Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Naturopathic Doctor Who Bombed a Plane

Episode Date: April 28, 2026

Robert tells Brandi Posey the thrilling tale of Dr. Robert Spears, a man who was not a doctor but was a trailblazing Naturopath. And when I say "trailblazing", I mean he committed terrorism on a plane.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Also media. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history. And we've got a fun one for you this week, folks. I know it's been a rough year. There's been a lot of pedophiles. I'm not just talking about the U.S. government. I'm talking about on the podcast. We've been covering a lot of pedophiles, in part because there's a lot of pedophiles in the U.S.

government, to be fair. But this week, thank God. We're handling just an honest, simple grifter, you know, one of the good, decent con men who makes this podcast and this nation possible. And to talk with me about just a corn-fed, good old-fashioned down-home con artist, Brandy Pozy. Brandy, you're a comedian, and you run your own comedy record label, and you've got an album Milk Job that's out right now, right now? Right now, right now, baby.

Hell yeah. Welcome to the show, Brandy. How you, how you doing? How you've been since last we talked? I've been good, also keeping up on the pedophile news and probably, you know. Keeping up with the pedophiles. Yeah, grinding my teeth as much as you, I imagine. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, it's frustrating to be aware of the world these days. I don't recommend it. Instead, why don't you, why don't we all just sink into a story of days gone by? and talk about a con man from like a family of con men. This will be a nice one, everybody. I hope you all enjoy it. Is this about a Beagle Boy?

It feels like you're about to tell me the story of the Beagle Boys. The Beagle Boys? Who the hell are the Beagle Boys? From Duck Tales? Oh, no, no. No, this is much worse. Oh, okay. Great, great.

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If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail. Listen to Eating While Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHawks. Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. So, we're talking about a guy named Robert Spears, who was one of the first naturopaths. He was a very influential figure in, like, the first wave. You have two big waves of naturopathy as like a discipline, one that kind of goes up from the start of the century until polio vaccines become a thing. And people are like, alternative medicine, why would we ever not want modern vaccinations and

the like? And then you've got one that kind of crops up more recently in the 70s. So there's like a split between the two. And we'll be talking about both this con man who, spoilers, winds up committing some pretty serious plain crimes at the end of his life. This ends in a fun slash mass murdery place. But before you get to the mass murder, there's a lot of cons. So this should just be a fun episode for everybody.

We're talking about, have you ever heard of Robert Spears? Is that name ring a bell? No. No, old Bobby has not. crossed my path. I can't wait. Well, we're going to talk about him. But before we talk about him, we've got a little mini-BTB episode, because I want to talk about the birth of naturopathy as like a field of endeavor, of work of quote-unquote medicine, and you really got to keep the quote-unquote there when you're talking about this period of time for sure. The guy who most often gets credit

for starting naturopathic medicine as a discipline was a German-born American with an amazing name. Like the guy most often described as the founder of naturopathy was Dr. Benedict Lust. Oh, amazing. Dr. Lust. How about me. He wasn't really a doctor. And to be fair, he didn't claim to be a medical doctor, but Dr. Lust is just really funny. Like I had to, I prefer that. I'll give him the stolen valor if I get to say Dr. Lust a bunch. Does this whole thing start with boner pills? Is that where we start? Is that, that's not, Dr. Lust doesn't? No, I mean, I'm sure he sold some weird boner medicine.

Don't get me wrong. He was selling, like, quack medical treatments in the early 1900s. He must have been. But I also think he was a legitimate believer. That's something this first couple generations of guys who become like the naturopathic, like movement, the first naturopathic crusaders, are like true believers. They're not guys selling snake oil a lot of the time, but they truly seem to believe in it generally. Well, I guess like at the same time, like what is actual medicine doing? It's like we're past leeches, but we're like, yeah, we got nails and skulls.

As we'll talk about, they are still doing some skull nailing. One of the problems with modern medicine at this period of time is we've just now, by the time you're starting in like the early 1900s, you're really starting to get the first wave of mass produced high quality pharmaceutical drugs. Unfortunately, you don't have like the basis of knowledge about like when those are good and when those like wind up being worse for everybody. a lot of cases. So you have a shitload of people being overprescribed like, oh, your four-year-old's coughing. Here's some heroin. That'll get him right back to baseline. No, I'm sorry to give it a four-year-old heroin. So people in this, if you're someone who's saying, I'm against, I think doctors use too many drugs. I want like a non-drug solution. In the 1900s, a lot of times you'll be doing better by going with like a quack doctor just because they're only feeding you homeopathic

medicine as opposed to straight heroin and cocaine, which has some negative health consequences. So it is more blurry when you're talking about the difference between alternative medicine, whatever, that kind of shit, and like the AMA. Like there's not as much of a gap between them as there will come to be in the modern era. That makes sense, yeah. So Dr. Benedict Lust, again, not a doctor, was born in Middlebock, Baden in Germany in 1872. So he's like a year younger than Germany itself. As a young man or child, it's a little unclear in my sources, Lust gets sick.

He contracts tuberculosis. And at the time, by 1872, it's not as much of a death sentence as it had been like a generation before, but a lot of people are still dying from tuberculosis. So if you get diagnosed with it, you know there's a pretty good chance you're not coming through the other side. But Lust takes a treatment that's become in vogue at the time. as known as the water cure. This was largely the invention of a priest named Sebastian Knipe.

But Knipe had discovered a book that some even older guy had written on curing disease via cold water plunges. You even see this today in a lot of like the podcast, right, health influencers, everybody. RFK loves the cold plunge. People have been doing this for way more than 100 years, like almost 200 years. There have been guys advocating for cold plunges, basically, as treatment for different illness. Now, in NYP's time, which is, again, the mid-1800s, tuberculosis was even more so a death sentence. And so he had gotten sick before lust gets sick. The guy who treats him also gets tuberculosis as a young man.

And he, like, finds this book and writes, quote, I clung to it like a drowning man. He later wrote, it became in a short time the staff supporting the invalid. Today it is the lifeboat that was sent to me by a merciful providence in the nick of time in the hour of extreme peril. And so NYP gets given what he thinks is a death sentence, this tuberculosis diagnosis, and he gets better. And he gets better while taking the water cure. Now, does he just, does he recover because of that? Or does he just recover while he does that? You know, Knape obviously credits his recovery to the water cure because he makes his whole life about that.

