Behind the Bastards - The Ballad of Doctor Orgasm

Episode Date: May 14, 2020

Robert is joined by Shereen Lani Younes to discuss the Doctor Charles Runels, the inventor of the “O Shot."FOOTNOTES: Plasma Donations from Recovered COVID-19 Patients Sexual Medicine Society on Unproven Regenerative Therapies for Erectile Dysfunction I Got a Shot In My Dick For Stronger Erections, and I Have Zero Regrets The O-Shot "I had the controversial O Shot injection in my vagina" Kim Kardashian Is Suing the Vampire Facials Inventor Not All Orgasm Doctors are the Same Dr. Runels Helps Vampire Procedure Providers Protect Women by Blocking Infringers The Secret Legal Story Behind the Most Famous Celebrity "Vampire" Selfie Spend Two Days with the Inventor of the O-Shot Donut Pussy Westport doc uses ‘O-Shot’ to restore sexual satisfaction for women Dr Orgasm will see you now: is the O-Shot what women need for better sex? The troubling backstory behind the “O shot®” Does the “O Shot®” give insanely good orgasms or is it a “no shot” Platelet‐rich therapies for musculoskeletal soft tissue injuries Orgasmic Disorder Why So Many Women Don’t Have Orgasms Where does the female orgasm come from? Scientists think they know FDA Letter Who is Charles Runels? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands.

Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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. This is probably a bad call. In any case, this is a show about bad people, the very worst people in all of history, and my guest today is Shereen Laniunas. Woo, it's me, I'm back, I'm back in the comfort of my own home. How do you feel about me gaslighting my audience about the fact that there are no other podcasts in order to keep them locked into my content stream?

I actually found it very entertaining and ingenious in a way that I wasn't expecting. I think making them believe this is the only source, you're making yourself essential to them. Yeah, people talk a lot about the downsides of gaslighting, but nobody talks about how good it can be for making money with a podcast. The inverse is there's so much to be consumed, but you just constantly telling them there isn't. I think that's pretty smart.

I will say, though, the word ingenious doesn't make that much sense to me. This is a side note, completely just a semantic thing I just realized is that genius is smart, but then ingenious should be not smart just because of the way that prefix is usually used. But in this case, it means even more smart, which is just my own, this is how my brain works now. I don't know how to have conversations. It's very, I'm frustrated by ingenious and I'm frustrated by inflammable.

And I know there's like a small cadre of grammar obsessives who have will explain how it completely makes sense that both of those words mean what they mean. I don't care. I disagree with grammar, regular. I regular disagree with grammar often. Me too, Robert, me too. So Shireen, you are the co-host of the ethnically ambiguous podcast and my friend and co-worker and, you know, and a really talented filmmaker and a talented filmmaker, award-winning filmmaker.

And there's really that's not true. No other way to to just launch into this episode than by saying, how do you, how do you feel about orgasms? You're welcome for booking you on this, this is, this is, um, now I know why Sophie told me I was coming in blind and now I was thinking about what I was getting myself into before I turned on my microphone before I agreed to jump on this call. This was not anywhere in the realm of my, uh, okay, well, I think orgasms are great. Um, I wouldn't know though, personally, if we really want to get intimate here right

off the head. Has it been even three minutes in this podcast? I don't know. It's a bad one. So. Wow. Okay. Well, um, yeah, that actually is kind of on topic, uh, Shireen, because, um, yeah, that's

was I selected for this on purpose or is this, this is, this can be a coincidence. Yeah, I just, I, yeah, I thought you'd be a, uh, uh, we talk about grifters together and our subject today is a grifter. So I thought you'd enjoy talking about him, um, and I decided to open things with that incredibly inflammatory question, um, because, because it's my podcast and I'm a monster. Wait. Is the question relevant? Yes.

It's extremely relevant. Yeah. Yeah. We're, we're talking about a guy who goes by the nickname doctor orgasm. Um, oh, cute. Yeah. Uh, so it's probably not, uh, a surprise to anyone listening, uh, or to any of us that, that men and women have, have very different orgasm experiences, uh, and this is rooted

heavily in evolutionary biology. Um, and one of the things that illustrates this difference is the incredible density of studies and articles about studies, um, all trying to unravel what's often described as like the mystery of the, uh, of the vaginal orgasm. Um, it's seen, yeah, yeah. And it's, I mean, this is really funny to be, okay, I need to like be candid here during this whole quarantine thing, like the, the, me not having, me not experiencing this feeling that everyone else seems to like relish in has been this like thorn in my side for like

most of my adult life. And I think this, this whole entire quarantine time has, I've been doing like a lot of research on this to be honest about like why someone have more trouble than others, like what it means to actually let go and like experience and receive pleasure. Like I have a lot of difficulty receiving good things, including like just like, even just like feeling nice. And I've been, this is, this is actually hilarious that we're talking about this because I've been like genuinely like studying like, yeah, like the ways to make myself feel okay enough

to experience this thing that has always been this like this inside joke that everyone else understood. And I, and I also think women talking about this pressure, they don't talk about it enough. Like I don't think society at large talks about women trying to overcome this pressure if they're not like already in the know of how to utilize or like receive pleasure. And so anyways, I feel like I've done my homework, even without meaning to. I had, I did not know this about you going into the episode, but that's actually going to be helpful in terms of trying to like parse this out because this is a more confusing

episode. It's not impossible. This is a medical grifter who claims to be able to cure women's who haven't, who have trouble or an inability to have orgasms. And for a number of reasons, I'm fairly certain he's a grifter, but you can find some people, some women who say that he helped them and it's a very complicated story. And it's more complicated due to the fact that like we, as I'm sure like your research has suggested, we don't really have a great, we don't really have a great scientific lockdown

on the vaginal orgasm, right? Like it's, it's, it's, there's a lot that's kind of up in the air about it from a research standpoint. Yeah. I mean, everyone's just so different. I think that's what boils down to. There's no like, there's no just like, I don't know, to put, to be crude, there's no like pump that you just like go at until something comes out of.

It's not like, I don't know. Yeah. Men literally have a button that you can press. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. It's, it's not for men or it's not for, you know, people with, people with, what's the

most appropriate term to use, wing dang doodles. The wing dang doodle orgasm is a pretty simple thing, right? Yeah. It's straightforward. It's self-displanatory. I think like, I don't want to get, sorry, I keep taking over this conversation. No, no, no. I mean, you're the, that's why you're here.

Please take it, take it over. So like, so when you're a boy, when you're like a prepubescent boy, like it's, it's understood that you're going to be going through changes, that you're going to be going through puberty and that means like exploring your body, like a wet dream for a guy is a pretty standard point of puberty. Yeah. But for girls, you're never encouraged or even told to explore yourself. And that makes you feel even not even on purpose, but it makes you feel a lot of shame about

your body. And I was raised pretty sheltered and I didn't, I remember really disliking my, I was disgusted by my, my genitals, like I didn't understand them. I didn't under, like I, there was a good portion of time before I like embrace my sexuality. And I'm still like overcoming those things now because of how you're raised as a girl, just to like shut it down and to protect yourself and to not be a sexual being because that invites unwanted attention. And so I think being raised like that and never like being encouraged to explore yourself,

it leads to adult women needing to figure it out even after they've already had sex for the first time or the second time or the 30th time or whatever. So, um, yeah, sorry, no, no, no, no, please. Yeah. And it's, it's one of the other things that it does is because there's so little conversation about this. And especially so little conversation that's like had in a, a kind of, I don't know, structured way, like our, our, our educational system doesn't build this in and most parents feel

too awkward to really talk about it. And so because a lot of women don't ever get to have these conversations and grow up, like with this thing of like, I, I, I don't know how to experience this. I don't know how to like get like, like this, this kind of mystery about their own bodies. Whenever there is a black hole of knowledge like that, it provides an incredible opportunity to grifters. Um, it's the same reason why when you have a huge virus hit, right? Like all these people start cropping up and, and are able to make claims like, oh, we know

how, I know how to cure this. I know how to treat this. Because like this weird mysterious thing that people don't understand is, is, is a problem. And there's kind of a vacuum of official information. And there's a lot of, there's actually like a pretty decent sized industry of grifters who just target women who are, aren't able to orgasm or, or don't orgasm as often as they want to. Like that's a big, like even when I was in India, there were huge like tantric sex, uh,

institutes. And like if you spent enough time in the towns where they were located, you would start hearing stories about the men who ran them. And they were like, almost, I'm not going to say tantric sex is bad, but all of these, all of these guys were basically cult leaders, right? Like, it's this, um, it's just this, this thing that happens. Um, and yeah, yeah, it's so unfortunate and it makes me so enraged because I understand that like, like, like this desperation to just feel something that you're, you're led

to believe is like a very human primal thing. And you feel, you feel almost broken that you can't experience it, like coming from my experience. Like I, maybe I was just, maybe it was, it's like too late or like maybe I wasn't raised correctly or maybe I know it's, it's my, why can't my body do this? And so you become an adult and you become so desperate to figure out how to do these things. I can, I can see someone getting misled just because desperation will lead you to do that.

And it's, it's this really, um, intimate and brutal thing to experience with yourself to, to have that being taken advantage of is so criminal in my opinion, because it's just I'm just mad, yeah, yeah, you'll get, you'll get mad every time on the show. So before we get into this specific orgasm grifter, I do want to talk, I wanted to go over a little bit of like orgasm research. Um, so just to kind of talk about like what's out there right now, which we'll help explain some things that are going to come into the story later on. So again, there's not a lot that's like ironed out, known for sure about the vaginal orgasm.

