It Could Happen Here - Anti-Vax America: Could It Happen Here?

Episode Date: June 20, 2025

As anti-vax beliefs become increasingly widespread, and vaccination rates drop, the greater the risk of some sort of massive viral outbreak or the return of horrific illnesses such as polio. This episode will explore what could happen if anti-vax beliefs spread further into United States politics and culture. Sources: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9577438/ https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/04/10/1168141163/the-dream-of-wiping-out-polio-might-need-a-rethink https://www.news-medical.net/news/20250427/Measles-could-return-to-endemic-status-if-US-vaccination-rates-fall-further.aspx https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/13/health/polio-vaccine-outbreaks.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. I'm Robert Evans and on my show Behind the Bastards this week, we have one of our worst subjects ever, David Byrd, founder of the Children of God cult, who we'll be talking about with special guest Ed Helms. He's not just like a weird religious cult leader. He was like fusing a bunch of hippie ideology in with this kind of like evangelical Christianity, Pentecostal preaching in the mid-century is a very weird guy. But yeah, I'll just get into it. Like nothing you just said makes sense. That doesn't say. But that's the beauty of cults.

Listen to Behind the Bastards on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Open AI is a financial abomination, a thing that should not be, an aberration, a symbol podcasts. with the greatest minds in the industry about all the other ways the rich and powerful are ruining the computer. Listen to better offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, wherever you happen to get your podcasts. Over the years of making my true crime podcast Hell and Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder. I'm Catherine Townsend. I've heard from hundreds of people across the country with an unsolved murder in their community. I was calling about the murder of my husband.

The murderer is still out there. Each week I investigate a new case. If there's a case we should hear about call 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murderline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sometimes as dads, I think we're too hard on ourselves. We get down on ourselves on not being able to, you know, we're the providers. But we also have to learn to take care of ourselves.

A wrap-away, you got to pray for yourself as well as for everybody else. But never forget yourself. Self-love made me a better dad because I realized my worth. Never stop being a dad. That's dedication. Find out more at fatherhood.gov, brought to you by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Ad Council.

CoolZone Media. Welcome to the final episode of Anti-Vax America, a special mini series from It Could Happen Here. I'm your host, Stephen Monticelli, a journalist in Dallas and sometimes contributor to Cool Zone Media. Over the past episodes, we've explored the origins of the current measles outbreak, the historical roots of the anti-vaccination movement, the overlap between vaccine hesitancy and conservative Christianity

that upholds a strong belief in spiritual healing and the eugenic implications of contemporary anti-vax ideology and the maha movement. In this episode, we'll explore the future. Could the United States see a massive return of viral outbreaks? How would a nationwide collapse in vaccination rates impact our public health? And what are we to make of the rise of alt-medicine and whether that could continue to spread if people like RFK Jr. elevate these hucksters into national figures? These are not just

academic questions. If vaccination rates continue to decline, we could see the return of diseases like polio, which had been eradicated in the United States for decades. In recent years, there have been cases of polio found in wastewater and one confirmed case of a man with polio in an unvaccinated community in New York. And experts warn that these isolated incidents could spread into larger outbreaks. And these concerns are well-founded, particularly given that RFK Jr. has said as recently as 2023 that early batches of polio vaccines caused cancer, something that has never been demonstrated in the research.

Vaccination is the most effective tool we have to prevent the spread of communicable deadly diseases. Without widespread vaccination, we face the very real possibility of devastating public health crises. And the resurgence of diseases like measles and polio, and smallpox and more, would put our most vulnerable populations at risk. Especially the elderly, the immunocompromised, and others who cannot be vaccinated. We don't have a crystal ball that will allow us to see into the future, but as the anti-vaccination movement grows, it is clear that the risk of large-scale outbreaks is increasing. And if we don't correct the course soon, we could see a public health disaster

unlike any we've seen in recent history, perhaps even worse than COVID, which took more than 1.1 million American lives. In this episode, we will explore what could happen here in the United States if the anti vaccination movement continues to get their way. As I conducted interviews with medical doctors and public health experts featured in this series, I asked them all the same question, where do you see this going? Each had their own answer, and all of their answers pointed in the same direction. Here's Katherine Wells, the head of public health in Lubbock, the largest county in West Texas, where the measles outbreak began. in Lubbock, the largest county in West Texas, where the measles outbreak began.

I do worry that, you know, we are going to see other vaccine-preventable diseases. You know, measles is the most highly infectious, but for all of those people that are becoming infected with measles, you know, they'll be immune, but that doesn't mean they're immune from mumps and rubella and other vaccine-able diseases that could easily enter a community with lower vaccination rates. And those can come next. So, I mean, that is concerning.