From here on out, the rest of his days, he's like a practitioner of this thing. And is this, is it? Oh, I was just going to, and just FYI to the listeners, if you want to look into this guy, his name is spelled K-N-E-I-P-P. Yeah. Just a... Knipe. Yeah.

Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Now, is the water cure just drinking water a thing that I think that we... Oh, okay, okay. It's like getting plunged in. It's like getting like guys are doing today, right? Where you get like this bucket of ice water and you plunge yourself in for whatever period of time. From an article in the Journal of Integral Medicine by Susanna Seranco, quote,

Building from this little book, Knife eventually modified the cold. water baths to what became his signature treatment. The shower baths are gushes, which he administered with a simple garden watering can. By pouring water on the subject, a quicker reaction is brought on than by bathing. Pouring was Father Knipe's special method. The object of all cold water applications is to cause a stimulation in the circulation of the blood, and they must last only long enough for this reaction to take place. Knight paid close attention to the primary and secondary reactions caused by cold water on warm skin.

And part of why this is so popular is that ice bathing or what he's doing, which is like pouring cold water on you because he says it causes the reaction faster. It has a physiological effect. It does measurable things to your body, right? That said, it is never, neither ice bathing nor any other kind of cold water exposure has been shown to treat or cure tuberculosis. There's no documentation of this working. However, there's a couple of things going on because both NYP and Lust will credit getting

better from TB to this cold plunge type thing, basically. And first off, in the 1800s, a lot of people are misdiagnosed when they're diagnosed with TB. A lot of deaths that are just credited to tuberculosis were something else. And doctors were worse at diagnosing stuff back then, right? And secondly, without treatment, a decent number of people survive tuberculosis. I'm not saying, don't get your tuberculosis treated. But I did find a 2023 article in the Journal of Tuberculosis and lung disease, which notes that about 40% of TB patients in 20,

2021 weren't diagnosed or treated, and that 10-year survival rates without any kind of medical treatment are about 40%, right? Which is less. People who don't seek medical care are a lot less likely to survive tuberculosis. Please, if you get TB, seek treatment. But it's not crazy that two dudes might have gotten sick and just gotten over it more or less intact, because that happens sometimes, right? That's just, you know, the human body be doing shit.

Yeah. People don't respond the same way to. every disease. Yeah, we're a powerful little machine that wants to live. Right. Yeah, yeah. Sometimes your body just pulls through. And cool people did cool stuff. Listeners are very familiar with front of the pod tuberculosis because almost every episode it comes in and either kills our villain or kills our hero. That's what life is like before modern medicine. And we're going right back to that period of time. Don't you worry. You give you give RFK another year or two. Yeah, exactly. I'm really rather not. I'm excited for the white handkerchiefs that people cough a little bit of blood into now to be made out of plastic.

I'm already stopped buying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Gone are the days of the cotton hanky. No, no, it's got to be plastic for me, baby. So cold water immersion does, because this is something people are advocating today, it does, again, have observable and measurable physical physical effects. Some studies have suggested can help treat chronic immune inflammation and have a beneficial impact on stress. However, number one, there's negative health consequences. It can raise your heart rate to a degree that can cause cardiac events in people.

There are like health nuts who have died doing cold plunges because it shocks their heart. Also, per an article in the International Journal of Circumpolar health, quote, many of the health benefits claimed from regular cold water exposure may not be causal and may instead be explained by other factors. In other words, most of the studies that suggested a benefit are flawed in some way. There's not, I'm not saying there's no bit, there are maybe some benefits, and especially because of the way it affects your heart in circulation, people with certain conditions might benefit from cold water plunges. But the science today is far from certain on this, and it's surely not curing tuberculosis, right?

No. But they have a lot less data back then, so it is more forgivable. I don't think Knife is a con man. I think he truly believes this saved his life, and he's doing his best to help other people, right? And I think the same is going to be true of the future doctor, not a doctor, lust. because he falls in love with this stuff when he goes to Knipes Clinic, which is basically a spa. Knipes doing these cold water exposure things. He's also giving people herbal medicine.

There's a lot of teas involved. And Dr. Lust falls in love with this. This is his first hit of what we today called alternative medicine. This is the very first gaspings of that. And Lust is immediately like, oh, this is my whole life. Right here, baby. I'm going to make this everything to me. Well, and it also makes sense because at that time, it was like that or chimney sweep, right?

What else are you going to do with you? your time. I mean, Jesus Christ. I don't even have television really going yet. Exactly. If I'm just sitting on a nice place that has some nice teas and things like that, it's like I'm going to maybe feel better than when I'm doing a 20-hour shift in the factory. Now, me, I would live at the pharmacy. I would be buying that heroin cough syrup every day of the week. Oh, man, if only, if only. So, lust moves to the United States near the end of the 1800s. And by that period of time, before we're really into the 1900s even, the U.S., particularly

New York, has become kind of this globally recognized mecca for nonsense medicine. Like, we Americans, we're on the ground floor of selling bullshit to people and claiming it cures disease. From 1896 to 1901, lust, because as soon as he moves there and he starts training in a couple of different, like, quasi-medical fields. One of the first. One of the first. One of the first, you know, which, so he trains as an osteopath, an osteopathy. An osteopathy is a difficult case to talk about. We're not going to be giving it enough attention. Today, if you run into someone who is an osteopath, they're probably a real doctor, right? Probably. It is largely a real type of medicine today, but it was founded decades ago by an untrained amateur who felt that all diseased was caused by

misplaced or deranged bones. To quote from Quackwatch. Quackwatch writes, quote, and most diseases were curable by manipulation of deranged, displaced bones, nerves, muscles, removing all obstructions, thereby setting the machinery of life moving. His autobiography, the founder of osteopathy, states that he caused a bald-headed man to grow hair three inches long in one week and that he could shake a child and stop scarlet fever, croup, diphtheria, and cure whooping cough in three days by a ring of its neck.

He was antagonistic towards the drug practices of his day and regarded surgery as a last resort. Rejected as a cultist by organized medicine, he founded the first osteopathic medical school in Kirksville, Missouri in 1892. This will not be the last time Missouri shows up in these episodes. Something tells me that's extremely true. Wow. Your baby's got whooping cough. Let me wring their neck. That'll fix them.

