Behind the Bastards - Part One: William Bailey: The Gwyneth Paltrow of Radiation

Episode Date: December 12, 2023

Robert sits down with Sofiya Alexandra to talk about Will Bailey, the fake doctor who made himself into the king of radioactive fake medicine and killed an unknown number of people in the doing. (2 Part Series)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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The assassination of President John F. Kennedy is the greatest murder mystery in American history. That's Rob Breiner. Rob called me, so would Edo Brein, and asked me what I knew about this crime. Well, ask who had the motive to assassinate a sitting president. Then we'll pull the curtain back on the cover-up. The American people need to know the truth.

Listen to Who Killed JFK on the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Calls-o media. ever you get your podcasts. Cool, so media. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where my headphones were not plugged in when I started talking. And now they are. We have a keen, eagle-like grip on the professional competence required to do our jobs.

Sophie and I and our guest. And so much funnier when the headphones that are not plugged in aren't like small, I bought it like, you know, at the end of the big black ones. That is so much funnier. I did a lot of opportunities to get this right. Sophia, Alexandra. Welcome back to the pod, Sophia. How have you been? How's it going? How's the world? Bad? The world is terrible. The world's bad. For noticing. Yeah. Thanks for having me on the pod. I am good. It's been a minute. It's

so nice to see y'all's faces. I've missed you. Yeah, I've missed you too. And obviously, Sophia, as you're aware, as I think most people are aware, as a podcast host, I maintain medical power of attorney over each of our guests. Now, this is probably standard, standard in the industry. My understanding is it's a holdover from English common law established in the 1600s by the very first podcasters. So the other day, you called me up and you said, Robert, should I dose myself with moderate quantities of radiation to gain unclear, unspecified health benefits?

And I sure did. And I was like, let me look into that. So, Sofia, let me look into that. So I did a quick Google, is it bad to irradiate yourself for health? And it turns out, yes, that's what we're talking about this week, is the radium grifters. The fact that you wrote that entire bot in your script.

I scripted the whole bit, Sophie. You scripted that entire thing, is so you of you. That's so funny. It makes me think of like you doing stand-up and literally writing out all of the parts where you're like, am I right? You guys. Yeah, your little like plug throws to the audience,

sure. No, I mean, what this is is I have a little, this is a free productivity hack for you writers out there. If you have a whole thing you have to write, like say 8,000 words about radium grifters and you're being a procrastinator, maybe just spend a paragraph or two writing out some bullshit jokes to your friends, you know?

And then just keep it in the script. Why not? Nobody has to read these but me. So, you know, it doesn't have to be tight. Well, that was cool, but I'm just excited that Sophia is here. I'm so excited that Sophia is here. And she has a new Patreon.

Let's start there. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's has a new Patreon. Let's start there. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's begin with the plugs. That's the right way to do this. Oh shit. Yeah. Come to patreon.com slash Sophia Alexandra. There's writing on there.

There's videos. There is just random shit. I'm into like Gailer and relationship and Erky and making clay pots and John Lee Hooker. I don't know. I'm a weird bitch. Come through. Well, check that out. And, you know, check out, check out Sophia, Alexandra's many other podcasts that she's done with us too. Some of our very best. And this is about to be this one, Sophia, going to be a classic, because we're getting back to our roots here. You know, we've been covering some dark shit

a lot on this show, and you know, we've really gone hard on the poor drifters. Oh really? That comes as a surprise to me. This is a fun one. This is a fun one. Guess that on more dead baby episodes than anyone. No dead babies.

Crazy that this is gonna be a dark one. We've got a lot of dead people, but not dead babies. Thank you for respecting me. But it's a fun mostly up until the second episode, mostly funny ways that people are horribly injuring themselves because it's good old, it's good old, tiny medical nonsense, right? It's people just poisoning their bodies with uranium because they think it'll, it'll help them deal with a cough. It's super funny if you can kind of dissociate yourself from the human cost. just poisoning their bodies with uranium because they think it'll help them deal with a cough.

It's super funny if you can kind of dissociate yourself from the human cost. Hey, snake oil me podcast daddy. I am ready. Yeah, yeah, it's going to be a good time. So the history of people using radiation as like a pop medical treatment, the way they use colloidal silver today starts in 1895 when a German physicist named Wilhelm Rotengin discovered X-rays for the first time. He published an article on a new kind of rays 50 days later, which is what we're all looking

for in life, right? I'm usually referring to Ray Bans there, but I'm talking about guy's name, Ray, usually when I talk about that. Yeah, guys named Ray. Yeah. I've had good relations with guy's named Ray, you know. I only fuck men named Ray. Usually we're talking about guys named Ray. I've had good relations with guys named Ray. I only fuck men named Ray. It's terrible. That's like that diet where you only read things. Yeah, yeah, it's just as effective. Yeah, I'm either celibate or I get hit a lot. That's what it is. That is the duality of Ray. Yeah.

Hey, everyone. My notes on this were a little messy. I just wanted to add that while it was Roachin who discovered X-rays, the guy who actually kind of discovered radioactivity as a phenomenon was honorary Becker-L. He worked with the curries. He shared a Nobel Prize in 1903 with Pierre and Marie Curie.

It was, I believe, Marie Curie, who named radio activity, but Henri was the guy who kind of first started discussing the phenomenon after the discovery of X-rays. So in 1898, famous scientist power couple, Marie and Pierre Curie, found radium in a sample of uraniumite. These are kind of, we're going over the birth of understanding radiation as a thing. Radium was soon found to have properties that were similar to x-rays, right? You could expose photo negatives and stuff with it. And a new field of study in this wondrous and magical property that certain materials had started to open up. And obviously,

x-rays, even today, reading about studying radiation, it's like wild. It's like space alien shit, right? So obviously people in the late 1800s starting to realize how radiation works is, it's not just like fascinating to scientists, but it also, you know, honestly, a good comparison note is in popular culture, radiation was treated in this period very similar to how people are treating AI now. We're like, some people are, you know, just trying to be reasonable

about it and say like, well, it may have this application to that and other people are saying, this is the silver bullet to every problem in society. You know, now it's like, we can just add AI to every problem and it'll fix it. And back in those like, we just got to radiate everything. And we're all tongue. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the attitude. They're like, yeah, we can in world hunger, you just irradiate all your crops. It'll be great. Yeah. That is, that is like how this,

where this is going to go. A Japanese scientific journal published Rotenjins work in 1896. Japanese physicist constructed one of the first X-ray machines the same year to beam crystals with X-rays for purposes that are not clear to me. The first X-ray ring crystals like like like the rocks like quartz or whatever. You shoot them. I think he was like crystals are cool X-rays are cool. Let's see what happens. It's a real PB and J situation. They had x-ray machines in Japan

for like a surprisingly long time before anybody started using them for like medical purposes. They were just like shooting random shit with them to see what it would do. Which is fair. Kind of awesome in what I would do. So yeah, yeah, basically. Also then that's why I'm not a doctor. Yeah, yeah of awesome. And what I would do. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Basically. So that's why I'm not a doctor. Yeah. Yeah. That's why I'm not. But you know, these people

barely were, right? It was the 1890s. Most early radiation researchers did learn quite quickly that this stuff was, they didn't, I wrote that they learned it was not something to play with. They played with it constantly, but they learned that it was a dangerous thing to play with, right? Marie Curie herself suffered pretty significant radiation burns a number of times touching the stuff. She's also like she and her husband both die horribly as a result. I was just going to say I was like, I'm actually fucking died from it.

