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

Episode Date: May 23, 2019

In Part Two, Robert is joined again by comedian, Billy Wayne Davis to continue discussing D. Gary Young, the Fake Doctor Who Created The Essential Oil Craze. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's partin' my twos? Behind the bastards, I'm Robert Evans, podcast host who shames his producer Sophie every episode with a new introduction that just does not land. I like the drywall one. Thank you.

Thank you. I like that one. Thank you, Billy Wayne Davis, my guest today. He can pop too. Comedian with a website. Yep, I got a website. For a tour. You can find me on Twitter too at Billy Wayne Davis.

There we go. You Google me. All my shit comes up at Billy Wayne Davis. We're getting a little bit more of a plug from you each time. I am getting better at promotion. Thank you. We're watching you learn in real time. Representatives say it helps with the money part.

Sort of like how Gary Young learned in real time how to be a doctor. I don't think he did. I don't think he did. I don't think learning how to be a doctor was his game. I don't think it's something you do by trial and error, medicine like science is as a discipline, but individually, that's not how you should learn. Learning was never one of his pursuits. No, not with having his head caved in by a tree.

Ambition. Yes. Super ambitious. You can't fault the hustle. Yeah, no. No, it is. It's impressive. And there's a perseverance that you don't see in a lot of doctors.

No matter who you were, no matter what government agency you were, you were not powerful enough to stop Gary Young from pretending to be a doctor. As long as you don't look in Washington state or Mexico. Or California. Or California sometimes. Or now Utah. Well, I could see where he went to Utah. And it's about to be a different country.

There's a certain type that finds their way to Utah, I guess. Yeah, there is a certain type. Orin Hatch and Gary Young types. And Joseph Smith. And Joseph Smith. Well, I mean, he never made it quite out there. That mob killed him. Yeah, well, he was headed there.

I knew that was his spot. I knew that was his spot. Brigham Young got him there. Something is calling me there. I feel like someday I'm going to be able to treat people's cancer in Utah with oregano oil. That's, I've got a secret. It's oregano oil.

All right. I mean, what kind of, it's the thought process. Because it is calculated. Like, hey, these people are desperate. Yeah, science can't do some things and a real doctor is occasionally going to have to say, I'm sorry, there's just nothing we can do. There's nothing. But Gary Young is never going to say there's nothing we can do.

Nope. Gary Young's going to say, you got 2,000 bucks a week? Yes. We can always do something. We can do so much shit. But you don't know about. Yeah. Let me tell you about hot tubs.

They're uses for babies. He's like that guy. And it's like, and I don't mean Trump jumps in everything. It's that same kind of thing where it's like, oh, you just lie. Yeah. All of these people left or right, whatever they align themselves with, all of the people who are grifters have way more in common with each other than with anybody else. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's not even, cause that's like more of a political thing. This is just like the eternal similarity of grifters. Like the similarity of, what's his name? The Wakefield, the guy who like created like the autism, like vaccine relief epidemic and Donald Trump and Alex Jones or Keith Ranieri, who was like more of a lefty side guy of this.

Yeah. He was the dude behind that cult where like we went to Hollywood branding themselves. They're all the same guy. Yeah. No, they really are. Whereas just like you just don't say like, I've never done anything wrong. Yeah. Yeah.

Never. Never. And none of them are as good as Elron Hubbard, who was the king of that type of person. I just think he had a gift. He had a gift. He did have a gift. Yeah. He could just get that big without like something special.

No. And he could just put out nonsense. Yeah. He was amazing. And if you can flood anybody, like not even just like print media or the internet or just anyone's brain with just nonsense, you can flood it. They just turn it off and like, I'm just one out of this. Everybody has a nonsense that they're vulnerable to.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's different for everybody. Cause we can all look at like the nonsense that like this group of people buys into and get essential oils, good care and cancer. No. Yes. But then you find your nonsense.

You look on your Instagram feed, that's your nonsense. What you're getting sold. I've realized if it says tactical, I'll be like, I'll click on it. Yeah. Yeah. I have so many machetes. I have a lot of them. And I do use machetes regularly, but not as many as I have.

No. Not nearly as many as I have. I have two. I have two. And I live in a nice neighborhood. I have like six. Yeah. I guess it's a very nice working class neighborhood that I do not need a machete for.

Everybody needs one machete. I found a good deal on a machete. What are you, you're just leaving machetes on the table? And then I thought I might need another machete for the back. I feel like all of my life problems can be solved. I just find the right machete. It's just a big knife. It's awesome.

It's awesome. He and I are, I'm from Tennessee. He's from Texas. There's a certain thing. We're like, yeah, I got, I gave my son a little knife. He's nine. Yeah. Yeah.

You give him a knife. He terrified him and he just put it in his drawer. I'm, I'm ogling a little like pistol. That's an AR 15, but a pistol with like a tiny little grip. And it's like, I know it's dumb. I know it's going to break anyone's eardrum that uses it. It's going to like ruin my wrist. It's a stupid, stupid thing.

But look at how neat it looks. It looks pretty cool. It looks pretty cool. Real cool. So we all have something we're vulnerable to that's, that's bad for us. And there are grifters out there who are great at making any understanding. And so don't trust grifters. Let's read about the rest of Gary Young.

The problem is that they're very trustworthy. They are, they are. That's their gift. Yeah. And I'm going to guess if you met Gary Young, you would not immediately be like, that seems like a guy who drowned his baby in a hot tub. Well, it's like George W. Bush. Yeah.

That's why they picked him. He's so, I don't like him, but I like him. Yeah. Yeah. I've, I've, I've seen him. I've been very close to him at like a speech and stuff, like, like not even a speech at like a, he was doing like a Q and A. And he's super likable.

Yeah. You're instantly sort of like, oh, I get, I get why, like, you know, like there are all the leaks that have come out of the Trump administration. I get why that shit didn't happen with the Bush administration. Yes. You just like, if you spend a time around the guy, like even if you like know what the fucked up shit that's going on, like you kind of like just like him. Still pretty fun.

