Yeah.

He's a class act. He's like Shaq. Unlike Shaq. Noah, he's like Shaq. Oh, he's like Shaq. Yeah, I like Shaq. I like Shaq too. Shaq's great.

Shaq is great. I mean, Shaq's great, but I mean, he's definitely not as nice of a person as LeBron James. I feel like now we're just splitting very large, tall hairs. Do you want to continue with the podcast? Just like a thought. You do host a show. I do host a podcast. So the logic of Hanman's idea that like cures like was reinforced a few years later when

Dr. Edward Jenner invented the first smallpox vaccine. This worked by, you know, essentially introducing a small sample of the disease into a patient to immunize them. Now, today we know that what Jenner did with his vaccine is very different than what Hanman proposed. But at the time, given the information available, you could be forgiven for taking Jenner's breakthrough as more evidence that Hanman was on the right track. And it made Hanman insufferable to be around.

Oh, he definitely was. That happens after this point. Ah, he's like, been telling y'all. I figured it out. Who told you? Clearly this is the same thing. Damn it. Electrified by his study, Samuel Hanman began a series of experiments to develop what he

believed would be a whole new and much more valid school of medicine. Since the underlying theory behind it all was that like cures like, he called his new system homeopathy. On his first book on the subject, he wrote, to obtain a quick and lasting cure, choose for every attack or illness, a substance that which can produce a similarity to the one it is to cure. Modern day homeopaths still cite this experiment as one of the greatest developments in the history of mankind.

One modern textbook claims, Chinchonobark was to Hanman what the falling apple was to Newton and the swinging lamp to Galileo. Hanman launched next into a series of bold experiments, both on himself and on his children, his wife and his students. In his first book, Fragmenta de Widerbus, he asserted that he had experienced 122 different symptoms from ingesting Chinchonobark, which suggested it must have a wide-ranging medical application. Likewise, Samuel had listed 174 known symptoms with the consumption of green peppers.

So I deal with health problems by eating peppers. God. 174 of them. Although, you know, this is obviously not real medicine, but it also seems pretty harmless like eating green peppers isn't going to cure anything, but it's not going to make you worse. Unfortunately, the very logic of like-cures-like led Hanman inevitably towards experiments with literal poisons.

Martin Gumper, one of his biographers, wrote, Day after day, he tested medicines on himself and others. He collected histories of cases of poisoning. His purpose was to establish a physiological doctrine of medical remedies free from all suppositions based solely on experiments. Hanman sent his children into the fields to collect henbane, sumac, and deadly nightshade. They grew up like young priests of the Esclepion of Kos. They felt the leaves, blossoms, and tubers with small but expert hands.

Everyone was obliged to join in the work, for there was no other way to succeed in his titanic plan of rescuing the wealth of natural remedies from the quagmire of textbooks and displaying it in the bright light of experience. The family huddled together, and every free moment of every one of them, from the oldest to the youngest, was made of for the testing of medicines and the gathering of the most precise information on their observed effects. So he sends his kids out in the field to grab poison and take it. So that's good.

I mean, that's his kids. There are his kids. He owns them. That's his. He's a doctor. He's a doctor. It was an exciting time for Hanman and his family. Unfortunately.

Which ones are going to die? It was not an exciting time for many of his patients. And I'm going to quote now from the ACSH's write up on homeopathy. Having amassed voluminous pseudo-knowledge by pairing many specific vial substances and particular diseases whose symptoms most resembled the effects he attributed to those substances, Hanman set up shop as the original homeopath who would begin his consultations by putting wearisomely numerous questions to the patient. The replies would contribute to his building a picture of the patient's condition, a picture

based exclusively on these replies, the patient's appearance, and Hanman's supposedly God-given intuition. For example, if the patient had a gray pallor, was sweating profusely and said that he or she suffered from abdominal cramps, Hanman would in effect look up gray pallors sweating and abdominal cramps in his tome, use cross references to narrow down possible remedies and thus decide that Strict9, a toxic alkaloid, was the ideal cure for the patient's condition. It'll make it stop. It'll make it stop.

It will stop a lot. Yes, it'll make it stop. Strict9 causes sweating and horrific cramps itself, so it seemed like a logical treatment for a patient exhibiting those same symptoms. Unfortunately, giving literal poison to sick people is likelier to kill them than cure them. That was, okay, good. That's what I thought, but I wasn't sure you were going to say that. Yeah, that's where this is heading.