I think that burns her secondary robber. She dies decades later, but like, yeah, but I'm saying like you can suffer a burn in your life and keep going But I think it's the painful death for me. Yeah, what I'm saying is that like well before the painful death They knew that like oh shit. This is like bad for us, right? Like we're hurting ourselves by being near this shit. Yeah Like Pierre Curie made a statement in 1901 that like I would not want to be alone with a pound of pure radium because I think it will burn. I don't know this. No one's ever

had this much, but I think it will burn all of the skin off of my body if I'm close to that much of it. And somewhere in Hollywood and actress was like, oh, all the skin off my body. Yeah. So, you know, by the turn of the century, again, like five years into, you know, serious research on this stuff, like several researchers had already died due to radiation exposure. So again, within the scientific community, as much exuberance as there is about, you know, radium and uranium, people are very much aware

this shit is like deadly. We don't fully get why it's deadly, but we know that it is super dangerous to be around in quantity, right? So after, now one of the side effects of this is that people are seeing how dangerous this stuff is, they're seeing the kind of horrible burns it can cause. One of my favorite stories,

like one of the scientists working on this keeps some like radium in his pocket and it burns a hole through his leg. But when this- What? When did she notice that it started burning and he just kept it in there? I think- Maybe I'm wrong about this, but my reading of it, I think it's the sort of, you know how like at that Bordeye yacht club party, they had those UV lights that just looked like normal UV lights,

but were for disinfecting slaughterhouses and so it gave everyone horrible sunburns on their eyes. Like, oh my God, I didn't know that. Oh, yeah, fucking great story. Yeah, they used, so there's, you know, people put UV lights and like dance, you know, like rave parties and stuff all the time, but there's also UV lights that are meant to like, disinfect slaughterhouses,

and somebody got the wrong UV light in this party, and it gave people like sunburns on their eyes, but they didn't notice it until like the next day, right? It wasn't immediate, they weren't immediately aware that anything was was a riot. It was kind of woke up burning. I think it's like that. The woke up burning is the first country song that I had to put out on my picture. Yeah, it's about your experiments with radium. It's about a UTI, actually, but yeah. So Pierre Curie, like he sees his friends get in his wife getting

horribly burned by radium and he's like, well, this stuff is dangerous, but also if it can burn skin this way, maybe we could burn away cancer, right? And that is the start of chemotherapy, is like somebody scientist like, well, the way that this burns people, you might actually be able to effectively like kill tumors and stuff with it. Okay. Someone that has had chemo, I'm like, totally did not make that connection. Yeah. Yeah. In terms of, yeah, wow, that's, I mean, that's, that's what you're doing basically with chemo is yeah, you're like, you're, you're effectively using radiation as a laser to murder a tumor. That's what you're doing basically with chemo is yeah, you're like, you're effectively using radiation as a laser to murder a tumor.

Well, no, that's what that's what that no, because chemo is chemicals. Well, yeah, I mean, it's not like we're talking about the other treatment. You're talking about actual radiation, which I also have had, which I think it's like skin cancer. They're dealing with first, right? It's my guess, right? Yeah, because that's probably the simplest. It's on the surface until they figure out how to actually, you know, radiate like tumors

inside you, which I'm sure took, you know, this another week. A long time. Yeah. Oh, a while. But like, so they start figuring out like, okay, this stuff is dangerous. It can hurt people pretty badly. But if you use it the right way, you can actually like kill cancer with it, right? Which is, you have to think about where medical science is in early 1901, the early 1900s. That is, this kind of reinforces the attitude that these radioactive

materials are fucking magic because cancer is just fucking death, right? It's the hand of God. There's nothing to, there's very, very little treatment available for a lot of this stuff. And suddenly, can I ask the dumb question? Yeah. When did people start realizing what the fuck cancer was? Oh, I mean, I mean, for thousands of years, we have understood, you know, they may,

we didn't maybe, we didn't have the kind of understanding we have about it now, but we knew that certain people would develop tumors and stuff and that that was inimical to life, right? And I think, you know, like physical removal of like skin cancer and stuff, like that has gone back a while, although it was obviously like of, of middleing efficacy. Savage-ish.

Yeah. This is, this is kind of the beginning of us starting, So it was obviously like of, of middleing efficacy. Saladish, yeah. Saladish. This is, this is kind of the beginning of us starting. And obviously we still don't have a great handle on cancer. But this is like, you have to, you have to keep in mind the possibility of any sort of effective cancer treatments beyond the crudest and most violent is like that hits the medical community like a bomb, right? Like it's, it's, it's a miracle almost. Like that is how they community like a bomb, right? Like it's, it's, it's a miracle almost like that is how they're thinking about it, right? Some of that is

irrational exuberance. They think it's going to work better than it does because it takes a long time for this to get more effective. But like there is this, that's going to play into the way people think about radiation. And it as a miracle cure is that like, yeah, it's the first thing that's given people really effective hope against cancer. That's a big deal, obviously. I'm going to quote from an article in the Journal of Medical History by Micah Nekau. Quote, the first to use X-rays for skin diseases was physician Leopold Freund of Vienna, who treated a patient's pigment in that- No, no, no, no, no, no, no, F-R-E-U-N-D, not Freud, Freud. Oh, okay. Which I think means friend, I don't know,, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, eczema, and skin cancer. Radioactivity from radium seemed similar to x-rays, giving scientists and medical doctors

high hopes for the medical use of radium. Before understanding the actual chemical and physical conditions in terms of modern science, doctors in different parts of the world, including Germany and the United States, used radium and the treatment of diseases such as keyloids, tuberculosis, syphiletic ulcers, hyperthyroidism, tumors, and cancers. Some of these treatments work. Some of this stuff like tumors, you can effectively treat with radiation. I think syphilitic ulcers are not helped by radiation,

but they're just kind of, they're trying it on everything. You know, they're given it a shot. I mean, it's hard. Syphilis, like, honestly, syphilis goes hard. Syphilis does not fly. Syphilis does not fly. Syphilis does not fly. Yeah, that's does not play. Syphilis does not play.

Yeah. Yeah, that's why I respect it. That's why it's divided by diversity. But I worship it. It's hard to work. Syphilis is out here making you crazy long-term. That shit goes hard. Making you crazy and possibly contributing

to the birth of horror is a genre, you know? So respect, respect to syphilis. That's exactly. I'm sorry, that's March, respect to syphilis. Sticks that. I'm sorry, that's March, respect the syphilis. Yeah. So one thing that's interesting to me is right from the very start, even among people who knew better,

there's obviously all this enthusiasm for radiation for reasonable reasons, but for basically everybody, including these very hard-nosed scientists like the curis, there's this irrational obsession with it that forms too. Marie Curie wrote about it, she would often write about it as my beautiful radium, There's this irrational obsession with it that forms too. Marie Curie wrote about it, she would often write about it as my beautiful radium, and would discuss kind of with this sort of awe, her feeling at the glow that pure radium have.

