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

Episode Date: December 14, 2023

Robert and Sofiya finish the story of William Bailey, after a brief interlude to talk about the radium girls.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On March 16, 2000, two sheriff's deputies were shot in Atlanta. A Muslim leader and former Black Power activist was convicted. But the evidence was shaky, and the whole truth didn't come out during the trial. My name is Mosey Secret, and when I started investigating this case in my hometown, I uncovered a dark truth about America. From Tinderfoot TV, Campside Media, and I Heart Podcasts, Radical is available now. Listen to the new podcast Radical, for free on theHeartRadio app Apple podcast 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, Apples, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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. Well, I like the fact that people who say,'m not as tough on musk as I should be or

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. Coolza media. It is behind the bastards, a podcast that is always opened with a mixture of consummate skill and of course, inimitable charisma by myself, Robert Evans, also with me on the call today, Sophie Lickderman, my producer, and our lovely guest, Sophia Alexandra, Sophia. Can you do a good, can you do a good, oh yeah.

Oh yeah. That was good, that was good. Thank you so much. I actually in my free time, I moonlight as the cool eight man. Oh yeah, I moonlight as the cool aid man. Oh, yeah, I had heard that. I had heard that. I will not be doing that because I would like to be excluded

from this narrative, thank you. Yeah. Sophie's just saying that because she drives the Oscar Meyer Weiner bus and doesn't want anyone to know. She's mad because she's actually cap and crunch. You think you think if I was driving that to Jamie Loftus, wouldn't know, let's be a part of it. That's why you gotta keep it a secret.

Jamie can't be trusted with that knowledge. Who knows what she'd do? She probably got a damn mind. She probably write a book and then go on a comedy tour about it. That's right, that's right. This blows her. How fucking horny that automobile is.

It is pretty funny. Anytime you see that thing going into a tunnel, it's a good time. Just good, clean fun. Just good, clean fun. So we're back and we're talking about our boy, Bill Bailey. So after 1921, Marie Curie has done her big show. Bailey has had a couple of cons, get busted by the government,

but he is off to the races now, making radioactive gizmos to make sure people have all of the radium. They need in their diets for optimum health. He started selling, yeah, what a hero. He started selling a radioactive paperweight called the Bio-Ray, which ensured any working man

could keep a healthy dose of uranium poisoning at his desk while he worked. Hell yeah, efficiency, my dog. That's what you need. He sold a radioactive water solution, the forerunator, which is made with putting, it's basically putting thorium in your water. And then there was the adino-ray,

his next foreray into the Dick Medicine game. The adino-ray was a radioactive belt clip that was meant to beam straight radiation into your penis. So really, just a great set of products there, right? He invented the early cell phone, you know? It sounds like he was a plant by like feminists to be like, the only way we can get free if we're being honest is we got to murder some of these men. Yeah, just like a little bit at a time and unseen ways.

Like, oh, you know how they get to go outside the house and work? I propose you put one in a paper weight, enjoy your work, bitch. You know what else they love? Belts. Let's do some in there, you know? It's so fucking, like, I keep thinking about, yeah, there's like some of these weirdo right wing guys will like flip out every now, sperm counts

are lower than ever in the West. And you know, like, man, we made it through the era where people were just putting, shooting straight thorium into their penises. Like, it's fine. We'll make it through microplastics. This is species, I'm not worried. You know, that there's not health consequences, but you people aren't gonna stop breeding just because we've poisoned ourselves. We do that a lot.

No fucking intensifies the more we actually feel like life is being slowly poisoned. Yeah, everything's fine folks. So Bailey's products were not cheap, and you might view him as the same kind of dude as like, again, like the supplement salesman who sponsor like info wars and shit with their alpha brain supplements. And this shit is not cheap. His dick cancer riser costs like $1,000.

So the primary victim. That's right, in old timey money. Yeah, in old timey money. So like, this is like buying a nice car, right? Is buying one of these dick cancer machines. Holy fuck, sorry. I need to like actually process how much money he wants for that dick shit.

Yeah, I mean, it comes down in price. Eventually, he's selling them for just like $150 as they, but at first, you know, it's hard to get. I wait for Black Friday, guys. If anybody is looking to buy one of these. For the deal to rate to a rating, your penis. Wait for that bulldoze, you'll be. Yeah.

Once people start dying, you'll be able to irradiate your tick a lot cheaper, folks, you know. So by this point, his first company, Associated Radium Kimists, had been busted by the Department of Agriculture for false advertising. So this man has now been busted by different government agencies three times. I think three different agents there.

I think it's the FDA, the FTC, and now the DOA have all gone after him for various scams. Nothing stops. Nothing he got of criminals. Yeah, yeah. Yes. The FDA has done the fucking patent medication, con man version of an e-gott.

Yeah, that's great. So he forms another company, he starts making new pills, he makes linarium, which sounds like it was basically radioactive icy hot and thorone, which is just a dick pill made out of thorium, right? It's just a thorium dick pill. What's wrong with me that one just said, I see hot with some radium or whatever.

I was like, that sounds kind of good. Sounds kind of dope. I bet it felt good, right? I bet it felt good. That's all I'll say. He had founded two new companies by this point. The Thorone company, named after his dick pills, was mostly thorium-based supplements, which he promised were good for.

All glandular metabolism and faulty chemistry conditions. He also sold the radio indocrinator, a gold-plated radium harness that you could use in several ways. When around the neck, it would rejuvenate your thyroid and around the midsection, it would irradiate your adrenals or ovaries. The radio-indocrinator he claimed gave off gamma rays that would ionize the indocrine glands. And I'm going to quote from the book Quackerie again here.

The idea was that ionizing, I.E. irradiating, the endocrine system would increase hormone production, or as it was better understood by its less enlightened audience that device worked by lighting up dark recesses of the body. The radio-inducrinator could even be worn under the scrotum

in a special jock strap, rigged up to energize undinspired penises. So that's good. So that's good. We're at like three different ways. You could expose your dick and balls to radiation now. Like this guy cannot irradiate enough testicles. Like he just loves it. He loves it.

And you know what they say? Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life. You know? You gotta respect it. You gotta respect it. You'll never, never work a day. What you love and yeah, you'll never. You'll never respect it. You'll never respect it. You'll never respect it.

You'll never respect it. You'll never respect it. You'll never respect it. You'll never respect it. You'll never respect it. You'll never respect it. You'll never respect it. You'll never respect it.

You'll never respect it. You'll never respect it. You'll never respect it. You'll never respect it. You'll never respect it. You'll never respect it. You'll never respect it. You'll never respect it.

You'll never respect it. You'll never respect it. You'll never respect it. You'll never respect it. You'll never respect it. You'll never respect it. You'll never respect it. But also a lot of his shit is like clearly bogus. There's definitely a degree, because he's done cons before. There's certainly a degree to which he knows he's conning people, right? So, you know, his stuff goes well though. He starts doing better and better, making getting better at like conning people.