Absolutely. The James Bond of doctors. It's crazy how many people who call them stuff. doctors still think like, oh, your kid's coughing too much. I got to basically break their spine. You got to let me get my hands around that fucking neck and just really throttle it like a son of a bitch. Like, that's still a lot of guys who say that they're doctors today. They paralyse kids all the time. Abuse the child until they say they're okay. Yeah. So now that said, as wild as that last paragraph was, from this point, osteopathy develops after this and to again what is today

a largely real field of medicine. There are still some quacks who call themselves osteopaths. But over time, the good osteopaths who cared about evidence-based care won out over the bad ones, I think. That's how the articles I've read make it seem. I'm not a doctor except for in New Jersey, right? But Dr. Lust is studying osteopathy when it is still firmly in its quack era. He also studies chiropractic medicine and takes classes on that. And if you remember our episodes on the history of chiropractic, it was founded by a guy. who learned the secrets of spinal manipulation from a ghost. That is where chiropractic medicine comes from.

Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. Amazing stuff happening in the late 1800s and early 1900s. So, yeah, lust gets into chiropractic, and he starts exploring botanical medicines, you know, what people would call like plant-based medicines. And it gets interested in the emergent field of what it comes known as physical culture. Bernard McFadden, who we've done episodes on,

is a major factor in this. He and Lust are kind of contemporaries, and they're writing about health and about a lot of the shit RFK is in. It's like, how can you stay looking buff longer if you're a dude, you know? Like, how can you get big biceps? Like, what kind of chemicals

will make it easier for me to keep muscle on? I feel like you're trying to convince me that RFK Jr. might actually be a time traveler from this era. That's the only way he actually makes sense, right? His ideology is firmly rooted in the, like, early, first 20 years of the 20th century.

Now, Lust is one of those guys who binges on fringe medical treatments. He's not discriminating. He likes it all. He's taken sunbaths. You know, the modern equivalent would be, modern equivalent would be those guys who, like, expose their assholes to direct sunlights for health reasons. He's exploring electrophotherapy. He's, like, shocking himself to make himself feel better.

He's, and crucially, what kind of makes Lust a trailblazer is he's putting all of these different quack treatments together. And he's mixing them with, like, cold water therapy. an herbalism, and he's looking at it all as one connected field, not a bunch of separate things, right? And that's a new idea. Previously, most of these old-timey medical grifters aren't seeing themselves as part of, like, a large movement that includes a bunch of different kinds of treatment.

They're like, no, the secret is electroph therapy. The secret is what a therapy. The secret is they've got their thing, and that's the thing that they're trying to sell. And Lust is like, no, no, this works a lot better if everybody's connected. And we're all part of like a united front pushing all these fringe treatments that the real doctors don't want you to have access to, right? He's unionizing the quacks. He's kind of unionizing the quacks. Yeah, that's basically Dr. Lust's story.

In 1901, Dr. Lust starts collaborating with a group of fellow travelers to set out the underlying theory behind their new discipline, which doesn't have a name yet. But they're firmly in opposition to what they call the druggists, right? Today, the term that like these folks uses olopaths to refer to like real doctors, what we call real doctors, but they're calling them basically drugists, right? And the critique they're making, which is to a degree valid in the time, is that real doctors just want to dope you the fuck up. And a lot of real doctors are just doping you the fuck up. That's not an unfair critique of the day.

That doesn't make what they're selling work any better, but it is sometimes less harmful, right? Sometimes if your doctors prescribing you like fucking arsenic and your fake doctors prescribing you fucking homeopathic arsenic, which is just water, you're better off with the homeopathic arsenic, you know? 100%. So the central tenet that Dr. Lust and his colleagues land on is this. The body can repair itself. And that rather than treating sickness, physicians should seek to restore balance to the body

so that it can cure its own illnesses, right? And it can avoid getting sick because if the body stays in balance, then it won't get ill. The website Indy Health Facts has a good summary of what Lust eventually comes to believe and push to make the center of naturopathy as a discipline. Dr. Lust was opposed to the processing of foods because such manufacture tends to destroy their true nutritional values. He was opposed to the administrations of all drugs and narcotics because they are unnatural elements which the human body is not capable of assimilating. He's opposed to the regimentation of the American people under medically controlled elements because such legislation will wipe out other

methods of treatment and bring inestimable damage to the health of every man, woman, and child affected. He's opposed to any legislation which in practice would prevent a family from attending to its own ills or the choosing by such family of any type of treatment it might desire because such legislation restricts personal liberty and tends to take from the American people the right to use the beneficial homespun efficient remedies which have been handed down from generation to generation. He is, it's just RFK.

It's just RFK, right? I don't think you should be able to tell people that anything they believe in. his medicine isn't medicine. That's a crime. That's the only crime. Not selling nonsense is medicine. Now, the name naturopathy is actually coined by a married physician couple, the doctors John and Sophie Sheel, who are kind of colleagues and contemporaries of Dr. Lust. They come up with the name in 1902, and Lust buys it from them. He purchases the naming rights, because as soon as he hears naturopathy, he's like, I can't beat that. That's the best marketing name for this thing that we're doing. Like, that's going to work really, and it is a good name. It's a really good name.

I don't know why, but like 1902 seems really early for buying naming rights. Yeah. No, this man is committed. He's convinced. And honestly, it works. Like, he is a visionary when it comes to this shit. Celeste opens a school for naturopaths. And he opens what's probably the first health food store in the world.

I think it's in New York. But yeah, he opens like a health food store in like 190. Right? Like in the fucking start of the century. So that stuff goes back quite a while. God, I don't even want to think about how bad this guy's deodorant was. Oh, my God. Just a solid crystal.

Just a solid crystal. No, it's literally emeralds. He's just rubbing it in there. It doesn't do anything. As naturopathy evolves, it becomes clear that its practitioners all share one curious trait, a distrust or even a hatred of medical drugs, in an often heedless embrace of every conceivable non-drug therapy, often to absurd ends.

Now, again, and the way Lest frames this is like, people have a right to use the homespun treatments that their ancestors have been using for generations. That's not what's primarily being marketed by the naturopath. They're into a lot of expensive and sane quack treatments. Take aeropathy. Aeropathy is a treatment that starts from the premise that, and this is true, heat can reduce pain, right?

We've all probably experienced this in some way. It's a pretty common thing to, like, you know, deal with, like, inflammation, joint pain. and all that sort of stuff. People have known this basically forever. If you've ever heard of like an old-timey treatment, the mustard plaster, where they'll put like this plaster of mustard on your naked chest, it's because that like burns and the heat offers like a relief from some kind of like chest cold symptoms and stuff.