Some researchers suggest that, that they play a psychological role in reproduction, obviously like there's no question about the role of the male orgasm in reproduction, but there is a question for, um, yeah, the vaginal orgasm and this, like, uh, so the, the, the researchers who suggest a psychological role say that basically because these orgasms feel good, it makes people with vaginas want to have more sex, which leads to more babies. And this is like pretty logical, right? You can at least, you can see a through line there. Um, yeah.

So, uh, one thing that these folks will point out is that, uh, solitary animals such as cats have what's called male induced ovulation. Uh, and that's where an egg is only released, uh, direct from the ovary during sex. Um, and there is evidence that cats orgasm in case you were curious. Uh, we know they release prolactin, which is a hormone that human ladies get flooded with, uh, when they orgasm and when they ovulate. Uh, one 2016 study I found suggested that the hormone, uh, release with the orgasm is probably an evolutionary holdover from when our ancestors moved from induced ovulation

like cats to the spontaneous ovulation that, that we currently enjoy, um, enjoy might be the wrong word there, but like, yeah, so that's, that's one theory. Um, and this study suggested that once, uh, ovulation, once like in our evolutionary timeline, when ovulation stopped, depending on like, uh, a man or, you know, a penis getting in there, uh, the clitoris moved from inside the vaginal canal to its current position. Um, and one piece of good news from all of this is that the clitoris evolutionarily speaking is not going to go away anytime soon. Um, the penis evolves from the same part of the embryo.

So as long as, uh, there are wing dang doodles, uh, there will be, uh, clitoris. So that's good news. If anyone was worried about losing those in a couple thousand years, science says it'll be fine. Yeah. Whoo. Yeah. I was concerned.

It also means that men are going to keep their nipples. Yeah. Oh, thank God. Yeah. I was worried about that. Those nipples are useless. Yeah. Well, no, they are not.

They absolutely are not. Oh, come on. A lot of uses for male nipples. Um, you can hang stuff off them. That's mostly it. Okay. Touché. So, uh, yeah, I, I, I think that's, that's good background to get because the medical

grifter we're talking about today, um, is a doctor who claims to be able to vastly increase the likelihood and quality of women's orgasms. And he does this by injecting their own blood back into their labia. Um, fuck. Yeah. This is probably nonsense, although it is not definitively nonsense because the exact kind of treatment this guy is using is still something that's, that's being studied. Um, but this is a case where there, it's possible there are some validity to what he's doing

medically, but the doctor himself is absolutely a piece of shit and a grifter. Um, and the fact that he is a huge population. Well, tell me more. Yeah. Yeah. Tell me more. I'm intrigued. Yeah.

This is a, this is an interesting one. So the fact that this doctor has a sizable population of interested customers is due in large part to the fact that as we kind of led this episode talking about vaginal and clitoral orgasm are actually pretty rare. People with penises report orgasms about 95% of the time and heterosexual encounters, while people with vaginas report orgasms only about 50% of the time. The reasons for this are hotly debated, but they actually kind of seem pretty obvious to me based on just the data.

So for one thing, age, education and income all increase the likelihood of orgasm for people with vaginas. Yeah. And this suggests that knowledge and particularly like kind of knowledge of oneself and one's biology increases your odds as a vagina haver of having an orgasm. 49%. Yeah. That makes sense.

Yeah. Yeah. Only about 49% of people with vaginas orgasm from casual sex, while 70% orgasm in committed relationships. And to me, this suggests the same thing, which is that orgasms are at least somewhat a project of knowledge and having a partner who knows your bits increases your chance of having an orgasm. And, and I will say, I didn't like say the word masturbation earlier when I was talking

about like exploring your body or anything, but I do think the fact that we don't talk about women masturbating and like, we're not really like, there, I mean, like now they're like, we're being more progressive. There's certain section of like youth that's like really all about talking about it. But when I was growing up, I didn't masturbate. Like I didn't know how I didn't know I still low key don't really know how. So because it's just, I'm not, I'm still trying to understand like, like how to receive pleasure. I'm so bad at receiving anything, let alone like a compliment or like, like how am I supposed

to receive fucking orgasm for myself? But I think our obsession with only talking about male pleasure and male masturbation leads women to never understand, like they don't have the knowledge about how to, to feel good sexually because they're not encouraged to it. And there's just so much shame around it. And even like, I remember watching porn when I was like a teenager, purely as like, studying it. I just wanted to understand what it like, what people were up to, like, what was this

thing I was missing. And every time they would show like a woman masturbating, it was this like, just crude, like, just like, it was just so, it wasn't good enough. Like it didn't, it didn't work, you know, I don't know if that makes sense. It's just, it made the scene too easy. And sorry, I keep getting distracted. I'm just, no, no, no, I mean, bring up a lot of shit, Robert. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, and you're not, you're, you're very far from alone in that

because like, you know, the data suggests like, this is a hugely common problem. Just in general, people who have vaginas not orgasming as often as they would prefer is very common. And there are actually quite a lot of women who have what's called female orgasmic disorder. And that's exactly what it sounds like. It's an inability to orgasm. And it is also incredibly treatable. Sex therapy is successful 65 to 85% of the time.

Well, that's good to know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that is a thing that exists. There's treatment options and the data suggests that they are very, they are very often effective. But those numbers still leave a lot of unsatisfied people with vaginas out there. And unluckily for them, Dr. Charles Runnels is around to take their money. Charles Runnels is the inventor of the O-Shot, a controversial therapy meant to correct a lack of vaginal orgasms. Dr. Runnels has been branded Dr. Orgasm by some and he's a big old piece of shit.

Now if you've not heard about his O-Shot, you may have heard about his other groundbreaking medical treatments, the vampire facial. This is the guy who did the vampire facial. Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah. Wow. It's this guy.

He's the same dude. Yeah. It's the same guy. The vampire breast list. Honestly, anything. But like coming from a guy, I'm already wary of anyone that's like, I can give women more orgasms. Like wouldn't a woman know the most intimately how to do that?

Like I'm already like, I'm intrigued only because like I'm so fascinated by the subject. Yeah. And I think just by default, that information, that claim coming from a guy is like already kind of like loses credibility for me because he will never understand what a vagina is capable of. You know what I mean? Yeah. But I don't know.

1000%. Yeah. You won't change your opinion on that over the course of this episode. No. Can't wait. So in addition to the vampire facial and the vampire breast lift, Dr. Runnels is the inventor of the Priyapa shot, which is a needle that you shoot into your dick to make your dick orgasm better.

So he's, he has picked, he's picked a path for himself and his path is, his path is sucking out people's blood and then shooting it back into pieces of them to gain kind of unclear medical benefits. Like that's this guy's thing. And the specific medical treatment that he is involved in and that all really all of his, his, his treatments are one second. The specific medical treatment that he focuses on, that kind of all of these different things are a type of is called platement rich plasma, plasma injection or PRP injections or PRP

therapy. Yeah. Yeah. It's a mostly when it comes to like skin rejuvenation and increasing cell turnover and all that stuff. Yeah. I don't think it's like, I think there's still, as far as I know, like the jury's still out as far as like it's actually bullshit or not.

Yeah. We'll talk about that some. It's certainly grown more popular over the years. And for folks who don't know, you're familiar with, I'm going to guess a lot of people have are somewhat familiar with this, but the basic idea is that a patient's blood is drawn out and then put through a centrifuge and the centrifuge concentrates all of the platelets, which are the blood cells that are largely responsible for the fact that your blood has healing functions.

Those platelets are then sucked back up and then injected into damaged or diseased body tissue in order to stimulate healing. And obviously it makes sense that people would try this as a therapy, right? Like the lot, there's logic to like, oh, yeah, I can see how if you concentrate like the healing parts of the blood and then shoot it into wounded. Yeah. Maybe that'll work. It's certainly falls under the list of medical treatments.

I was like, yeah, it was worth a shot. People should have given it a, yeah. Wow. We'll give it a go. But it got really popular just with like celebrities and stuff, like not like wounded or damaged skin. It was just like to increase or to, it was like marketed as like a youthful like fountain of things.

Yeah. Exactly. And it started the very first PRP therapies were in sports medicine and largely kind of as a way for professional athletes and the like to more rapidly heal from rotator cuff injuries and sort of similar, you know, wounds, the kind of stuff that like, you know, a lot of times you like, you pull an ankle, you fuck your rotator cuff up, you fuck up a knee and like it kind of stays a little bit fucked up forever. And so this was kind of, they were trying to figure out how to deal with that, right?

Like maybe we can accelerate the body's healing so we can actually get this shit fixed. Yeah. And there are, there are some professional athletes and stuff who swear by this treatment. The actual scientific data on how well it works is very muddled. I found a systematic review in the Cochran library that analyzed 19 studies on PRP therapies. And when they did a bias analysis, only three of these studies were judged to be at low risk of bias because obviously a lot of people with financial interest in PRP therapy working fund the studies into whether or not PRP therapy works.