He really, one of the things that's gonna set him apart from a lot of the pack is, he goes directly to the medical community with a lot of his inventions. And part of this is that he's a Harvard man. He knows how to talk to people who went to like these fancy colleges, right? He knows the right things to say.

He knows how to put on that proper attitude. And in 1924 William Bailey stands up before an annual meeting of the American Chemical Society and gives a career defining speech about the medicinal potential of toxic radium exposure. He announces, we have cornered aberration, disease, old age, and in fact life and death themselves in the indecrints. Basically, we've backed Illness into a corner and it's in the indecrints system.

I'm just watching him stand in front of like Illness's and the mission accomplished banner just drops. Yeah. We did drops. Yeah. We did it. Yeah. Now, when you envision this moment, the speech it gives to the American Chemical Society, you gotta think about it the same way we used to think

about like Apple's annual product announcement events, right? Will Bailey is the Steve Jobs of Radium, right? He's getting up there being like, this is insanely great. You know, you've never been able to radiate your dick as much as you can now. And a lot of people, many of them doctors, are as excited for this moment as people were in 2008

to see the iPhone. So they listened with wrapped attention as he walked them through his newly evolved understanding of how radium therapy was supposed to work. By this point, Bailey had convinced himself or at least decided to market his products under the understanding, that aging was caused by the gradual failure of one's endocrine glands.

This process could be reversed by ionizing them with radiation, which would reverse damage and rejuvenate the worn out glands. Full of pride, he told this audience of scientists, I am satisfied from definite clinical experience with the radio-indocrinator that a method of ionization is now available, whereby we can definitely, practically without exception, retard the progress of synasense and give a new lease of relatively normal functioning power to those whose son of life is slowly sinking into the purple shadows of that longest night.

The wrinkled face, the drawn skin, the dull eye, the listless gate, the faulty memory, the aching body, the destructive effects of sterility all spell imperfect, indecrudent performance. So that's cool. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the voice is really the part I only part I care about. Yeah. Yeah. I do, I do always enjoy when I get a chance to take that bad boy out for a spin. So that is some grade A scientific mumbo jumble, right? Just unparalleled nonsense, but it's sold to his audience. Part of the stuff that you mentioned toxins. I'd like to know how many toxins are actually

gonna be leaving my body. Yeah. So what's the, what's the toxin situation? You know, Star Trek, the radium is like a teleporter. It beams the toxins right out of your body, you know? The more radium you're exposed to. Yeah, there we, you could sell this shit today, right? We're not far from it.

Another Republican administration and they'll make it legal to sell this shit again, right? It'll go everywhere. Joe Rogan will be laughing at it, which honestly could solve a lot of problems for us. Like if we just all turned to blind eye to radium medicine for like five or six years, we might be in the clear. Yeah. Yeah. We just solved a lot of stuff. Just let them think people are ready. Yeah. Put like 50 50 I ever mect in uranium mix and just let people shoot it up their assholes, you know, it'll be fine. So, uh, this, this shit, this nonsense, Bailey's putting out, it sells to his audience.

And part of why, again, these are all real scientists, part of why they believe in what he's saying is they think that William Bailey is a scientist like them, right? By this point, he was not just pretending to have graduated from Harvard, but he started claiming that he'd went on to do graduate work at a prestigious college in London and become a PhD, right? He's claiming to be a doctor now. Now again, in reality, his Harvard admission exam, he got kind of mid grades on,

and all of his worst grades were in like scientific fields, engineering and physics. He's not, not only is he not a doctor, but this is specifically the shit he's bad at, right? It's like me selling accounting software. Yeah, exactly. I'm like, oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. I'm like, you want to know what to do with your money. Maybe talk to me. Who when someone says stocks, I just picture a folder and you open it and it's empty. Yeah, I'm imagining me, it like a Jordan Belford at the end of like when he's doing those big seminars at the end of Wolf of Wall Street. I'm just up in front of a crowd. Folks, you're hearing a lot of things about what you can do with your money, put it into a 401k, a high yield

investment. But no, no, no, no, no, I want to walk you through the real way to get rich. Barry it in a big hole. That's right. The big hole method for just $20,000. I will walk you through everything you need to do to dig a big hole in your yard and bury all your money in it. This is what Warren Buffett does. This is what Bill Gates is doing.

That's why Bill Gates bought it at Farmland. He needs more holes. You know what else? For a very small monthly fee, I will let you keep your money in my big hole. That's right. That's right. You put all your money in my hole, and I promise it'll still be there when you need it.

That's right, and it won't smell weird or anything. That's right, yes. So his lies are not seriously, again, there are doctors and scientists, as we'll talk about, who are angry at Bailey and all of the, who do push back about this. But in the mainstream, this is pretty accepted. And in fact, the paper of record, The New York Times, reaches out to Bailey the day after

the speech and they wind up just exerting, exerting his, exerping his speech to write an article about the wonders of like irradiating yourself for health. They just, without questioning it, like, reprint chunks of his speech as an article about the wonders of like irradiating yourself for health. They just, without questioning it, like reprint chunks of his speech as an article in the New York Times. So he's doing great by 1925. Bailey moves his headquarters to each orange new joysy and he launches yet another company,

the Bailey Radium Laboratories. It was through this company that he would produce his masterpiece, Radathor. This was a pre-bottled radiation-infused beverage. It was through this company that he would produce his masterpiece, Radathor. This was a pre-bottled radiation-infused beverage. Basically it's vitamin water, if you put a couple Hiroshima's worth of rads inside it. So he had the ear of a decent chunk of the scientific community and a lot of credulous journalists.

And as a result, Bailey decides he's going to do something new to advertise Radathor. Rather than like the standard patent med ads, I mean, he's doing do something new to advertise Radathor, rather than like the standard patent med ads. I mean, he's doing these too, but he starts advertising specifically in like medical journals and publications, right? And this part is actually pretty brilliant. He's kind of on the cutting edge here. He's aware at this point, the FTC and the FDA are looking at him and guys like him, right?

Putting out specific health claims in like a scientific journal would get him in trouble. He can't do that, but he wants scientific legitimacy. And so he realizes, if I just publish research or at least articles that look like research, talking in general about radium therapy and how radium affects the human body, but without making claims about my products, if I'm just publishing research on radium, and it's attached to the name of my company, that acts as an advertisement. But I'm not in danger with the FTC, right? They can't come after me.

Like that. Yeah, you smart. This is an innovation, right? Profesh. Yeah. So instead of saying the Thorinator will cure your depression, he just bought his way into publishing scientific monographs and magazines, and particularly publications read by physicians, and I'm going to quote from the Journal of the American

Medical Association here. One example of these monographs, a 32-page pamphlet published in 1926 under the title Modern Treatment of the Indicron Glans with Radium Water, Radathor, the new weapon of medical science, was mailed to every physician in America. The pamphlet outlines Bailey's theories and are just skeptical physicians to, place one or two of your most obstinate cases on radium water so that you may observe its action right in your own practice. The pamphlet also included many photographs that purport to show the process of radium

refinement and purification at the Bailey Laboratories. These were later found to be fakes. Bailey simply bought his radium and miso thorium from the nearby American radium laboratory of New Jersey, bottling it into skilled water at his plant and marking up the price more than 400%. But at least it's real radiation, you know? Yeah, I mean, Lisa he has integrity.