Quote. Oh, it's a jerk off, that's your way of. Yeah, oh, it's hot to her. She's hot, she's hot for radium, right? Those gleaming seemed suspended in the darkness and stirred us with ever new emotion and enchantment, right? There's something magical about it. One US surgeon general described radium as reminding him of a mythological super being,

while an English physician described it as the unknown god. And again, we're not doing nuclear shit, right? Nobody's- This is wild. This is like how fan boys talk about Elon Musk. That's wild. This is like how fanboys talk about Elon Musk. Yeah. It is, it is, I think, honestly, the best, the best touch point for, for how people were talking about radium at the turn of the century and radiation at the turn of the century is like AI and shit. It's just this,

the discussions of it are often completely divorced from what it can actually do because it just seems magic, you know. But no one's out here like writing sonnets being like my beautiful AI. It's the hazy AI. You're gonna be AI with those sonnets? And they're dog shit. Yeah. You're not wrong. So newspapers reporting on early medical studies

into radium as a cancer treatment, published breathless reports with titles like, radium is restoring health to thousands. This is the last time we're going to talk about Radium that way. In 1904, John McLeod, a physician at Sharing Cross Hospital in London, developed radium applicators to treat internal cancers and showed evidence that they shrink tumors. This is like, I think the birth of kind of modern chemotherapy, right? First, we're using it to just kind of like shoot rays that sort of external cancers and the like, McLeod figures out the, and I'm assuming this is horrifically crude, but like,

here is how you deal with, like you basically use radium to kill internal tumors in a, in the earliest manner of like what we are doing today, more or less, right? This was treated as a go ahead by some in the medical community and many, many grifters in the quack medicine industry to start dumping radium into every conceivable product, right? We know now like, yeah, you have to be very careful about how you introduce this stuff to the body to treat internal tumors because it's dangerous and it can potentially be worse than the disease or at least just as bad as the disease if you're not careful about it. But people are just like, oh, I say, is it thing?

No, everything is that's I in it. Was this our gonna oil? Our gonna oil's now in everything. And they do treat it exactly like people fucking treat us IE berries, right? Where they're like, well, if it's good in your body to kill cancer, it must just be good to like microdose, right? Like mushrooms, right?

We just need to be taking radiation all the time, right? Why wouldn't we? Just in middle, we'll go a long way. Yeah. Yeah. If a lot of it can help you when you're sick, a little bit of it must keep you well, right? That is literally what a lot. And like, that is, that is an insane thing to think. Although you have to give them some credit, they just didn't know as much back then, right? Like every clown in like all of us are stupid too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They were as dumb as we are just, exactly.

About different things like, we just don't know yet what we've been extremely stupid about. Oh, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I still think we're gonna find out that like a lot of the stuff in our sodas is the worst thing ever. They're gonna talk about some of that, but also maybe not.

It'll probably just be all of the fucking gasoline fumes in the air. But literally they were like, hey, LaCroix made of fucked up stuff. And everyone was like, cheers. And popped another fucking six back. No one cares. No one cares. I mean, I'm drinking fucking, it says it's brewed with real tea and lemon, but it's one of those nonsense bubbly waters

who knows what kind of poison is in this fucking thing. No one trusts anything. And we're just, oh, I do love it whenever like my friends that I spent 10 years doing drugs with get like on a health kick and are like, no, I'm not going to drink that diet soda because it's got this. And it's like, man, I know what we snorted together. Right? Like, you're like, no, I'm not gonna drink that diet soda because it's got this and it's like, man, I know what we snorted together, right? Like, you're like, I'm cocaine smelled like a fucking gas station, okay? I've seen you smoke whatever you found.

Did you mean the cushions of the couch? Yeah, now we care about Aspirin, Dave, or whatever. Like, whatever. Eric, I watched you pick up a half smoked cigarette from outside a bar and light it because you were that drunk like don't don't talk to me about fucking Aspiritane. Yeah, and you look at filter dog. Yeah, you started on the filter. So people are getting real excited about radiation and the seemingly magical properties of radium were reinforced by a series of

discoveries around the turn of the century and this I wouldn't have guessed into the healing properties of hot springs. Now, if you like some of the time reading Victorian novels, right, there's basically always a character who gets sick and has to take to the the spa town to like take in the vapors, right, take in the the waters and shit, right? Like that goes, that's a true. Yeah, you go convo us, always. Yeah. And I think probably for as long as there's been civilization, people have known, well, I felt better once I got in that hot spring. It's probably good for me. And it is, actually, for pretty basic reasons, right?

For what, soaking in hot water can be really healthy for your joints and your muscles. It can really be pain. You know, it's better than just a hot spring, Robert. Is a hot tub? Yeah, is it? Well, no, what if we combine two of our favorite things? Yeah. Well, actually, this is weird.

What they find is that those things have always been combined, right? So they're, they're trying to figure out. We're at the end and hot springs have always been combined. We've always been together. Yeah, yeah, that is a property. I'm gonna explain this. It actually makes a lot of sense. I just had. That is a property. I'm going to explain this. It actually makes a lot of sense. I just had never thought about this before. So, um, you know, there's this folk belief

that has some backing in it that like hot springs are good for your body, right? Um, and they didn't really know why. Um, and so they start at the same time as they're discovering that radiation is a thing how it works. They're starting scientists who are trying to figure out like what is it about hot springs that have healing properties. And I'm going to read from a write up on Radiant Patent Medications in the Journal of the American Medical Association here. This is talking about researcher studying hot springs.

They noted throughout history, hot springs like those at Brombach and Germany, Isheia in Italy, and Saldebein in France had been touted as panacea for a variety of ailments, including rheumatism, creatinism, impotence, and melancholy. These salutary effects were achieved only when the waters were drunk or their vapors deeply inhaled. Bottled water from these springs rapidly lost its potency. The great German chemist, Justus von Leibig, attempted to analyze the waters from Gostein Springs, eventually ascribing their power to a dissolved gas with mysterious electrical

effects. In 1903, the discovery was made that the apparent formalkological agent in these waters was radon, radium emanation, an alpha-particle emitting gas with a half-life of less than four days that was produced by decaying radium. Alpha-particle emitting isotopes taken internally in minute quantities were hailed as powerful natural elixirs, capable of delivering direct energy transfusions to depleted organs.

So I have a basement, right? This is not the case everywhere that there are basements. I really didn't think your transition from that quote was gonna be so I have a basement. It's relevant because in the Northwest at least, and I've only ever had a basement here in Texas, we don't have basements because of the grounds weird. But I had to get, I was told like basically, hey, your basement has not had radon mitigation.

So it will fill up with a radioactive gas and you will get horrible lung cancer if you spend a lot of time in your basement unless you install what's called a radon mitigation system, which basically is a pump that pumps the air regularly up out so it can rise into the sky. But it's just that like because of decaying radium in the earth, the dirt is filled with radon, right? That gets in things. So if you have a basement, it will fill with radon.

And these hot springs, because they're being fed from like underwater, you know, rivers or pumps or whatever, fill like also have radon in them. Now, the radon is not causing the health benefits, right? That's just because it's nice to be in hot water. It's good, it's relaxing, it's good if your muscles and joints. But they're starting to realize there are health benefits to radiation, and they realize that a lot of hot springs have natural radon gas, and they're starting to realize there are health benefits to radiation. And they realize that a lot of hot

springs have natural radon gas. And they're like, the radon is what makes springs good for you. So clearly, if we just dose people with radon, it will make them healthier, right? That's the danger of correlation. Yeah. Being, you know, causation, it's not. Yeah, it's like, that's exactly what's happening. also there, but that's not. Yeah, yeah, and that's what they decide is like,

oh, it must be the radon that makes the hot springs good for you. Everyone should start taking as much radon as they fucking could. So this is going to take off very quickly in the early 1900s. And initially, it is not radiation, putting radiation in food and medicine is not regulated, especially in the United States.

Now, we had at this point, we had at this point, 1906, we passed the Peer Food and Drug Act, right? We've done episodes on this. It was a large part of it was in reaction to like, the fact that milk kept killing entire cities worth of babies, when it would be full of worms or whatever.

Radon, though, radium was not regulated under the pure food and drug act because it's a natural element. Which is still, this is still a problem with like supplements today where they're like, you can make a lot of bullshit claims and like sell people. Alex Jones says all these, it sells all these nonsense supplements. And it's like, well, it's, it's a natural element. It's not a drug. So you can, you can basically do whatever as long as you avoid a couple of easy pitfalls. This is how radium gets introduced to the American diet.