But even when they kind of excluded the bias studies, the existence studies didn't show evidence of any significant effect from PRP therapy. There is some evidence that it might help reduce pain, but that's really about all we can say conclusively. There's a decent amount of evidence that it can help reduce pain when you're healing from an injury in certain circumstances. There's really nothing hard to support the claims that it accelerates healing, which doesn't mean that it doesn't because this is still pretty new, but like the jury's definitely

still out. And of course, there is no clinical, I want to get this right out of the way, there is zero clinical evidence that it helps with work asms, like not a drop. That is just a wild progression of like, yeah, like where else can I put blood? Yeah. Oh, people are stuck. Where else can I inject someone's blood? Yeah.

Jesus, man. Yeah. And it put one of the things he's kind of taking advantage of is that surprisingly enough, like labial tissue, you can actually do this kind of stuff and it doesn't really hurt. Because the place that he injects it into, there's actually not a lot of, like you don't have a ton of, you don't know, like all of that area isn't super sensitive, like there's actually parts that aren't because like it's meant to tear apart during childbirth and stuff. The way you word it, that was very graceful.

Yeah, that's not nice. Thank you for that injury. Yeah. Sorry. But it's like, this is bodies. This is where we all came from. Like we all, yeah. I could, I could see how someone can rationalize this because when you are, when you're orgasming,

when you're supposed to receive pleasure, like all the blood is supposed to rush there. So that, I could kind of rationalize this, this concept of like, well, if you're having trouble, then I'll just put blood where you're supposed to have blood and then, then everything is solved. But it's not that simple. Yeah. Like all of the best bullshit medicine, it, there's a level to which it makes kind of intuitive sense where you're like, oh yeah, this, I can, if you explain the idea of the

treatment to someone, just a random person on the street, I think most people be like, oh, okay, yeah, I can see how that might work. Like it's not inherently nonsense, you know, the data suggests that it is, but it's the, the idea itself, it does kind of fall under the, yeah, probably it was worth trying, right? You know? Right. Oh my gosh. You know what won't inject your own blood back into your genitalia?

The products and services that support this podcast have never done that unless we are running an ad for, for the O shot, in which case, please don't get that until you finish listening to the podcast. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt.

And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say.

For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back, uh, okay, whew, we're back, what a journey, so speaking of journeys, before I start talking about how the O-Shot came to be, I want to talk a little bit about the clinical background of its inventor, one Dr. Charles Runnels, aka Dr. Orgasm. Now I became aware of Dear Charles through the writing of one Dr. Jin Gunter, an OBGYN and an author of a book called The Vagina Bible. She is professionally angry at scammers who push nonsense medicine on the vaginas of the

world and she is not a fan of Dr. Runnels. I love her already. Yeah, yeah, she seems to know what she's talking about. She certainly has the professional qualifications to be talking about this subject, absolutely. I just love an angry woman, you know, I just love an angry woman, that's all it is. Yeah, she's really angry. And I low key, not even low key, because like a third of my content is based on it. One of my very favorite genres of thing on the internet is like furious doctors writing

about like medical scammers, I just, I love that shit. So as Dr. Jin Gunter points out, Dr. Runnels, the Dr. Orgasm, is an internal medicine doctor. And internal medicine doctors, their training does not focus very much on the vagina. During his medical school, Charles Runnels likely spent a pretty minimal amount of time studying gynecology. He may have done a few months of residency at a gynecological clinic, but that would have been the most. So if this Orgasm doctor doesn't have a background in gynecology, what's his background in?

Well, on his own website, Dr. Runnels says that his first love was medical research. And he lists his chief medical hero as Dr. Werner Forsman. In 1929, Forsman performed the very first heart catheterization on his own heart. And this Werner Forsman is a legitimate medical badass. Runnels writes that this guy, quote, tied the nurse down and cathed his own heart, then walked up three flights of stairs in order to photograph it. And this is largely accurate, although the truth is that the nurse agreed to let Dr. Forsman tie her up because he needed clean instruments and she had access to them and he might die

doing this and he didn't want her to get in trouble. So it was kind of like they were kind of doing this so that if he died doing this, she wouldn't get blamed for it. That's why he tied her up. But yeah, it's a cool story. It's actually like a really awesome medical story. It's like out of the nick or something. Yeah.

Forsman had this theory about how you could catheterize a heart and he had been denied a permission to attempt it because it was seen as too dangerous. So he decided he had to work it out, do it on himself and he worked out a deal with the nurse so that they could do this and not endanger her life and career. Why Dr. Runnels idolizes Dr. Forsman will become clear presently. For right now, it's important for people to know that Forsman spent a lot of his life reviled by the medical community for his irresponsible self-experimentation. He was only recognized as a genius after World War II when he finally received the Nobel Prize.

Dr. Forsman spent most of his life as a humble, grunt-level medical practitioner. He was a German military doctor in World War II, so he worked with the Nazi army. But he was like treating wounded people, which is I guess the least objectionable job you could have in Nazi Germany. And then he was like a town doctor. He was like a small town family physician for years and years and years. And after he won the Nobel Prize, he was actually offered a fancy job running a German cardiovascular institute, and he turned this down because he felt like he didn't know enough to do the

job well. Like he was like, he was a very humble man, in other words. So Dr. Runnels idolizes this man, and there's a lot to idolize in Dr. Forsman, Nazi service aside, just like it's a cool medical story. And when Runnels first got his MD, his desire was to be a medical researcher. Now I don't have a tremendous amount of detail about Dr. Runnels' early life, and most of what we do have comes from an article in The Guardian that, well, not bad, is largely just repeating what Runnels says about his own early life.

He says that as a teenager, he endured horrific cystic acne. This is not what most of us was described as bad acne. I'm sure we all have a bad acne story. He was one of those people who's like whole face was just this oozing, painful mass of sores. He claims it was, yeah. And there was at least one kid at my school who had this kind of acne, and it did seem like a nightmare.

No, it's brutal. Yeah. Runnels claims that his acne was so bad that he forgot what his own nose looked like. And yeah, there's not many worse ailments you could have as a teenager. This was obviously disastrous for young Charles' personal life. He recalls praying to God, if you could make me attractive, I will find something good to do with it. And luckily for him, a miracle cure soon did arrive.

Dermatologist treated his skin with X-rays, which cured the cystic acne but left him with a lifetime of melanomas, which have required constant treatment in order to stop from turning cancerous. As an adult, Dr. Runnels now claims that his childhood battle with cystic acne gave him enormous compassion for people suffering from incurable conditions. The pain of what I have called the hidden population. Now, if this story is true, it's certainly easy to see how it could have sparked his youthful desire to embark on a career as a medical researcher.

And that's exactly what he did. But unfortunately, he was not good at it. In 2004, he got approval to conduct a study on the efficacy of a new smallpox vaccine formulation. He got approval to do this, but he did not get approval to conduct the study on homeless people. However, it- Oh my God.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're getting right into- Oh my God. Oh my God. What a piece of trash. Yeah. Yeah, he's not great. Like, okay.

I could have sympathy. I was just thinking like, yeah, I have a, I have an emotional depth. I have an emotional depth to understand empathy and to sympathize with someone that has really bad acne and is going through a hard time, self-confidence or whatever. That does not give you a fucking green light to, oh my God, oh my God, what a fucking piece of shit. Yeah. Yeah, he's a real piece of shit.

God. This study is bad. God. Like, oh boy, howdy. So he, basically it's expensive to recruit subjects for a vaccine study and it's hard, but tricking hobos into letting you test drugs on their bodies is easy. And that's kind of just what he did. And he did, he did get approval to conduct the study on people from a homeless shelter

after he had already started testing them. Yeah. So he filled his- Ask for forgiveness, not for permission. Yeah. And there's a lot of other shadiness. So he filled his sample group with men and women from a local New Orleans homeless shelter, I think 22 of them.

And as the FDA later wrote, quote, you enrolled 21 indigent persons from a multi-service center for the homeless into either study, only after enrolling eight of these subjects, you received approval from the institutional review board IRB to enroll vulnerable subjects as described below. Regardless of the IRB's decision to approve the enrollment of vulnerable populations, persons utilizing the multi-service center for the homeless were unsuitable for consideration for these studies for many reasons, including but not limited to the following. These individuals were unsuitable because they were economically and or educationally

disadvantaged. Some subjects could not understand or follow the protocol requirements. For example, subjects, and it lists a couple of subjects, did not understand how to measure his or her temperature in order to complete his or her daily diary as they reported body temperatures ranging from 84 degrees Fahrenheit to 97. So one reason why this was bad is because like these people had to keep data on themselves in order for the study to make be of any value and they just weren't competent to, they didn't have the kind of education to do that.

The FDA's complaint continues, one requirement for doctors doing these sorts of studies is that they complete a vaccine risk assessment questionnaire at least six times during the study. The questionnaire asks about the health and medication use of people the study subject lives with. This is obviously a project for homeless folks who live in a center because their household contacts include every person, including staff and volunteers at that center. So this is a huge problem because again, if you're testing medicine on people to see if

it works, you have to know what other medications they're taking. You want to limit and control for that. And you have no fucking idea what people at a homeless center, many of whom are addicted to drugs themselves are actually taking. And you don't know what they have the option to take. You just can't. It's a bad group to use for a study like this. There's the moral problem of conducting a study on these folks because a lot of them

have mental illnesses that mean that they can't really provide informed consent. And then there's also the fact that you can't get good data out of these people because you can't control the things you need to in a study. There's a whole lot of reasons. This was the worst way to conduct a study. There's no upside. There's just a lose-lose. The upside is that it's cheap and it's easy if you don't care about actually performing

a good study. But that kind of negates his entire ethos that he's self-proclaimed, right? Yeah, it sure does. So there were a lot more problems too. We're not even done with this shit. Dr. Reynolds got his institutional research board to approve him to have an impartial witness observe the informed consent discussion that he got while recruiting these homeless people to act as guinea pigs.