Still pretty fun dude. That's just what they're good at. Because the penguins back there. And Obama had that same gift where like, I know we're dropping a lot of bombs on Yemen, but like, he makes me feel so good about myself. Yes. And he's doing some other good stuff. That was a good thing.

Yeah. I mean, I'm not saying, I don't think either he or Bush were grifters even though I'm very critical of the Bush administration because they're both people who tried to do concrete things as opposed to like trying to perform unregistered surgery. Yes. Yeah. So there are numerous large essential oil companies in the United States today. And this is all thanks to Gary Young's vision and the staggering success of Young Living.

Now, within the industry, Young Living differentiates itself from all these imitators with a strict focus on the highest possible quality standards for their products. I brought this up last time. They say there are no pure essential oils on the market. That is the claim they make. But I found counterclaims in a number of places. Allegations that Young Living oils are in fact adulterated. The most compelling of these allegations claim from a former-

I've done pornography. They're adult. The most compelling of these allegations came from a former distributor for the company in a blog post titled, The Day Young Living Broke My Heart. Now I wouldn't normally use a personal blog like this as a source, but this person actually went to the trouble of having his oils tested at reputable laboratories and he posted every piece of evidence on his blog from the shipping information to prove that he shipped it directly to the labs to the results that the lab sent him.

What did they rip him off for? I'll get to that. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, you can check. Because that is motivated. It is motivated.

And it's one of those things where I suspect this guy believes some things I don't believe about essential oils. But he really, from a journalistic rigor point of view, did a good job of laying out his case and providing the evidence. Just fired up. Probably had some relationships where he's been like, I have to prove my points. That's exactly what he got to. So the writer's issue with Young Living came from their seed to seal guarantee, which promises

that none of their oils have ever been adulterated or had anything added to them. So this dude sent his cinnamon oil into a lab for testing and found that multiple synthetic chemicals were present inside it, including synthetic, there were a bunch of synthetic chemicals. I'm not going to try to read that fucking thing. Yeah. It had a bunch of fake stuff in it. Quote, tears filled my eyes as the reality of the situation began to sink in.

This is serious for him. I know. I know, but it's cinnamon, dude. My close family used cinnamon bark internally, not to mention the sheer volume of Thieves products, which is like one of their product lines that contain cinnamon. I've attempted some conversations with my uplines about the issue, but merely got, don't worry. And I've used the products for years and I'm fine, quickly realizing that I would not get the answers I wanted from them and not knowing where else to turn.

I sent an email to Young Living's Chief Operating Officer, Jared Turner, and included a copy of the test report. Hope and Faith briefly returned when I received a reply from Jared, thanking me for bringing the issue to his attention and promising me a reply. But he never got a reply. No. Yeah. So this guy was like a true believer who also seems to be a real big believer in the truth

and was very frustrated by this and had been like advising his family to take this stuff medicinally. So it's something to take. Yeah, to just say it cures a bunch of stuff. So it's not just like the smell stuff, because that's what I know essential oils to be. Yeah. And there are some, there is some mild evidence that essential oils are useful in complimenting traditional medical therapy from like a recovery standpoint, some very mild evidence that certain

ones can be helpful therapeutically along with actual medicine in certain specific situations. They don't cure your cancer. But like Young Living is one of those companies where they're like, oh, you take this internally if you have this problem and this problem. And so this guy was like having his family take this stuff and was horrified to realize that they were cutting it, which is essentially what's going on is these people are cutting it just like, you know, my Coke dealer used to do with baby laxative. And it's just, you know, he was as angry as I was when I found out that I'd been cheated.

I find myself saying this a lot lately is just quoting the jerk where he's like, oh, it's a profit deal. Yeah, that's exactly what's going on here. So yeah, this guy, this guy was very horrified and promised not to buy the products anymore. But of course, not every Young Living devotee has his devotion to the truth. In the first episode of this podcast series, I mentioned a review I found of Gary Young's wife written biography on a website called Cultivating Mom. Now the author of this site was another distributor for Young Living and she reviewed Gary Young's

biography and I found it deeply entertaining. Here's what she wrote. You know what? I'm going to give this a review. Yeah. I am a researcher. It is in my blood. So before I signed up to become a member of Young Living Essential Oils, I did my research.

Wow. The negativity, vitriol, and blatant lies that abound on the internet have not left the father of essential oils she capitalized the first letter in every word of that. Unscathed. One thing that became clear was that there was no evidence to back up many of the claims against him, some of which, if they were true, would have landed him in jail as opposed to being the world leader of a global enterprise. I chose to see the lies for what they were.

Vicious attacks on someone who has spent his whole life trying to help others. That's why when this book came out, I could not wait to get my hands on it in order to finally hear the real story in the words of Gary's wife, Mary Young. What? Okay. Can I just say real quick? Yeah. I just want you to imagine going to your wife and being like, hey, I got an idea.

Why don't you write a book about me? Why don't you write a book about me? About me. About me. People won't believe it if I write a book about me. I can't do it because of my humility. And the head thing. I don't type so good.

You know, I smash things, but you could write it. I just keep breaking computers with an axe. So the review goes into detail about Gary's famous accident, which is discussed exhaustively in everything ever published about Gary Young. The author hilariously writes this, as Mary Young has always said, Gary does not like to talk about his accident that left him with a prognosis that he would be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life, but she was able to put together the compelling story that takes the reader from Gary's depths of despair to his regaining his ability to walk.

So still nothing about that brain. Not a damn thing about that brain. Now this reviewer also notes, quote, the reader gets to walk with Gary through every expansion and farm purchase, reading about what he did in Ecuador is be on belief. After seeing the poverty and conditions of local schools, Gary decided he had to change what looked like a hopeless situation for the children of surrounding communities, out of which grew the Young Living Academy to teach and enable these children to have a bright future.