That kills a lot of people to be safe people. Yeah, because of the poisons. Because of the poisons. Turns out that's bad. It's his defense. You have to let me fail. If I have succeeded in curing one patient, it's only because I failed on 999. It's a numbers game.

You kill 100% of the patients you don't treat. That's what Wayne Gretzky said. Reverend Dr. Wayne Gretzky. That's his famous... Ah! My headphones fell off. That can only mean it's time for an ad plug, Billy Wayne. Okay.

Plug it. Before we do the ad plug, you want to touch tips here? I always want to touch tips. With our blades. Beep. Oh, that's so good. 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 guns. He's a shark. And not in the good badass 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, the 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. 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. 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 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 Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. Sophie, you're making a strange face. What's up? I feel left out. I don't have a weapon. You have to mind. Why thank you, Billy.

You're welcome. I'll pull out my knife. I get the machete here. Thanks, Robert. Okay. All right, cool. All right, let's touch tips and recommit ourselves to the study of bastardry before we get back to this topic. Oh, that's good.

That's going to be great content for the audio podcast we do. Metal on metal. Yeah, everybody loves the sound of metal on metal. Almost as much as they love the sound of Cody's time machine. Oh, that was so creepy. It was horrible. It was disgusting. Now, doot, doot, doot, doot.

I used to believe that's a metaphor for something disgusting. It's a literal of something disgusting. Cody Johnston made the most horrifying what he thought was a sound effect for a time machine. It sounded like Cockroach is performing oral sex. Yeah, it wasn't great. It was like, no. Terrible. Okay.

Terrible. Samuel Hahnman's practice of giving poison to sick people worked out terribly and killed a huge number of them. Quote, for stomach pains, he regularly prescribed quarter ounce doses of mercury. He instructed one poor soul. Jesus Christ. So much mercury, right? God. That's like 20 thermometers worth of mercury.

And that's going to hurt you. That is not going to help. Not coming back. He instructed one poor soul to take half an ounce of sulfuric acid in the morning. Another half ounce later that day. I do not think they made it to the second dose. And if you get to the end of the day, take a little more. Take a little more if you make it.

You can just imagine that person making it through and then just being like, all right, you got to take another. I don't want to do it again. That second dose just falls right out through the whole burn. He made it through. Oh my God. Yeah. A purported healing system that Hanmen asserted God had revealed to him

was having devilish effects on his patients who were dropping like flies. I just picture him with a big pad of paper and just going, nope, not that one. Acid's not the solution. Not it. Nope. And I'm guessing it was like for heartburn or something. It's like, oh, your heart's burning, huh?

I think I know what'll deal with this. You want to burn your heart back. You want to burn your heart back into alignment. You got to drink some fucking acid. Drink it. Oh boy. Yeah. So, you know.

Why is it bubbling? That's the carbonation. Some doctors might have, you know, realized from all of these dead people that this theory of like-caring like maybe was not as universally applicable as Hanmen thought. But Samuel Hanman did not make that decision. Instead, he decided that his theory just needed a little bit of alteration. You know, you don't want to scrap a whole medical theory

just because you burn a couple of people to death with acid. Yeah, he just looked up and his healing pile was a lot smaller than the dead body pile. Yeah, and that does mean you need to rejigger some things. Yeah, he's like math's wrong. The math's not right working out here. Now, to adjust his theory, Hanman turned back to his masonic and a coat roots. He added a new stage to the treatment. Instead of just dosing his patients with fatal poisons and watching them die horribly,

he began diluting said poisons to a ridiculous extent. He'd start by adding 99 drops of alcohol to one drop of the actual substance and then he would shake the mixture to potentialize it and activate its magical powers. Potentialize it. Potentialize it. They still do that. You got to shake this shit. Obviously, if you don't shake it, it doesn't work.

That's brilliant. It's like one of those five-hour energies. Yeah. You got to shake it. You got to shake it. He would then dilute it further, adding 99 drops of water to one drop of this 1C mixture and that would create a 2C mixture and so on down the line until essentially nothing was left of the original substance.

Of course. No, it's just a placebo. It's just a placebo. But to Hanman, he saw this instantly have a massive positive effect on his patients because it's way better to give someone water than strychnine. Yes. Yes. I mean, allegedly, I don't know for a fact, but that's how I've been going to the medical

school. Yeah, I'm not a doctor. But I think that will. Googleing has suggested that to me. Yeah, I think if you drink water, it'll make you feel better. Aren't you both Reverend doctors? We haven't met that trick. We haven't gone to Haiti to bleach people.