Yeah, yeah, that's what I respect. Is a man who sells honest poison to you. Right? Thank you. Good man. So Bailey shipped his pamphlets to every registered physician in the country and filled them with testimonials

from happy patients and doctors. He helped blaze a trail that would later be followed by Purdue Pharmaceutical decades later in the marketing of oxy content by offering a rebate to physicians as a professional fee. So if you prescribe rad author to a patient, whatever they spend on it, you get 17% of that as a kickback directly to you, right?

That's smart. Now, to their credit, the AMA does eventually come after it takes them a while, but the AMA is like, this is unbelievably unethical, like incredibly evil, but it works really well. And again, some of these doctors are prescribing it, are prescribing the equivalent of like hundreds or thousands of doses per patient. So there is good money in this shit,

especially because a lot of these patients are rich, right? Like you are milking the rich by poisoning them with radiation, which like, not necessarily always bad. Or anything. You know? We should be worse. It's complicated. Yeah.

Oh my God. Yeah. And the maybe pile. In the maybe pile. Yeah. So from what we can tell, Bailey definitely over hyped his products beyond what he actually believe they could do. But he also seems to have been, yeah, yeah, yeah, all the radiation and then you get cocky.

Yeah. And then you start to get a little air again, right? Now, he seems to have been genuinely convinced that to some extent radiation was good medicine. Again, he is, he becomes a daily user of Radathor. I have found no evidence that he was lying about this. He does seem to have taken his own poison. We'll talk more about that at the end. Again, I respect him. Is this actually a fan episode? Yeah, yeah. This is now where fans of this guy, right? That's all I'm hearing. Yeah. And he does seem to, he seems to be upset. And again, he is to some extent consciously still

conning people, because he has made con products, like he has made outright cons. So he's both, we all contain multitudes, right? And he does seem to have an actual obsession with trying to figure out why radium is good for you, right? He is trying. And again, he doesn't have any competence as a scientist, but he does try

to do his own research here, and I'm going to quote from Smithsonian magazine again. By 1925, Bailey had formulated his central pharmacological thesis concerning radium stimulatory powers. As described in a lecture that he gave in 1925, this thesis was essentially a variant of the radiation-esque catalysts school of thought. More than 90% of all diseases claimed to Bailey were the result of endocrinologic dysfunction that prevented the transmission of essential physiological factors. Without the correct metabolic signals, the body lapsed into a state of biochemical energy deprivation. Eventually, this state exhausted the parake

nymal organs resulting in anemia, lacetude, cancer, depression, idiocy, and many other problems. Bailey believed that the energy lost their ineffective metabolism could be replenished Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Ac, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, Acid, our band, Radio Axial with Glen Controls. That's actually a pretty good band name. We're flaky and actually opening for, what's the name of that? Of the name of that device that that dude was pedaling to make your dick? What was it called? Oh, the Thoreon.

Yeah. Yeah, we're actually, uh, uh, the Thoreon, yeah. Yeah, we're actually opening for own sound. Yeah. Yeah. And speaking of irradiating your dick again, you can buy some dick pills that probably aren't radioactive if you listen to these ads. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. So the holidays can be a great time. A lot of us are focusing on getting gifts for our friends and family, but the holidays

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Jamil Alamin, a Muslim leader in former Black Power activist, was convicted. But the evidence was shaky, and the whole truth didn't come out during the trial. My name is Mosey Secret and when I started investigating this case in my hometown I uncovered a dark truth about America. He says to me, you want me to take care of them for not doing something or paying you something like that? I said no, what you talking about? Right here, no idea. Who you know, who you have become? That's how he approached you. You know, he meant what he said. Yeah. I'm thinking, murder, enemy, you know. I think that's what he was thinking. Yeah. From Tinderfoot TV, came-side media and I Heart Podcasts. Radical is available now.

Listen to the new podcast Radical for free on theHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts We're back and yeah, we're we're talking Bill Bailey So Radathor takes the fuck off. This is a huge success. He finally has his big hit, right? It's fucking, it's fucking wild. He sells more than 400,000 half ounce bottles of Radathor in just five years. And again, these are all 400% markup. So he is making bank off this shit. Now, by this point, the boom years of Radathor evidence had begun to mount that there were horrific long-term health consequences to being exposed to radiation. And this is going to bring us to a bit of a digression, but this is a story

worth telling infamous tale of the radium girls. It is, this is a fuck, I think a lot of people are broadly aware of this, which is why I didn't like make it the whole focus, but this is a wild ass story. It is laid out in gripping detail by author Kate Moore and her book The Radium Girls. But I was like, why do I know that? Yeah, I think people have heard this. And this is, the Radium Girls story is a standard story of like an evil corporation abusing its workers for profit, you know, when they should have

known better and ultimately killing them. It's very shady. I wanted to focus more on the patent medication stuff because that's more fun, but we are going to talk about the radium girls now. This is where shit gets pretty bleak. As I've noted before, sufficient doses of radium and like toothpaste will make your teeth glow, right? This was a thing people advertised for at the time. This meant that radium because it can glow has the potential practical uses. You can make stuff like watches and dials that need to glow in the dark glow, right?

For like planes, for military equipment, right? For industrial equipment and like, it's obviously it's useful if you have like a watch that can glow in the dark, right? You don't have to like turn a line on. Like a road divider or whatever. Yeah, a road divider, a compass, right? You don't have to turn a line on. Like a road divider, whatever. Yeah, a road divider compass, right? You know, all of the different things you need

if you're like firing artillery in the night or some shit. So obviously, there's a military application. A lot of this takes off like radium dial painting, takes off as an industry when we get into World War I because there's a sudden demand for the equipment that they need to be able to have like dials lit up on. And this is a demanding job, right? You cannot, if you are working on stuff that's going to be military, it's going to be used

to like drop bombs and fire shells at people, it has to be precise, right? You have to be accurately putting everything on. So that is, you know, a job that has to be done by skilled workers. And there's no other way to apply this stuff than by hand, right? It has to be done by skilled workers. And there's no other way to apply this stuff than by hand, right? It has to be done by hand. And women with tiny hands were generally seen to be the best at this job, right? So dial painting becomes.

Oh my God, my brother just faking taxidine and sign. I'm just doing the five to just faking all of it be like this. Mm-hmm. You would have been a great radium girl, although it's... Girl, you had those radium girl hands. You got those radium girl hands. You don't want to have those because it does not in well for them.

But this is considered an incredible job for a while, right? It has a reputation for being the elite job of poor working girls because it pays three times normal factory wages. Kate Moore notes that dial painters were in the top 5% of female workers nationally when it came to compensation. So like, this is seen for ambitious poor young women, this is how you get a leg up.