Measles is sort of like a canary in the coal mine when it comes to vaccination rates. It's the first sign of a collapsing system. Here's Dr. Peter Hotez, the vaccine scientist in Houston. You know, with the formation of anti-vaccine groups in the 2010s in Texas, you started to get these steep rise in parents requesting non-medical exemptions that their kids could get out of being vaccinated for school.

And it was particularly strong in the same places where people were refusing COVID vaccines years later, especially in conservative rural areas of West Texas, East Texas. The vaccination rates continue to be strong in our cities of the Texas Triangle, Dallas, where you are, and Houston, am and San Antonio and Austin. But in the more conservative rural areas of West Texas, East Texas, that's where you saw big declines in kids getting vaccines. And once you go below a certain threshold, roughly below 90%, then bam, then you start to see breakthrough childhood infections.

And usually the first one you see is measles. You can ultimately get all of them, but measles is the first one you see because it's so highly transmissible. It's the most transmissible virus we know about. So measles is kind of the, whatever you want to call it, the early biomarker of a problem with your vaccination system. And unfortunately now it's just tearing through West Texas in the pan. And unfortunately, now it's just tearing through West Texas and the Panhandle, and now it's in four states, all more or less in the Great

Plains area of the country, right? It's the Panhandle in West Texas at the southern end of the plains, but into adjoining areas in New Mexico, then going up into Oklahoma and now Kansas. And my worry is that this is a very large, probably much larger than is actually being reported. I mean, I don't see this thing wearing down anytime soon, and I'm worried about really prolonged measles epidemic to the point where we could even lose measles elimination status in the US if it goes on a full year. Between 2023 and 2024, we've had a four-fold rise in measles epidemics outbreaks.

We've had a six-fold rise in whooping cough protestors cases. We've had polio appear in the wastewater in New York State. So we're already trending in the wrong direction even before this current administration because of all the anti-vaccine sentiment rhetoric out there. Now you throw on top of it efforts to actively dismantle our vaccine ecosystem and I can only imagine what's going to happen. I really worry about the widespread return of all these childhood illnesses just like we're seeing now with measles. I mean worry about the widespread return of all these childhood illnesses just like we're seeing now with measles. I mean, we're looking at the potential

of sustained transmission going on for months and months to the point where we could lose our measles elimination status. And then it goes on from there because measles is the most highly transmissible. I worry about the same with whooping cough, pertussis. I worry about even potentially polio returning. And not only in the US because as we both know, the US is very good at exporting its culture. We export our music, we export our movies. I worry about exporting this stuff

and I worry about the impact on Latin American countries, on low and middle income countries in Asia and Africa and in Europe as well. So a complete unraveling of our vaccine ecosystem and global goals. And that really gives me a lot of pause for concern. And on that note, a quick ad break. I'm Robert Evans and on my podcast Behind the Bastards, we talk about the worst people in all of history. We've discussed a lot of horrible monsters in our time, but this

week we have one of the very worst we'll ever talk about. David Berg, founder of a cult called the Children of God. We'll talk about all of his horrible crimes with special guest Ed Helms. He's not just like a weird religious cult leader. He was like fusing a bunch of hippie ideology in with this kind of like evangelical Christianity Pentecostal preaching in the mid century. He's a very weird guy. But yeah, I'll just get into it. Like nothing you just said makes sense. That doesn't say.

Right. But that's the beauty of cults. Listen to Behind the Bastards on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder.

I'm Catherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country, begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband. It's a cold case. I have never found her, and it haunts me to this day. Murder is still out there.

Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145.

Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops call this Taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that Taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley,

comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Binge episodes one, two, and three on May 21st, and episodes four, five, and six on June 4th. on Apple podcasts. It's probably safe to assume that the majority, if not the entirety, of the audience of this show grew up in a time when vaccinations were widely embraced and considered beneficial. That also means that most of us have never lived during a time when children and adults were regularly disabled or killed by diseases like smallpox or polio. In the 20th century, 300 million people were killed by smallpox.