Is there like, well, the FDA says it's natural. So you can put as much of it as you want in your milk. That's so wild. I didn't know about that natural pull or whatever the fuck. Yeah, it's like, well, there's a lot of poison found naturally too. Yeah. Like are we just like chill with arsenic being like just slowly. That does come into the story so fiat because we were for a while.

Oh, yeah. Shut the fuck up. So all of these fraud treatments start spilling out into pages of newspaper and magazine ads with bold claims like remarkable new radium cream liniment. There are drives out pain for making joints and muscles instantly, right? They're like, it's the radium in the hot spring. So let's get rid of those healthy like hot waters and just put pure radium on people's bones.

I'm sorry, petition to make that voice your permanent voice. Oh, you're going to be hearing a to make that voice, your permanent voice. Oh, you're gonna be hearing a lot of that voice today, Sophia, don't worry. I am delighted. Yeah. So the reveal that so many healing springs gave off radon, again, it doesn't mean

that that's why, like the good things, like I don't, we don't spend time in our basements as places appealing, just because they're full of radon, but dumb ass old timey people, they're not as smart as you and I is, right? We smarter than this. We would never do any, we would never, for example,

take a cattle deworming medication because we believe it's going to cure all of our sicknesses. Yeah, and because a very tiny man, they used to host a show where they eat worms, still used to do it. Like, and definitely abs 100%. If it was like, if podcasts had existed in 1906 and so had Joe Rogan, he would have been,

he would have been telling people to microdose radium. He would have been like, you're a dumbass. If you're not microdose, it's straight radiation. You gotta take some rads every day. He would have been glowing. Yeah, he would have been glads every day. He would have been glowing. Yeah, he would have been. He would have been fucking time. Yeah.

Nothing but elk meat and fucking radium. So the name of the new therapy that a lot of health griff to start pushing based on these ideas is called mild radium therapy. As opposed to like what we're actually doing when we're treating cancer, which is a much heavier dose right of this kind of stuff. So mild radium therapy is basically, we're micro-dosing this shit, you know? Mild radiation therapy advocates weren't sure why this stuff worked, right?

There were significant debates. Some suggested radium compounds stimulated organs directly. Others believed the radiation acted as super-powered bleach, killing microscopic toxins that caused cancerous tumors. There were theories that radium stimulated your adrenal glands or perhaps the thyroid. What seemed clear beyond doubt was that the healing properties of radium came from alpha particles emitted by a radium nucleus. Now, obviously, Sophia, Sophie, all three of us are trained nuclear physicists.

We don't talk about it much on the show, but, you know, privately, all we talk about is like thorium plants and shit. We're very knowledgeable about this, but because our audience are a bunch of dumb dums, I'm going to read a quote from the AMAs journal explaining how this shit works rather than try to do it myself. Alpha particles are large, relatively slow moving chunks of nuclear matter consisting of two protons and two neutrons. They possess tremendous energy and produce a dense cloud of ionization events when traversing matter. Because they dissipate, their energy so rapidly, they can only penetrate 4,200 U.M. Limiting the range over which they can exert their effects to a distance of about 10 cell diameters.

Such a lack of penetration prevented their use in cancer therapy, and the early radioactive sources produced for curi therapy all contained filters designed to stop alpha particle transmission. Though high doses of alpha radiation produced an intense blistering response on the skin, alpha particles were considered just too difficult to harness in the service of cancer treatment, and were largely ignored by oncologists. So basically what this is saying is like the method of action that is being used in this mild therapy is the stuff that, once they oncologists started fucking around with radiation to realize,

this stuff is too hard to control. So we're not going to use it for most things, and then it becomes the province of medical grifters. So we're going to use this for fucking everything. Now, I mean, I heard that, but really all I heard was not enough penetration, not enough penetration. That's, that's right. That's right. This is, this is, my old radiation therapy is basically getting deep dicked by straight up radiation. Like that is what's going on here. Now, to be fair to our old time idiots, by, you know, early kind of the outbreak of World War One

that period, there are some studies that seem to show real medical benefits to light radiation therapy. Now, these are all very flawed studies, but they led to this belief that people could back up with what seemed like good evidence that radium might treat rheumatism, gout, syphilis, anemia, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, and a white... ED. Well, yes, actually. Sure, that lashes. By far the most common kind of radiation medication I've come across are variations of dick bills.

So yeah, we'll be talking a lot about that. That's what the original jerk off machines were for. Yeah. Yeah. It's just like people think it's like there's that old like whole thing They thought they think like gynecologist used to like jerk their patients off Which is like not a thing it was a thing invented for a movie that just spread But originally the jerk off machines were definitely we're like oh, we're gonna solve all these men's problems

If like these jerk off machines jerk them off like obviously we get all the bad to come out through their Gis. Yeah, that's doctor in 101. Yeah, get them get them a prostate poker that's like made out of pure uranium, you know, that's actually that's actually more or less where this ends up. One of the things they did know that was shown pretty early on in radiation research is that when you exposed like a portion of someone's body to radioactive waves, their leukocytes, their white blood cells would kind of cluster around where that that beam was hitting. I'm guessing this is just your immune system trying to defend itself from something, but like this led the assumption that if you irradiate part of the body, it will bring the white blood cells there, and the white blood cells, those are basically the worker bees of your immune

system. So that's part of what the logic here is. It clearly stimulates our immune system, which must mean if you're sick, you kind of like x-ray the part of you that is suffering, and it'll bring the white blood cells, and they'll take care of the problem. That's one of the reasons people think this works. That's not what's happening. Please do not irradiate. You're like elbow if you've got tennis elbow, right? But that's what people think is going on.

Treatments like this take off like gangbusters among certain segments of the medical community. One physician reported that from 1913 to 1921, he dispensed over 7,000 injections of radium. The over-the-counter trade in radium, and he's again, just shooting straight radiation into people's body when they're like sick or whatever. Yeah. That's so wild. Yeah.

The over-the-counter trade in radium-based pharmaceutical remedies was even more widespread. One of the most popular early devices was inspired by the supposed benefits of radon hot springs. The Revegetter by R.W. Thomas. This was basically a big crockpot type device that you poured your water in, it has a spigot, and this is like how you drink your water every day, right? You pour it into, it's like a filter bottle, right?

But you know what the bottle is made out of? Tell me. Pure uranium. It is a sister of uranium that you pour your water in and you're supposed to drink six or seven glasses of uranium water every day. Hey, I'm sorry. That's flawless. Yeah, it would have been a lot easier to make like a back backyard nuclear weapon back in the day, but um You know who will teach you how to make an atomic bomb? Our sponsors, yeah. Next Goods and Services providers. We are sponsored entirely by Doc Brown from the first back to the future movie. Um, and there's nothing he loves more than giving people access to nuclear

weapons. When Walter Isaacson set out to write his biography of Elon Musk, he believed he was taking on a world-changing figure. That night he was deciding whether or not to allow Starlink to be enabled to allow a sneak attack on Crimea. What he got was a subject who also sowed chaos and conspiracy. I'm thinking it's idiotic to buy Twitter because he doesn't have a fingertip feel for social emotional networks. And when I sat down with Isaacs in five weeks ago, he told me how he captured it all. They had Kansas spray paint

and they're just putting big axes on machines and it's almost like kids playing on the playground. Just choose them up left, right, and center. And then like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he doesn't even remember it, getting the bars, done an excuse being a total f***. But I want the reader to see it in action. My name is Evan Ratliffe, and this is On Musk with Walter Isaacson. Join us in this four-part series as Isaacson breaks down how he captured a vivid portrait of a polarizing genius. Listen to On Musk on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Tune in to the new podcast Stories from the Village of Nothing Much. Like easy listening, but perfection. If you've overdosed on bad news, we invite you into a world where the glimmers of goodness in everyday life are all around you. I'm Catherine Nicolai, and you might know me from the bedtime story podcast, nothing much happens. I'm an architect of Cozy, and I invite you to come spend some time where everyone is welcome and kindness is the default. When you tune in, you'll hear stories about bakeries in the walks in the woods. A favorite booth at the diner and a blustery autumn day. Cats and dogs and rescued goats and donkeys, old houses, bookshops,