This is how you can escape poverty, right? Which is, again, why this is a lot less fun than selling radioactive poison to rich people. Because these jobs are so good, the first women who get them guard them gellessly, often recruiting close friends, they keep in the family, right? They're like, if there's an opening, I'm going to make sure my sister, my aunt, my niece, gets the job, rather than like somebody off the street.

And so one of the things that's going to be devastating about this is that often factories will have like multiple sisters, all the sisters in a family working side by side on the production line, and you know, one guess as to how their lives end. Other workers at the factory, and this is very important, the radium girls are not wearing any kind of PPE. They are exposed directly, physically, through their skin with a mix of radium and paint. It's like mixed into a powder and then turn into a paint, basically. They have no protective gear.

The workers at the factory that is making the paint that's mixing these pigments that are processing raw radium, they wear protective gear, right? They've got like lead aprons, they're wearing gloves like they understand. They're probably known. They matter. They in fact are men.

Yeah, they matter. Like that's obvious. Like what are we gonna be wasting so see equipment on making vaginas? That is a big part, that is a big part of what's going on. But that's, it's interesting, that's not all of it. As we'll talk about, a lot of these men are insanely reckless with this stuff

in ways that kind of confuse me because they do know it's dangerous. They're covering up the dangers for the women but they are also taking risks with this shit. I don't fully get, some of it, you get the feeling, I think, radium and uranium and shit when people first started fucking with it, I think it kind of, there's a high, I don't know if it's like an actual physical high that it affects your brain, but like because of all of the buzz around this, because of how new and exciting it is, it deranges people a little bit.

I don't know that, I don't think there's like a medical or pharmacological, I think it's a psychological thing, but it does appear to be, we'll talk about this in a bit, but that does appear to be happening. Well, I love that you mentioned in the last, in the first one. Yeah. But I was thinking like, since the life expectancy

is so not great. Yeah. Like how many studies could there have been possibly done? Oh, there's none at this point, right? Right? No. Like, for somebody, like, you might absolutely be 100% correct. Like, how would you check that?

Yeah. I mean, they know that it can kill you just because, like, pure radium will, like, burn people, people have died as a result of that. But the idea that, like, tiny amounts, like, for one thing, it hasn't been being used long enough that people who are being exposed constantly to smaller doses aren't getting cancer yet. So you can't really like, it's just not as, it wasn't immediately clear, although as we'll talk about, they did know enough that they should have been taking precautions, right?

Yeah. But they certainly don't know nearly as much as we know now, right? And part of why they're not giving these girls PPE is that the paint used by the radium girls is so diluted. They're like, it can't, this is not enough to be dangerous. And again, part of how they're thinking about this, they're not thinking about this the way we think about radiation, which is like, yeah, you want to be exposed

to as little radiation as possible, right? They're thinking about it as well. In high doses, super concentrated radium can be very dangerous to people, but in lower doses, it's a medicine. It treats these different illnesses. So it's like, they're thinking about it the way you think of aspirin, right? Obviously, if you were to like, chow down on a brick of aspirin, you would get very sick.

But if you take a pill when you've got a headache or whatever, you feel better, you know? That's kind of how they're thinking about this, right? So they're like, well, in these doses, it's not going to hurt these girls, right? Now, obviously, this is absurd, as Kate more rights in a column for BuzzFeed. Radium's luminosity was part of its allure, and the dial painter soon became known

as the ghost girls, because by the time they finished their shifts, they themselves would glow in the dark. They made the most of the perk, wearing their good dresses to the plants so they'd shine in the dance halls at night, and even painting radium onto their teeth for a smile that would knock the suitors dead. Grace and her colleagues obediently followed the technique they'd been taught for the painstaking handiwork of painting the tiny dials, some of which were only three and a half centimeters wide. The girls were instructed to slip their paintbrushes between their lips to make a fine point, a practice called lip lip pointing or lip dip paint routine as playwright Melanie Marnick later described it

Every time the girls raised the brushes to their mouths. They swallowed a little bit of the glowing green paint So that's that's great. That's good. Yeah, yeah Now one of the women who instructed grace in this technique later recalled to an interviewer. The first thing we asked was, does this stuff hurt you? Naturally, you don't want to put anything in your mouth that is going to hurt you. Mr. Savois, the manager, said it wasn't dangerous that we didn't need to be afraid. Now this was a lie. Even giving the incomplete understanding of radiation at the time, they knew enough to know that there was a danger to the job of these women.

Again, the men handling radium and labs are wearing lead aprons and tongs and shit. These women are not even warned that those precautions exist, right? They're not being told that there isn't a amount of radium that's dangerous, because that's common knowledge to scientists. But to lay people, there's no knowledge that there's any danger to this stuff. It's like widespread.

And so even though I think a lot of these guys legitimately believe they were not being exposed to enough to hurt them, these women were not being told that there are any potential dangers to radium, which like is irresponsible. The fount is particularly bad because the founder of the U.S. radium corporation, which employed the radium girls, was a scientist named Sabine von Sochocki. He literally invented the paint that they used, and he was aware of the dangers of radium even in smaller quantities. Again, this is not just some businessman who, like, adopts this because it's good money, this is a

scientist. He had worked personally with the curies in the earliest Radium Research. He had seen radiation burns, and he had been injured by radiation himself, and I'm going to quote from the Radium Girls here. From them, and from the specialist, and he had been injured by radiation himself, and I'm going to quote from the radium girls here. From them, and from the specialist medical literature he had studied, Vonsachaki understood that radium carried great dangers. The curries by that time were intimately familiar with radium's hazards, having suffered many burns themselves. Radium could cure tumors, it was true, by destroying unhealthy tissue, but it was indiscriminating

in its powers, and could devastate healthy tissue too. Vonsa Chucky himself had suffered its silent and sinister wrath. Radium had gotten into his left index finger, and when he realized he hacked the tip of it off. It now looked as though an animal had not it. Of course to the layman, this was all unknown. The mainstream position, as understood by most people, was that the effects of radium were all positive, and that was what was written about in newspapers and magazines.