In the 1940s and 1950s, polio killed nearly half a million people worldwide annually and paralyzed hundreds of thousands. But both of those diseases were effectively eradicated decades ago. The last person living in an iron lung, the medical device that keeps people who were paralyzed from polio alive died in March of 2024 and even measles, which is considered a relatively less dangerous illness was routinely deadly before vaccination was widespread. There was a time when thousands of Americans died from the disease every year. All of that was due to the creation of vaccine policy and infrastructure over time. But now RFK Jr. and the Maha movement threaten to tear all that

down and send us back in time. Here's Dr. David Gorski. I'll start with vaccines and then I'll try to move more to Maha. So, with vaccines, what I think we're seeing is the systematic, intentional dismantling of federal vaccine infrastructure and policy. This whole call for placebo-controlled trials, if they define new vaccines as any new vaccine, it will mean that there will be no new vaccines approved until it's changed, which would at the earliest be after Trump is out of office. If they define it as just new vaccines for diseases that don't have vaccines, it might be less of an issue. Either way though, contrary to what they claim they want to do, which is increase public confidence in vaccines, it will almost certainly have the opposite effect. I recently wrote, I think, yeah, it was last week's post. I wrote about a study that modeled what would happen with certain percentage declines in

vaccine uptake for four different vaccines, including the measles vaccine, of course. And it estimated, you know, some pretty catastrophic numbers if, for instance, vaccine uptake declined even 10% or 50% over the next 25 years. You know, millions of cases, thousands of deaths. In other words, going back to basically the way it was before the measles vaccine was licensed in the early 1960s. You know, sure, you can complain that the model was somewhat simplistic, but if anything, I think it was probably conservative because they used a lot of conservative assumptions. We could well be heading for that sort of future,

although it takes a while for things to change even with the sort of radical action that RFK Jr. is taking, and likely we would not see the worst effects really take off until after Trump's out of office, assuming he leaves office in 2029. So it'll be left to his successors to deal with the mess. And it's always easier to destroy than it is to rebuild, obviously. Now the interesting counterpoint to, you know, Maha saying, oh, we must increase the gold standard science applied to vaccines and make the standards

for approval and licensure, you know, much more stringent. The exact opposite is what they're talking about for things like stem cell therapies, you know, the vast majority of which are unproven and often very expensive. A lot of other, you know, wellness treatments and that sort of a thing. So we could be seeing a lot less novel pharmaceuticals and vaccines being approved because the anti-pharma, you know, suspicion will be such that the bar for approval will be higher, arguably too high.

I realized that in the past I once argued that maybe our bar for approving some drugs was too low, but that was more based on the various accelerated approval programs that had come into being in the years before that that where I thought that perhaps the follow-up after the initial accelerated approval was not adequate. At the same time, it could become more and more like the Wild West when it comes to everything else. We could very well have the equivalent of the traveling snake oil salesmen going across the plains in their cart and selling their various liniments.

I'm not exactly sure what that would look like. I do know that, for instance, it's already pretty much like that for a lot of quote unquote stem cell therapies that have never really been demonstrated to be effective and safe and, you know, the same randomized clinical controlled trials that they demand, you know, for vaccines. One thing I have little doubt of is that public health is going to be degraded significantly over the next four years. And how we recover from that, I don't know. I'm struggling with what can be done to resist it or slow it down, given that, I don't know. I'm struggling with the, of what can be done to resist it or slow

it down, given that, you know, the entire Republican Party doesn't seem to want to put any sort of checks on this administration. Mm hmm. And you know, if we were to have some other sort of major pandemic, either a new virus that breaks through or a return of some disease that was once out of circulation, there's no real guarantee that deaths or widespread illness or disability as a result of those possible events will even spur a reaction in a way that would set us on a path back towards confidence in public health and vaccination. The outcome of COVID was, it's quite clear that COVID was sort of an accelerant for a lot of the anti-vaccination beliefs that had long been incubating in our public discourse and broad

distrust of public health entities in general. And like you said, Trump's successor will be left to clean up whatever mess is made. And it's possible that Trump's successor could be someone like JD Vance. Yes, it could. Or someone who shares this affinity for, you know, quasi-eugenic statements or beliefs or this general disregard for the consequences of a sort of social Darwinist approach to public health. And so, you know, we don't want to overstate the risks and be And so, you know, we don't want to overstate the risks and be doomsayers. But on the other hand, there's this real potential for the return of, you know, God forbid, something like polio or a breakthrough avian flu.

You just reminded me, polio was one of the diseases modeled in that study and the results was it coming back and hundreds or even thousands of cases of paralytic polio. Right. And we live now in a time in which it's always been the majority of people who have never had someone in their family who was in an iron lung. But we live in a time now where the historical memory of that is somewhat lost because it's not even in the popular consciousness. It's not something that is featured in media. You used to read books or watch films or even in television.

