Part One: David Berg and the Children of God (ft. Ed Helms)

Robert sits down with Ed Helms to discuss one of our worst monsters: David Berg, founder of the Children of God cult. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Robert Evans?

  Welcome back once again to Behind the Bastards, the podcast about the very worst people in all of history. And folks, this week, you know, I've said this a couple of times, but I always mean it. This is one of the worst guys we're ever gonna talk about. And in order to really get behind this bastard in a way that makes him palatable, we've got to bring on one of the best guests we've ever had, a man who needs no introduction, perhaps the eddest of all helms, Ed Helms. Welcome back to the show, Ed.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  Thank you so much. I'm so glad to be here.

• 0:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  I agree, I'm extremely ed-ish, Eddie. I'm the, I don't know if I'm the eddest, but...

• 0:45Robert Evans?

  You're definitely the helms-est of eds, I think we can agree with that.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  I'm the helms-est, that's for sure.

• 0:51Speaker 02

  And you're the host of Snafu.

• 0:54Robert Evans?

  Right, yeah, great podcast, entering season three. It's a podcast about some of the most, biggest screw-ups, or fuck-ups, I guess, just based on the literal translation of the title, in the history of the US government. Last season, you talked about the massive, sweeping, unprecedented civilian-led infiltration and expose of FBI surveillance files. And this season, you're talking about how the US government tried to poison a shitload of people during prohibition.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a dodgy, it's a dodgy world out there, folks. And we are living in it. But no, thank you for that plug. I'm extremely proud of Snafu. It's a labor of love. It's an unbelievable amount of work. But we have an incredible team between Gilded Audio and Film Nation and myself. And yeah, we just do a ton of research. It's legit. It's like legit research.

• 1:54Robert Evans?

  Really, really good.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  History, it's real history. And then the book, of course, I have a book that just came out. I don't even have one to show you. Oh my gosh, I'm so unprepared.

• 2:01Speaker 02

  On the YouTube, we'll put the graphic up for folks.

• 2:05Robert Evans?

  Okay, good.

• 2:06Speaker 02

  We got you.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  It's a fantastic book, New York Times Best Seller.

• 2:10Robert Evans?

  Hell, yeah.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  Also called Snafu, the definitive guide to history's greatest screw ups. Lots of chapters, each chapter is a different screw up. Unlike the podcast where the entire season is one screw up. You get a whole caboodle in the book.

• 2:25Robert Evans?

  Caboodle of snafus. Well, we're talking about a great screw up today, although it's it's not a screw up of just the US government. It's more like every time a cult leader gets way too big for their britches. It's kind of like a collective human screw up like, oh, man, we really let that guy get too far. We shouldn't have let that happen, right? You're looking at like Jim Jones and like, oh, shit, man, we really, we screwed up. How did that happen? Today, we're talking about a guy. You may not recognize him by name, but I think a lot of people will recognize the cult. The dude was named David Berg and his cult was called the Children of God or the Family International.

• 3:04Speaker 03

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.

• 3:08Robert Evans?

  Picture this, you're listening to the Sniffy's Cruising Confessions podcast and suddenly, wait, what did they just say? Well, the questions raised in those showstopping moments will be answered in the all new bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions Bedside Manor. Hosts Gabe and Chris will dive deep on a specific topic covered in that week's Tuesday episode, from sexual health and HIV prevention to finding the right doctor. Listen to this special bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions Bedside Manor, now on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get podcasts. Sponsored by Healthy Sexual from Gillian Sciences.

• 3:39Speaker 04

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 4:10Speaker 05

  This January, bare-knuckle fighting championship takes over the ocean. The inaugural Brew's Crew sails from Miami to the Bahamas aboard the Norwegian Jewel. Three straight days with pool decked bare-knuckle fights in the Caribbean. Mess of parties, beach events, DJs, cigars, tequila tastings and non-stop action. The lineup reveals coming soon. Cabins are disappearing fast and the prices won't stay this low. Reserve your spot with just $200 down at B K F S E A dot com.

• 4:42Robert Evans?

  We're back. Have you ever heard of these guys, Ed?

• 4:46Speaker 01

  Just the most, um, the tiniest bit. Like I have the broadest sense of this group. I might recall more as you go.