So again, this guy... That figure shit is intense, dude. Yeah, like he cut his own finger off when he got a little bit of it in there. He knows these girls are taking a risk and he just doesn't care, right? Like, I mean, the sexism joke earlier, which, I'm sure, is a part of it, but I mostly think honestly it's a classism thing, right? It's like, you don't give a fuck. Like, you know, okay, I'm gonna recommend this book

that I've talked about before called Fashion Victims by Alice and Matthews David. I said you guys it, because I'm gonna do a podcast with her, but she talks about all of the different ways that clothes were essentially killing people that were making them and wearing them, but one of the things is like The people that work in the factories matter so little That their lives are totally an okay thing to sacrifice which is like what workers rights even had to be a thing

You know, yes, we're just like oh, yeah, we give a fuck about the people that make our shit. Like that would not even be an issue clearly. Anyway, I'm not saying anything new, but yeah. No, no, yeah. That's, I always valid to like bring up, especially when we, as we're in this new age of unionization, like there's a good reason why, because without unions and worker protections, they would literally just poison us all with radium

for a lot of life. Yeah, to death, and they don't care because there's a million more people. Why would you give a shit? Yeah. And again, I will say, as we're critiquing him for this very validly, he is also, again, he has this kind of irrational transfiction with radium, right? And by all reports, he was also pretty reckless with this shit. He was known to play with it to hold tubes of radium with his bare hands to watch this like he would turn the light off so he

could like watch its luminosity in the dark. He would expose his arm up to the elbow in radium solutions. Company co-founder George Willis was also really reckless. He would pick up tubes of radium with his like four finger finger and they were supposed to use four steps, but he would just use his hands. And again, these guys are so reckless with this stuff because they just kind of love it. And their colleagues are like, well, these guys are the scientists. If they're doing this, it must be safe.

And again, if you saw this in a movie and you do see it, and like, you know, a superhero movie when a villain or a woman is like drawing something, you're always like, this is so ridiculous. But listening the way that these people actually relate to uranium and shit, that's exactly it. I'm like, there's YB, psychological,

something component that is connected to it because like, yeah. That's not normal. No, and yeah, I do, I don't fully understand what it is, but something is clearly going on here, because these people are treating it like a fucking villain in a Spider-Man movie, treats like the Superhero's Sarah or some shit, right?

Like they're willing to foe right here. Yes. And it's interesting, because a lot, there are scientists, prominent ones, who are warning about this. One of them, normally, this is the only time we're going to bring up Thomas Edison in him not be the bastard, but Thomas Edison was aware of all this

and thought it was fucking crazy. He remarked right around this time, there may be a condition into which radium has not yet entered that would produce dire results. Everybody handling it should have care, right? That's, oh, get the only time Edison says something perfectly reasonable, but like, yeah, man, they probably should be wearing some protection.

He's basically like, we don't understand this stuff and you're just, you're sticking your arm into a vat of it. What is wrong with you? Like, this burns people. We should be careful here. Now, you will not be surprised to hear that the effect of all of this radium on the bodies of the young women painting these dials was nothing short of calamitous. The radium that they had eaten particularly settled inside their bodies, and basically

honey combs their bones with radiation. It is drilling holes inside their bones like Swiss cheese. This kills their marrow and it causes their bodies to literally collapse in on it themselves like a dying star. One worker, this young woman named Grace, her spine is crushed. She is like given a brace. It basically her spine just crumbles inside of her. Another girl has her jaw eaten away to a stump.

Some girls would shrink. They would like lose multiple inches because their leg bones are just crumbling and compacting from the inside. And while all of this is going on, their bones were glowing in the dark, right? So fucked up. Like it is some of these women first realized they were sick when they saw their, they would see their own bones glowing back at them in the mirror. Like what the fuck?

Yeah, it's insane. And like yeah, we've got a picture here. This is one of the radium girls who has, I mean, honestly, I don't mean to be like, blind about this. It looks like a 90s prosthetic. Like if you were gonna give someone a fake chin for like a skit where they're,

you know, you're trying to make them look like J. Leno or something, like that's what, but it's just a tumor. It's like a tumor that's a good eight inches of like chin, basically. Like, it's. I'll even more and it's also so filthy. It's, yeah tumor that's a good eight inches of like chin, basically. Like it's not even more and it's also so. Grooser. It's, yeah, it's really. I mean, it is. It's actually, it's more like the mass

of a brick that's just stuck under her jaw. Yeah. Like the tumors, these, these young women got are ghastly. Some of the most unsettling body horror shit I have ever encountered in my research. Like it is gnarly. And yeah, obviously by the time you have this kind of radium exposure, there's no cure treatment. You can't fix this. Like this is by the time your bones are glowing in the dark, you're dead, you know? But also like how much research and work would have to even be done for anybody to even try to reverse it. Yeah, I mean, there's no way to even like

There's so far behind the ball on that, but even then I think today by this point I don't think there's shit we could do for these girls. Oh, no, we can't yeah, I'm just saying like the amount of time You would need to figure out how to solve something like this like they do not have that time Yeah, no absolutely not like this is a death sentence and they you know these are not dumb People these women like they realize as soon as they they don't know what Radiation poisoning is because it's not really well known at that point, but they know By the time your bones are crumbling inside if you will I'm I'm going to die, right? They are not possessed of irrational hope here. They're very aware, like, oh my God,

my job has fucking killed me, I was lied to, right? Now, while they start coming out, going to the press, trying to get help, basically the equivalent of workmen's comp for getting poisoned at work, the radium industry, these companies making the paints, painting the dials, deny there is any danger to their products. They basically say these girls are crazy,

something else is wrong with them. Radium, we all know radium is a health product, right? And there's so little of it in this paint that no one could get harmed by it, right? And in fact, when the story that radium girls are getting sick breaks in the news the New York Times is like well we got a report on this see if you know see what's up to it you know who can tell us if these girls are full of shit or not our buddy William Bailey

so they call will Bailey the guy selling radium water and he's like there's no proof that radium is responsible for any of these deaths you know nobody gets sick from radium this is just nonsense they're women you know they don't know anything. It's just also awesome that if you want to know about a thing, you don't go to the people that have the thing. No. You're like, no, what the fuck can we do to learn from them? No, they'll, well, Bailey's a scientist.

We, The New York Times, didn't check to verify that he has any kind of degree, but he says he's a scientist. Who would lie about that? Not a man, so like, lady. I'm being a Harvard man. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, I bet that is a big part of it. I bet the fucking reporter who reached out

as some Harvard educated writer and was like, well, a Harvard man would never poison people for money. He would never lie on behalf of his industry. So now I will say, again, a lot of the doctors and stuff we're talking about this are not good people. There are some, these girls, you know, when they get sick, this is horrifying, and the physicians who are seeing them and realizing what's happened are horrifying, and some very brave crusading physicians basically go to bat against a significant chunk of the medical

industry and against the radium industry to like try to get not just get justice for these girls, because to his extent, that's impossible. But to try and stop people from being exposed to radium, right? Because they realize, oh, these girls are getting sick from radium paint. All of these products on their shelves are full of radium. Potentially, that tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people could be getting sick. We have to stop this shit, right? And the radium girls, though, I will say, you know, these doctors, a lot of these doctors,

they testify, they are great. The primary response to this attempt to kind of bring it into this industry is centered around these radium girls who are actively dying and basically organize a very effective crusade to bring their employer to some sort of justice and to put a stop to this shit. And these, again, this is an incredibly horrific story. These girls are aware we cannot be saved, right? We are doing this to stop other people

from getting sick and dying. Grace Friar, who is one of the one of the radium girls said at the time, it is not for my self-eye care, I am thinking more of the hundreds of girls to whom this may serve as an example. Kate Moore writes, quote, It was grace who led their fight determined to find a lawyer even after countless attorneys turned her down, either disbelieving the women's claims running scared from powerful radium corporations or being unprepared to fight a legal battle that demanded the overturned

of existing legislation. At the time, radium poisoning was not a compensable disease. It hadn't even been discovered until the girls got sick. And the women were also stymied by the statute of limitations, which ruled that victims of occupational poisoning had to bring their legal cases within two years. Radium poisoning was insidious, so most girls did not start to sicken until at least five years after they started work. They were trapped in a vicious legal circle that seemingly could not be squared. But Grace was the daughter of a union delegate, and she was determined to hold a clearly guilty firm to account. Eventually, in 1927, a smart young lawyer named Raymond