And I think it, I've never had it performed on me, but I'm sure it does like feel like it helps at least. Aeropathy takes this concept up to 11 and incorporates what was literally called the name of the device use for aeropathy is a human bake oven as a treatment. They're literally putting people into actual ovens and at like oven temperatures. I need to show you, Sophie's going to put on screen if you're watching this, a 1912 ad published in the Calgary Herald, and I'll read the ad to you. It's got a picture in the center of what looks like a fucking iron lung, but it's an oven that everything but the person's head goes inside. And it says, rheumatism positively cured by the human bake oven. Can you take 500 degrees Fahrenheit?

Try it. 500. That's crazy. You shouldn't take 500. No, absolutely not. I was like, okay, okay, okay. 500. You're burning your face off.

That's well in excess of what I've read most of these treatments where usually people seem to be slow cooked from anywhere from like 280 degrees Fahrenheit, which seems to have been like the most common, 280 to 300 degrees is like a normal temperature. and for most people doing this, the high temperature is up to like 400 degrees. But obviously, as that ad shows, some people are going way further than that. And it's not always the whole body ovens, some smaller contraptions were used to get a single part of the body, like this easy leg bake oven. Sophie's going to show you, which just, I mean, it almost looks like one of those cuffs

you put your arm in, and it's on a, but I can see how you just kind of jam your leg in there and it just like bakes the shit out of it. Yeah, turn my knee into a brownie. Let's go. Wow. What a choice. This must have hurt and killed people. I haven't run into stories of that.

You shouldn't be baked. Like, there definitely are people getting burns, because, again, you shouldn't be baked. Every doctor, I think, will tell you that now, is that, like, 500 degrees is too much for any part of your body. You cook meat. I don't even know that my oven actually goes up to 500 degrees. You probably shouldn't be cooking meat at 500 degrees. That's crazy. Broil your baby's cough out of their chest.

They go above like 400. No, seriously. That's crazy. Like, I like a hot sauna. I like a sauna. That is a whole different ballgame from this. This is crazy. That's another fucking level of bat shit.

Now, naturopaths were also known to advocate astral healing and zodiac therapy, which is basically giving someone tea based on their horoscope. And there were a bunch of weirder treatments that Quackwatch collected for an article on this, like, quote, blood washing with herbs. auto therapy, which is, quote, treatment with potions made from the patient's infected tissues or excretions, and autohemic therapy, which involves a solution made by modifying and potentizing a few drops of the patient's blood. Great stuff. Wow. Man, honestly, but seriously, shout out to him for being able to sell somebody's shit back to themselves. Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

A hell of a salesman. Your own blood, selling your own blood, man, you made that, bro. that's crazy. Yeah. Wow. Now, to be totally fair to Dr. Lust and his colleagues, it's like 120-something years ago. Again, real doctors aren't always a lot better than the quacks. And the naturopath, you know, they have some points in this era. But what's happening is you're going to start not long after this period seeing the development of like real medical science.

Like people, medicine from 1900 to like 1960, probably. gets better faster than it has it like any other point in history. Like you'd be hard pressed. I mean, maybe the like 60 years after that, but even then I don't think we had jumps quite as big as that leap from in 1900, a lot of people are still basically living the same with similar medical access to what they would have had in like the 1600s, right? A lot of parts of the world. There's not massive differences from how shit would have been in like the Enlightenment era

in terms of the average person's access to good medicine to by 1950 to 60. even people out in the sticks have a much better access to real quality medicine and to doctors who actually know something meaningful about how disease spreads. And you have the ability to actually prevent a lot of these diseases for the first time. And that's going to be disastrous for this first wave of naturopaths, right? Is that especially from like 40 to 60, it becomes really impossible to deny that like, okay, well, the people who use the naturopath are still getting sick and dying from all of like the weird plagues going around.

And the people who are getting vaccinated, don't. are living. Well, it's also funny, we've got World War II happening during this time period two, right? And the idea of being like, here's like a tea for your leg that got blown off. Is not... Your homeopathic medic?

Yeah. Oh, good. Okay, what about this? Echinacea. Is that good? It's been reduced by a thousand gallons of water. Oh, no, you're dead. You bled out. You bled right out, huh?

That was a femoral hit. Did either of you see that Skid-S&L did in the last month or so that was like making that was like a combination of making fun of the maha movement but also like the pit it's literally this no it's literally this modern times you would love it you would love it it's great also harry styles isn't it hell yeah great good good for harry styles so you know and it's also important note that one of the key differences one of the reasons that like osteopathy becomes more of a real becomes a real discipline and the reason that medicine you know in 1900 and 1920 maybe a lot of

doctors aren't really much better than the naturopaths, that changes too. Because the real doctors, even if they start from position of believing a lot of bullshit, are doing what you ought to do, which is you document, okay, we prescribed this treatment to this many people. And, oh, actually, it turns out that after a year or two, there was no difference between them and the people who didn't get a treatment. Or between them and the people who got this other treatment that's cheaper, or, you know, whatever, you prune away. You find out, oh, some stuff we can see isn't working. So, we're not going to do that anymore. And some stuff, the consequences of giving people these medicines, even if they work immediately,

is worse than, you know, giving them this alternative, so we're going to do that. And the field gets better, and we get a lot better at medicine over time. Naturopathy's problem, and the reason why it doesn't really go down this same road, is that it was fundamentally created and always run primarily by a bunch of weird little guys and girls, who each had their own specific kind of alternative or quack. therapy, like water therapy or blood washing, and they were primarily getting into the naturopathy, not because they saw themselves as, they're mostly not like lust. They don't see themselves as scientists who are part of a movement. They've got a thing to sell. And if that's the

attitude you approach your discipline from, that's not conducive to good science. Yeah, you're coming at a, yeah, scientific method versus the vibe. Right. Is what we're talking about. And versus I'm already, if this doesn't treat this disease, I'm out a shitlet of money. Like I'm ruined. Like this, I have to be able to sell this. Even if I realize it doesn't work after a while, because I'm pot committed to this shit. Speaking of pot committed, you know who's pot committed to this podcast?

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If I'm outside with my parents And they're seeing all these people come up to me For pictures, it's like, what? Today now, obviously, it's like 100% They believe everything. But at first, it was just like, you gotta go get a real job.

There's an economic component to communities thriving. If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail. And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food. They cannot feed their kids. They do not have homes. Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them. Listen to Eating While Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And we're back.