beaches where kites fly, and pretty stones are found. I have so many stories to tell you, and they are all designed to help you feel good and feel connected to what is good in the world. Listen, relax, enjoy. Listen to stories from the village of nothing much on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts I'm Grace Campbell and on my new podcast 28 dates later. I'm changing the narrative on how we find love Join me on a wild adventure as I go on blind dates Finding suitors on the internet's strangest apps and only picking people who are the total opposite of my type. Dissecting my dates and listening in

on all the cringiest moments will be my friend Ross. Every time I hear about it, I go in and I call my boyfriend and I'm like, thank God! And my friend Dan. Okay, the dead is floating, I've never heard of my life. Who won't be giving me an easy ride? Honestly, if you had to say that to me

on a date, I would have walked out. Uh-huh! And after going on 28 of these dates in two months, will I find that special someone, or will this experiment prove that there's no good way to find love? And I should just give up on dating altogether. Oh! It's time to find out.

Listen to 28 dates later, with me Grace Campbell on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. And we're back! So, I want to read a quote from the book Quackery by Lydia Kang and Nate Peterson next talking about this Uranium Water Dispensing System. And if you had any leftover water at the end of the day, advertisements encouraged consumers to water their plants. One of the problems with the revigator, besides slowly poisoning people with about five times the radium concentration recommended for drinking water, was its lack of portability. Several similar but smaller devices sprang onto the market, including the Thomas Cone, the

Zimmer Ammonator, and the Radium Ammonator, all of which operated on a similar principle that you simply plopped them into water you were about to drink. These devices, collectively dubbed immonators, were typically manufactured from Carnotite or a primary ore of uranium. The uranium would gradually decompose, producing radium and radod gas in turn, which then infused the water to make it radioactive. So you just dump in some uranium in your water to take like a sip, you know?

That's what you need, right? You know, it's just a little bit of uranium. It's good for you. Yeah. It's called a Chernobyl chime. You still have this respect, huh? Thank you. Oh, man.

Yeah, that, it does sound. And one of the things that's weird, I haven't found a good explanation of this, but a lot of people report they feel better. They feel invigorated. They feel energized when they start consuming this stuff. And a lot of that is certainly has to be the placebo effect. I do wonder if maybe like there's a physical just because of it's doing shit, like maybe there's some sort of weird high that comes from taking radiation in this way.

I don't know how you would like study or prove that objectively, but a lot of people do seem to report, like yeah, I felt like I had more energy. Now, all these people die horribly of cancer like five years later, but it does seem to make people... But very energetically, they pass with real pep. I haven't found like a solid explanation for this, but there are enough reports that a lot of people

seem to experience, and maybe it is all placebo, but it seems like it's more consistent. And you'd see for that, I don't know, but it does seem like people experience some, like beneficial, like they feel good on this stuff for a while. So maybe there is some sort of weird high you get when you're poisoning your body with radiation. I don't know. Um, but that is, that is at least how people report feeling when they're on this stuff, right? Now if you're making health products in the early 1900s and you really want to provide people with the maximum benefit Of course people barely drink water back then, right? It was all high balls, you know So if you were yeah, it's like it was like stupid people would make fun of you if you drink water

Yeah, you're fucking dumb ass square little fiddish. Yeah. So and they're talking to a baby who's trying to literally drink milk out of its mother's teeth. Yeah, like just like your dumb ass, where's your fucking man hat? I do say that to babies often. But so if you want people to get enough radiation

in the early 1900s, water is not your best bet. SIGARETS are. And so the good people at the A, but Shari tobacco company in Bodden, Germany started producing the world's first radium-laced cigarettes. For when you really wanna give your lung cancer some chest hair, right?

Like that lung cancer's not doing enough on its own. You gotta really fucking pump those numbers up. That's some wookie lung cancer's not doing enough on its own. You gotta really fucking pump those numbers up. That's some wookie lung cancer you got. Now, that is insane. That is like one of the craziest things I've ever heard. But the craziest thing is that like, well, these radium cigarettes had a lot more radium than normal cigarettes.

Sigarettes already have radium in them. Sigarettes actually have like more radium than you would guess in them. Like all of our cigarettes are to someium in them. Sigarettes actually have like more radium than you would guess in them. Like all of our cigarettes are to some extent radioactive. I did not know this. I actually found this out. That's crazy. I had no idea.

I'm going to quote for an explanation. I'm going to quote from an article on the EPA's website. Naturally occurring radium found in the soil and from fertilizers can be taken up by the roots of the tobacco plant. Radium radioactively decays to release radon gas, which then rises from the soil around the plants. Radon later decays into the radioactive elements led to 10 and Pallonium-210. As the plant grows, the radon from fertilizer, along with naturally occurring radon decay

products and surrounding soil and rocks, cling to the sticky hairs on the bottom of the tobacco leaves, called tricomes. Rain does not wash them away. Pallonium-210 is an alpha emitter and carries the most risks. Sigerets made from this tobacco still contain these radioactive elements. The radioactive particles settle in smokers' lungs

where they continue to build up as long as the person smokes. Over time, the radiation can damage the lungs and can contribute to lung cancer. And like one of the things, like radon-heavy fertilizer is often used by the tobacco industry. I think they from what I've read it makes for like bigger yields. And it is like research has found that if you are smoking tobacco with lots of radon in it, you are

at a higher risk of lung cancer than normal, obviously the non smokers, but the normal smokers, right? It's like, if you have two, it's the same thing if you're like getting exposed to radon because you're in like a basement that hasn't been mitigated. If you're a non-smoker, you are less likely to get cancer from that than a smoker who was also exposed to radon. Like the two, the risks compound upon each other, right? I had no idea of that, but I guess cigarettes are all radioactives, so that's cool. I'm literally used to like run a student organization in college that like a lot of the what we did was um, anti-philip Morris action. And I knew all this other shit about them did not know this.

Yeah. Neither did I. Wild. Yeah. So that's cool. All of this brings me to the story of our actual bastard for the episode. William John Alloicious Bailey. That is, we have, we do have a specific bathroom name. I refuse to hate a name. A man that has Alloquishes in his name.

Allo, I know. Alloicious. Alloicious. Fucking nonsense name, right? Like how fucking dare you? So, Will Bailey, born May 25th, 1884 in Boston. We have woefully little about his childhood or his early life. He seems to have come from a working class background. Probably poor would be a better way to describe it. One writer in scientific American described him as growing up in a tough neighborhood. And he has a rough background. His dad, who is a cook, dies when he's very young. He has, he dies when he dies when Will is young, but he dies after having fathered nine children, right? So holy shit. He was getting it in. He couldn't have been that old, right? So

he must have just been putting one out per year from the time he was like 60, you know? Town. Yeah, yeah, putting in work, putting in work. But this means that like, his, so Will's mom is always single. She doesn't remarry. So she is on a single mother's salary, $15 a week, raising nine kids.

Oh, that's, I know, ow. No. And I looked it up. That's about in modern terms, that's the equivalent of raising nine children on $2,000 a month before taxes. Like, I don't know how you do that. I have literally no idea how you do that. That's not possible.