This is the bleach part. Yeah. I understand. But I want that sweet, sweet. I do want that title. You take just what if we make our own program? How do we become accredited to give people fake medical degrees? This is America.

You can do anything. We're just like, oh, I don't think it's probably as hard as we think it is. Yeah. We've got to find someone who owns a small college and then give us an honorary doctorate. You know who's let's talk to. Oh, what is Liberty? They're in trouble right now. Liberty University.

We just did an episode on fall. I bet we could get that. Yeah, they need some help right now. They need some help right now. Let's get in bed with the fall wells. Yeah. What could go wrong? No.

Where are we getting the pool with the fall wells? Oh, yeah. Have you seen that stuff? About the trainer and stuff? Yeah. Oh, yeah. The pool boy? Yeah.

What is his name? Juan Carlo. Juan Carlo. It's so... I'm proudest of him. He did well. He did. He did very well.

Every move he made, I was like... Good boy. Yeah. This is a good story. Solid man. So, obviously, Hanman starts diluting his literal poison and he notices massive improvements in his surviving patients. I'm not dehydrated anymore.

Yeah. It's great. Nor are my insides liquefying. It's great. Now, to Hanman, this proved he was on the right track. He added the aphorism, less is more, to like cures like. And together, these two facts laid the cornerstone of homeopathic medicine. Yep.

Hanman's diaries of his less is more period included much alchemic and astrologic symbol. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm quoting here from that write-up. They all understand marketing. Oh, yeah. Yeah. To, like, a degree that most people... I wonder with Hanman, though.

I wonder if he's just... This is just kind of how science works when you know less. Gotcha. Word is simplifying. Because you do have to think like everyone's dying from everyone's treatments because they're all bad. Like, we laugh about him giving someone a quarter ounce of mercury because that's debt terrible. But also, like, normal doctors who weren't homeopaths were also giving people shit that's

mercury. And we know that you don't do that now because of them. Because of them. Yeah, there is that point. Yeah. So I think it's very possible that Hanman is just... He's making some... Clearly some logical failures and being like, oh, now when I diluted it, they got better.

That means diluting it makes the medicine stronger. It's like, no, that's not quite it. No, the stuff is killing them and you're giving them less stuff. You just stopped poisoning them. And he's like, nah. Or. Or. Water.

Less is more. Yeah. Or the saying. Yeah. So he started, you know, spending his nights shaking and mixing and cooking up all sorts of magical cures for people. And over time, Hanman grew to dilute his medicines more and more. In 1799, while he was based in a small town called Konigsluter, an outbreak of scarlet fever

hit the community. Hanman thought the symptoms of the disease, headaches and wide open eyelids with a dull, staring look were similar to the effects he'd observed on his friends and family when he dosed them with atropine to see what would happen. Following the theory of light-curing like, he dosed patients with atropine. Thankfully, it was an extremely diluted 1,432,000th solution. So it, you know, it was basically water. I'm going to quote from the University of Washington here.

The reason for diluting the drug was Hanman's awareness that drugs were often responsible for aggregating existing diseases or introducing new ones with contemporary dosages. Still believing he was observing drug effects, he gradually gave his peer drugs and greater delusions. Hanman rationalized this action by speculating that in illness, the body was enormously more sensitive to drugs than in health. He's making a lot of logical leaps here. It's interesting. Yeah.

And here's a question. Is he also dosing himself? Yes. So he's just getting madder and madder. Yeah. I do suspect that's having an impact. Yeah. Because he gave himself a lot of poisons.

Yeah. I'm sure he did some. And his kids. Affects the mind. You don't hear much about his kids. None. Well. Well.

All that mercury. Yeah. Now he continued his tactic of diluting his medication until things reached their current point of homeopathic absurdity. A modern homeopathic treatment for the common cold would be a 6C solution of onion. Why onion? Because when you cut an onion, your nose gets all stuffed up like it does when you have a cold. Oh, man. Yeah.

Now if you're wondering how much actual onion is in a 6C dilution, well, I'm going to quote from the ACSH's right up again. A 6C onion concentration would result if one filled Wimbley Stadium to the roof with water and added one drop of an onion mother tincture. A 12C onion concentration in a homeopathic pill is equivalent to that which would result if one added a single drop of onion mother tincture to a body of water the size of the Atlantic Ocean. So he's just giving them water. He's just giving them water. It's like a LaCroix water. It kind of depends on how you do it. It's like an onion version of LaCroix.