We're back and we're talking about naturopaths. So the AMA guys in Dr. Lust's day have a lot of teeth, and they do not take kindly to a bunch of weird-ass hippie types taking patients and claiming to treat disease. The AMA declares war on Dr. Lust, and they managed to score some real hits. Per an article in the Journal of Applied Natural Medicine, Lust was arrested 14 times and fined what's $500 because a dirty woman's sleuth of the Medical Trust, the American Medical Association, with an unspeakable name, took an electric light bath in his institution. Now, that's from a naturopathic publication, quoting a naturopath. I wanted to know more about this story, this dirty woman sleuth of the medical trust. They're probably the medical trust because trust busting is popular in this era, right? This is the Teddy Roosevelt era, when some of this is going or when a lot of these people's political awakening is.

So, you know, that's why they're framing it that way. But I looked into this, and it turns out that in 1921, Dr. Lust was arrested for committing criminal libel against Francis bin Zeriki or bin Zekri. That's the unspeakably named woman who worked as a detective for the AMA. Lust wrote that she was a disgrace to American womanhood and to the free soil of America on which she treads. I want to hear her story. Yeah.

How do you become a medical detective? Wow. Well, because she's, they've got her trying to bust, trying to prove that Lust and his followers are representing themselves as doctors, right, are illegally claiming to be treating diseases in a way. that exceeds what they're what they're free to do, right? Obviously, freedom of speech and shit, you have some room, we have a lot more room today, even, to sell like quack treatments, but you can't say certain things.

Just to say, on your fake medicine. Just to say that quote, a disgrace to American womanhood into the free soil of America on which she treads, hot, love it. Yeah. Great tattoo. Great t-shirt. Every woman I've ever loved. Yeah, I want to see a film noir movie about this woman.

Just like in her office smoking a cigarette and just like somebody comes in with a bag of their own blood and was like, I need help, detective, let's go. Yeah. So these guys are all getting arrested a shitload for practicing medicine without a license, which is actually why Dr. Lust buys the rights to the word naturopathy. So his people will have something else they can call themselves that's decidedly not a doctor and thus much more defensible. And that actually works really well. Do they have a seal the way that like doctors have a seal? I'm sure they do. In the middle of just like a logo.

Yeah, they've got a logo. They've got a paperwork that they're issuing because he's handing out licenses for naturopathic doctors, right? And once they start branding themselves that way, judges tend to agree, even when they're still sentencing him. He was told by one judge, there's no evidence that you practice medicine or held yourself out as a physician, but we find you just the same. And the naturopassable point is like, look at the injustice of the system. see this as a judge being like, yeah, man, you technically figured out how not to say the words that would have definitely been illegal, but you were for sure representing yourself as a doctor in selling medicine, and I'm just going to find you anyway, because I know you're guilty,

because you are, because you were doctor lust, by the way. No matter how much flack the AMA through his way, naturopathy kept struggling forwards. From the 20s to the 30s, roughly half of U.S. states passed laws that allowed naturopaths and other drugless healers to practice, per quack watch. However, as modern medicine developed, many of these laws were repealed in all but a few mail-order schools ceased operations. The doctor of naturopathy, the N.D. degree was still available at several chiropractic colleges, but by 1957, the last of these colleges stopped issuing it. The National College of Naturopathic Medicine was founded in 1956 in Portland, Oregon, but until the mid-1970s had very few students. From 1960 through 1968, the average enrollment was eight, and the total number of graduates was 16. So again, there's a gap of like a generation from between.

between the first and second wave of naturopaths. It makes, by the way, Portland, Oregon, where naturopathy, like, its second wave started, the seeds of its rebirth, just had an outbreak of measles traced to a safe way. And it's not because people can't afford vaccines. That's not. If you look at where the fucking viral outbreaks of cured diseases occur in Portland, it tends to be more affluent neighborhoods who are choosing not to take vaccinations. You can always get an organ to come up

if it's like a weird medical thing Some obscure very tiny cult Borgian medicine stuff Weird cold Yeah Ancient white supremacy Modern white supremacy I love my adopted home

Organs like hey hey how you doing Hey hey hey We're keeping it weird man Hey you're crazy aren't you Welcome to Portland Yeah but our weather rocks It is nice great weather We hate the sun

Yeah. The weather today is so good, you guys. It's awesome. It's like 65 degrees and sunny. It's great. It's perfect. I'm wearing a t-shirt. Summer, fire season this year is going to be a nightmare, though.

Yeah. Anyway, that's an important point. If you're talking about naturopathy today, there are some differences because there's like a break of a generation in between two fields. I think a lot of the same problems are still present, an issue of, you know, at least with this first wave, the very first naturopaths like Dr. Lust, I think. really believed in what they were doing. A big part of the problem is a huge amount of like the second wave are just people who

realize, oh, this movement connects me to a huge base of people I can sell nonsense to. And that's what they, and that's definitely a lot of the founders too. It's, it's, I, maybe I'm wrong about lust being in this genuinely. Like, I honestly can't tell with him, but it seems like he's somebody who like really does think this all works. And that's not going to be the case with our actual suburb. of this week, Robert Spears. Yeah.

Who, again, is the guy we're talking about this week. Yeah, or at the very least, like, less believed it at the very, for some period of time, it clearly, he clearly was a believer and who knows what happened later. But, you know, I mean, you're not going to go through all of this trouble necessarily if you don't have true belief behind that for some point. Right, right. That's, that tends to be how I think about it, too. And, yeah, so Robert Vernon Spears, the guy we're actually talking about, was born on June 26.

1894 in Cassville, Missouri. See? I said we get back to Missouri, and we sure as hell did. It's actually going to show up a few more times in these episodes. He was not, however, born under the name Robert Vernon Spears. This is one of our classic con man stories where this guy has like 30 or so serious names, by which I mean a name that he had, like, he took real efforts to falsify as his own. He's got documents for these names.

He's got dozens of them. This guy goes through so many fucking names. He was probably born Clyde Stringer or Clyde Porter. But even that, I have to put a probably on because Clyde slash Robert's mother is a woman we just know of as Matilda. And she writes her kid's name. She gives him a different name on different government documents because she's also a con woman. And so from the beginning, she's like setting her son up for success being like, I'm going to make sure nobody ever knows what your name is, boy. Like this will really benefit you down the line.