So that was how he got permission after the study started to use homeless people as test subjects. And the way he did this was by promising to have an impartial witness who can make sure that these people were providing informed consent. And obviously the purpose of this was to avoid a ghoulish situation where mentally ill or drug-addled individuals were tested with experimental medications in exchange for money without understanding that they'd agreed to be tested with experimental medications in exchange for money.

That would be a horrible thing. So thank God he had an impartial witness, right? Wow. Thank God. Wow. I'm glad he had an impartial witness, right? Fucking motherfucker. But he had acne.

He had really bad acne though. So he's allowed to do this. Oh my God. I hate him. I hate him. You want to hear who his impartial witness was? Another homeless person that he was testing drugs on. Oh my God.

He's such a piece of shit. Like this is awful. Okay, but this is like pure evidence. This is pure evidence of him repeatedly taking advantage of those who are vulnerable. Like whether it's women that can't orgasm or people that have no other choice, you're still taking advantage of people that are vulnerable and like that's like 101 grifter, 101. Come on.

Yeah. And it gets worse. Like this is honestly one of the worst scientific studies I've ever heard of anyone conducting. So obviously people who are conducting proper medical studies are supposed to do a lot of research to understand the preexisting conditions of members of the study. So like you look at how their body is doing before you start putting meds on them. This is to avoid endangering people and to ensure that like the folks conducting the study learn as much as possible about, you know, how certain medications affect people

with different health conditions. So obviously all of Dr. Reynolds's patients underwent EKGs and blood and urine samples. But Charles just didn't tell his IRB about any of the adverse health conditions that he revealed in this process. So a bunch of people were found with heart problems. He just didn't say anything about it. And in fact, one of his subjects after being medicated was hospitalized for chest pain and he also didn't tell the IRB about that for more than two weeks.

So that's all really bad. It's horrible. Like this is one of the worst, like if you're a science person, read the FDA's complaint about this study because it's shocking how bad it is. The gist of how is he still allowed to practice medicine after this? Like that's what I'm well, that's what we're building for. Oh my God. He was.

Yeah. So, um, yeah, the gist of all this is Dr. Reynolds used homeless folks as test subjects and took the actions to obscure the fact that many of them didn't understand it was being done to them. He covered up their illnesses, all of this horrible stuff. In 2008, the FDA investigated him for this and initiated disqualification proceedings against him. And he was disqualified from working as a clinical investigator in 2009.

As a result of this investigation, Dr. Jim Gunter explains what that means, quote, getting disqualified by the FDA means a clinical investigator has repeatedly or deliberately failed to comply with applicable regulatory requirements or the clinical investigator has repeatedly or deliberately submitted false information to the sponsor or if applicable to the FDA in any required report. A disqualified clinical investigator is not eligible to conduct any clinical investigation that supports an application for a research or for marketing permit for products regulated by the FDA.

So he gets banned from being a medical researcher basically because he's so wildly irresponsible at it. Yeah. Yeah. And obviously because he's a subject of this show, but we know what happens. We know what happens. He gets famous for the vampire facial. Like he sure does.

He didn't have a, he didn't have a comeuppance. No. You know what I mean? This is not the comeuppance show. This is enraging. This is not the comeuppance show, although if we were to really dig into it, we could come up with a good, since this is an orgasm based episode, a good come joke based on the word comeuppance.

But I'm going to leave that to the listener to put together in your own head. You know what? Yeah. I didn't think of that when I said it out loud, but it's pretty good for you. It's there. You know, take it, take it for yourself, make the joke your own. You know? This is a DIY.

The comedy in this podcast is very often DIY. It's the only podcast out there, so take what you can get. Yeah. We're like the Ikea of jokes about bad orgasm doctors. Not a lot of money in being that. I don't know why we took this path. Anyway. Yeah.

Obviously, being at the subject of this podcast, Dr. Reynolds did not learn a goddamn thing from his failures or from his punishment after he gets banned from conducting medical research because of his, how horrifically irresponsible. He gets fined in 2000, also in 2009, $5,000 by the state board of medical examiners of Alabama for the misuse of hormone replacement therapy after he massively overdosed two women with testosterone. Wow. Yeah.

Yeah. And he defends his actions by saying that the hormone doses helped his patients just as he defends his actions with the vaccine trial by saying that he didn't know the subjects were homeless. What? Come on. Yeah. He's just a liar.

Now, yeah, Dr. Reynolds, again, when he gets talked about his misuse of hormone replacement therapy because he overdosed women with testosterone, he will say that it helped his patients. And I wanted to know what he meant by that, and eventually I was able to find a video posted to his website, which is called the Cellular Medicine Association titled Who Is Charles Reynolds? The association is run by him, and he made this whole video. He doesn't acknowledge that he was fined for doing this, but he does talk about how he started doing testosterone therapy for women.

And he, again, doesn't acknowledge that he hurt people doing this, but he does say that it gave them such high libidos that their husbands couldn't keep up. And so he started injecting their husbands with testosterone. And I can't tell you if that happened or not, but I can tell you that doesn't sound like good medicine. I'm not a doctor, but that seems like a bad medical call. So yeah, Reynolds says that in 2010 he started hearing about PRP therapy, which was then, again, mostly the province of sports medicine, although gynecologists had started using the

technique to inject platelets around the urethra of women who experienced urinary incontinence. And it does seem to help with that. There's some, I don't know if there's hard studies, but I know a lot of people say it helps with that, and I haven't seen any reason to believe it doesn't. But I'm going to let Dr. Reynolds himself explain what happened next. This is Dr. Charles Reynolds explaining what happens after he realized that PRP therapy was being used on people's faces. Back in 2010, someone brought to me a centrifuge that had been used by the orthopedic surgeons

to prepare platelet-rich plasma for the knees and by the dentist and wound care, wound healing. Excuse me. So the person bringing the centrifuge says this has been FDA approved for preparing plasma, platelet-rich plasma. And if you use it, of course, it's blood, the blood's not FDA approved, the FDA doesn't approve your hair or urine or your saliva or your blood, but they have to approve the device that makes the plasma to go back into your body. So he says this has been FDA approved to prepare plasma to go back into the body, and it's

been shown to cause new tissue growth, new blood flow, new volume, and there's never been a granuloma or serious infection or serious side effect from platelet-rich plasma. You should try it in the face. I thought, oh, this is wonderful, because if this works in the face, I mean, instantly because I was tuned into the sexual problems, I thought if this works in the face and does all those things, then this should help the genitalia. So he's like, yeah, I saw that this worked in the face, and I was like, well, if this helps people's faces, then clearly it helps their genitals, which nobody says that about

anything. Like I'm not like, well, because my straight razor helps me get a nice shave, I should clearly shave my dick with a straight razor. Oh my God, what a line of thought. That makes so much sense just to jump from face to dick. Contact lenses help my eyes, they must help my penis. I will say, I didn't know what he looked like before watching that, and I am a little bit more than needed to be upset.

I'm more upset than I wanted to be that the fact that he's not unattractive. He's conventionally attractive, and it's proven that people trust people that are attractive. If someone is good looking, if they're tall, if they're built, if they have a charming way of speaking, he has a deep voice, he has a southern, what's that word, twang or whatever to his voice, he is presenting himself as an alpha, and you're going to trust that if you're vulnerable. Even if he was like, that just makes me sad, I wish he wasn't, I just, but it makes sense. The fact that he's gone away with it makes sense a little bit more than it did before

now in my brain. You know, Sherene, what you're saying is exactly why I think we should just mandate disfiguring facial surgery for all American citizens, and you know who's here to help with mandatory disfiguring surgery is our sponsors at Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, who have developed a brand new knife missile that is just going to guarantee nobody gets trusted on the basis of their attractiveness ever again. So please support Lockheed Martin in its quest to disfigure all of us. Yep, enjoy these other products.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic, and occasionally ridiculous, deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records.

We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind-blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup.

Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So we're back. Again, I know a lot of doctors actually listen to this podcast. We have a lot of doctor fans and I'm interested in their takes on the clip that we just played.

As a layman, it seems like competent medical researchers don't say if this works on the face, it must be good for helping people fuck, but I'm not an MD. So I'll leave that to y'all. My sister is a doctor and I know she would fucking shit all over this. It's like a reach. I want to bring this up really quick. Do you know, I don't know if the movie Contagion had a huge upsurge recently. I don't want to, I guess this is like a spoiler, but it's been around long enough, then who

cares? Yeah, you can't spoil a movie that old. At the end of the movie, the cure comes about because the lead researcher injects herself with the medicine or with the vaccine. And my sister as a doctor, and I'm sure many doctors that watch this movie, I know it's a movie, but it's kind of the same idea of what this person, Dr. Reynolds, was inspired by. It's like using yourself as a martyr and using yourself as this hero to save the day.

And realistically, that is bullshit. It's a cool story, but it's not as medically or factually sound, and it's really dangerous. Like, no one, no medical professional would do that. And he was like, I don't know. Okay. The troubling part is that there have been a couple of really groundbreaking medical professionals who advanced medical science because they were willing to dangerously experiment on themselves.