• 4:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah. These guys are, if you kind of want to cut cult leaders into like three different groups, you've got kind of on the lightest and the guys who like, yeah, there's some psychological abuse, they're taking money from people, but they're not committing any like serious violent crimes, right? They're just kind of in it for the cash. And then the middle, you've got the guys where they're like physically and mentally abusing people, but they're not like killing anyone. David Berg is on kind of the far end of the spectrum where like he is, he is just some of the worst stuff I've heard of a cult leader do. He's about as extreme as it gets and he's interesting because he's also, 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, uh,

• 5:38Robert Evans?

  like Christianity, like Pentecostal preaching in the mid-century. He's a very weird guy. But yeah, I'll just get into it.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  Like nothing you just said makes sense. That doesn't sound right, but that's the beauty of cults. Like they just kind of make it up.

• 5:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, they can make it up as they go along and they're very rooted in their time, right? This guy, this quote couldn't have gotten started any other year, but like 1968, which is in fact when it gets started. David Brantberg was born on February 18th, 1919, kind of at the height of the influenza pandemic. His parents were Virginia Berg and Heilmann Berg. They were both evangelical Christian preachers participating in what was called the revival movement, right? So at this time, We've got a lot of these like traveling itinerant preachers moving around throughout the US, mostly but not entirely in like the south and southeast. And so you've got this network of churches, but also these traveling preachers who make their money

• 6:33Robert Evans?

  getting crowds and hyping them up. And there's a lot of, sometimes they're doing like fake psychic surgery. Sometimes they're doing like snake handling where they'll like milk a snake of its venom and then pretend to get bit beforehand to be like, "Look, God protected me," right? Like it's a show act in addition to being preaching, right? And you know, this, that's the big movement at the time. And that's how David's parents kind of make their living. David would later write that his father, Hjalmr, who was a Swedish immigrant to the US, had been converted by his maternal grandfather. And before finding Jesus, Hjalmr was a, quote, "cigar smoking, beer drinking, wild dancing, party going, good looking and loose living young man of the world."

• 7:12Speaker 01

  I would think anyone named Hjalmr fits that description.

• 7:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah, seems like a loose living man.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  Well, now what origin is that name?

• 7:20Robert Evans?

  Swedish. Yeah, he's very Swedish. Yeah.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  Hjalmr. I like it.

• 7:24Robert Evans?

  And it's, we don't know if that's actually true. Like it's kind of a thing in this world of evangelical preachers to pretend that, you know, before you got saved, you were a real bad guy. And the fact that he can't think of anything but like, "Well, I drank beer and danced." Right? It's like, "I don't know, man. I've known worse guys."

• 7:41Speaker 01

  I don't know. Depends on what kind, like how much beer and what kind of dancing, I suppose.

• 7:47Robert Evans?

  That is a good point.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  Dancing can get dirty.

• 7:50Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. As I was, Kevin Bacon, let us all know.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  Patrick Swayze.

• 7:55Robert Evans?

  Pastor Swy, Jesus Christ. I'm, I know. That's shameful.

• 8:00Robert Evans?

  So one of the weird little facts about his parents is that before she met Hjalmr, Virginia, his mom, was engaged to be married to Bruce Bogart, who I think was Humphrey Bogart's cousin, which is just a weird fact. Hjalmr was hired entertainment at the wedding and she just kind of leaves her fiance to be with him. So, you know, there's a story there that's interesting, but we don't have it.

• 8:24Robert Evans?

  Whatever the truth, from the time David knew his father, he was a zealous minister. Berg would later write that this was- Almost too much for his mother because this is not the guy that she'd married. I don't know if this is true either. David describes his mother as very, very strict and religious, and she's going to be a super famous preacher later. He just kind of doesn't like his mom, so he takes a lot of pot shots at her in the biography that he wrote about himself. I think that's probably more what's happening here.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  We call that an autobiography.

• 8:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Sorry, yes. Hjalmar and Virginia go to religious universities. His mom goes to Texas Christian University, gets a degree there. They have their first son, David's older brother, in 1911, his older sister in 1915, and David's the youngest of the family in 1919. Virginia would later claim that after having her daughter, she had been completely disabled for five years and then miraculously healed. And if this is the case, then she had David before she was healed. And scholars who've looked into the family are like, there's no evidence that she was ever really sick. This is, again, just kind of like part of the myth-making. And I bring this up because as David grows into the family, he's going to be used to the idea that both his parents are like these traveling freelance preachers,

• 9:34Robert Evans?

  and that they just make up stuff about the family, right? And about their history, that like, as their kid, he knows a lot of this isn't true. And he just come, you just lie about your backstory because it sells better.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a show.

• 9:47Robert Evans?

  Right, right, exactly.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  Kind of like Bob Dylan.

• 9:49Robert Evans?

  But like Bobby, right, like Bob Dylan or a pro wrestler.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  Like a lot of entertainers, truly, yeah.