Yeah. It's like more concentrated or more diluted LaCroix. LaCroix is a lot stronger than homeopathic medicine. Is someone in the next room cutting onions? They're like, no, that's the medicine. That's the medicine. But we did make it by having someone in the next room cut onions. And we took the smell of it and sprinkled it on the water.

You're actually getting into what is the problem, one of the modern problems with homeopathic medicine. But that's going to wait until part two. They don't always dilute it so much. Now, the ironic thing about all this is that Hanman's nonsense medicine actually saved a huge number of lives during this period of time. This is not because his cures worked, but it is because real doctors in this period were prescribing people poison. Most sicknesses suffered by most people get better on their own after enough time if you just don't give people deadly poisons. Now, Hanman's patients would start taking his nonsense water, they would heal of their body's own accord, and they would avoid going to a regular doctor who would have probably tried to drill a hole in their brain to let the ghosts out.

In this way, completely by accident, Samuel Hanman did succeed in advancing the frontiers of medical science in a major way. I'm going to quote from the 1963 book, The March of Medicine. However, we may judge Hanman's theory, one thing must be admitted, it led to a decisive change in medical thought. If the sick recovered all the same and this could not be disputed, it must be a matter of self-healing. Homeopathic treatment, in other words, no treatment, was often far better. So basically doctors start realizing like, okay, this guy's giving people nothing. We know that. We know that like his, because we knew math. We know Avogadro's number of shit at this point. We know this is just water and his patients are doing better than ours.

Maybe we suck. Maybe we're bad at this and we need to really fundamentally change how we do medicine. And Hanman was a big part of that realization. That's really nice. And then it's also like, you think there's a period where like, maybe if we send our patients to the ghost we let out of their brain, that would help. Yeah, they try that. They send a lot of patients to the ghost that they let out of their brain too. That just seems like probably a step they went through. Yeah, it wasn't an even march of progress. This one dude's like, hold on. That dude was the doctor and we let that ghost out of his brain.

Let's see what the doctor ghost knows. And he didn't give them poison so the ghost doctor was a better doctor than the actual doctors. The ghost doctor would absolutely be a better. I would rather go to a ghost doctor in this period than Hanman or a regular doctor. The more and more I come to these, the more and more I realize like, oh, it makes sense we destroyed this planet. Yeah, we're not a smart species. It's crazy it took us this long. Yeah, no, we've really made a lot of progress for as dumb as we are. It's kind of inspiring when you think about it that way.

We're doing all right, you guys. While real doctors took the apparent success of Hanman's methods as a reason to revise their tactics, Samuel himself continued to plow forward and develop his treatments into a wide-ranging belief system. Homeopathy was immediately popular with patients for obvious reasons. From a report in the National Institutes of Health, quote, the differences between orthodox medicine and homeopathy could hardly be more vivid. From its beginning, homeopathy always began with a long consultation, lasting at least an hour in which all aspects of the patient's illness and life were discussed.

Homeopaths like to stress that they practice holistic medicine and the appropriate treatment chosen in contrast during the first half of the 19th century when homeopathy was becoming established, orthodox medicine was immersed in the belief that advances in understanding disease could only come from a detailed correlation of symptoms and signs of the sick patient on the ward and the findings at autopsy, clinical pathological correlation. So these orthodox tactics did lead to eventually a greater understanding of health and illness, but it also meant in the immediate term that doctors were basically often, we're just going to wait until you die and cut you open and then we'll see.

And then we'll be better in the future, which patients aren't big fans of. No, that's not why you go. They like a doctor who treats you as a person and not as just like waiting to cut into your corpse. It'd be like you took your car into the mechanic and he's like, ah, I could, but I'm not going to. But when it quits running, bring it to me. When your brakes fail on the highway, I'll cut your car open afterwards. And I'll tell you it was your brakes.

Yeah, I'll tell you why the brakes didn't work. I'll tell you exactly why they didn't work. Yeah. So Hanman showed no interest in detailed pathology, none in conventional diagnosis and treatment. He was only interested in the principles of homeopathic medicine, which he used to name the illness. Classic homeopathy was therefore seen by its supporters as an attractively safe symptom, simple, easy to understand and centered on the patient as a whole and not on pathological lesions. By 1801, Hanman had moved on yet again back to a town near Leipzig.