That's like, that's a fucking nightmare. Like, that is, yeah, just horrifying to comprehend. And like you said, before taxes. Before taxes. We don't know. I haven't found much really about his mom or about his background, but like, just from what we know, she kind of sounds amazing. Like she was, she somehow managed to pay for William to go to a private school.

Like it becomes clear that he's a really gifted kid that she manages to pay. She sends him to the Boston Public Latin school, which is like the, I think the oldest public school, like private school, but public is in anyone can go if they pay in the country, right? So a very prestigious institution. It is the kind of private school you send your precocious young boys to. If you want them, basically, like what it's, it's big reputation.

It's good for precocious young boys. Yeah. If you're, if you've got a gifted kid and you want him, basically, like what it's, it's big reputation, it's like. It's good for a cautious young boys. Yeah. If you're, if you've got a gifted kid and you want him to go to an Ivy League school, but you don't have family money or like, like a see admissions, you send them here and it like, it specializes in getting these kids ready for the Ivy's.

He does really well. He graduates high school, 12th in his class, and he and his mom basically have a goal of getting him admitted to Harvard. He does not do great on the entrance exam, particularly his science stuff is bad, but he gets accepted anyway. And he enters Harvard as a freshman in 1903.

Again, we don't know a lot about what was going through this dude's head as a kid. From what we know about his background, the poverty and struggle that his mom has to go through, I think we can infer he grew up used to being very poor and fucking hating it, right? This guy's goal, I wanna go to Harvard, I wanna like, I want to make something of myself.

I don't wanna be poor, I'm not going to do it. And like, whatever I have to do to make money is going to be okay, right? That's the conclusion this guy comes to. And obviously, while he's in college, while he's sort of like starting to his formal education, it's the same period that all of these discoveries about radiation are happening. They're figuring out how about radium on the hot springs, the curies are doing a lot of their work. So this is all kind of a boom period both for public fascination and what seems to be this miraculous new scientific discovery.

And also the early 1900s is the boom period of what's called patent medication, which is basically random pills and elixirs that could be claimed to do anything because the FDA didn't really do a lot back then. That's what I'm saying, y'all snake oil. Yeah, yeah. He's coming of age in the snake oil era. And while he's a smart kid, his grades are good at Harvard. He's always struggling to afford to stay there, right?

And after about three semesters of increasing financial difficulties, William Bailey has a realization, which is, why do I want to finish college when the really valuable thing is just having the degree? I've been to Harvard enough that I can talk convincingly about it, right? I can just drop out and lie. You know, it's 1903. Nobody's got the internet. Nobody's going to be able to check up on me, right?

I just fake a deep diploma. Yeah, I think you get all the benefits of college. That's the best. Fuck you, Harvard. You can say you did whatever. No one is how are what are they calling Harvard? Yeah. Yeah. The Harvard cops going to come after me. Fuck it. I'll just lie. Exactly. So he moves to New York City. He gets a job at an import export business, editing their catalog and he he spends his free time

scheming. His earliest plot now that he's in this import export. He's dealing with like international trade and stuff. He decides, he thinks he can convince the federal government to appoint him to be the unofficial U.S. trade ambassador to the Emperor of China. Again, he's like 20. That's kind of ambitious, you know? I don't know how those are sky.

Yeah, he starts with a big one. And he decides to try to do this. He spends hours, all of his free time basically, writing and sending letters to, God knows, like, it's huge numbers of US government officials, right? And he's just like laying out, here's how I would modernize trade with China.

You know, here's what I'll do if you guys make me this, which like, again, he doesn't know these people. He has never visited China. He knows nothing about it. This does not go anywhere, right? People do not buy, buy into making him the ambassador. So he gives this scheme up and he starts traveling. He starts living on the road. Basically, just like going to different countries, lying about his background and, you know, getting whatever job it seems is going to get him the most money. This kind of ends in 1914 when he is in Russia working with the Zara's government like consulting

on oil drilling operations. He has absolutely no experience here. He does not know what he's doing, but he's good at lying to the Zara. So, you know, that's a useful story. That will get you far. That will get you very far for about three more years at this point. And then you will most likely get murdered. Yeah.

And then the Bolsheviks will kill you. Yeah. Yeah. But he's smarter than this are because when the war breaks out, you know, being a fairly observant person, you get the feeling this guy understands people pretty well. He decides quickly, Russia's not going to be safe much longer. Heads right on back to the United States. He gets a job working in a machine shop and he would claim in his letters to his call.

You know, at any point in his story, if you make that proclamation, you will be right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Russia might not be safe anymore. Always a good call. Truly. So he decides, I'm going to,'m gonna, he gets back home and he starts sending letters to his former classmates from Harvard, all of whom are in their upper class careers and shit. And he just starts lying, telling them that he's invented patents for like motor vehicles, moving pictures, armor plates.

He starts claiming to have invented a magneto generator. Don't fully know what that is. He's just kind of like lying about stuff to try to impress people. He's the Elizabeth Holmes, one point out. Yes, yes, he's very much is that kind of guy. Now what he's really doing is launching his career as a con artist. He found a company called the Carnegie Engineering Corporation.

He has enough knowledge about industry terms, about like, because he's worked in sort of machine shops that he can kind of fill out at convincing fake business perspectives. And he uses the name Carnegie, because the Carnegie family are like the most famous industrial dynasty in the country at the time. So he just like sticks their name on his business because he figures like, yeah, smart.

He knows what he's doing. And then he starts advertising, putting up ads and papers being like, for just, you know, I'm selling a $600 mail order automobile. And you can do it on credit. So you spit send me a $50 deposit. I'll ship you the automobile and you'll pay it back later, right? Wow. Which seems like a great deal, right? You know, you get a car for 50 bucks. That's not bad. It's sad to me up. It's sad me up. Of course, there was no factory and no mail order car.

How dare you. Yeah, he's just lying. But thousands of rubes sent him their hard earned money and he makes a good amount of money off of this. Well, some of us are not rubs. We just thought that that sounded like a really great deal and like that car sounded awesome so whatever. I can't afford.

He did kind of do a Tesla where he's like, yeah, pay me a little bit of money in front of it. There's totally a car coming. You'll get your cyber truck soon. Um, so according to the Journal of the American Medical Association, quote, the supposed factory turned out to be an abandoned sawmill with one box of tools and three stenographers.

Um, this gets found out when like he gets a right, the FTC comes after him basically, right? He gets arrested on December 14th of 1915. He's convicted of fraud and he spends 30 days in jail. Like most con men in similar positions, getting caught and being given a slap on the wrist, merely convinced him to be more careful next time. So we opts to go for a real product. Now, not a product that works, right? But an actual physical item his customers will receive, so that it's harder for them to like complain to the FTC.

He's like, what I've learned is I need to be a better con artist. Thank you. Yeah, they really challenge him. It's a little like incarceration doesn't really fix anything. No, I think for a guy like this, and I feel the same thing about Elizabeth Holmes, because I don't think we're getting any safer by keeping her in a prison for 11 years.

You tattoo on their face, con artist, right? That should mitigate the danger, right? They can stay free, just everyone has to know that's a con artist whenever they walk past, you know? I mean, at the very least, maybe attach it to like every credit check, every whatever you possibly have. Sure. Other stuff probably.

Sure. Sure. Other stuff probably. Sure. Sure. Other stuff probably. Sure. Other stuff probably. Sure.

Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure.�.�. Sure. Sure. we have like, you know, instead of using the FBI for, you know, in trapping random people

at mosques, we have a federal agent follow every con artist and every conversation they have, they walk up after us and say, she's full of shit, like just absolutely full of shit. Like, whatever she said to you, fucking lie, do not give this person any money. That would be actually the sickest job. I think that might work actually. Yeah. Like you just come up with individual, like interesting ways to tell the person the same news. Yeah. That fucking person that you're on detail with

or what it was like, they're a con artist, but you just like one time it'll be a singing telegram, one time it'll be balloons. Like you'll get a flash mob going. You'll do the robot. Like I don't know, you could just really go crazy. You couldn't, I think, you know how it, there's always, I'm sure you have a few of these people in your life.