Now, hearing about Ecuador made me curious, and thankfully I found a little bit more about Gary Young's work in Ecuador in that New Yorker article I've been quoting from. Do you remember Sterling, the former COO of Young Living, quote, Sterling says he was also alarmed by a video he saw of Young, whose only medical degree is a doctor in naturopathy from an unaccredited school, performing gallbladder surgery and giving essential oils intravenously at a clinic in Ecuador. He's like, he found a place to commit surgery. That's what it was.

These people need my help. When he does it, it is committing surgery. It is committing surgery. Yeah, it's like, I did some murders, I did some surgeries. God. How many Ecuadorians have died under Gary Young's and scalpel? I shouldn't be laughing, but he just is so relentless about wanting to perform medical operations on people.

It's a weird tick to be like, just to look at somebody like, you know, I'd fix you. I could fix you. I'm just sitting here. You know I'm a doctor. You came into my village and you want to cut me open, he's like, no, I'm a doctor. You got cancer. I can tell it from your blood. That's an Elizabeth home shit, too.

You've got cancer. It is weird that they both do, like, finger prick blood tests. It is the... I will say, Gary Young's clinic's blood tests work as well as they're in assistive. Yes, they do. Because people are doing the same thing, too, like sending cat's blood and twins and stuff to Elizabeth homes. I didn't hear about cat's blood, but yeah, their tests were not good.

It turns out Gary Young only opened his clinic in Ecuador because a 2005 lawsuit closed his clinic in Utah. Apparently, a young woman was prescribed so much vitamin C that her kidney shut down almost killing her. She successfully sued the company, forcing Gary to hop to Ecuador to continue pretending to practice medicine. A lot of vitamin C. That is way too much vitamin C.

So much that your kidneys are like, come on. They're just like, nope. What are you doing? How many oranges are you eating? You got to get out of Utah. And it was not any safer working on one of Gary's farms than being a patient in his clinics. On August 17, 2000, one of his home-made essential oil distillers ruptured at the lid,

building a worker at the Young Living Farm in Mona, Utah. The farm was fined $10,280 for seven safety violations. The Utah Ocean Division reported, quote, the entire operation was designed by Gary Young president and built on site. The vessels were not built under any consideration to American Society of Mechanical Engineers Code for Pressure Vessels. No type of pressure relief device was installed on any of the vessels. So he basically built bombs to distill stuff with.

This is you make more money if you don't do it the way the government says. Because the government, they want you to do all these things like not have your things explode in people's faces, which is fucking, that's why regulation's bad. You have to wait. And I don't wait. The free market says your factory can be indistinguishable from an IED. If I have a stuff, give me a thing. That's what the free market says.

It's what Charles Cuck told me. Did he tell you that in the free market, that's based on everyone starting from zero and we're not going to do that? Well, that's that. Yeah. Yeah. And he's got his axe. Okay.

I'm going to get out of here. He's got his axe. He does not like you talking about flaws in the free market. So speaking of free markets, it's, Sophie's saying that's an okay, that was a pretty good one. Product. In the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations, and you know what, they were right.

I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark.

And on the gun badass way, nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself

stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman.

Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Right, so Gary Young had just shut down that woman's kidneys with vitamin C, started performing

unregulated surgery in Ecuador, and he got that guy killed by building a bomb instead of a distiller on accident. So you can't make essential oils without breaking a few human beings. And no amount of death and misery stopped the rocket light growth of young living. By the early 2000s, they were by far the largest essential oil vendor in the market. It's hard to say exactly how large they were, but we're talking about hundreds of millions a year in revenue by this point. Geez.

Yeah, they're like a billion dollar company now, or at least they claim to be and probably are. They're an MLM too. So it's always like, yeah, they're a multi-level marketing company. I was going to ask how they get their products out, but never mind. They do sell a lot of, they're a very popular essential oil seller, so they sell a lot of product, but a lot of their money comes from the MLM thing where you sign up to be a distributor, but the money is really in signing people up underneath you.

So again. Not a pyramid. Multi-levels. Yeah. Legally distinct from a pyramid. Just horseshit. So we don't know exactly how much, but it's a lot. They're making a fuckload of money.

Well, and yeah, they don't really, yeah. Yeah. It's hard to get a hard, a fuckload of money is fair to say. So success inspires imitators, companies eager to repeat young living success in selling dubious healing oils, maybe without the fraudulent founder who kept getting arrested for pretending to be a doctor. And in 2012, the most successful these imitators, a company called Deutera, had grown to be nearly as large as young living.

Some analysts suspected they were even larger. That year, Gary directed his company to sue Deutera for $350 million. Now young living alleged that Deutera's founders had stolen both trade secrets and distributors from young living. The court case rolled along slowly until in 2015, both companies announced that they had passed $1 billion in sales. Now it took about five years for the case to reach a civil jury trial and on the second day the smell of essential oils was so strong that the judge in the case complained of a

headache and a stomach ache and begged both sides to wear slightly fewer essential oils. The jury eventually dropped all charges against Deutera and that was like 2017 or so, I think. So basically their claim was, hey, you're doing our scam. Yeah, you're doing our scam. Stop doing our scam. Stop doing our scam. Welcome to court and the judge was like, everyone smells too much. Your scam is hurting me.

Please stop. It's physically hurting my brain. In June 2017, the New Yorker sent a reporter to Young Living's Fulfill Your Destiny distributor convention in Salt Lake City. The hallways were packed with good-natured, heavily fragrant people heading to workshops with names such as Yoga, a business tool, and Essential Care for Animals. They wore t-shirts that said essential oils, heck yeah, and there's an oil for that. And I'm silently assessing your oil needs.

Never have I sneezed so much. Never have I been blessed so enthusiastically when I sneezed. We'll have the article up on our site. It's a fun article. Fulfill Your Destiny. Yeah. Give me $2,000. Give me $2,000.

Let me try delivering your baby in a hot tub. I'm probably a doctor. Are you the hot tub baby? By this point, Gary Young's company Oil Menu had grown to over 150 options, from basics like oregano and cintronella to Christmas spirit. Cintronella? Cintronella. That keeps the mosquitoes.