And it's kind of threading a needle that's maybe too fine for most people to want a thread to say that like, yes, people who are willing to do that have advanced the frontiers of knowledge before. And also to say, but it's still a bad idea and we should have moved past that. Like right in 19, fucking 29, some doctor who can't get approval is like, well, fuck it, I'm just going to try to stint my own fucking heart. And it works. And it's good that it did.

But also that was like a century ago and we should not have to do that anymore. Yeah. I mean, I totally agree with you. I totally agree that like, there are some cases where it's really been like groundbreaking and progressed medicine. But I think the fact that this doctor was caught up in that particular narrative, it's a kind of telling of the kind of doctor he was even trying to be like, he's more consumed with the story.

Yes. He's not really consumed with the medicine. You've hit on an incredibly important point that he is consumed with the story and the story gets wilder from here on out. So strap in, Shireen, it's going to be fun. OK. Yeah. So as that video goes on, Dr. Reynolds goes on to say that he read a lot of papers.

I think he says thousands. And I don't think there are thousands which showed that PRP treatments were effective in reducing signs of aging on the face, which again. He can't read. Yeah. The evidence and also the evidence is not overwhelming on that. And so as a result of reading a lot of papers, he decided to start experimenting on himself with PRP facial treatments before he started shooting stuff into other people's genitalia.

Now, since he was legally barred from conducting clinical trials, he just jumped right into experimenting on people with his own PRP facial treatments. Dr. Reynolds began marketing them under the trademark name Vampire Facelift. And I sorry, I got it wrong early. I said he's responsible for the Vampire Facial. His trademark name is the Vampire Facelift. And you will see when people advertise that they do vampire facials, they're actually technically like legally ripping him off because his is the Vampire Facelift.

I feel so bad for him. I don't care, but it's from a legal standpoint. It's important. Sophie. Sophie, he had acne. He did have acne. I feel so bad for him. Now in this video, he claims that coming up with, he decided he had to trademark this

thing before there was really any hard evidence that it worked because this would be important for him being able to responsibly treat people. See if he just called his PRP. It's important for his story. It's important for his fucking story. And for his finances. If he just called, he says that if he just called this like PRP facial by the names other people were using, Vampire Therapy was a common name, then any bullshit doctor could claim

to be providing his therapy and what if they accidentally hurt someone? So he claims that he had to trademark it so that he could avoid people getting hurt. Yeah, that's nonsense. I think that's nonsense. Vampire Facelift is a good media ready name and trademarking it allowed him to license his treatment to other doctors and make passive income from thousands of practitioners that he trains often in online courses who basically act as franchisees. Interestingly enough, Charles denies that anything he does is that what he does is anything

like franchising. So he says that like, this is not franchising what I'm doing. And in the same breath that he claims is not like franchising, he compares the name Vampire Facelift to the trademark golden arches of McDonald's, which is amazing. What? Yeah, he's it's pretty that whole video is pretty fun to listen to. So Charles insists the whole reason that he did this was to ensure a consistent standard of care and insist that everyone abide by the same stringent practices he does.

And spoilers, someone advertising a knockoff vampire facial like a year ago, got two people infected with HIV. And they weren't people that Ronald had trained. So he was like, well, look, this is what I'm saying. Like these people are using a knockoff and they got folks sick. But it's like, yeah, they got folks to buy their treatment by using the name that was as close as possible to the one you use. Well, yeah, anyway.

So for the next couple of years, Dr. Reynolds made a name for himself and a new fortune as the inventor of the Vampire Facelift. His dream of injecting people's blood back into their own vaginas though had to lay dormant for a while. He grappled with fame and expanded his clinic. But then as Dr. Reynolds tells it, one day fate in the form of his girlfriend forced his hand. Oh my God.

Oh, buddy, we are heading in for one of the most irresponsible stories of a medical experimentation I can conceive of and it is a fun one. So as Dr. Reynolds tells this story, yeah, there's a number of different versions of the story that he's given. I prefer the one written up by a journalist from The Guardian who interviewed Reynolds and I'm going to read that now quote, Charles Reynolds's lover surprised him at his office demanding that he inject blood into her clitoris as a Valentine's Day present. She hiked up her dress, hopped onto the exam table and motioned for Reynolds to put on

his headlamp. She explained that she'd been watching him inject his own penis with blood for about a year and that while his bigger and stronger erections had been fun, she'd grown tired of the one-sided sexual enhancement. It was her turn, so Reynolds bowed between her legs, numbed her clitoris with an ice cube and shot her up. I don't know how graphic you can be with this thing, he said over the phone pausing mid-story to ask me about The Guardian's policy on discussing orgasms, but the next

afternoon she came to see me and her orgasms came more quickly, very strong ejaculatory orgasms, the passion, the thunder, the sound she was making, he sighed at the memory. That's when I thought, I should try this on my patients. And I know the fucking doctors listening to this have their fucking jaws on the floor right now. Oh my fucking god, that is his story, that is another fucking chapter in this fucking story. I hate him.

Also, like if this, oh no, no, no, no, no, no. No! I just thought I should, yeah, I should try this on my patients, it's amazing. So I'm not a doctor. I saw you, I saw you injecting your penis this whole time and I was like, I won't, no, that never happened. So I'm not a doctor, but the American Medical Association is a doctor and it seems to me and to Dr. Jen Gunter from whom I found this pointed out that this whole story is a very

clear violation of the code of medical ethics, which states, quote, romantic or sexual interactions between physicians and patients that occur concurrently with the patient-physician relationship are unethical. Such interactions detract from the goals of the patient-physician relationship and may exploit the vulnerability of the patient, compromise the physician's ability to make objective judgments about the patient's health care, and ultimately be detrimental to the patient's well-being. Which shouldn't need to be said, but is written up there and this seems like a clear violation

of that to me. I love that he added that she was like, grab your headlamp. Yeah, get on in here. No one would say that. Like that's just like a clear, like he's making this up. No girlfriend is like, oh my God, grab your needle and your headlamp. Like no. Yeah, it's something else.

So Dr. Runnels tells this story to reporters as if it is a charming anecdote. In the reason why he thinks this is charming is very much rooted in his idolization of Dr. Forsman, the guy who did that heart surgery on himself. So yeah, Forsman experimented on himself. He was exiled from mainstream medicine for his boldness, but he was eventually recognized as a medical pioneer and a genius. Runnels wants so badly to identify himself with Forsman that he includes this line in the who is section of his website.

Quote, I actually pulled up Dr. Forsman's story on Wikipedia and read it for a few minutes to get psyched out before I injected my own penis with PRP, which I did twice before I injected any other person's penis or clitoris slash vagina. Now some people might quibble with the fact that he's equating himself in his orgasm medicine experiments with a doctor struggling to cope with a way to save heart disease patients, but I actually think that sexual health is incredibly important. So I'm not going to like ding him on that. What I will ding him for is the fact that Dr. Runnels clearly never cared about anything

but rushing to patent his treatment so he could ring the most possible money out of it. Dr. Forsman, on the other hand, spent decades as either a small town doctor or a frontline military doctor. He turned down impressive jobs and titles when they were offered to him because he felt they exceeded his depth of confidence. He was a pretty humble guy, whatever else you want to say about him, and his innovations contributed to medical science. None of those things can be said about Dr. Runnels, although I am glad he moved on from

experimenting on homeless people to experimenting on his own dick. I guess that's a step forward. I mean, yeah, it's the step I prefer. I would prefer him injecting himself than injecting innocent homeless people, but his claim that first of all, two times, if you're only to be like, I injected myself twice before anyone else. First of all, if you want to be serious, twice is not enough. That doesn't seem like a lot, no.

And also, this just brings me back to my point of him being so consumed with the story versus the medicine. He wants to be a pioneer so desperately that that's all he, that's all it is. And he'd clearly, the way he describes the story tells you that he'd made his mind up about what this was, because a real scientist doing, if they did this to themselves, might note like, okay, well, it feels like my orgasms are better, but is it possible that I'm just into medical kink? Maybe this is just my kink, and it's not a groundbreaking medical treatment.

Perhaps other research should be done. Yeah. But also, you should never, that's a really good point, you should never go into anything being like, I'm going to be a pioneer because of this, like that's the whole point of research and testing, like he cites, he read his Wikipedia page to psych himself up, are you shitting me? Yeah. Yeah.

It's all of this is horrible. Yeah. Now, Dr. Charles- But he puts it out himself. Yeah, he does, because he thinks this is fine, and he's never really faced consequences for it. So, clearly it is fine. It's delusional, because he's attracted.

Goddammit. So, Dr. Charles Runnels names another hero on his website, Barry Marshall, Dr. Barry Marshall, and Marshall is another doctor with a very cool story. In the early 1980s, Barry Marshall became convinced that peptic ulcers and gastric cancer were both caused by a specific sort of bacterium. Conventional medical wisdom at the time was that ulcers were caused by stress or certain foods. Marshall ridiculed it first for his hypothesis, and has been quoted as saying, everyone was

against me, but I knew I was right. And Dr. Marshall eventually proved his hypothesis by drinking a culture filled with ulcer-causing bacteria and giving himself an ulcer. His work revolutionized the treatment of ulcers and the prevention of gastric cancer. He was awarded a Nobel Prize for his enormous achievement, and you can see why Dr. Runnels likes this guy. Runnels writes about Dr. Marshall, quote, he gave up gaining acceptance in Australia and then came to the U.S., and only after the popular press started talking about it

that physicians start reading his research. He gave himself an ulcer by drinking the bacteria. Dr. Marshall, in his acceptance of the prize, quoted Daniel Borstein. The greatest obstacle to knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge. Now, some of what Runnels says here is true. Dr. Marshall did, in fact, give himself an ulcer. But there's actually a lot of debate about whether or not the medical community was wrong to be as skeptical about his ideas as they were.