I do, certain people are just inherently trustworthy and everyone likes them. You send out NFL scouts to the colleges and be like, oh Chris, everybody likes Chris, everybody trusts Chris. You want a gig? Like, yeah. American needs you. Yeah.

Chris is just saluting on his way to. But Will Bailey has just learned how to be a better Connor artist. So the next product that he picks is a patent medication called Lazy Go, like LAS-I-GO. LAS-I-GO, Versus PURB manhood is the the full name of the product and as you may have guessed, it's a boner drug, right? And obviously when you think boners, what chemical do you think?

Radium. Oh, no, strict nine, strict nine. He's not in the radium yet. These are just strict nine boners. My dad, it's like I don't even know this. Yeah, one of my own time. Of course. That's why basically dick nine, right? You know, that's what we call it. It's because it's so fucking good for the bonus. Now, giving people strict nine pills for erections seems dangerous and insane,

but it was also pretty common in patent medications of the day. And I want to quote from an article I found hosted by the Buckley Valley Museum. And this is one such medicine from the Buckley Valley Museum's collection is a bottle of Fellows Compound's syrup of hypophosphites. Invented by James Fellows, a St. John New Brunswick drug merchant in the late 1800s, this

remedy was widely sold to doctors to dispense the patients, as well as directly over the counter in pharmacies. Fellows' compound was considered an excellent recuperative tonic that could be used as a treatment for anemia, neurosthenia, bronchitis, influenza, pulmonary tuberculosis, and wasting diseases of childhood. Like, oh yeah, your kid's not putting on weight. Strict nine will help with that. Little bit of strict nine, you know?

I'm sorry, wasting diseases of childhood. I'm gonna get that as like a bumper sticker. Oh my god. Don't hug me. I'm suffering from wasting diseases of childhood. Now, if you're not a chemist, Strict 9 is what we put in rat poison, right? It is very toxic.

You should not ingest it specifically not in quantities. Despite its potential toxicity, Fellows' compound was manufactured and sold throughout the early 1900s. And what I found in that article, because again, they have a bottle of this at this museum. They're like, our Fellows' compound bottle still contains its original liquid,

making it a somewhat hazardous artifact to keep in our collection. Staff deal with this hazard by wearing nylon gloves whenever they handle the bottle. So it's still dangerous enough that you got to wear PPE to hold this. They were just selling it to kids who were coughing. Yeah.

That's cool. So Alas for William, the law caught on to his strict nine-boner pill scheme. And he was fined $200 plus costs for, yeah, selling drinking rat poison. That's just not enough. Yeah, yeah, not enough. Nope, not a, and it doesn't stop him.

All it does is it makes him think like, all right, clearly there's good money to be made in selling people dick pills. And you know, I am also he's also getting increasingly interested in like people are really obsessed with the endocrine system in this period. We're just starting to understand what it is. So he's like, I bet all problems are caused by issues of the endocrine system. I wonder, I want to sell ways people can boost their endocrine function, you know? Now, he's also aware that a lot of radiant-based patent medications are being released. And he's like, that seems like the fucking business to be in.

Speaking of the business to be in, whatever business is sponsoring our podcast is the business to be in. Love it. When Walter Isaacson set out to write his biography of Elon Musk, he believed he was taking on a world-changing figure. That night he was deciding whether or not to allow Starlink to be enabled to allow a sneak attack on Crimea. What he got was a subject who also sowed chaos and conspiracy.

I'm thinking it's idiotic to buy Twitter because he doesn't have a fingertip feel for social emotional networks. And when I sat down with Isaacs in five weeks ago, he told me how he captured it all. They had Kansas spray paint and they're just putting big axes on machines and it's almost like kids playing on the playground. Just choose them up left, right, and center. And then like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he doesn't even remember it, getting the bars, done an excuse being a total f***. But I want the reader to see it in action. My name is Evan Ratliffe and this is On Musk with Walter Isaacson. Join us in this four-part

series as Isaacson breaks down how he captured a vivid portrait of a polarizing genius. Listen to Onmusk on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Tune in to the new podcast Stories from the Village of Nothing Much, like easy listening, but perfection. If you've overdosed on bad news, we invite you into a world where the glimmers of goodness in everyday life are all around you. I'm Katherine Nicolai, and you might know me from the bedtime story podcast, Nothing Much Happens. I'm an architect of Kozy, and I invite you to come spend some time where everyone is welcome and kindness is the default. When you tune in, you'll hear stories about bakeries and walks in the woods.

A favorite booth at the diner and a blustery autumn day. Cats and dogs and rescued goats and donkeys. Old houses, bookshops, beaches were kites flying and pretty stones are found. I have so many stories to tell you and they are all designed to help you feel good and feel connected to what is good in the world. Listen, relax, enjoy. Listen to stories from the village of nothing much on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Grace Campbell, and on my new podcast,

28 Dates Later, I'm changing the narrative on how we find love. Join me on a wild adventure as I go on blind dates. Finding suitors on the internet's strangest app and only picking people who are the total opposite of my type. Dissecting my days and listening in on all the cringiest moments will be my friend Ross. Every time I hear about a day, I go in and I call my boyfriend

and I'm like, thank God. And my friend Dan. OK, the dead is floating. I've never heard of my low. Who won't be giving me an easy ride? Honestly, if you have to say that to me on a day, I would have walked out. A-ha! And after going on 28 of these dates in two months,

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So at the turn of the decade, 1920, radiation therapy was still at this point, it's a bigger market in Europe than it is in the US because Europe is where a lot of radiation research starts. And over in Europe, you can get radioactive candies that are like, Advertise, it'll make your teeth glow, which is great shit. Oh my god. Fun. Great.

I just think during those Instagram ads, you know, they're always just like selling the teeth whitening shit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that is exactly like how they're kind of marketing it, right? Mm-hmm. They're selling, you know, linomance potions, gadgets, a lot of different wild shit. But the tipping point for US-based radium medication therapy is a tour of the states that Marie Curie takes in 1921. Now, obviously, Curie's a real scientist. I don't think she's a bad person. She's not trying to ignite a scam medicine radiation industry. Your opening was she's a real person. I don't think she's a bad. She's a real scientist. So she starts writing, she basically does this big tour of the US where she's writing on a train

and giving speeches all over the place of these stops about all of the potential that these different radioactive compounds and elements have in medicine, a whole bunch of other things, right? This is the birth of nuclear science, basically. So she's talking a lot about that kind of shit. She's very charismatic, she's well-spoken, and she gets people excited. Again, the hype is a lot like the hype of shit. She's very charismatic. She's well-spoken. And she gets people excited.

Again, the hype is a lot like the hype for, you know, AI or whatever. The problem with this, and this isn't really her fault, but because she's such a good hype woman, a lot of dummies get convinced that radiation should belong in everything. And grifters like, well, Bailey realized that like, if I slap just like how like there's like Pepsi now that says made with AI on the fucking bottle, grifters realize like, Oh, shit, if we just stick with rate, this has radiation in it, people will buy even more of this. They'll pay a fucking premium. Now, it's possible William Bailey met Curie at some point. We don't actually know that, but he was clearly inspired by her work and his own dabbling with radiation therapy escalates right after her 1921 tour. Bailey produces and circulates a translation of Curie's groundbreaking 1910 two volume book

Treatise on Radioactivity, which is what she got her second Nobel Prize for. And he establishes a company associated radium chemists incorporated, which starts firing out various radioactive medications. There was DAX, a cough suppressant, claps, and influenza treatment that profited off of the still-present terror of the recent 1918 pandemic. And then of course, ARIM, which is marketed as a weight loss care. This one might have worked because if you do irradiate yourself enough, you will get skinny.