Yeah, it does. I've used a lot of, especially traveling without healthcare, I've used a number of different, like I'm actually a big plant-based medicine nerd. I make a lot of my own sabs and poultices for injuries and stuff like that just because I'm out in the middle of fucking nowhere a lot. There's plants like plantain and yarrow and comfrey that have real proven medicinal benefits, stuff like Willowbark, which is where we get our aspirin from that you can. We got the chemicals from the earth to start with where the pills are from.

Exactly. They don't come from nowhere. I mean, some of them do. Some of them were just like switching atoms around at this point. It's crazy. Yeah. But like, this isn't- Some of the stuff that works the best is still just fucking plants and shit.

Oh man, speaking of plants, I don't know, this is like a free ad just from marijuana. It is, yeah. Do it. I feel like that's a great ad. Just do marijuana. Nike really has the best slogan ready if they start a pot brand, like medicinal marijuana, or not medicinal, sports marijuana. That'll happen.

CBD, all that. Yeah. CBD for your CTE. Damn it. That's a good idea. I know Carl Turley. I'll call him. He'll make that shit happen.

Okay. So, yeah, Christmas spirit, which, quote, taps into the happiness, joy, and comfort with the holiday season. There's dragon time to create feelings of stability and calm during cycles of moodiness, and of course, highest potential, which presumably helps you get rich as shit. Now, this is probably a good place to get into just how exactly not a Dr. Gary Young claimed his essential oils work. Here's Dr. Eva Briggs dissecting some of Gary's claims from a book titled The Missing

Link, where Gary lays out the scientific underpinnings of the essential oil chemistry, quote, from Gary. One of the primary agents in the blood that is responsible for the delivery of the nutrients through the cell walls is called oxygen. Now, I'm not a big science guy. It doesn't sound like a controversial statement to me, because I'm dumb. But Dr. Eva makes a good point, quote, animals do not have cell walls. The most basic high school biology courses teach that only bacteria and plants have

cell walls. Animals do have cell membranes. Gary, quote, you see in the human body, we have a substance called blood, and that blood has a very specific purpose. That purpose is to transport nutrients to the cells. The purpose is to transport nutrients to the cells, to nurture and feed the cells. When we look at essential oils, they have the same role and play the same function in the plant as blood does in the human body.

That wouldn't even I know, that's not what they do. But let's hear from Dr. Eva. Essential oils do not transport nutrients to plant cells, phloem transports nutrients to plants, and xylem transports water. Examples of the functions of essential oils in plants may include attracting beneficial organisms such as pollinators or repelling organisms that might eat or infect the plant, which is why I said trinilla does something. That's like third and fourth grade science.

That's real fucking basic. Yes. But he's really calling people's bluff is what he's doing. Yeah, because you're not going to check that out if you're signing up to be a distributor in an MLM. No. You're just not. I wouldn't have caught the cell walls thing, because it's been too long and all I remember

is that the fucking mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. Well, we both, yeah, the essential oil thing where it takes it, you're like immediately like, no, I don't think that's how that works. I don't think that's how that works. I can't correct you on how it works, but I know that you're full of shit. If you're telling me this thing that burns when I put it on my skin is the same as blood. It's plant blood. Yeah.

It's plant blood. It's what he's saying. I don't feel like that's true either. I feel like you're a doctor now. Where's your baby again? It's hot tub. I keep coming back to the killed his own baby thing, but I feel like it's really worth dwelling on.

Well, it's also that thing like the reviewer said, the lady's like, I read all these awful things about this man, and I just didn't believe them. And it's like, well, there's newspaper articles from the 80s talking about that one, but she does raise a good point. And she's like, why isn't he in jail? I'm with you on that one. That is a good question. Probably ought to be in jail.

But it sounds like also he always gets fined like $10,000 seems to be reoccurring fee. So he's like an old hippie where he just carries around $10 grand for bail money. He's like, this will get me out when they throw me. He's like, they'll throw you in jail in Arkansas, so I always have 75 bucks in my sock. Yeah, they don't want anything. Distributors are the lowest level of the young living hierarchy. 94% of members never rise higher than that. The top of this legally distinct from a pyramid are people at the royal crowned diamond level

who make up less than one tenth of 1% of young living. Many of the speeches at the convention that the New Yorker went to were delivered by diamond level distributors who earn a median monthly income of $32,000. Now, almost no one at young living reaches that level, the few who do essentially act as posters for what might be possible to the hopeful masses. One of the diamond level speakers that the New Yorker writer met built her business up by working as a TV anchor. In other words, she had a platform completely impractical for 99% of distributors to ever

build. Oh, that helps. Here's what she said to the assembled people at the convention. There's nothing holding you back but yourself. We all have the same oils. We all have the same 24 hours in the day. The only ones who don't make it to diamond are the ones who give up. Anybody in this room can do it.

Very basic MLM stuff. Yes. Yeah. It's your lack of effort. Yeah, it is your lack of effort if you do not succeed with this. Not in your built-in broadcasting. Yeah. Now, I'm sure you're not surprised to learn that 94% of young living's 2 million active

members made less than a dollar in 2016. Meanwhile, most royal crowned diamond distributors made more than a million a year. Most people would call this a pyramid, but it technically isn't for reasons lawyers can argue in court. At the 2017 Fulfill Your Destiny convention, Gary Young made his entrance by riding into the convention center on a sled pulled by Huskies. The year before, he flew in on a zipline. These garish introductions were necessary.

He was trying to hype up the launch of new oil blends. In 2017, that blend was also called Fulfill Your Destiny. $34 would get you 5 milliliters of black pepper, blue spruce, and frankincense. Black pepper. Black pepper. Oh, that's ballsy. Well, if you throw that in with the frankincense, which actually does, frankincense has some medicinal properties too.

Cool stuff that you can do with frankincense. Not this way. Gary claimed that this would open up your pineal gland. Nope. Nope. Nope. It will not. I know that for...

No. Sure. DMT opens the shit out of your pineal gland. Yeah, that's what I was gonna say. It's like, if he's selling DMT, I'm interested. Yeah. And if he's making some fucking essential oil out of mimosa hostilus root bark, then I'll be like, okay, brother, yeah, that'll open your fucking pineal up.