There would be examples of something like that, someone who had been impacted by polio and whether they were left disabled and had less use of their limbs, or, you know, if they ended up in an iron lung, you know, that was something at least people were aware of the risk. And it's kind of parallel to something another public health official I spoke with talked about how there's, you know, been like two decades of doctors who went through their residencies never even seeing a case of measles. And so now we're having to sort of reeducate, not just our doctors,

but really the whole population. And that's a massive undertaking. We'll hear a bit more from Dr. Gorski right after this ad break. I'm Robert Evans, and on my podcast Behind the Bastards, we talk about the worst people in all of history. We've discussed a lot of horrible monsters in our time, but this week we have one of the very worst we'll ever talk about. David Berg, founder of a cult called the Children of God. We'll talk about all of his horrible crimes with special guest Ed Helms. He's not just like a weird religious cult leader. He was like fusing a bunch of hippie ideology in with this kind of like evangelical Christianity

Pentecostal preaching in the mid century. He's a very weird guy. But yeah, I'll just get into it. Like nothing you just said makes sense. That doesn't set. Right. But that's the beauty of cults. Listen to Behind the Bastards on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get

your podcasts. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Catherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband

at the cold case. They've never found her and it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. I've never found her, and it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator

to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into,

call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. OpenAI is a financial abomination. A thing that should not be. An aberration.

A symbol of rot at the heart of Silicon Valley. And I'm going to tell you why on my show Better Offline, the rudest show in the tech industry. Where we're breaking down why OpenAI, along with other AI companies, are dead set on lying to your boss that they can take your job. I'm also going to be talking with the greatest minds in the industry about all the other ways the rich and powerful are ruining the computer. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, wherever you happen to get your podcasts.

I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this Taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that Taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you

Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes one, two, and three on May 21st,

and episodes four, five, and six on June 4th. Add free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple podcasts. You know, one of the things that anti-vaxxers like to do is to try to claim that, oh, back before the vaccine, people didn't think measles was a big deal. And they will point to that famous episode of the Brady Bunch that I don't know if you ever heard of where all the kids got the measles and it was You know played mainly for laughs, you know Like they're all happy about being home from school and they're not very sick They just have little dots painted all over them because I guess that's how they showed them having the measles Sure can't beat the measles, that's right. No medicine. Insider out. Like shots I mean. Don't even mention shots. Yeah. Measles, measles, measles. Well, all the kids have

now had the measles. So have I. Well, I had them years ago. Looks like the Brady's are finished with the measles. There was also an episode of the Flintstones that played, believe it or not, that played the measles for laughs. And there was an episode of the Flintstones that played, believe it or not, that played the Musels for laughs. And there was an episode of the Donna Reed Show from the 50s. They would point to like those and go, oh, they didn't consider Musels a big deal. Well, if you read the actual medical and public health literature, you know, they did. And, you know, there were hundreds of thousands of confirmed cases a year, maybe millions of cases a year, and at least averaging about 400 or 500 deaths a year, which doesn't sound like a lot, but

in anything having to do with children, that's a lot of death. Because we don't expect children to die. Children should not die. They usually, you know, it's not like elderly people where, you know, it's expected that that's when, you know, the body starts giving out and people are reaching the end of their lives. Children death rate should be low. That's why we look at, you know, childhood cancer and there was such an effort made, you know, over from like the 50s on to try to decrease the rate of death from childhood

cancer. And the results have been pretty spectacular. About 85% of children with cancer live, which before it was a pretty small number. And the funny thing is the number of childhood cancers is very small compared to a lot of other things that cause death. We viewed it as sufficiently important to try to do something about it. At least we did. The question of whether we will continue to, because, you know, anti-chemotherapy and various cancer nonsense tends to go right along with Maha. And the other thing, you know, for instance,

when RFK Jr. made his, one of his statements, it was, was it in early March, I believe, or it was in March sometime, about, you know, where everyone was like, oh, he said the MMR works and is the best way to stop the spread of measles. Yes, but, you know, instead of the traditional messaging that you would come out of the CDC, which would be, you know, get vaccinated, you know, MMR is the best way to, you know, put a stop to this.

Please, please parents get your kids vaccinated. Instead what he sort of said is yes, the vaccine, you know, vaccination is good, you know, best way to stop the outbreak. But then he buries it instead of baffling with bullshit, it's more like burying it in bullshit. He talks about, you know, vitamin A supposedly to treat measles. He talks about how children die with measles

rather than of measles, which should sound very familiar because they pulled the same rhetoric out for COVID. And the idea being that only the children who were already sick were harmed by measles. And that your middle-class healthy children are not in any danger. One way to look at the anti-vaccine movement besides the eugenicists undertones,

sometimes not even undertones, one way to look at it is as a purity cult. You may remember the whole pure blood thing from a few years ago, like those that were not vaccinated or refusing to mingle with those who are, whose blood has somehow been contaminated by the vaccine. It's the same as, and think of how much of alternative medicine involves,