Yeah, like the more flesh falls away from your fucking bones. Yeah, the skin hero we will be literally on this point, there's not a lot to differentiate Bayley from all of the other grifter selling radium medications, right? Every quack doctor and professional poisoner is racing to market, new irradiinated supplements. I hate it when I'm trying to scam. And then everyone is trying to stay on the same path. Yeah. I want to be the only scammer. Yeah, tragic.

Now this is a time of astonishing creativity in the field of causing new and curable cancers. Perhaps the most reckless example of this was the radium eclipse sprayer. This is a pesticide gun that operates on the brilliant principle of killing insects by irradiating absolutely everything in your home in garden. One ad bragged that it quickly kills all flies,

mosquitoes, roaches, it has no equal as a cleaner of furniture, porcelain tile. It is harmless to humans and easy to use. I don't know about that. Certainly not harmless to humans, but yeah, it's basically just a radiation sprayer. Yeah, yeah. Home products, a Denver based company, has the cunning plan to combine animal gland supplements,

which at the time are being marketed by the likes of bastard plot alumni, John Brinkley, the goat ball doctor. So basically, this is like the liver king shit where it's like organ meat is a super food. They're mixing organ meat and radium to produce one of the most, yeah. The perfect hot dog, two great tastes,

the two great together. They call their product Vita Radium. And home products claimed it would help weak, discouraged men, bubble over with joyous fatality. So again, it's a dick pill, right? You know? Now, I know what you're wondering, how would you take a radiation in an organ meat speedball, right? Because that's what this is. I'm going to quote from the book Quackery here. I was not ready to learn this. The men who had the unfortunate experience of taking Vita radium certainly bubbled over with something because those radium supplements were suppositories. Radium suppositories. Patients were literally putting radium up their own

asses. The women, however, had it worse in an effort to combat the eternal feminine problem of sexual indifference. Home products produced women's special suppositories. When inserted vaginally, these radium suppositories were claimed to cure all manner of sexual indifference, home products produced, women's special suppositories. When inserted vaginally, these radium suppositories were claimed to cure all manner of sexual afflictions, and once more reinvigorate their sexual appetites. Your wife doesn't wanna fuck, shove some radium up her hoo-ha. I, it's like already bad enough

just being a woman during that time, but now I also have to have a fucking nuclear pussy. Oh yeah, you got a nuclear vagina for sure. You know, like my eater in lining already sheds. Now like the rest of my internal organs will just shed right out of my pussy. That's cool for me. One of my ovaries popped right out and just started walking around. The pills must be working. That's this, a fallopian tube in my hand.

I'm sure. The primary issue with these different products outside of the fact that they're incredibly dangerous was that they're not cheap, right? Radium is not common, right? Radium is, it's not common, right? It's rare and expensive. And so is like, yeah, uranium ore. Like, only the very wealthy can afford, for example, that full uranium sister and for their

family kitchen. So most people who were selling recreation, yeah. Most purveyors of recreational radiation products were either marketing them just to rich people They were like premium products or if they were affordable It's because the company lied about the product being radioactive which in this case is a real good thing You know You want to get your hands on something good. Yeah, but that's not how people see it at the time And I'm gonna quote from the Journal of the American Medical Association again. Pharmacopias from the 1920s listed

dozens of patent medications that supposedly contain small amounts of radioactive materials. Paradoxically, most of the governmental regulatory intervention in the growing field of radio pharmaceutical nostrams was limited to prosecuting patent medicine manufacturers who supposedly radioactive preparations were found to give off only background levels of radiation. So the FDA goes after people, but just because they're not putting enough poison in the meds. This isn't nearly deadly enough. You're not gonna give them any kind of crazy cancer with this.

How do you expect this woman's possetum? Yeah. The FDA has one goal, and it's making sure people continue to get new kinds of vaginal cancers. So, let's see turns in on myself and becomes a literal tarnished. I don't think we succeeded. So Bailey and some of his peers in the patent medicine industry are just stir. Bailey particularly is a real, he does seem to be a true believer in radiation, but he

radiates himself quite a bit. So he is frustrated by like how many of these products are cons, right? And so he starts working on a solution to this problem, an affordable economic way of exposing yourself to the equivalent of several dozen X-rays each morning. This is where he would find his fortune and rack up his highest body count. But we're going to talk about that in part two, Sophia. Oh, shits. Oh, hang in. Yeah. Yeah. So you got anything to plug before we roll out a part one? Yeah. Thank you for asking. I have a new Patreon. It's the Sophia Alexandra project. So go to patreon.com slash Sophia Alexandra.

And there I will be posting writing and videos and other really dope stuff. So go there. Based. Well go there or be square, you know. Thanks. And obviously Sophie and I, you can subscribe to the show Add Free at Cooler Zone Media. Also, if you go to CoolZoneHealthProducts.com, we're releasing a new supplement line. Everything you need to stay healthy, to stay energized.

It's honestly folks, it's just a 50-50 mix of uranium dust and cocaine. So, you know, you'll have energy, you're gonna get fascinating new cancers. Cancer's, we're working on some cancers that people have never seen before. Doctors are very excited about our uranium cocaine. You know what I'm saying?

You know what I'm saying? You know what I'm saying? You're saying that part in wet hot American summer where they're like going into town and she's like, hey, get me some lube for my pussy. I'm not. You've got uranium lube. It's just per uranium. You can either use it as lube for sex or you can run a nuclear reactor off of it.

It works for both. No longer will you have to go two different places for that. Get you a girl who can debos. Listeners often ask asking what would happen if I didn't interrupt Robert during one of those things and honey's now you know. Yeah. It's not good. You're right. We get it straight from the source. I go to Chernobyl. I did up some Chernobyl dirt. I mix it with some fucking, you know, industrial horse loot, but a big bad a boom. We're good to go. Hey, I summer near Chernobyl when I was a kid.

So I just have it inside my body. Yeah. Robert throwing, throwing, throwing an eel. Give that promo code. Yeah, we'll eel up a horse. We'll do it all, baby. We'll do it all. Anyway, see you all Thursday.

Don't listen to Robert. Bye. Behind the bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, CoolZoneMedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Walter Isaacson set out to write about a world-changing genius in Elon Musk and found a man addicted to chaos and conspiracy. I'm thinking it's idiotic to buy Twitter because he doesn't have a fingertip feel for social, emotional networks.

The book launched a thousand hot takes, so I sat down with Isaacson to try to get past the noise. I like the fact that people who say, I'm as tough on musk as I should be are always using anecdotes from my book to show why we should be tough on musk. Join me, Evan Ratliffe, for on musk with Walter Isaacson. Listen on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Tune in to the new podcast Stories from the Village of Nothing Much. Like Easy Listening, but for fiction.

If you've overdosed on bad news, we invite you into a world where the glimmers of goodness in everyday life are all around you. I'm Catherine Nicolai, and I'm an architect of COSI. Come spend some time where everyone is welcome and the default is kindness. Listen, relax, enjoy. Listen to stories from the Village of Nothing Much, on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy is the greatest murder mystery in American history. That's Rob Breiner. Rob called me, so would Ed O'Brien and asked me what I knew about this crime. Well, ask who had the motive to assassinate a sitting president. Then we'll pull the curtain back on the cover-up. The American people need to know the truth. Listen to Who Killed JFK on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.