Barry accepted their case, and Grace, along with four colleagues, found herself at the center of an internationally famous courtroom drama. By now, however, time was running out. The women had been given just four months to live and the company seemed intent on dragging out the legal proceedings. As a consequence, Grayson and her friends were forced to settle out of court, but they had raised the profile of radium poisoning.

Just as Grayson planned. And you know, this is, again, you know, they're not able to take the radium girls, this first group of them grace. They're not able to take this case as far as they want to because they don't have much time, but they settle, they get money for their families and this becomes an international story. And so thousands hundreds, you know, at least hundreds of other women and I also assume an equal number of men at least working in various industries with radium, find out for the first time that this shit is dangerous, right?

And it is like, this is like a horror movie scene, right? As these stories start to come out, and they're being read in offices, where people are using radium paint and doing other shit with radium, right? One dialed out. And came in after brushing their teeth, with with their radium toothpaste. Yeah.

Yeah. Everyone's just looking at their glass of radium water being like, oh, no. One young woman who worked for another radium corporation, she's a dial painter as well, but in a different state, she's an Illinois. Catherine Wolf later recalled, there were meetings at our plant that bordered on riots. The chill of fear was so depressing that we could scarcely work. And now I bet you're wondering why the fuck would you keep working after you learn this? Well, you got to keep in mind a lot of this shit is breaking right at the start of the

Great Depression, right? And in the middle of the Great Depression. And so people are suddenly aware, oh my god, this is killing me, but also you know it will kill my family is if I can't buy food for my kids that I'm a single mother to suddenly. If we get shit pushed out on the street when there are no other jobs. So they really, this is like, it's an impossible situation, right? You don't want to die of cancer, but also starvation's right around the corner. Starvation's right there too.

Yeah, it's fucked up. So yeah, real bummer. But you know what's not a bummer? Sophia, these goods and services. These goods and services. That's not a bummer at all, just a good time. So have some products, folks. Right, tall. On March 16, 2000, two sheriff's deputies were shot in Atlanta.

Jamil Alamin, a Muslim leader and former Black Power activist, was convicted. But the evidence was shaky, and the whole truth didn't come out during the trial. My name is Mosey Secret, and when I started investigating this case in my hometown, I uncovered a dark truth about America. He says to me, you want me to take care of them for not doing something to pay you something? I said no, what you talking about? But I had no idea who he had become. That's how he approached you. He said that. Yeah, I'm thinking murder in a minute. I think that's what he was thinking to me.

From Tinderfoot TV, Campside Media, and I Heart Podcasts, Radical is available now. Listen to the new podcast Radical for free 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 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 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. In the new Amy and TJ podcast, Amy Roboc and TJ Holmes, a renowned broadcasting team with decades of experience delivering headline news and captivating viewers nationwide are sharing their voices and perspectives in a way you've never heard before.

They explore meaningful conversations about current events, pop culture, and everything in between. Nothing is off limits. This was a scandal that wasn't. And this was not what you've been sold. The Aimee and TJ podcast is guaranteed to be informative, entertaining, and above all, authentic. It marks the first time Robock and Holmes speak publicly since their own names became a

part of the headlines. This is the first time that we actually get to say, what happened and where we are today. Listen to the Amy and TJ podcast on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Now, we're back. So this is, it's also, you know, part of why people don't quit immediately, why there's like a lot of confusion in the industry among these workers is just like, well, we still need money. And another part of it is that all these radium companies, they're kind of, I haven't read precisely if the tobacco industry looks at how these companies respond

when they formulate their own responses later in the century to a similar sort of like, you know, revelation, but they use a lot of the same tactics that will later be used by Big Tobacco. And the biggest one is they flood the zone with disinformation. The Illinois firm that wolf worked at radium dial denied any responsibility and the way that they do this is they come in and say, you know, we're concerned, obviously, about our workers.

We don't want anyone to get hurt. So we did medical tests. You know, we studied, we did tests on these women who got sick to try and see if they had radium poisoning. Now, here's the thing. They had done medical tests on these employees. And those tests had shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that all of these women had radiation poisoning. So what does radium dial do? They just lie. They just say the test didn't show anything and they burned that fucking research. To further muddle waters, they paid for a full-page ad where they stated, if we at any time had reason to believe

that any conditions of the work endangered the health of our employees, we would have at once suspended operations. Now, listen, if we had known... Harvey Weinstein was some sort of a raper, we would have never allowed him to dominate the film industry like he has. Oh, God.

So here's the thing. This actually gets more ghoulish than that. This is one of the worst things I've ever heard about a company doing because not only are they hiding research that proves that their employees are getting sick from this work, not only are they lying to people where they continue to get exposed to more radium, not only are they putting out propaganda, but when their workers die, obviously families who are losing their kids could pay for an independent autopsy, could have research done, could have these bones studied, and that would prove that these girls, they steal the bones of these dead girls to hide, to like destroy them so that it can't be.

Like they're stealing the bones. Of their, of their dead employee. That is. Oh, and you gone ahead and you said, steals their bones. steal their bones. I think that might be the worst thing I've heard of a company doing to their workers.

That's not all their bones. It's a high bar, but that's, that's like that. I mean, when I say Goulish, I'm not like that's not even fake. That is literal ghoul shit. You are stealing the bones of a corpse. That is actual just literal ghoul shit. Motherfucking bones, my dog. Yeah, that is pretty bad.

So 1938, it's like when fucking, is it Mormons that convert? Oh, dead people, yeah, well, they'll make Anne Frank into a Mormon. Yeah, they'll come through a Jewish cemetery and be like, you're a Mormon now. Man, I have applied what I call the Anne Frank rule, which is that if you start to bring up or reference Anne Frank in anything other than, for example, the diary of Anne Frank, stop it.

Stop it. Don't do that. Let her be. She wrote her book, talk about the book if you want to. If you are bringing up Anne Frank for any other reason, ceased. It's not necessary. It's not necessarily the Martin Luther King rule. It's like, sorry, are you white?

You're not bringing the Luther King into your arguments. Thank you for the speech. Leave it be. There's putting things that he said. Just stop. Just stop. Let the man rest. He is not not to be made a part of this. Yeah.