His notebooks revealed the kind of problems most of his patients came to him with. Insomnia, headaches, dizziness, constipation, lack of appetite, backaches, menopause, menstruation. In other words, all things that tended to resolve themselves. Yeah, life. Yeah, life. But Samuel Hanman watched his patients improve after giving them water and he grew convinced that he had solved the problem of sickness for all time. His fellow doctors were less than convinced and they were particularly frustrated with the fact that

high society, the aristocracy and the very wealthy increasingly embraced homeopathy over orthodox medicine. By 1805, he was widely recognized as a physician of note. In 1810, he published The Organon of Rational Healing, which would be published in five editions during his lifetime. Leipzig University, his alma mater, hired him to give lectures. From 1812 to 1821, he taught six-month courses on the principles of homeopathy. Curious young minds from all over Europe flocked to Hanman's classroom to learn from the master. By this point, he'd grown utterly convinced of his own brilliance to the point where he told one group of students, he who does not walk on exactly the same line with me, who diverges,

if it be but the breath of a straw to the right or the left, is an apostate and a traitor. And with him, I have nothing to do. Oh, good. Yeah. Good. He doesn't get more better at his old age. No. Yeah, yeah.

This is kind of where he gets to be a little bit more problematic. Well, everyone's telling him how great he is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, in fairness to him, compared to the poison doctors, he's solid. It's good. It's a good record. Not giving people poison is a good move as a doctor. I wish I'd been a doctor, then.

It would have been so much easier. Yeah. Machetesan could have really taken off. I think so. He just cut off a digit. Just cut off a finger. That is... Oh, he's trying to give you acid?

I'm just going to cut your finger off. Just give me... Which finger do you hate? Yeah. Do you have a... We all have one we love. Everybody's got an evil finger. Which finger do you hate?

That's the core of Machetesan. God! All right. It's time for ads, Sophie. Sophie's saying it's time for ads. If you like cutting your finger off, try these products. Service this. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the

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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 heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys 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.

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 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 offending 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. We're back! You tried that Billy.

In 1821, at age 66, Samuel Hahnemann was granted unlimited privileges by a nearby duchess, allowing him to live in luxury while he took a partial retirement to further develop his theories. 66 in the 1800s is old as fuck. He lives a long fucking life. That is, I mean it's old now. Yeah, he lives forever, essentially. Yeah. He continued to be the center of the homeopathic field, directing the establishment of a homeopathic journal, and watching as new homeopathic schools were established by his former students. While homeopathies spread over the continent, Samuel Hahnemann continued to work until, in 1828, he presented his greatest discovery since his first breakthrough.

The father of homeopathy had finally found the root of all chronic illnesses. No. The itch scabies. Really? Yeah, he decided it was scabies. That's not, I can tell you from experience, that's not the root of all illnesses. No, no, I've stayed in some shady hotels and stuff. Yeah, now Hahnemann termed it Psaura and claimed that scabies basically acted as the soil from which all diseases sprung.

Modern homeopaths are very much divided on whether or not this last great theory of Hahnemann's was a misstep or the key to a proper homeopathic treatment. Actual doctors recognize that scabies is actually caused by tiny microscopic mites and has nothing to do with, say, multiple sclerosis, or he after chronic illness. But I'm sure during that time, it was a huge problem. Scabies is everywhere. Everybody's got scabies who comes in with something else wrong. Yes. Must be the scabies causing it. It's like people that do hardcore drugs always also smoke pot.

Yeah. That's the same fucking thing. It's exactly that logic. Yes. Gotcha. Now, in 1835, Hahnemann married a 35-year-old French socialite. She'd originally been one of his patients. 35-year-old?

35. I mean, even then. Even then, old horny dudes existed. Yeah, old horny dudes. And he is apparently great at it. Yeah, she'd originally been one of his patients, which I'm sure presented no ethical dilemma. None. His family, particularly his surviving children, were horrified when the now very elderly scientist left for France with his young new wife.

Oddly enough, that year, 1835, was also the year homeopathy faced its first effective rebuttal using what we would recognize today as actual science. Oh, I bet he didn't like that. I don't even know what he thought about it, because it's not like there weren't like online journals and stuff that's happened far away from him. And he was busy. He was busy fucking his new wife. He was like, oh, you guys got a problem with it? I don't care. I'll make sure you ain't got no scabies.

See this? She's French. Homeopathy had taken off among the great and good in the kingdom of Bavaria. In Nuremberg, two homeopathic doctors did a brisk business treating the nobility with nonsense water. This irritated a fellow named Friedrich Wilhelm von Hoeven, the city's chief public health official and the head of the hospitals. He wrote a critique of homeopathy under a pseudonym. According to the NIH, quote, Von Hoeven accused homeopathy of lacking any scientific foundation.