quote unquote, detoxification. I like to call it ritual purification because it's like more of a religious concept than it is actually a medical concept. And look at how treatment of quote-unquote vaccine injury involves something like chelation therapy to pull the evil heavy metals that are supposedly causing autism out of you. So the idea that you have control of your health if you only make your terrain in your body hostile to microbes through your superior lifestyle. The one example of this that I like to point out

and the best retort to it that I like to point out comes from about 2009 if I recall right. It was Bill Maher on his HBO show. And Bob Costas was the guest. And he was going on about how, you know, this was around the time of the H1N1 flu pandemic. And he was going, you know, he was going, he was going on about how he didn't need the flu vaccine because, you know, his terrain was so hostile to the flu because, you know, of his superior lifestyle caused me to roll my eyes.

And that if he were on an airplane with people coughing with the flu, he would not get the flu. What did Costas say to him? I love this retort. He said, oh, come on, Superman. Bob Costas could have easily used a different word in his retort, given the eugenic tendencies of the modern anti-vaccination movement. And the word I have in mind is ubermensch. But I digress. If the ubermensch of the anti-vax movement like RFK get what they want, we will live

in a world where preventable, communicable diseases run rampant, the deaths of children are justified as either a part of God's plan or a survival of the fittest herd immunity strategy, where snake oil and beef tallow salesmen are heralded above doctors and scientists, and where only the strongest will survive at the expense of the weak. Diseases long thought defeated could return and our ability to address new viruses will be diminished if RFK Jr. successfully dismantles what remains of our public health bureaucracy, and he's doing it at a steady clip.

In other words, the future may end up looking a lot like the past, more than it already does. And that's terrifying. The last time deadly pandemics, religious fervor and resistance to medical science and eugenic policies all coincided historically with global trade breakdowns, things did not work out so well for anyone involved. And unfortunately, if I've taken one thing away from my exploration of anti-vax America, it's that things will likely have to get worse before they get better. It's really hard to get people unstuck from their beliefs.

Despite more than one million Americans dying of COVID, the reaction to pandemic restrictions combined with the anti-vaccination movements convincing misinformation around vaccines radicalized many people against vaccines and public health measures in general. Before I recorded this final statement, the Texas State House voted to advance a bill that will expand the ability for parents to seek exemptions for trial vaccination requirements for school. And this is happening as a measles outbreak is ongoing.

And things aren't looking good, but there is at least one sliver of hope that I've found. As my conversation with Gare illustrates, it's possible for people who grow up in communities where vaccinations are avoided or where there is no belief in them to get out of those communities and to get themselves vaccinated. And as my conversation with Catherine Wells illustrated, it is also possible for people who have been hesitant to get their children vaccinated for something like measles to be spurred into action, for something like measles to be spurred into action, given reporting around an outbreak. But the question that ultimately remains is whether enough people will have their minds changed and embrace what the science tells us we should do. Given Dr. Gorsky's astute observation that the anti-vaccine movement is somewhat like a purity cult,

and Gare's comment that escaping their anti-vax upbringing was sort of like escaping a cult. Unfortunately, I think we will have to temper our expectations for how quickly we can extricate our nation from this deep, dark place that I call anti-vax America. I'm Stephen Monticelli. Thanks for listening. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.

For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonedmedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. I'm Robert Evans, and on my show Behind the Bastards this week, we have one of our worst subjects ever, David Byrd, founder of the Children of God cult, who we'll be talking about with special guest Ed Helms.

He's not just like a weird religious cult leader. He was like fusing a bunch of hippie ideology in with this kind of like evangelical Christianity, Pentecostal preaching in the mid century. He's a very weird guy. But yeah, I'll just get into it. Like nothing you just said makes sense. That doesn't say, but that's the beauty of cults. Listen to Behind the Bastards on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Open AI is a financial abomination, a thing that should not be an aberration, a symbol podcasts or wherever you get your job. I'm also going to be talking with the greatest minds in the industry about all the other ways the rich and powerful are ruining the computer. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you happen to

get your podcasts. Over the years of making my true crime podcast Hell and Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder. I'm Catherine Townsend. I've heard from hundreds of people across the country with an unsolved murder in their community. I was calling about the murder of my husband. The murder is still out there. Each week, I investigate a new case.

If there's a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sometimes as dads, I think we're too hard on ourselves. We get down on ourselves on not being able to, you know, we're the providers,

but we also have to learn to take care of ourselves. A rapper way, you gotta pray for yourself, as well as for everybody else, but never forget yourself. Self-love made me a better dad because I realized my worth. Never stop being a dad. That's dedication. Find out more at fatherhood.gov. Brought to you by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Ad Council. This is an iHeart Podcast.