So in 1938, not long after Catherine Wolfe, the stories had gone viral in her workplace. They're having these meetings, freaking out. Do we have to worry about getting cancer? Shortly after that point, Catherine wakes up with a tumor on her hip. And in very short order, it grows to the size of a grapefruit. Her teeth start to fall out.

The detail that like fuck me up about this is that she winds up. That's my nightmare. She's like picking fragments of her jawbone outside of her mouth, out of her mouth, like, because it's just crumbling inside of her. This is my fucking nightmare, honestly. Yeah. I literally have nightmares about this. Oh, God, it's, yeah, I can't imagine really much worse

other than like this happening to your kid, right? That's the only thing worse than this happening to you. Yeah. And I don't think I would be a functional person if I were going through this. Katherine launches a fucking war on her employer. Like while she is literally pulling fragments of her own jaw out of her head on a daily basis, her body is rotting on her. She fucking organizes a legal campaign against

them. She's so she's fucking these all of these ladies are fucking awesome. She soothes her employer, which is one of you know, and this is like not only is this not easy because they have a lot of money, but her neighbors start coming after her when she sues the radium dial company because it's the great depression. There's not a lot of other employers. So they're like, you're threatening everyone's ability to make a living, right?

They don't care that they're in danger, too. I want my husband to go to the job that's killing him. Yeah, exactly. Catherine does not let this stop her. She testifies before to judge. She like, the court case goes through again. The company tries to delay it. She gets too sick to go into court. And so she has, they have the judge and the lawyers show up to her house. She gives her like testimony on her deathbed. And she and her lawyer, Leonard Grossman, win their case. The horrific story of the Radium Girls builds popular support for a whole raft of new regulations.

A lot of our workers' regulations come out of the backlash to what happened to these girls. And in fact, Catherine and this whole, like the series of court cases launched by the Radium Girls are a major factor in the establishment of OSHA, right? This is a big part of how we get OSHA. And, you know, it is obviously does not save any of these young women, but they are continuing to save lives to this day before OSHA,

about 14,000 Americans died on the job every year. And again, this is like when the country's a third, the size that it is now, today about 4,500 workers die on the job every year, right? Still too many, but like that is like the, the, the, the, the, these, these girls saved a lot of lives, you know, while losing their own. It's a, it's as admirable a story as I've ever heard. You're a hero. So that is a long digression from the story of William Bailey, although he did tie into this, you know, he's giving comments to the New York Times, but you can't really talk

about radium poisoning without talking about the radium girls, nor should you. One crucial difference here between what the radium dial corporation, these other radium companies that these girls work at is doing, and what Bailey is doing, is that the death toll of the radium dial companies is very well documented because we have all these women who go to work there and they get sick and we know they died and we know it was because of the radium that they were exposed to at work. We don't know how many people died or were maimed as a result of all of the radiation

they got from Willough Bailey's products like because number one, it's a lower dose than the radium dial girls are getting, but they're taking it sometimes, and these people are taking it for years and then maybe 10 years later they get a cancer. And like, well, they were a smoker too. They now, of course, we know that if you're a smoker, you're going to get more lung cancer faster if you're also exposed to radium, right? It is not known.

We'll never know how many people died because of this guy's stuff, but like, he's tens of thousands of people are taking the radium products that he makes. Maybe more, I think his death toll is significant. I'm guessing this guy's got at least a 9-11 on him, you know? But I don't think it's provable, right? It should also be noted that the radium dial corporation and others were at least manufacturing products that did something, right?

They had a function. Bailey is just selling pure snake oil. Whether or not that makes him better or worse is pointless to discuss, but I do think the difference is interesting. It's also worth noting that the progress that came about as a result of the Radium Girls Brave Battle was not immediate. As late as 1930, the FDA had taken no serious action against Bailey or his compatriots, and these, this last court case like ends in 1928, right? So compatriots and these last court case like ends in 1928, right? So there is starting to be backlash, building, and people agitating to like really restrict where this stuff can be used.

But in 1930, the FDA is still like, we don't have any legal basis to go after this guy. Several warnings, the FDA does publish warnings because of all of these grisly photos of dying dial painters, but they don't really do anything. The FTC is a bit faster on the draw. In 1928, which is the year that Katherine Wolf soothes the radio and dial company,

they start an investigation into William Bailey's company, particularly into the claims he's making about Radathor. But this takes a while to work its way through the system. But so in 1930, two years later, they finally charge in with false advertising. Now, unclear if that would have been enough to bring him down. He has enough money at this point to have fought this. But this charge comes across at the same time

as another very significant development, which is what's going to actually bring it in to not just Bailey, but this whole industry. And of course, it's a rich white guy getting sick from radium poisoning, right? Oh no, that's the worst possible outcome. That leads to real fast changes. Even the imbuyers is an upper class athlete.

He's a competitive trap shooter. And he was the champion of the US amateur golf tournament in 1907. Oh yeah, he even said he was that kind of white. That's the way he is why he is golf champion white. He is also the CEO of a metal foundry. He is a millionaire who is famous for his parties and womanizing.

Smithsonian magazine writes that his quote, swav demeanor and social conquest at nearby girls schools earned him the nickname Foxy grandpa. So, that's probably, that's probably something criminal. Right, that grandpa. So that's probably school. That's probably something criminal. Right. That's probably that's probably bad. Yeah. Foxy grandpa. Yeah. Foxy grandpa. Yeah. Cause he's going after women or people who are so young. Right. Mm-hmm. I'm not sad. This guy winds up telling horrible. Yeah, town. Yeah. Like it is, you can't even sing.

It is funny that like you have these deeply sympathetic, really incredible people, these radium girls get sick and die and it slowly brings change. But like the worst man in the world gets sick on radium and it's this instant fucking backlash. Yeah. Seriously, it's like the like the look for us like rapist backlash. Yeah. Seriously. It's like the like the look costs like rapist guy. Yeah. And everyone's like, well, now we got an end radiation.

You do have to think of this guy. He's like a Gatsby type, right? Oh, of course I picture Lee at Leonardo DiCaprio. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's got like horse racing stables in multiple countries. Yeah. You said Foxy, Grandpa. I immediately saw Lee and Argy Capriot.

Yeah. Yeah. there you go. So his downfall even buyers his downfall begins in 1927. He's you know, attending the annual Harvard Yale football game and on his way back, he's got a private train, he owns a private train car. He's like partying with his friends and he falls drunkenly off of his top bunk and injures his arm. You know, he thinks it's just like a sprayrain or something, but the pain doesn't leave him. You know, he goes to a bunch of doctors, he takes different treatments for weeks, all these different physical therapies and, you know, months go by and it's just not, it's still this chronic pain.