He suggested that homeopathic drugs were not real medicines at all and alleged homeopathic cures were either due to dietetic regimes and the healing powers of nature or showed the power of belief. He called for an objective comparative assessment by impartial experts if, as he expected, homeopathic treatment proved ineffective, the government would need to take drastic measures to protect the lives of deceived patients. A little bit of both in between. Yeah. It seems like everyone is very reactionary. Yes. I mean, nothing strange. Nothing strange.

But they have a hard time going in between. Yeah. It's interesting. It is interesting. It's a common problem with people. John Jacob Reuter, Nuremberg's homeopathic doctor, defended his discipline by claiming that even children, lunatics and animals had been cured by homeopathic solutions. He challenged Von Hoeven to try some homeopathic. Three comparisons, like, you know, children, lunatics and animals.

And animals, the three kinds of people. You know. He challenged Von Hoeven to try some homeopathic medicine, a 30 C dilution of salt and see if he didn't feel something. This test or challenge sparked dozens of physicians and pharmacists in Nuremberg to take him up on his offer. He said, now I want something sweet. Yeah. Now I kind of want some chocolate. So suddenly all these physicians started doing tests on themselves with diluted salt water.

And eventually they hit upon the idea of conducting a single large scale test, instead of all doing individual tests. Following a widely publicized invitation to anyone who was interested, more than 120 citizens met in a local tavern. The minimum number needed to proceed had been fixed at 50. The design of the proposed trial was explained in detail. In front of everyone, 100 vials were numbered, thoroughly shuffled and then split up into random into two lots of 50. One lot was filled with distilled snow water, the other with ordinary salt and a homeopathic C 30 dilution of distilled snow water, prepared just as Reuter had demanded. A grain of salt was dissolved in 100 drops of distilled snow water and the resulting solution was diluted 29 times at a ratio of 1 to 100. So this is like a double-blind experiment.

You get your control, you get your test group, and a list was made of which subjects had received which substances. The subjects themselves were kept in the dark about what they'd received. So this is believed to be the first double-blind study conducted in the history of medicine. This is what it's done to try and see if homeopathy worked. Like, Hanman advanced the frontiers of medical science more than almost any other single person, completely by accident. Yes. Completely by accident. It's kind of cool.

A contrarian accident. That being like, I don't think this is right. Yeah, I think I'm the only one who knows anything. Well, that's what I was going to say too. It seems like a lot, even to this day, arrogance takes us way farther and helps us in some degree, but we hurt ourselves pretty hard till we get there. There's actually a lot of interesting writings on the evolution of overconfidence and why overconfidence occurs in species and stuff, and how if you've got two species, two different animals competing over a resource, and one of them believes irrationally that it will win in a fight, and so it always tries to grab the thing.

Like, sometimes it'll get in fights, and sometimes it will lose those fights, but more often than not, the less confident thing will just be like, I don't want to fuck with you. I don't give a shit about it. It's like the dog that goes for the treat first gets the treat most often, you know? Or whoever throws the first punch. And with human beings, it means sometimes we build arsenals of nuclear weapons capable of annihilating all life on Earth and hand them to doddering old men. And it also means sometimes we look up at the moon and go, yeah, I bet we could fling a guy into that. Let's just go up there.

Let's figure this shit out. Yeah, we can do it. Fuck it. I mean, if my car goes this fast, that's just a bigger gas tank. Yeah. That happened in Huntsville, Alabama. That's amazing. That's where they build those rockets.

Yeah. So keep making fun of the south. Yeah. We fucking landed on the goddamn moon. That's where all the NASA shit is. Mm-hmm. Because nobody else is that fucking crazy. No.

Well, that's a lot of it, too. Yeah. There's a lot of rednecks going like, wait, I know how to do this. I can get us up there. That's really like the core history. That's why like all the great test pilots come from like Ohio or something, like flat boring places where it's like, oh, yeah, I've been rolling around in a car trying to get myself killed for years. Might as well do it for science. Yeah.

Yeah. And I can fly? Yeah. All right. All right. Fuck yeah. I'll be the first one. Yeah, I'll do that.

Yeah. I'll get on board this. You're any Chuck Yeager. He's still very, very, very confident in old age. We were like, well, God, how cocky was he when he was little? How could you not be being Chuck Yeager, though? I think you accomplish a couple of things and then you're just like, oh, I can do anything I want. And you're like, who's that Chuck Yeager?