There's not a clean paper trail for your life. That's not going to be SEO for 150 years. Yeah, yeah. Trust me, being able to become a new person by skipping counties is going to be much more beneficial than name recognition in the life you're going to lead, my son. Well, and it's fine. I will say if this kid was born a Clyde, I have a little bit of respect from out of the game.

Oh, born Clyde. Clyde. Clyde to the bone. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love to hear. I'm excited to hear about a Clyde who identifies as a Robert. That's great. Yeah, well, he comes to later. Alan Logan, author of the Spears biography, self-styled, just notes that Matilda, his mom was, quote, a woman who also used many names and changed her own identity as circumstances dictated. She claimed her child was the son of a farmer named George Stringer from northeast Oklahoma, which is where George was born and where he was raised for the first three years of his life. They got married when he was three after moving to Missouri. So they raise him for the first few years of his life in Oklahoma.

Then they move up to Missouri. And his mom uses the surname Smith on her marriage certificate to George. But she had been using the name Jenkins most of the time prior to that. So even her husband knows she's given two different options as to her maiden name. And her headstone would give yet another last name. This was a slippery woman, and she would pass those traits on to her son. Her marriage to George did not last long. After a year, she was caught having an affair with some other dude, and so she takes Clyde in the night and abandons George, who files for divorce.

This is also going to leave a mark on Clyde. He's going to not have the best record of sticking around for marriages, as we'll talk about. And he kind of inherits that from his mom. Yeah. I love this woman as, like, the Moriarty to the... She's amazing. The medical detective lady. I would really like to see their paths crossed.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, these two characters were born for each other. Yeah. So after leaving her husband behind, Matilda would tell her son that George had, quote, died of pneumonia. But Alan Logan writes, it is not entirely clear who she was telling Clyde had died of pneumonia because we don't actually know who Clyde thought his father was, right? Like, we just have some old paperwork. So it's not entirely clear who Clyde's dad was or who she told him it was.

Matilda moved through men at a rapid pace. Right. Hell yeah, Matilda. I mean, don't, you know, you got a little kids, so I got questions. It's not great for Clyde. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. She's living it up, though. She's living it up.

A lot of men are having the male version of this life, which is much more common. So you have to stand a woman who's willing to, like, break free from tradition and really, like, really just be like a very, very masculine kind of scumbag. And honestly, I appreciate that, you know? It's nice to see. The glass gutter is just as important as the glass ceiling, I think. The glass gutter matters just as much as the glass ceiling. Women have the right to be scumbags, too.

Matilda, we salute you. You know who else is a scumbag? Nope. That's not good. I like the roof over my head. Sure. Well, anyway, here's ads. Okay.

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Listen to eating while broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get. your podcast. And we're back. And we're talking about whether or not our advertisers are scumbags. Sophie says no. I say, I don't know.

Who is right? Probably Sophie. Legally, I think I have to say that. You do. So in 1890, Matilda, who was just going through this carousel of men in cities with her young son. In 1890, she married an elderly farmer.

I understand, Matilda. She's pretty cool. Not a great mom. mom doesn't do a good job raising this kid but pretty cool to read about her thought min trotten and i appreciate that she marries a civil war veteran with lifelong injuries and a drinking problem to match and he's got uh like a a kid that she winds up uh well she winds up having a kid i don't think it's his i think she cheats on him and she has a kid with somebody else and he gets pissed so he bounces in 1902 and now she's a single mother of two as a result Clyde

experiences deep poverty for basically his entire childhood. His mom is only able to keep them fed and sheltered by moving constantly from town to town and conning strangers to stay alive. I want to read a quote from the book Self-styled. As they moved from place to place, he saw Matilda retelling their story and remaking her identity. She used different names when it suited her. Clyde may have absorbed more from his mother than she realized, including the seeds of his own restless wanderlust and the ease of taking on aliases. This is just he was like made in a lab to be a con man, basically. Matilda eventually marries again,

and the family settles in prior Oklahoma, merging the families of two single parents who now had six kids between them. This marriage doesn't work out either. And when things get bad enough that Clyde doesn't want to be there anymore, he realizes, kind of by his adolescence, I can just leave. Like, there's a train station in town,

and he figures out when he's like 12 or 13, I just bounce on a train and go away for a couple of days or a couple of weeks, like, if I don't want to be around here. And I can just visit new, places and then I can come back whenever I'm ready, they'll take me back. And he loves the freedom of the road. And he starts in order to fund these trips. He doesn't want to work. So he starts committing petty crimes while he's a way to pay his way, you know? I know a lot of friends who have gone through versions of this period in their life. Oh, yeah. We've all got a couple of crusties

in our past, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, this behavior ultimately gets him in trouble when he's like a teenager and he gets sent away to a reformatory school for some time. However long, he's at this reform school by age 16, he is out because he gets in trouble for passing bad checks and then using the ill-gotten money to buy nice clothes and stay in hotels. And he's like paying in check for hotel stays and for clothes for more than they're worth so he can get cash back, basically. That's a big part of the scam. It's a lot easier to do this stuff, although he still gets caught every single time, right?

that said, this is a time in which the authorities are a lot likelier to look the other way at formal charges if people can work things out themselves. Basically, if you get caught, a cop is likely to just kind of like drop things, as long as you're both white people, right? If like two white dudes are willing to agree, okay, he made it right, we don't need to go any further. Usually they'll just be like fine with it, right? That's a lot more common in this era. So he's like a raptor testing the fence too. So he's just like, okay, where can you? What is the move here?

Yeah. What can I get away with? And part of what he learns is he's really charming. Clyde is deeply charismatic. And so people are kind of like often willing to forgive him. Because as soon as he gets caught every time he'll say, oh, yep, I did it. This is what I did. And he'll like apologize.

And as a result, I think that in his youth kind of keeps him from catching serious charges until he turns 18. So Clyde, one of the things about Clyde is he fucking loves trains. very relatable, right? Unfortunately, he loves trains because of the crime potential inherent in those trains. And he's been observing employees at the local railroad company, MKT, cash checks. And he also, one of his friends, I think, works for MKT and his dad, his friend's dad had worked there for a while. And so he, like, talks to that guy and plies him for information about how the checking, check writing process works for MKT employees at the MKT bank. And then he forges the name of his friend in a check. payable to himself. And I'm going to quote from Alan Logan's book here. His real audacity wasn't taking that forged check to his friend's father, the MKT Railroad agent who cashed it for him. The check was only for $9, $233 today, but the thrill of it was priceless. The MKT Railroad was enraged by the outrageous stunt. They deployed Special Agent Porum

to give Chase, as Spears made his first known headlines, described as the gilded youth. Clyde Stringer from prior Oklahoma. When they finally caught up with him in June 1913, the newspapers reported how special agent Porham had traced him from Kansas City to Oklahoma City and across the state east and west. He was finally found at Murdoch, Kansas, hunting for work in a harvest field. First off, that's a long way to chase a guy for $9. It really says a lot about how little there was to do back then. Like, you are going to the ins of the earth for nine bucks. It's the principal, I'm sure, is what that guy would say.