Well, you do have my attention. You just gotta smoke it out of a crack pipe. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Now, I guess we should be grateful he didn't try to inject any of this and do his patients via IV, although he probably did, but in Ecuador, yeah. Starting in the mid-auts, frankincense became an increasing focus for Gary Young and his

company. He was apparently inspired by a trip to a market in Oman, where he saw thousands of bags of frankincense resin in the streets. He built a distillery in Salala and, in 2010, opened the first modern frankincense distillery in the world. There's just one problem with that. Using essential oils at industrial capacity requires vastly more frankincense resin than the world's existing trees can supply.

Oh. Mm-hmm. According to Anginette Decarlo, an environmental scientist focused on the plant, Young Living's Demand threatens entire ecosystems in the Middle East and North Africa. So, so, so, I'm trying to save some people's babies. I need it to make me rich. Yep. For my abundance, Will.

This is actually a crucially important and untold part of the essential oil story. Despite their earth-friendly image and focus on pictures of wholesome farms, Young Living and its competitors are something of an environmental plague. Before Gary Young, essential oils were a thing, but they weren't particularly popular. Tens of millions of people were not constantly dolloping their body in frankincense and myrrh and oregano and lemon peel. The market for these products has increased tenfold in just the last couple of decades, and producing essential oils is not easy on Mother Earth.

The Earth Island Journal notes, quote, In order to produce a single pound of essential oil, enormous quantities of plants are required. 10,000 pounds of rose petals, 250 pounds of lavender, 6,000 pounds of melissa plant, 1,500 lemons, and so forth. That sounds like R. Kelly's studio orders. Yeah, it kind of does. We need more rose petals. We need more rose petals.

So where do all these thousands and thousands and thousands of plants come from? Quote, The majority of popular essential oils companies source their raw materials from corporate farms that turn out large quantities of plants. Because with the cultivation of products on many large farms, pesticide usage is common, and there is currently no organic certification specifically for essential oils, which large companies like Young Living and Deuterus cite as a reason for forgoing organic certification altogether.

In the end, consumers are left largely on their own when it comes to discovering which pesticides are used on crops that are used for essential oils, especially since most companies aren't voluntarily giving up that information. You're putting pesticides on your body, which is also true if you're smoking weed by the way. If you haven't been out to a lot of those farms, you can't trust when they say there's not pesticides on them unless you know the grower. You can't.

Yeah, there's pesticides on all of them, Dan. Yeah, man. I've been through so many of those fields. And if you... They wear Tyvek suits to spray them down. They look like... There's chemicals on all of it. And you know how you can tell if it's got it on there?

That harsh burn after you smoke it? Because if you go to Eugene where they do all the organic stuff, it does not have that. They're still, even then, they still have to wear the suits because they're using like sulfur and stuff rather than the chemical-like pesticides, like you still have to keep the pests off it. Yeah. Like it just depends on what you use for it. They use different bugs too sometimes.

Yeah. Yeah, you can't let fucking mites get on those things, you lose tens of thousands of dollars in a day. It's crazy. Crazy. You know what else is crazy? The value of the products and services that are about to be advertised to your ears. That is crazy.

During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you've got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters

in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based

on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't

a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. It is possible that Young Living, the company founded by a man who drowned his own baby on accident and repeatedly impersonated a doctor, holds itself to the most stringent safety

and environmental standards. Fun fact, Young Living recently pled guilty to illegally trafficking rosewood oil in from Peru where the plant is a threatened species. The company was also found to be illegally sourcing spicknard oil from Nepal that were fined $3.5 million. That's not the only regulatory trouble the company got into, of course. In 2014, Gary Young's business ran afoul of the FDA, quote, from the FDA. Based on a review, FDA has determined that many of your Young Living essential oil products

such as, but not limited to, thieves, cinnamon bark, oregano, immune power, rosemary, myrtle, sandalwood, eucalyptus blue, peppermint, ylang ylang, frankincense, and orange are promoted for conditions that cause them to be drugs under Section 201G1B of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. Because they are intended for use in diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease. Now, the FDA pulls some specific examples of the most egregious lies literally printed in Young Living brochures and on their products.

Among those lies, Young Living seemed hell-bent on convincing its consumers that their essential oils could prevent Ebola. Quote, viruses, including Ebola, are no match for Young Living essential oils, are under the subheading top oil choices for viruses, top on my list is thieves. Thieves is highly antimicrobial, it could help against Ebola. And Ebola virus cannot live in the presence of cinnamon bark nor oregano. Good to know. Interesting.

Somebody, somebody should maybe let all those people in Africa know that they just need more cinnamon. Drop cinnamon. What's that, sprinkle it. It's just, god damn it. It's that saying about famous people, like, if they were nice before they got famous, they're gonna be extra nice when they're famous or if they were like whatever they like before they were famous.

It's like, it's the same about these motherfuckers where they're like, they're shitty on whatever level and then they get access and money and then they're gonna be shitty on this giant level. Yeah, they're just, it just gets bigger. Where they're fucking up countries instead of states. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly what they do, like they start with like fucking up their own life and drowning their baby in a hot tub. And then move on to fucking up ecosystems and convincing millions of people that they

can cure Ebola with cinnamon. That's exactly what they're doing. Yeah. Now, Young Living has its own experts like aromatherapist David Stewart who argue that doctors like Eva Briggs and those hacks at the FDA don't understand that essential oils have their own divine intelligence which allowed them to heal without harming people providing ourselves with everything ourselves need. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

What's that? You don't, that seems, I'll face to you. I just want to, I just want to, I need to sum up and say out loud what I think that that person just said was that essential oils have their own, the, the... They're choosing to heal you, yeah. Mm-hmm. So they're sent to it? Yeah.