Dr. Runnels claims that the skepticism was only because cutting out ulcers was big business and other doctors had no financial interest in alternative treatments. And this claim is undercut by the fact that Barry Marshall received funding from a major medical institution to spend a whole year conducting his research. He did test it on himself eventually, but he was given funding to do the studies that he was doing. So the idea that he did face resistance, people who didn't think that what he was suggesting was reasonable, but also there was an institution willing to let him conduct these studies in

a controlled and scientific way. So it's not like he was completely alone, like an institution was like, yeah, there's enough merit to your case that like, here's some funding, figure it out. You can argue that doctors were more skeptical than they should have been. But Dr. Marshall didn't just give himself an ulcer and say, see, I've solved the problem. He had a research partner, he had lab assistants, he worked at an institution. When he proved his hypothesis, more tests were conducted and more research was done until an effective treatment was devised.

This is how medical science is supposed to work. By contrast, Dr. Runnels did not go from shooting his own dick or his girlfriend's labia full of blood to conducting double-blind clinical trials. This would be difficult because he's been banned from doing that sort of work due to his shameful criminal conduct, borderline criminal conduct. Instead, he left right to not just, he left right to selling the O-shot. So like they didn't do, he didn't do what Marshall did. He just starts marketing this thing after he decides it's effective.

That should be a fucking crime. That should be a fucking crime. Seems like it oughta. But it's not. And he started selling and conducting training sessions so other doctors could sell the O-shot too. As of this moment, he's trained at least 500 medical practitioners and more than 20,000 women have had the O-shot done on them.

Runnels estimates that it has an 85% success rate, based mainly off of how he feels, because again, no conclusive clinical trials have been done on this treatment. He does have like one or two small batch studies about its efficacy at treating other things that he cites as evidence that the O-shot works. However, as Dr. Jim Gunter notes about one of the studies, the only study of vaginal injections listed on Dr. Runnels' website is the Journal of Women's Healthcare, an open-access journal from Omix Publishing Group, which has been listed as a potentially predatory journal.

Now, there's no universally agreed-upon definition of a predatory journal, but most of them are basically self-publishing platforms for scientists. They allow you to publish a study for a fee and they provide no editing or peer-review process, because a lot of them don't actually care about putting out good information. Some of these... It's just like shitposting yourself. It's like medium for scientists. Yeah, exactly.

I was just thinking the best. Gunter continues, quote, regardless of the journal, it is a stretch to call this paper a study. It's a case series of 11 women with a variety of sexual complaints raging from dysparunia to orgasmic disorder. The sexual dysfunction experienced by a woman with dysparunia, never mind that there are multitude of very different conditions that can cause dysparunia, so it really shouldn't be a single diagnosis in a study, cannot be compared with the sexual dysfunction of a

woman with an arousal disorder. The results of the 11 women, 64% reported some kind of improvement. But honestly, the statistics are of no value given the small sample size and the fact that there are four very different diagnoses lumped together. I also can't tell if it was retrospective or prospective. The two women who had minimal pro-procedure dysfunction reported extreme arousal for one to two weeks afterwards. This is the only bad effect noted in the 12 to 16 week follow-up.

The paper has a very short follow-up, but Dr. Reynolds' website claims the O-shot lasts at least 18 months but up to three years for some women. So there's just nothing really to back him up. He has paid to have enough of something that looks enough like a study performed that he can claim that he's got medical backing, and no more, because a real study might reveal that this doesn't work very well. So that's good. That just makes me so mad.

And I'm realizing now that I didn't really have to divulge or like a broadcast that I'm like. There you're so. I don't know why I just felt the need to just like be so candid. I just have absolutely no filter. But I will say talking about this stuff is so important because if someone had talked about it the way I'm talking about it, when I was younger, I wouldn't have felt like such a fucking freak.

And I wouldn't have felt like such like a just unable, like I wouldn't have not felt human in my inability to feel this very human thing. And so I like was thinking that maybe like I shouldn't have said it, but now I'm like doubling down and I'm just the reality that I'm even having that thought that if women are continually afraid to even breach the subject or broach the subject rather encourages people like this fucking just disgusting human being taking advantage of women that are so desperate to feel something and just like understand what receiving pleasure is like. And like I can do all my homework.

I can like like practice all these things. I can buy toys or whatever. But I'm going to be I'm going to know my body better than any fucking hack ever will. And like women should be encouraged to really do that more so than I don't know. I'm just I'm just getting heated. I'm getting a little bit. This is a frustrating story. Yeah, it's a very frustrating story.

Because like yeah, like all grifters, he's praying on a real vulnerability. Like this is a thing that people like like like women who you know are struggling with the thing that you've been very open about struggling with. That's a painful vulnerability and he knows that it means he can fleece them for a shitload of money. Yeah. And it's that sucks. And he obviously has.

And he's he's he's become a very wealthy man from it. Yeah. Like that's that's that's that's just infuriating. Yep. Yeah, it gets infuriating or Dr. Gunter has done a lot of like looking into this guy's like like digital presence. She notes that in the paper that he had published that's purporting to be a real study about this stuff.

He listed his address as medical school comma Birmingham comma Alabama comma USA. This is not a medical school. Yeah. He stuck medical school on his address because he knows that no one looking to get this treatment will check any further. Yeah, it's awesome. Now. Wow.

Yeah. Yeah. And in Dr. Gunter's opinion, the most unsettling thing about kind of the lack of information about the efficacy of the shot is that there are no animal studies to show how the vaginal epithelium might respond to PRP quote, the bulk of the published studies involve wounds and tendons, muscles, not healthy vaginal tissue. This is a very important point because it is possible that PRP could increase the growth of blood vessels into vaginal tissues and we don't know if that is good or bad.

If a woman has human Pamplona virus in her vagina and gets a PRP injection, that could cause the HPV to spread or make it more likely to develop into cancer. Could it cause scarring? Could it lead to unregulated growth of nerve endings and cause pain? Could it trigger trigger autoimmune conditions of the vagina or vulva? She's pointing out, we just don't know and this is why you don't start injecting, performing a treatment on tens of thousands of women when we don't know any of this stuff. Like you research it for, like there's a case.

You never jump to human trials, you never do that. There is a case for hastening human trials in the event of say a horrific plague spreading over the land and you really need to get a vaccine out fastest. There's a cost benefit analysis that can be done and things can be accelerated. But this is not an immediate life or death issue. Like orgasms are important, but we can take the time to make sure this isn't going to cause horrible damage to the people getting the shot. This isn't like a vaccine for a death plague.

We have some space here. I would rather have the time and energy being given to it to make it so we can do it right. This is a serious issue, but it's not, for a medical standpoint, you never, it's just... It's very frustrating. After all this, we've established how reckless this guy is and how unproven his treatment is. The question that follows naturally is why do people keep buying it? The answer for that is really fucking sad.

It ties into the stuff we were talking about at the top of this episode. A lot of women or a lot of people with vaginas can't organize or orgasm reliably. The best treatment for this seems to be a combination of therapy and having a committed partner who cares about your understanding or cares about understanding your body. You can't prescribe that, right? To a certain extent, no doctor can write that on a sheet and hand it out to you. Falling in love or at least falling in like enough to have regular sex is not easy. Dr. Reynolds offers an easy answer, an injectable answer to what is really a very complicated

question. This helps explain the demand for doctor orgasm services, but it doesn't explain why so many women do swear by his work. And for that explanation, we're going to have to turn back to that article in The Guardian by Kathleen Hale. The opening paragraphs of this article about Reynolds are filled with more red flags than a Communist Party rally. And I'm going to quote here.

"...Runnels' office isn't anything like the sterile exam rooms most women associate with gynecological exams. It's intimate, personal, and cozy, because in addition to treating thousands of patients there over the years, he also lives there. There's a small entryway... the small entryway opens up to a living room dominated by gym equipment. In the bathroom, I found a functioning shower and shelves filled with employees' toiletries. The only examination table was separated from the kitchen by a curtain.

Pamela, Julie, and Vivienne, the three women on Reynolds' four-person staff, greeted me with open arms. In order to better understand what they promoted, Pamela and Vivienne told me they'd both had O-shots administered by Reynolds. Mark, the sole male employee, opted for the male version, a P-shot. If you're like me, that stuff gives you some flashbacks to Dr. John Brown, the guy we talked about who did horrific surgeries from his own home on trans people. It's generally not considered ideal for a doctor to perform operations in his own home,

but it's also not impossible for such a situation to be sterile, and I have not heard any allegations that Dr. Reynolds has set up violates any health codes. The part where all of his employees use the medicine that he makes is real culty and a bit of a flag, though, and the cult vibes don't decline as the article goes on. Quote, as we awaited for the arrival of my first interview subject, Lacey, Reynolds suggested that I might want to try the O-shot for myself. You'll love it, Vivienne said. She told me that doctors regularly flew in from all over the world to be trained in the

procedure and that initially they reacted to offers of free O-shots just as I had, with a mix of embarrassment and surprise. But by the end, she said, everyone wanted one. I mean, it's kind of, I can kind of understand, like, if you go to a dentist or an orthodontist, you want everyone there to have straight teeth, right? Like you want everyone there to have had braces or whatever, but this is completely different. Like it's not the same thing. And I do think, I think the fact that it's in a house and not in a more sterile place,

I think that lends to getting these women to trust him. Like it's more intimate and it's more, you're praying on them in very emotional mental ways that they don't even realize, you're making them feel like they're safe, but they're not. And it feels like the kind of classes he does with the doctors, the in-person ones at least, are kind of like that too. There's a line in here where Reynolds laughs, quote, recalling how the last class had run until three in the morning just to accommodate demand. And he says, it's like a Baptist revival except you're injecting each other's genitals.