Oh, yeah. Go ahead. I'll just let him. Yeah. You can smoke in the maternity ward. So obviously the double blind, this first double blind study showed that it didn't, the homeopathic medicine didn't do anything. So the first blind study worked.

Yeah. It worked. So yeah, in 1835, a bunch of dudes at a bar succeeded in proving homeopathy was nonsense. But as I've said a number of times on this show, proof has never convinced anyone of anything. Nope. Yeah. Quackery is the oldest European example of what we now call CAM or Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

That's a nice term used by professionals today to avoid hurting the feelings of people who truly believe crystals are going to heal their arthritis. The whole reason a field of fundamentally unscientific ideas is treated this way traces back to Samuel Hahnemann. Before his rise to prominence, medicine outside the mainstream without data behind it was just called quackery. I'm going to quote next from an article in the Royal Society of Medicine. Most of these pre-1850 quacks tended to specialize, some were bone setters, others claimed to cure

venereal disease without the use of mercury. Dr. Taylor of Beverly in Glauchester arranged to attend regularly at three public houses to which patients only had to send in their urine and he would tell it once whether they were curable or not. There were self-siled oculists who specialized in the treatment of cataract and curies of cancer without operation. One of the latter calling himself the High German Dr. Simon invited you to visit his house yourself, a cancer of the armpit of five pieces of twelve and one-half ounces weight which

he claimed to have removed. Most of these regulars were uneducated or even illiterate and only a minority were full-time healers. They usually had regular jobs such as blacksmith, farrier, grocer, butcher, cheesemonger, cobbler, cutter or mechanic. They often claimed patronage of the great and good. Dr. Scott's bilious and liver pills were used by the Dukes of Devonshire, Northumberland and Wellington, Anglesey and Hastings and the Earls of Pembroke, Essex and Oxford, while

Dr. Lampert at 36 High Street, Borough, London claimed to visit the well-to-do in the West Indies, the Isles of Skilly, London, Nottingham, Derby, Norwich, Lincoln, Boston, Glauchester, Wolfer, Hampton, Litchfield, a bunch of fucking British names and for good measure, almost every other town in the kingdom. These are regulars had one thing in common, they had little if any interest in understanding of orthodox medicine in their time. I ain't got time for fancy book learning, I'm doing magic. And it's not always bad, like the doctors who are like, oh, we can cure your VD without

using mercury, like they could cure people's STDs, but they weren't making it worse with mercury. Yeah, you know that, you know what sucks? Worse than VD. Mercury. If you drink mercury. Yeah. Oh God, you put mercury down your pee hole.

Don't do that. Just mm-mm. Yeah. Mm-mm. So things changed in the early 19th century largely as a result of Samuel's work. Homeopathy gave quacks an ideology and a school of medicine to stand alongside, while old-fashioned quacks would rarely visit the same town twice because they were fundamentally frauds. Homeopaths would continue to practice in the same area for years, even decades.

People at the time recognized this change. Quote, an orthodox practitioner remarked the old-fashioned quack with his ferago of receipts who seldom visited the same neighborhood but at very long intervals in order to avoid recognition. This class of practitioner is fast coming to a close. It was being replaced by literate and educated empirics who read books. This remark signaled the emergence of a new form of unorthodox medicine which formed the basis of what is today called complementary alternative medicine. This is where we get goop from.

Oh yeah. It used to be if you were a fringe medical person, you wouldn't stick around in town. You'd sell your snake oil and get out. Because of Hanuman, these people established themselves as like, no, no, no, we're going to set up offices and try to do, we see ourselves as legitimate practitioners. And that is all really humans need is a different, subconsciously we're like, it's like the marijuana doctors. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like the marijuana doctors. Samuel Hanuman and his wife lived out their last years as popular socialites in France. The only hiccup in his golden years came when his wife was charged for practicing medicine without a license. But this does not seem to have led to a significant penalty. He died a millionaire in 1843 at the age of 89.

So good life for him. God. Yeah. Yeah. That's a long ass way to live. Yeah. Because he drank all that water staying hydrated. He was very hydrated.

Yeah. He was extremely hydrated. Yes. The most hydrated man in the 1800s. Now Hanuman went to his grave believing that his decision to dose himself with China bark was a moment for human science on par with Newton being hit by an apple. And in some ways that is true. His violent reaction to quinine has forever altered the progress of medical science.