Yeah, it seems like it. Well, I'll read the quote. I'm going to quote from David Stewart and you let me know what it seems like he said. The molecules of a therapeutic grade essential oil form a harmonious, coherent, functional family designed and intended to serve us and heal us according to the highest will of their creator and our creator who is one and the same, God, which really ties into what you're saying about the owner's manual and him thinking he's God because he's the one making all this bullshit.

Yes, he thinks it's his manual. It's his manual. Wow. He's hooked in the head and now he's God. We really, really should do more research on head injuries. You just got, if something happened, you got to watch them. Yeah. That doesn't mean anything bad.

A lot of people have them. They're fine. They go on to be doctors and politicians and there's nothing wrong with it. But keep an eye on it if they keep pretending to be a doctor and maybe drown their baby. Keep an eye on some of them. Yeah. I wanted to get an idea of exactly how Gary himself built the scientific efficacy of his essential oils.

I found a video of him from the Mid-Aughts. In it, he and his interviewer are standing in a snowy forest. He has a chainsaw in his hands and we're going to watch this video and I want to make sure that the videos turn towards him so you should, you should see G, G, young. I got a robot axe. He's going to tell you how balsam wood works. If the viewers could smell, what do you smell today? It is so exotic and so exquisite.

Can you tell us about the health properties of balsam oil? Oh, it is, Terry, very exciting because first I did the studies seven years ago in our clinic in Utah before I sold it and that was phenomenal because as we know, cortisol is a hormone in the body and is referred to as a death hormone. The cortisol is what makes us age prematurely. It's what reduces the immune system. Our compromised immune system, cortisol levels are always high. We also see that people who experience depression have high levels of cortisol.

When the body is high with cortisol, it also produces acid, high acid levels and I thought there's something to this balsam oil besides other things that I was looking for. So we started doing a study in the clinic and lo and behold, we discovered that just breathing the aroma from the oil through the distillation was lowering cortisol. No, god damn it. Can I describe? Yeah, go for it. First of all, he's dressed like a lumberjack, like straight up lumberjack, like holding

a chainsaw. He's holding like a commercial chainsaw, like that's a, and he's, but he's just, he's leaning on it. He's not actually holding it. He's leaning on it in the way that you don't with a commercial chainsaw if you're a lumberjack. It's just a very, what, and what he's describing is very confusing to what he's presenting visually. Do you know what it is?

He's also describing like, like he's a doctor, but he looks like a lumberjack, he looks like he's about to finish this interview for his company's official video and then start shopping some trees. He's like, we got some work today. We're down a man didn't call in, but here, hey, you got a little lump. I'll take care of it tomorrow. You know what? I got this chainsaw.

Why don't I just give it a try? Well, and it also like lets me in. I had this picture of like a more of a schmoozy salesman type, but he's not. He's got this earnest way about him. I can see why people who don't know anything about medicine would find him convincing. Yes. Because he has, yeah. Yeah.

He's not like what you'd think a snake oil salesman would be. No. He's not like Lyle Lanley. He seems like a country doctor, like a doctor who would work in a town that is a one-room schoolhouse. Yeah. No, he does. He reminds me of one of my grandpa's friends who's also a lawyer, but also with a dairy

farmer. You know what I mean? Yeah. One of those people out in the sticks who does farming and also does a serious professional trade like medicine or law, he feels like probably because he grew up around a bunch of those people and decided to do that, but without going to school. Well, that's what I was just thinking, like while we were talking about it, I was like, that's what has happened is a tree fell on his head.

He doesn't have the ability, but he has picked up on this kind of hokey folksy, yeah. Probably after the tree fell on him, the county doctor came over and printed on him. Yes. That's who he was around the most. He said, I'm going to be a doctor now. Boy. We figured him out. We figured him out.

Too late. We figured him out. This kind of rhetoric and these claims of great healing potential have consequences. The Atlantic Institute is a pro-essential oil aromatherapy organization, but one that urges responsible use of the substances rather than treating them as cure-alls with their own divine intelligence. I found a fun 2014 article where they list the 10 worst side effects suffered by people misapplying essential oils.

Most of them sound utterly terrifying, but fairly minor. Like this. Quote, undiluted oil on mouth sores, between 25 and 35 drops of essential oil on canker sores and mouth or tongue after being told it was safe. This resulted in a trip to the ER because of racing heart, panicking, gagging, dry-heating, extremely hot fever, dizzy, sick, and high blood pressure, I thought I was going to die. Yes. I bet he did.

I bet you did. Don't do that. I did the thing and then I died. Yeah. Then I almost died. Well, we're getting to that. Now, the most serious side effect they found evidence of came from somebody dosing themselves with what is known in the crazy part of the essential oil community as a morphine bomb.

Now, this does not include morphine, which I would be ordering it right now if it did. This is a mix of balsam fur oil, the oil Gary was talking about in that video, with copaiba, which I have not heard of, and frankincense. The most prominent recipe I found for the morphine bomb was by Kaylin Bax, a distributor with Young Living Essential Oils. All the oils in the recipe are, of course, made by Young Living, a picture of her recipe up on the site. Here's what one person experienced after taking a morphine bomb for extreme pain.

They advertised it could be used via inhalation, on skin or ingested. I trusted this combination would alleviate my pain due to their claims. Within a few hours of ingesting the oils, I began having racing heart, shortness of breath, pressure in my chest that radiated to my back, up my left jaw, and down my left arm. The symptoms continued and I eventually experienced cold sweats and nausea. The symptoms did not go away. I went to a hospital.

They gave me an EKG, blood work, and a CAT scan. They determined I was having a heart attack. I remained hospitalized for three days and underwent a heart catheterization. Thank God Gary Young was not catheterizing that heart. I can do it. No, I know what to do. Let me get my chainsaw. Scoot over, Doc.

Let me get in there. Let me get in there. Let me just root around in that for a little bit. You got any fishing line? I learned this in Ecuador. He's got that, like, I think the way he said it, it felt like he knew what he was talking about. Yeah.

It was clear he did not. It was clear he did not. The blood shot out like that. On the subject of the amazing ability of essential oils to divinely analyze your health and provide yourselves with everything they need and nothing they don't, I found a Reddit AMA with a former young living employee. This employee claimed, obliquely, that Gary Young pressured his employees about how to vote in 2016.