He can't play golf anymore and the constant pain makes it, he can't get erections anymore. So he's like, anything, I'll do anything to deal with this. He's like one no golf, two no more trap shooting. And three no more pussy, like I will kill myself. Yeah, you have to fix me, Doc. So he's got all this money. He shops around for doctors until he finds one named Charles Moyer. Now, Moyer is one of these doctors who is aware of Bailey's kickback program on Radathor

and is like, if I get this rich guy to take a shitload of Radathor, I'll get in a fucking, I'm getting a pointer, I'm getting a couple of points off of each bottle he buys, right? So, buyers tries this stuff. He like says, hey, try this Radathor shit, it'll cure you. Buyers tries it and he likes it, right? He feels energized. He starts feeling like his old self again. He can get hard, he can play golf. Again, I don't know is this the placebo effect? He just finally did his, always his arm just actually healing and he should have given it more time. I don't

know, but he claims to feel fucking great. And in fact, he falls, he is, he is like the power user of Radathor, right? He's drinking on a daily basis, he's drinking three times the maximum, maximum recommended dose, and he loves it that his gifts, he starts buying cases of it for his friends and loved ones, like, but he's also like taking it off label, right? So like the three times the maximum amount. And his doctor's like, sure, that's just three times

as much money for me, fuck it. He buys cases whenever he gets a new girlfriend, and I think the term girl is very literal there. He'll give them cases of Radothor to drink for their own health, and he starts using it to water his race horses. No, don't fucking kill the horses. Yeah, yeah. Between 1927 and 1931, he personally consumes between 1,500 bottles of the stuff. Estimates that have been

done recently, you know, after the fact, when we started to learn how to measure radiation better, scientists now estimate that he exposed himself to about three times a fatal dose of radiation over the course of four years, the equivalent of several thousand X-rays. Wow. So that's cool. Starting in early 1931, buyers began to experience increasing complications. His bones seemed to be eating themselves, splintering and dissolving one by one. His marrow failed and his kidney stopped working. A brain abscess destroyed his hearing.

By the end, he was bedridden, unable to move her here, but still alive and horribly alert. Now his social prominence means you cannot sweep this under the rug. This is a famous rich guy, a radiologist, Joseph Steiner, who looked at the radiographs of buyers rotting bones, launched a crusade of his own. He had to take action because the other doctors who worked with buyers, including buyers' personal physician, refused to acknowledge that this was radium intoxication, right? I think because they're all getting kickbacks. Like, no, man, you're not sick because of radium.

You just need to drink more milk. So this guy's stiener is like, no, this is fucking radium poisoning. He's been poisoned by this stupid drink he's taking. And he makes this enough of a noise about this, that a government commission is formed to investigate. And they have buyers again, he becomes another person, he testifies from his sick bed right before he dies to this commission.

An attorney who was present to that testimony later described, quote, a more gruesome experience and a more gorgeous setting would be hard to imagine. We went to Southampton where buyers had a magnificent home. There we discovered him in a condition with beggar's description. Young and years in mentally alert, he could hardly speak. His head was swathed in bandages. He had undergone two successive jaw operations. And his whole upper jaw, except in two front teeth,

and most of his lower jaw had been removed. All the remaining bone tissue of his body was slowly disintegrating, and holes were actually forming in his skull. Jesus Christ. Yeah, pretty fucked up, pretty bad. On December 19th, 1931, the commission issued a cease and desist to Bailey's company. This did not help buyers. He dies in early 1932, but his death provided the impetus for the FDA to push for expanded

power so that they can take action against quack medication. A lot of the FDA is what teeth that has come out of this period as a result of this. A backlash boiled over from the medical community against patent drugs like Radathor. Regulations came quickly and Bailey's business collapsed. He escaped any personal consequences for this or his role in any other countless number of deaths, though. We know of at least one female friend of his who died because he kept giving her Radah Thor, but the number of people who developed cancer as a result of taking his and, you know, his other products is kind of unknown. Bayley does become persona non grata after this point. He's, you know, the press starts

going after him. He's like, hounded in the streets by journalists and stuff. There's these constant inquiries from like Newark Public Health officials. Eventually he has to flee town, right? Worker or reporters find him at his office front at the Adino Ray Company in East Orange. And when they ask what kind of business he's conducting, he's like, it's an advertising business. And they're like, well, the name on the door is the same as this radiation product you were selling.

And he's like, oh no, the name on the door doesn't mean a thing. I'm not selling anything radioactive. Eventually he has to like drop out of public life entirely, although weirdly enough. I feel like he's like Army Hammer. Kind of. He has more of a second act than Army Hammer. Oh no. He somehow gets a job as the editor of a newspaper in New Jersey.

And like pivots to being a politics influencer, he writes books on like global politics and like health. In World War II, he's an aircraft observer under the first fighter command. He invents a method of swimming instruction for soldiers. He like puts together, he possibly, it's hard to tell how much of this, he definitely does some of this. Some of it's hard to tell how much of this, he definitely does some of this.

Some of it's lies, like he claims that he was the manager of an IBM electronics division during the war, and we don't actually know if that's the case or not, there's not evidence of it, really. I feel like Charlottes be charlatan, and so it's hard for me to like know if like any of the achievements or whatever it's it. Yeah, what we do know for a fact is that on May 16th, 1949, me to like know if like any of the achievements or whatever it's it. Yeah.

What we do know for a fact is that on May 16th, 1949 in Tinsboro, Massachusetts, he dies age 74 from bladder cancer. And this is almost certainly due to all of the radiation tonics that he drank over the course of his life. So he lasted too long still, but I don't know, Shane McGill and Beaton by a year. So there's that. You've never read the book of drink with Shane McGill and you should absolutely. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. This is not to you, but to like a person listening. Yeah. And listen to, I mean, all of his albums are great. I'm always, if you're looking for an in-road into the poges, Rum Sodomy and the Lash, never been beat. Incredible. And but also, like, read the book,

listen to the music at the same time, it's fucking tight. Hell yeah, hell yeah. Well, that's a happy note to end on. Listen, listen to, and reach, and be going, don't irradiate yourself for unclear health benefits. Yeah, just know. If you were gonna drink some uranium tonight. Maybe don't. Maybe don't.

Maybe know uranium to drink tonight. You do, girl. Okay, you can grow up to your brains and some uranium if you want. I don't know why to tell you. So, got anything to plug? Yes, please follow me to my new Patreon. Patreon.com slash Sophia Alexandra.

And you can read my writing there. And you can look at pictures and stuff and watch videos. It's a good ass time. So come through. Oh, yeah. Yeah, come through, check it out. And, you know, go to hell. I love you. We all love you.

Take care of yourself unless you're Bill Bailey. OK, bye. I'll show you Bill Bailey. Yeah. Behind the bastard is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website CoolZoneMedia.com or check us out on the IHR radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. On March 16, 2000, two sheriff's deputies were shot in Atlanta.

A Muslim leader and former Black Power activist was convicted. But the evidence was shaky, and the whole truth didn't come out during the trial. My name is Mosey Secret, and when I started investigating this case in my hometown, I uncovered a dark truth about America. From Tinderfoot TV, Campside Media, and I Heart Podcasts, Radical is available now.

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