Over the years, several medical professionals have tried unsuccessfully to recreate his findings. One doctor who did so representing the board of health wrote, Chinchona, even in the preparation advocated by Hanuman did not cause fever in either healthy people or animals. So this is a little weird, right? No one has ever been able to recreate the effects of Hanuman's first groundbreaking experiment. But during my research, I did come across one fascinating theory that might just explain

this mystery and kiosk on how homeopathy was really started. I found an article by Dr. William E. Thomas, a Melbourne based physician and medical historian. He notes that quinine, the active ingredient in Chinchona, is only toxic in higher doses than Hanuman took. However, there are some people who are allergic to quinine and the symptoms are startlingly similar to what Hanuman himself reported. It can be concluded then that Hanuman might have suffered from an allergy to quinine, which means that the fundamental foundation of homeopathy, like the idea that like cures

like is based on the fact that Dr. Hanuman had a rare allergic reaction to quinine when he took this bark. Which is just the most human element of this whole thing. Yeah, it's very understandable. Yeah. Wow. Now, Billy Wayne. I'm excited of who he's led in to Pandora's Box here.

That is what Part 2 is going to be. I'm excited about who comes in here. Because Samuel Hanuman, an imperfect person, you can criticize him some ways. Not really a bastard. No. Not really a bastard. Just a dude who made some logical leaps that were not justified by the actual evidence, but that are understandable in the context of the time.

And then really just kind of took some confirmation bias after that. A lot of confirmation bias, young French wife, you know. That's distracting. Yep. And it would be very distracting. In Part 2, we are going to talk about some of the actual bastards, the horrible harvest and corpses that is Samuel Hanuman's modern day legacy. So a lot of dead babies in Part 2.

Of course there is. Yep. Yeah, Billy Wayne, I feel like the right way to break up this game of tennis we're going to play. Yeah. I think we should go to five total points. And I think we should do the first two points at the end of this episode. And then we'll have the last three, assuming there's any pieces of this VHS tape left.

Yeah, thank you. All right. Yes. Thank you, Sophie. Sophie knows that when you grab a machete, you do it by the blade. That is? I'm going to put myself back. Just don't hurt Anderson, please.

All right, Sophie, are you ready to ref? Yeah. Okay. I thought it was up. So how are we? Up. Anderson. I'm going to serve first.

Okay. Here, let me put this. Now, I don't know how to play tennis. I don't think it matters. I don't think this is how to play tennis. No, let's see. All right. Let's see if I can.

I do know one thing, which is that I'm supposed to say zero serving zero, right? That's how it starts. You can. All right. No, isn't it love? No. Love is 15. No, love is zero, isn't it?

No. 15. It's love. It's, I don't, fuck. It's a little bit distinct while I'm going to try to hit it at you. Okay. Oh, you hit it. I hit it backwards.

That didn't work out. All right. All right. All right. Just get out of the way of it, I think. What does that count as? I think that was a point. Hit the back.

All right. Let's see. All right. It's one, one. Yours is cut. I'm not, I think, yeah. All right. All right.

Yeah. We'll try this one. 15 all. Oh, yeah. Look at that. That was a good one. That one's, it's holding up pretty well. You got to give it credit.

All right, Billy. All right. It's two, two. We're tied. We're tied. And the deep, the VHS of basic instinct is holding up surprisingly well. Pretty. Pretty well.

Let's take it out of its case. See how we're. Oh, nope. It's been cut so much that it is. Oh, is it in there? It's now in there. I think we actually wedged it into the paper. That's awesome.

Nice job, guys. Nice job. Paul Veroven. Great director. Oh, yeah. Billy, you want to plug your plugables? Yes, bwdtour.com slash tours on my live dates. I'm coming to Atlanta, Seattle, Portland, Eugene, Cincinnati, Huntington, West Virginia, Birmingham,

Alabama. See Billy Wayne live. Come see us. There's a variety of bladed instruments, I'm sure. And continue listening to this podcast and also find it on the internet at BehindTheBastards.com or at BastardsPod on Twitter and Instagram. There's also another podcast that exists by T-shirts on T-public. What's that podcast called?

Oh, it's called The Worst Year Ever. And it's about politics. Wow, that sounds so dumb. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Okay, tune in on Thursday to see who wins the game of what is definitely not tennis. It's not tennis. Not at all.

No. No Andersons were harmed in the making of this podcast. Yeah. Shit! What the fuck? I'm just saying I can't guarantee. I can. How do we light this thing on fire?

No, we're not lighting it on fire. So I need... 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 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 iHeartRadio 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? 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. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.