It's giving comic book, The Gilded Youth. Yeah, the Gilded Youth. Yeah, no, he does have a comic bookie style nickname. Very Catch Me If You Can of him, too. It feels, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm picturing Leo Dio, like, this is like a Leo-Dio type guy. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, although, again, Frank Abagnale, the real guy behind Catch Me If You Can, was an absolute fraud.

Like, the stuff in the movie didn't happen. It was mostly just creeping on ladies. Well, you know, movies is the biggest con of all, so. That's right. That's right. It's the final level of cons. So Clyde does more than a year. behind bars, he's sentenced to prison, and he's not released until August 31st, 1914.

And as soon as he's free, he establishes a pattern of behavior that's going to be with him for the next half century. He'd kind of consider going straight, maybe briefly toy with the idea, and then he would immediately commit a series of daring frauds in assorted small towns of cities across Oklahoma and the middle states. And he's just going to like commit a bunch of fraud and then fucking get arrested periodically in a pattern. And this becomes like the normal, like, tempo of life for him for the next several years, right? Is he'll commit a bunch of petty fraud, mostly passing bad checks and stealing merchandise from, like, different retailers he worked with over the years. Then he'll get caught and he'll get in some trouble. He'll either talk his way out or he'll do a little time and then he's back on the road. I imagine he also has like a bunch of babies and baby mamas all over the country during this too.

Well, he does, he has some. He does have a couple of kids that he abandons, like, I think like three over the course of the story. He also has a lot of wives that he abandons, as we'll talk about. So within three years, by 1917, he's a wanted man again. So when he moved to Collingsworth, Oklahoma, he changed his last name from Stringer to Porter and figured, that'll be good enough.

Nobody's got to guess that Clyde Stringer's Clyde Porter. That's not going to, that's impossible for people to suss out. And then he passes another series of bad checks. and he has to steal a car to flee town. Clyde drove the car to a train station and left it parked outside with a note being like, here's who this car belongs to, I'm sorry I had to take it. You know, this is where you should return it to, you know? So the cops ultimately raid Clyde's home, and they find a bunch of stolen property and a huge number of forged checks. These were of such high quality that businesses started posting copies of Clyde's bad checks to warn their employees

about what to look for when trying to spot bad checks, right? That like, these are the archetypes, bad checks, so you should familiarize yourself with them. Wow. Okay. He goes on the run for a few more months, but as is always the case, he can't avoid the temptation to visit his family and friends, and he gets caught in Toledo operating under yet another fake name, and he's visiting a sister, and that fake name is Charles Howard.

He shows up in court dressed per the Tulsa Daily World to the nines in a dark suit, white turned-down collar, and multicolored silk tie. It was his second attempt to win a reputation in the bad. check line. So they're always kind of, he's handsome and he's well-dressed, and the newspaper is always right about that. And it starts to, there's this big, it's going to be even bigger in the 30s, this like gentleman bandit archetype that's huge in American pop culture. And because Clyde is handsome and he's mostly robbing banks and he's not doing it violently, a lot of people kind of like him. Like the news is interested in any Clyde crime story because he's this really likable criminal

figure people want to hear about. When does Bonnie and Clyde happen? Because that's a different Clyde that Rob begs. That's going to be in the 30s. Totally different Clyde. This Clyde's going by Robert by then. That's his point. You've got to get out of the Clyde business by the time there's that other Clyde.

Yeah, exactly. He's just like a hack. I think there's a strategy here. I think he knew he was going to get caught when he stole that car to get away. And I think the note he leaves is part of his image campaign, basically. That like if I leave a note in there, telling them how to return it to its owner, that'll go better for me when I ultimately wind up in front of a judge. And it does work for him. He winds up in front of a judge. In his biography of

Clyde, Alan Logan notes that most of Clyde's victims in this period didn't press charges. And many who did still described him as basically a good guy. Like they were like, well, I think he's a really good guy. He just fucked up here and I'm still pressing charges. In keeping with tradition, these recent charges are ultimately dropped, which Logan claimed. was due to a technicality. I'm not sure if that's accurate. Vanishing Act, which is another book about Robert Spears slash Clyde. The author of that, Jerry Jameson, suggests something different.

Quote, the judge let Charles Howard off easy, citing the thoughtful note he had left in the stolen car. This time, however, he suggested the young man joined other American patriots fighting in Europe during the Great War. So basically, Clyde gets off, but on the condition that he joined the army and go fight in World War I, right? That's kind of what happens here. He's like, you're a good young man. What if you just go into the trenches for a little while?

How does that sound to you? Let's see how your stationary gets you out of this one, buddy. Yeah, yeah. I think he's trying to be nice. Not traditionally a nice thing to do. Make someone go to World War I. But Clyde does join. He signs up.

He joins the Army. And he uses a fake name to join the Army. And this name he picks, I think because he's like, this gives me a chance to establish the name I'm going to be known by for the rest of my life. So when he's joining the army, he goes by the name Robert Vernon Spears, which is absolutely a fake name. But that's most of his life he's going to keep going by Robert Vernon Spears. As soon as he signed up, just a few days before he reported for duty, Spears befriended another recruit, C.S. Gilbert. And the two went partying before handing their lives over to the army.