Hell yeah. Yeah. Quote, one of the biggest stories I heard was that he called a company-wide meeting around election season and basically told everybody that they should be voting for a certain political candidate. Many people were scared that they would lose their job if they didn't vote a certain way, so it took an assurance from the executive team, not Gary, to ease everyone's minds. So don't know who he was urging them to vote for?

Got some theories? I have an inclination. I have an inclination, because it feels like a tactic that a certain politician would use. It does feel like that. It does feel like that. This employee had also had several hilarious stories of these divine oils badly injuring people.

The greatest story you have to tell is about when I had a woman who called in because she read something that putting that oregano in her sports bra would help her losing weight. Ended up with her burning her breasts, reported the FDA and was given a full refund. FDA is literally breathing out of the company's neck, so they are very compliant. One of the worst adverse reaction cases we had was when a guy's wife had followed another boss babes recipe for eye drops that included thieves and peppermint oil. The poor guy was given the drops and not only did it burn to high health, but the guy's eye was, to put it simply, a color it never should have been.

Now boss babes is a term people in that subreddit which is focused on MLMs and stuff, used to describe people like the lady who wrote that fawning review of Gary Young's autobiography or the lady who wrote the morphine bomb recipe. They are women, mostly young mothers, who attempt and occasionally succeed in building distribution networks for young living products. Many of these people wind up desperate to moot product, which is what leads them to stretch further and further the sort of claims they make about what essential oils can do. One questioner in the reddit thread asks, quote, Why do these oil MLMs promote putting

this stuff on animals when many are knowingly toxic to animals? Is corporate okay with the claims that this stuff is fine to use on animals? To which the OP replied, quote, Their stance is very confusing as they would not shut down recipients for animals, but they also would heavily promote their animal line of products that they claim would work with some off-brand PETA instead of suggesting regular oils. I would always tell members it's not safe at all though. Now if that's true, this person was distinctly not in line with his company's values. In January of 2018, Oman's Facebook post went viral when she warned that she had accidentally

poisoned her cat by getting a eucalyptus essential oil diffuser. Eucalyptus for everyone listening is toxic to cats. Don't keep eucalyptus in your house if you've got fucking cats. I don't know if it's bad for dogs too, maybe look into that, but it's fucking bad for cats. The post was shared 700,000 times and prompted warnings from the ASPCA about exposing pets to essential oils. Buzzfeed notes, quote, Neither do Tara nor Young Living immediately return questions

from Buzzfeed News about their products and animals. However, on its website, Young Living states that you can absolutely use its products on your animals. So that's great. Absolutely. Absolutely. They may kill them, but you can use them. You can do it, you can.

You can absolutely do that. 100%. You shouldn't, but you can. Gary Young died in Salt Lake City on May 12, 2018 after a series of terrible strokes that all his essential oils were tragically unable to prevent. He has survived by millions of young life distributors and, in a very real sense, dozens of spiritual children who have picked up on his methods and created their own dangerous medical scams and Gary Young's own image.

In June of 2018, James Joseph Martin of West Sacramento, California was sentenced to one year in jail and five years probation after pleading no contest to three felony counts of practicing medicine without a license. He had been going by the name Dr. James Martin, DPSC. Now you may not have heard of a PSCD or DPSC. It sounds like a PhD, so most people don't question it. Here's what the website Credential Watch says, quote, hundreds of practitioners are using the credential's PSCD or DPSC and or Doctor of Pastoral Medicine to promote their services.

These titles come from the Texas-based Pastoral Medicine Association, which licenses practitioners and registers prospective patients as members who wish to receive care from these providers. The PMA, which is headquartered in Irving, Texas, describes itself as a private ecclesiastical membership association with a mission to promote scripture-based health and wellness concepts. That's a lot of the best doctors get their training from the scripture. From the scripture. Yeah, exactly. Old Testament.

Exactly. A lot of medicines based on the Old Testament. On the Old Testament. So that's just great. The directory of doctors who have received this degree includes more than 2,200 names. So while Gary Young may be dead, you can rest easy knowing that thousands upon thousands of other fake doctors have taken up his mantle and are probably delivering children with dangerously little qualifications and oversight right now.

Wow, just Airbnb doctors going, they just filter out, is there a hot tub? Is there a hot tub? That's... We can get that baby out of you, ma'am. That is... I was just thinking like, is that a mental illness where you're like, no, I'm a doctor. Are you just like... I wonder...

Or is it conniving where you're like, they go home every day and they're like, I can't believe this shit works, man, this is crazy. I feel like with Gary, it is more on the illness side of things just because when he got rich, he didn't stop. If it was just about money and wanting to pretend to be a doctor for money, why would he be doing surgery still after you've got hundreds of millions of dollars? Does feel like that's like an urge. He really wants to be a doctor.

I won't get in there and fix what's going on. I don't think anything's going on there. Let me get in there. Let me get in there. Every now and then, he just stare at where I think my appendix was in a way that I'd only seen men look at my dick before. I want to cut you open. I want to cut you open.

Let me get an ax. I'm a doctor. I am a doctor. But then he... It's frustrating because he's also very competent, it seems like. It's certain things, exceptionally so. And then other things, no fucking clue at all. No.

I'm going to guess that gallbladder surgery in Ecuador did not go well. Probably not go well. There's still, they still tell that story like when the white man came and opened up our cousin. That was a crazy day. We don't know what he took, but it was not his gallbladder. He is not allowed back in this village. If you came from Ecuador and know anything about what the fuck Gary Young was doing down

there, please reach out. I'll read it. He threw us a line. It is, I mean, how far he went, billions, and what cracks me up is like it's just one word removed from snake oil, which is a cliche. He was literally selling oil that he claimed could cure all your problems, but he called it essential and not snake. Yeah.