I know, that's fucking wild. Yeah. Now, Hale, this Guardian article by Kathleen Hale also notes that the location for Reynolds's office, which is Fairhope, Alabama, is in the middle of the Bible Belt, and it's a place where vibrators are illegal due to the state's anti-obscenity laws. Where I grew up in Texas was like that too. They had to market them as cake toppers, like as decorations for cakes for bachelorette parties and stuff.

Even though- Yeah. Because it's illegal to sell a vibrator, because Texas hates women. Whoa. Yeah. That's crazy. I had no idea. Yeah.

And the data here is imperfect, but there is a decent amount of data that suggests that highly religious women, and particularly like religiously orthodox type women, are more likely to suffer from orgasmic disorders than secular women. And the women Hale interviews- Yeah. I can tell you why. Obviously, you grow up with shame around your body, and that shame, you have this inability to really let go and experience pleasure.

Obviously, that makes sense, but he's pretty much taking advantage of that. He's capitalizing on this group of women having the issue that he is pretending to know how to solve. Yes. And it makes sense that this guy, who otherwise you would expect a doctor like this to be like in Los Angeles. I think he picked his location. I think he decided to stay in Alabama for a reason, and it's that he's very good at

manipulating this particular kind of person, very religious conservative ladies who have orgasmic disorders, and he's good at making them trust him. Yeah. Yeah. Hale's article. Yeah. So the women that Hale interviews for that article describe themselves overwhelmingly as very empathetic, Bible-believing Christians like the women who have gotten this shot,

and an outsized number of them are, unfortunately, victims of rape or sexual assault. Quote, Lacey, an athletic 40-year-old businesswoman told no one when she was raped for the first time at age 13, but soon her father noticed something different about her and started calling her a whore and a lesbian. Physical abuse followed when Lacey's next rapist, her husband, found himself unable to climax unless Lacey was in excruciating pain. He raped her throughout their 10-year relationship. So yeah, and the damage from this left her at 29 years old with incontinence and scarring.

She wet the bed, and she was just kind of unable to orgasm. Doctors responded to her concerns by suggesting she used lube with her partners in undergo psychotherapy, and by age 30, Lacey never expected to experience sexual pleasure again. She tried using a back massager to stimulate herself, but it left a callus on her clitoris, so she just didn't know how to—yeah, she's just a victim of unbelievable abuse who did not know how to—like who was maybe getting some psychological counseling, but because of where she lived and sort of like the culture she was in was not able to really talk about sex with anyone and never had that conversation—never had a conversation about how to masturbate.

And then she meets Dr. Runnels, and they meet at a bank, and she learns what he does, and she confides in him that she can't orgasm, and he tells her that he knows something that might help. And I get the feeling—she says that he gave her the O-shot, and she immediately felt alive down there. You get the feeling, though, that also they're having just conversations about sex, and maybe she's never gotten to have that. He's giving her an intimacy she's never known.

Exactly. And I don't want to discredit any of what these women have felt or are feeling, but there is a level of placebo that goes into this, just leading up to it, just like the connection he makes with the women, this promise of—just like everyone telling them it's going to work, the staff, and everything. There's going to be a certain amount of placebo that just by default is there because it's so high. Yes.

And the data we have makes it very clear that having healthy conversations about your genitalia and about sex with people who care about you or at least seem to care about you really helps with an orgasmic disorder. That's a super important part of treating it. And again, this is part of why you need an actual study on something like this, because there's no separation for the conversations they're having and the intimacy of the encounter and the shot. None of that's being separated.

There's no way to know what the shot is doing, if actually anything, because a whole lot is wrapped up in all of these women's stories with Dr. Runnels. And that's— But that just helps him. Yeah, it does help him, but it does not necessarily help these women. It doesn't help us to know if this thing actually works. Yeah, which is why skeptics like Dr. Jim Gunter will point out that anecdotal data is not the same as scientific data.

And she pointed that out to Kathleen Hale in the Guardian article, because Hale talked to Dr. Gunter. And Hale understood that, but also had a lot of trouble writing off these women's experiences. She was clearly convinced to a degree by their embrace of the o-shot, and it's very convincing when you have a lot of people say, this thing helped me. She did ask Runnels, though, why he tended to gravitate towards trauma victims, and his answer was interesting. He responded, quote, I don't really know why I'm surrounded by people who have pain.

I do absolutely make a conscious effort to find them. I think my real usefulness evolves out of it's not even compassion. It's more like obsession, which is more of an honest answer. That's like a dirty thing to say. Yeah, it should be, right? Yeah. What the fuck? Yeah.

Like, that's... And that is... That's... Wow. There is a reason why cult leaders gravitate towards abuse victims, as do grifters. Because in general, our society does a shit job of taking care of these people, and it's a natural human need to respond to people who reach out and show compassion for you in times of lonely darkness.

And I think this explains part of Dr. Runnels' success, and another part of it is explained by what's called placebo theater, which is the very well-documented fact that receiving any kind of treatment in a clinical medical setting, especially if it's expensive, will increase a patient's belief that the treatment will work and actually increase the efficacy of the treatment. This is a placebo effect thing. And it doesn't help a lot when you're treating metastatic cancer, but a lot of orgasm is mental, right?

And that's where the block comes up for a lot of people, and it's not unheard of for placebos to be effective in up to 60% of cases for these sorts of situations. Because again, you don't actually have to physically affect, you just have to make them believe. Like, and if they believe it'll work, this is primarily a mental block. That's all it is. I mean, not all it is. There's more to it.

That's a lot of it. Yeah. A big part of the research that I've been doing personally, like, they talk a lot about letting go and ways to make your mind, like, let go, essentially, of everything. Because there's this pressure around even achieving, the word achieving an orgasm is like so, I think, counterintuitive because it makes it seem like you're reaching for something constantly. And if you're having sex with a partner, at least in my experience, I always felt like

I'm never going to give them what they want because I can't do this thing that I'm supposed to be doing. So then I get really into giving rather than receiving, and I get a lot of pleasure out of that. But then it kind of like, when you're really grappling with this idea of, yeah, the fact that it's all mental, it's all mental. Because if you're too consumed with, I can't do this thing, or if you're even thinking, like, I have to let go, I have to let go, that's not letting go.

And so I can only imagine all these elements that allow women to, for their mind, like, he's making them comfortable enough to believe that this is going to help them, and that in and of itself makes them feel better. And if that's all he was doing, I wouldn't have any problem with this guy. I mean, I would because of the homeless people study, but I wouldn't have a problem with this current business. If this guy was just like, hey, I'm a doctor in the Bible Belt, and I help women who have problems orgasming, and a lot of women said he helped them, I'd be like, yeah, fine, great.

But he's also injecting them with, he's also performing a medical operation that we have no data on what kind of long term harm it might do to them. Like, that's where the issue is, right? That's the huge issue. Yeah. It's not just therapy. It's not just talking. You're physically doing something to a body that's not medically sound.

And another impact comes from the fact that the O-Shot costs about $1,200 to $1,500. And controlled studies have shown that spending more money on a medical treatment can increase the placebo effect as well. And even Parkinson's patients have shown physical improvement in situations like this. So again, a lot of this has nothing to fucking do with whatever he's injecting them with and everything to do with the psychological atmosphere that this person sets up and his operation. Now, the experts Kathleen Hale talked to and mentioned all of this, but as she writes,

quote, as a layperson, I couldn't help but respect their authority. But as a human being, it was hard for me to discredit so many women's stories. When they said the O-Shot worked, I believed them. So she got the shot herself, and it didn't do anything. And I think it's just because she didn't, she's never had, she didn't have an issue, right? Like she had no problem having orgasms. She had the shot and she didn't notice anything.

And that is what you would expect. She didn't go into it with trauma. She didn't go into it with a, like, something to be fixed, you know, like she wasn't searching for a placebo. Like, you know, I don't know, that makes sense to me. It's one of those things where like at the end of the day, I have to admit that compared to our usual bastards. The harm this guy is currently perpetrating is minimal.

Like these women are out in money, but there's not, well, there's not evidence he's helping them. There isn't evidence he's hurting them. Although it is possible that he's doing a lot of damage to them, we just don't know for a while. Because again, nobody's fucking looked into this. It's, I don't know, like I hate this guy because I think he's a bad person and he's taking advantage of people.

But I also, I think the thing that I hate more than this guy is the fact that we have such a shitty system set up in our country for any kind of sexual healthcare, for informing people about their bodies, for giving women who are having this problem a place where they even know they can go to for help. Like that's That system leads him for his success. Like that system made him successful. And I agree with you that like in the grand scheme of things, he's not like a murderer.