True to form, Spears told his new friend, hey, this is crazy, but I'm like broke right now. Is there any chance you can, like, front me some money so we can, like, party? I'll totally get you back. And Gilbert's like, of course, man, we're. going to be fighting in the trenches together, I got like two grand in my pocket. I'll take care of us. And the two spend like two days partying and drinking and going to strip clubs. And at the end of it, when they're like sleeping in their hotel at night, Robert Spears steals his friend's cash and runs like fuck, just as far as he can get before the cops catch him, which they do immediately. Spears confesses

and he hands over the money, but Gilbert refuses to press charges. And in fact, he begs the cops to release his friend saying, I guess I like that. guy and besides i'll be serving in the trenches with him it's like if you got went to prison you wouldn't but gilbert seems to be a very nice dude yeah oh poor gilbert you need to go you need a coda meeting buddy you deserve a better friend man this guy is not your friend um there's like a local news story at the time with the title lad freeze the one who robbed him very cute very fucking in 1917. I don't know much about what Spears actually did with his time in World War I, because

he mostly lies about it later, right? We get very little detail about what his actual service is. It looks like he probably spent the last year of the war as an aviator sergeant in the 314th Arrow Squadron, which was attached to the precursor of the British RAF. There's no evidence that he was a fighter pilot, but he pretends to have been a fighter pilot as soon as he gets back. If you're going to be a con man, what better job. than fighter pilot, right?

You're not going to lie and say you fought in the trenches like a schlub. You want to be a pilot, baby. That's the sexy job, man. Uh-huh. They got the aviators. Ain't nobody else got the sunglasses, yeah. It's a mark of how fucking bullshit our era is that, like, even if you get trapped in one of like these cool, like one of our modern 21st century wars, like the cool new technology

is so lame to be the guy working with. Like if in 1917, you're like, yeah, I'm a fighter pilot. Europe that's like cool as hell in like 2026 if you're like yeah I'm a drone pilot's like get away from me bro that's gross like you play video games and kill people get out of here I don't want you to be in the same room as me that's sick yeah like not even cool enough to be a fighter it's it's it's it's a bummer um I guess there's that Kuwaiti fighter pilot who took out two of our F-15s on accident that guy's sitting pretty is the only guy with an air-to-air kill in a long time we do not do much of that anymore.

Oh. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. So by this point in time, Spears, he goes over, he probably has pretty pedestrian service, and he comes back lying that he'd served as a first lieutenant, and he'd survived all these harrowing duels in the skies above Western Europe until he was finally shot down and wounded.

He returns to St. Louis after the war, and he starts telling the story to any woman who will listen, right? Like, that's, of course. I bet he had a fake cane for a while and stuff, too. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. You got a doctor house that shit.

It works great. Almost as good as an eye patch. I can only imagine this man's like dating profile. Oh, it's a nightmare. Oh, my God. Not a word of it true. He's definitely got his fake credit score on there. Oh, yeah.

Not real. Oh, my gosh. He's got some like Photoshop photos of him. Oh, it's incredible. It's the best. Trust no man. Wow. Yeah, number one, Chad.

So he ultimately wins the attention in the hand in marriage of a woman named Ora Clayton. Run, girl. This is the start of what's going to be. No, don't worry, Sophie. She's not going to need to. This is going to be the start of a regular con act for Spears, which is he would entrance a young woman. He would ask for her hand in marriage. They would get married.

And then in the night, he would steal everything in her house that wasn't nailed down and run like fuck for a new town and start a whole new life. What a fucking loser. The group. What a palpable. He's just marrying ladies and robbing them. What a pump gas, bitch. He does that so many times. Like, I don't know how many times in total, but it's like more than you have fingers on at least one hand.

It might be like two or three hands worth of fake marriages. He does it a lot. And he's just moving from city or state. How far is he going? Just down to town. He's not always even leaving the county, Sophie. It was a different time. Fair enough.

Fair enough, buddy. You can live a whole new life. Prototypical fuck boy, here we are. It is so, it's fucked up, but it's pretty funny. So days after marrying and abandoning ORA, he asks Dorothy Hayes for her hand in marriage, and then he abandons her, takes all of her shit, and drives out west. He just keeps doing this. He spends the early 20s conning a series of victims, several of whom become his wives.

He does this in like Seattle. He moves down to Portland, Oregon, and then like through California, Nevada, Idaho and ultimately winds up in Denver, Colorado. Like, he is just leaving, he's leaving a trail of heartbroken women who are also broke because he took all their money wherever he goes. And then, he's the Tinder swindler. He's the Tinder swindler. He's the Tinder swindler.

But things, he kind of gets a reverse thrown at him when he, in Denver, he meets maybe his only real match, which is a young lady named Laura Marlowe. And she seems perfect for him. She's beautiful. She's got a rich family that he can fleece for all their worth. So they get hitched and they book an expensive vacation. And Spears is like heading upstairs to get their luggage from the hotel that they'd been staying in for the last couple of weeks.

And Laura flips the script on him. And by the time he comes downstairs with their luggage, she's stolen all of his money and run for the hills. This is an hour after they get married. Like he gets turned about it. Got your number. Ooh, man. Takes all his shit and bounces.

Laura Myers. Feminist icon. Yeah, Laura Myers, feminist icon. We love the Laura Myers. Wow. And that's the moment he actually fell in love. Yeah, yeah, that's the moment. The first time in his life.

Yeah. It is beautiful. You love to see, you know, the story in that way. Well, it middles that way. We haven't even gotten to him becoming a fucking naturopath yet. There's a lot more left of the Robert Spears story. But not today because we're at about an hour. So, yeah.

I think Brandy, you want to go out with any plugs here? Yeah. I have a new album. It's called Milk Job. I'm a stand-up comedian. It's out on my record label that I started called Burn This Records that is trying to bring more equity into the comedy space for DIY comedians all over the United States and world. A big thing that you could do to help our label out is if you went to YouTube.com slash Burn This Records and followed our label so I can monetize video. That would be a huge, huge. huge, huge help. I would really appreciate it. My album is going to be a special that comes out in April, so you'll be able to see it there as well, too. And then I'm on Vans Warped Tour all summer long doing comedy. So, yeah, come say hi. Awesome. Excellent. All right, everybody. Well, that's going to be all of it for all of us, for it today at Behind the Bastards, a podcast that you just listen to. Why not listen to another one? Why not on all of your different devices? Just constantly have episodes of this show playing on random loops. You don't even have to listen to it.

Just always be playing our episodes. You know, break into your friends' houses. Do that with their electronics too. You know, that's, it's a fun way to do us a solid that will have no consequences for anybody. Breaking and entering is fine if you do it for a good cause. That's the our official behind the bastard stance. No, it is not. Goodbye. Okay, well, we're done. Sophie and I disagree on this. Bye. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Coolzone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips in our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, YouTube.com slash at Behind the Bastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

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When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands. I vowed, I will be his last target. He is not going to get away with this. He's going to get what he deserves. We always say that, trust your girlfriends. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe, on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors, where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence.

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