And people were like, just put it on me. Yeah, and the focus on oils is in part because it's so expensive, because if you're actually, if you actually spend any amount of time caring about like sort of, you know, like the non-woo bullshit side of like natural plant-based medicine, you just buy plants. It's very, you get pounds of most of the stuff that does anything good for pretty cheap. Even if you're using frankincense and Merck, a couple of bucks for like a, like it's not that expensive to get like a lot of it, but essential oils are expensive as fuck. Because you got to do the thing.

You got to do the thing and then adulterate it with a bunch of stuff so it's cheaper for you. And then, yeah, it's, it's. An odd scam. An odd scam. Yeah. Work. They don't do it.

Like, there's a lot of stuff that like, yeah, there's some health benefits to this, but like not to the essential oil. There's no evidence that that does anything. Well, it's got its own brain. Yeah. And it will figure out what's wrong with you and it will go to there and fix it. Yeah. Which is very similar to fucking Elizabeth Holmes scam.

Very similar. If we're, if we're just going to go to the same. She just said it was science. Yeah. Yeah. And her thing was like, for this tiny drop of blood, we'll know what's wrong with you. My favorite line of hers was the, uh, we can tell if you ate something bad. Yeah.

That's the one where I was like, I was like, who even I know, like, that's not how that works. Elizabeth, you were, you went to school for this for a year and a half. Like, I spent more time on that learning Arabic and all I can remember is how to say United Nations. I took way more than that in Spanish and I can, I live in a Spanish neighborhood and yeah, barely communicate. Yeah.

But like, I'm going to guess you don't learn all that much about blood science in your first two and a half semesters. I figured it out. Yeah. I will, that one lady is like, no, you didn't. No. No, you did not. No, you did not.

It's very hard. It takes like a decade. I want you to. Yeah. But you didn't. But you don't know what you're talking about. And she just heismaned her, just stiff-armed her and moved on and then didn't blink at all those old dudes.

That's what they all do. That's what they all did. Well, yeah. Yeah. It's the same, it's the same scam. They're all the same. All of these scammers are the same, whether or not they're tricking Joe Biden into thinking their blood testing machines work or tricking single moms into thinking that oregano oil

is the right kind of eye drop to use. Like they're all the same person. Well, and it's like any setback wasn't like a real setback for them. I think that's the amazing mental trick they do. They're very mentally resilient people. Yes. Yeah. Because most people would be like, okay, what is fucking me up here?

Yeah. Because I get to a point every time and then I have to leave, oh, it's because I'm not a doctor. Yeah. But I seem capable enough I could go to medical school. I feel like I'm a doctor. But you know what? I'm a doctor.

I'm a doctor. I'm just going to keep saying it till it's real. I'm a doctor. It's that thing like you were when the secret was a big thing. It is that. That does work, but just for grifters. Yes. Like.

They're not wrong. Yeah. You just keep saying you're the president. One of these days it'll be true. And it happened. And it happened. And that's the thing with Trump too. I'm fascinated with that.

And I try to remind people, they're like, how can he be like that? I'm like, well, his lifestyle has never been affected. Yeah. Ever. Nothing. He still, no matter if he loses in court today or whatever, he goes to the mansion, gold mansion in the sky. Yeah.

It's just like. And has his male wife that he ordered. It's like Gary Young. None of his, none of that getting convicted of pretending to be a doctor multiple times never was a setback. He was just like, let's go where it's warm and you just find another state. I'm tired of this. I'm tired.

All this gray and rain. Let's go down. Finally. Well, let's just go to Utah. They don't give a fuck what you do in Utah. Just keep sailing your own. I mean, that's what we live in Hollywood. So.

Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. I mean, this is. The thing is, like, if you're a grifter and you wind up in Hollywood, it's fine because the worst case scenario is you make the Boondock Saints. Yeah.

Or the room. Or the room. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. It's you make a fake blood test at company. And in Utah, it's you wind up performing unlicensed surgery.

You're exactly. Yes. Oh, that is. So grifters just move to LA. Just come to LA. The weather's great. It's, and if you don't make it, it's pretty good life anyway. Yeah.

The weeds fine. Like, it's cool. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty cool. Your ability to handle rejection will serve you very well in this town. Oh, it is. Yeah.

It is. That's the number one skill here. I know. Like, it didn't happen. Yeah. Yep. You'll be running this motherfucker. See?

And then we get into some dark stuff about the stand up industry. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Oh. Not just stand up. Not just stand up.

This whole fucking. Really. Yeah. The whole, whole civilization actually. Yes. Billy. Yes. Let's plug those plugables.

Just, if you want to follow me on any of the socials, just Google Billy Wendavis. I'm on most of them. All that stuff will come up. I am going on tour very soon this week. Next week I'll be in Colorado. If you go to bwdtour.com, all that stuff comes up. I'll be in Nashville soon. I'm going to Austin, Houston, Oklahoma City and your neck of the woods, the Caboo Festival

of Dallas. Yeah, Dallas. That's where I spent a lot of time as a kid. I'm going in and out. Cool. That spaceship over there and Irving. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, the, the whatever it wasn't Irving we talked about. Oh yeah, you could go, go pay $49 and get licensed as a doctor of pastoral medicine and Irving. I might do that. You should, you should do that. $50. Dr. Billy Wayne Davis. That would be fantastic.

You could perform gallbladder surgery in Ecuador. This is, it's a big year for me. I'm Robert Evans. You can find me on Twitter at I write okay. If you live in Ecuador and know whatever the fuck Gary Young was doing up there, please do hit us up. You can find this podcast on our website, behindthemasters.com, you can buy shirts at tpublic.com, behind the bastards.

They have things on them, jokes, such stickers too, mouse pads, Coke spoons, Coke spoons, all branded, all with my face on them. So that's kind of cool. We're on Twitter and Instagram and at bastards pod and I have another podcast called it could happen here, which you should watch if you want to be really, really, really listened. You should listen to Sophie. It's been two hours. You should listen to the podcast if you want to be sad.

That's it. That's the end of the show. Go fucking hug a cat. Bye. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of goods.

Are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut that he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass.

And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price?

Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.