Like he's not like, he's not, you've talked about shittier people on your show for sure, but the institution at large, you're right, is what is contributing to his success. And that institution is so flawed and so broken. And it makes women believe that they are, that they need to be fixed and he's capitalizing on that in a huge way and he's getting away with it and he should have been banned from everything medical a long as time ago, but he's still operating on a level that should be criminal. Yep.

Yep. And he's, he's trying to get into coronavirus grift. It's a pretty minor one. He wants to like create a nationwide blood bank basically to, to take plasma rich blood from people that have had it, that might have antibodies and give it to other people. And like folks who aren't grifters are already doing basically this. He's just trying to create his own thing and it doesn't look like it's working. I haven't seen it pick up a lot of steam.

Well, because he's the blood guy. Yeah. He's the blood guy. So I don't know. Like as far as all of the grifters that I worry about, he's not super high on my list. Keep an eye on him because he might wind up with a grift that actually does harm a whole lot of people or he might find out that his current grift is more harmful than we know. I just am so frustrated by the story at the same time.

Like as with most of the grifters who are currently eating the decent and often kind of dumb people of this country alive, the reason why they're able to do what they do is because our, we don't take care of our people. There's no systems that provide people with any option that they have a chance that they have, that there is actually a reasonable, non-exploitative way to deal with a problem like a sexual problem that they have. And so the first handsome, well-spoken person who has what look like convincing credentials and says he can cure you, you'll just trust him if he has a nice face.

And there are so many ways we should have set up our society to reduce the ability these people would have to grift the vulnerable. But we have done none of that. And I guess that makes sense because this is America. Yeah, I agree with all of that. And it's really terrible because it's so true. And I realized that most of your listeners, actually no, I don't realize, I'm assuming that a lot of your listeners are men, but for the women out there that are listening

to this, if you relate to anything I said, like you're not alone. And I know this is not supposed to be about my own shit, but I just am so angry that someone like this is getting away with something that I've struggled with my whole life. And I'm a sexual person, and the fact that I have this one thing that's been bugging me my whole life, especially in like today's world where everyone's really empowered and sexually just outspoken and everything, as someone who's also progressive, it makes me feel like I can't keep up. It makes me feel like I'm not, I can't really understand where everyone's coming from.

And maybe it'll happen one day, maybe it won't, but just accepting that where you are right now is where you are is so much better than being, I don't know, berating yourself or something that is not in your control. Like you just, I don't know, I just wanted to end this in like a poetic way and it's not coming out the way I wanted to. There's no poetry in America. I just don't want people to feel like this is a subject that we shouldn't talk about because I had hesitation admitting that I've never like, that I have, I don't know, this

experience and I like, I have, my sexual history is like a little bit confusing just because I don't know, I am the way I am, but I think the fact that me even coming from someone who just shat all over the sky and would never do this thing, I can't deny that there is a little, the little voice in my head, I was like, well, what if it does work? Like what if this, like when we first started talking about it, I was like, well, maybe this is the answer to all my problems and this is coming from someone I think I'm not, I think I'm like reasonably intelligent. So I don't know, I just think the depth of shame and trauma that we hold within ourselves

is just not okay. And we just have to come at this whole thing with like love and I haven't talked to a human all day today. So I forget how conversations work. So please come me off at any time. No, you're great. I'm sweaty. I'm so sweaty talking about this.

So I don't know. I just, thank you for having me on to talk about this. I just, I just said everything I was supposed to say. No, I mean, what you're supposed to say was how you felt. Yeah, that's fine. Like it's, it's important to talk about this. A guarantee there are people who will listen to this and have a version of the same experience you're having and it will probably make them feel better to know that they're not alone

in that. And that's a good thing. And if we're talking about things that reduce the ability of guys like this to grift people, it is being able to talk about this shit. So I'm glad that you felt comfortable talking about it to an intimate audience of me and Sophie and several hundred thousand strangers. Cool. Thanks, Robert.

I will say right now, if any of the fucking dudes listening do creepy shit on Twitter to you after this, I will fucking tear your ass a new one digit. Don't be a fucking gross about this. Okay. Don't be fucking disgusting. Nobody be assholes about this. Yeah. Thank you, Robert.

I appreciate that. I mean, like I just, I go back to this idea that if someone was as open, if someone, if it was the norm to be open about this, I wouldn't feel so weird as a kid or as a as a teen or whatever, growing up, kind of feeling like there was something wrong with me. And so I think we just have to keep encouraging these conversations. And it's the same institution that put this guy to be successful. That same institution, that same societal fucking game is the same one that makes women like me feel like they need to be fixed.

So, um, so yeah, I mean, like I, I know like putting myself out there is like just like by default, I'll get like weird replies to it or whatever, or just like responses. It's going to be an interesting week on Twitter for you. Yeah. Also, I'm like a little bit low key afraid. I'm like, because I was like, I was raised Muslim, my entire family's Muslim. We don't really talk about like, you're not really raised to like talk about sex or, uh, there's just a lot to unpack as far as like me talking about this goes.

Like it's not just me as a woman in the society. It's like also me and like my culture and like my family in particular, like I just, there's a lot to unpack for me here. And this is not like I'm using this as therapy, which I shouldn't do. But I think even coming from like as an Arab woman, as a Syrian woman, that's even another group of people that I would like to encourage this conversation with like with it, you know, is like, if you're a child of immigrants, if you're, you're not taught about these things as when you're growing up, it's just going to lead to more confusion and to lead to more

questions and not, but that's not like a blanket statement. Like there are plenty of people who are fine and thriving the way they are, but this is just from my own personal experience that, um, I, I think that's why I'm so unfiltered and so candid is because I just needed someone to be this way when I was a kid and I needed to say everything that was on their mind because that's, that wouldn't, that would have made me feel less like an alien, trying to study humanity, watching porn. You know what I mean? Like I, I don't know.

I mean, I think the thing you're landing on is that when you realize you are kind of done dirty by your society and the adults around you when you were a kid because of like a failure that they, that they had, you know, regardless of whether or not we consider them good people, like there was a, there was a shortcoming in what we had available to us as a kid. When you realize that the best thing you can do is try to be that adult, um, maybe to someone else so that they don't wind up with the same hole in their, um, experience, their education, whatever as a, as, as they grow up.

And that starts with like talking about the shit that you realize like, oh, I wish people had talked about this when I was a kid. Yeah. Yeah. And it seemed to be the person that I needed when I was a child. And when you're growing up, you don't see it as a societal failure. You see it as your own failure. And I think that's what's dangerous, especially when it comes to like women's pleasure is

that you don't see it as a system failing you. You see it as you failing yourself and you fail, like you're failing your own body and you start to resent your body and like, why can't I do this? And then hopefully as we get older and become more aware of the society at large that makes us feel this way, then we can like combat those things and just become the people we were always meant to be, which is just ourselves. And that's my spiel. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

Uh, this is the only podcast on earth. Thank you for, thank you for having me on the only podcast to make it in this pandemic. What an honor. I know the wait list is so long. It is. It is years. Yeah. And I just say, if you're looking for something to do during this time, I might recommend

a book of poetry written by Shereen that is on Amazon called Dime Piece. It is lovely. Oh, wow. Thank you so much, Sophie. Thank you. I'm currently working on my next one. So that is nice for you to plug. Thank you.

Best news ever. Also, since we're just another thing to do is just try masturbating. That's, you know what, now's the time. Now is the time to really just like try to figure it out when like you have so many hours in the day. You're actually, you know, you have exactly 24. That's, that's, that's a fact, but you have time to explore yourself if that's what you want to do.

And I'm sure many of you are already doing that, but this has been quite the journey for me and doing your homework means a lot of things, you know? So just do your homework on your body, on yourself, on your mind. You know what? That's, I've said my piece. Cool. Alrighty. Um, well.

Well, I don't really know how else to end the episode other than, um, think a lot about all this and, uh, uh, go unfuck the world. Yeah. And masturbate. Fuck yourself to unfuck the world. That's the only message I have. I co-host a podcast on, uh, the iHeartMedia network, iHeartRadio network. It's ethnically ambiguous.

We talk to people that are, um, uh, marginalized about their struggles in the world. And we also just talk about ourselves being children of immigrants. I am Shereen. You can follow me at shirohero sh-e-e-r-o-h-e-r-o on Instagram and on Twitter at shirohero 666. Thank you, Sophie, for plugging my book. I'm a filmmaker. I have some short films on my website. You can just, it's my, everything is like in my Twitter bio or some shit.

I don't know, whatever. Figure it out and just Google me. Um, but yeah, that's about it. I have another podcast called the women's war. Yes, you do. Check it out. It's upbeat. Uh, I also have nothing else.

That is my whole life is these two podcasts and I've returned to avoid in between space and time, uh, when you were not listening to me. So please listen again regularly. And thanks for letting me ramble a little bit on this. Yeah. Thanks, thanks for letting me just ramble and go. I know this is like a longer episode. I just, uh, I got, I got worked up.

I think it's good that you did and that you said the things you said. So thank you for coming on and speaking candidly and, uh, again, don't be weird about this people. Don't be fucking creepy. Okay. It's fine. Whatever. I'll just mute.

I'll just mute you. It's fine. That is the episode. Bye. Bye. What would you do if the secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, Hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U S and fascism.

I'm Ben Bolin. I'm Alex French and I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sorted tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to let's start a coup on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows. 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 to death sentences in

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