• 9:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. No one was ever born named Nicolas Cage. It's simply too cool of a name, right?

• 10:02Robert Evans?

  Like his mother, David's going to go on to later have claimed that he suffered from a variety of untreatable illnesses that were cured via prayer. His bio on the website, established by the cult he later found, says that he was born with influenza and also an enlarged heart. Neither of these is super unlikely, but this kind of weaves into the bio he makes that he was spared from all this by his prayers, right? And then he was like healed so that he could do his work. His biography, the autobiography on his church's website also goes into a whole host of what I think are increasingly unlikely ailments for him to have suffered. At three years of age, his foot was Run over by an automobile and the doctor said he would never walk again. But again, his parents believed in God and prayed and his foot was miraculously healed.

• 10:47Robert Evans?

  Although the doctor said that many of the bones were crushed. When he was seven years old, a water heater exploded in his face and the doctor said he would be permanently blinded. But this time God used an old friend, a real saint who prayed for his eyes and they were instantly healed. I don't know. Maybe I don't think a water heater exploded in his face.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:08Robert Evans?

  Maybe.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  I mean, that would do a lot more than blind you, it seems like.

• 11:12Robert Evans?

  Right. And he's like, we have pictures of his face.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  Like, cause those are, those are made of iron. Those things are like, like an exploding water heater.

• 11:21Robert Evans?

  It's like an IED going off. Yeah.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, fully. Like, there's a lot of shrapnel, for real.

• 11:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. And his face is like, fine. Like, there's not really much evidence of this. What we can confirm is that he grows up, like I said, in this family that it's almost like a wrestling family, right? Where it's like, yeah, we've got like, we've got like the kayfabe that we have to keep about our background, you know? And so he's going to be very good about this his entire life.

• 11:45Speaker 01

  Is he going on these church revivals, like, from the get-go? He's just, they're, they're like, living on the road?

• 11:51Robert Evans?

  Sometimes. He is, for a part of his early life, I think up until he's like 10 or 11 or so, he mostly stays at home and one of his parents will be traveling at any given time, occasionally both. Like, he will describe himself later as very lonesome as a little kid. Cause he both, he doesn't have a lot of friends and he barely sees his mom, right? Because they're very busy and traveling constantly.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  Right. I would wager that describes a lot of cult leaders.

• 12:16Robert Evans?

  Right. Yeah. Lonely kids, too much time thinking.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  And sorry, sorry, remind me where this is, his childhood?

• 12:24Robert Evans?

  It's mostly in, I think at this point, they're like in, like, Mississippi or something like that. But they're, they're like moving around his entire childhood. They wind up in Florida. And then California are kind of the two places he's primarily raised. A little in his early life, they're moving so much, sometimes like every couple of months that it's unclear to me. Cause like, his dad or his mom will get a job, like, pinch hitting at a church for four months or something, right? So that the, the normal pastor can go out on the road or whatever. Um, so he's raised a lot of the time by this like combination of maids governesses and like, like uncles and aunts occasionally, and he doesn't get a lot of attention. Um, and this is kind of highlighted by the fact that the attention he does get as a young boy,

• 13:09Robert Evans?

  and probably the earliest direct adult attention that he strongly remembers is sexual abuse, um, which is also going to like leave a mark. Um, this starts when he's three and it's, it, you know, it's the maid of his house who like, he claims is, is kind of molesting him to help him get to sleep. So he'll talk about this positively as an adult. And that's kind of relevant because he's going to come to believe that this kind of stuff is positive for members of his cult to do, right?

• 13:37Speaker 01

  That's so interesting. Do you, I, I read that in Victorian England, this was commonplace, that governesses would give little boys, uh, hand jobs essentially at bedtime.

• 13:49Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  The, the theory being that they would help them fall asleep.

• 13:53Robert Evans?

  Yes, and that's exactly what his maid says that she's doing. Um, and his mom does not like, his mom finds out and assaults the maid, like is hitting her and fires her, which I think we could all agree, pretty normal response from a parent. But he, and as you said, like, this is not at the time, like, it's a kind of thing that happens a lot more often than you would have thought. And he, as a kid, thinks it's unjust and fair. Cause he's like, I don't get why my mom was so mean to the maid, right? Like, oh, interesting. And yeah, and this is going to like, kind of compound over the years. He's going to keep having experiences like this and convince himself that sort of his reaction to them is the normal and healthy one. And that's going to lead to him pushing this on a lot of other kids, right?

• 14:36Speaker 01

  So complex.

• 14:38Robert Evans?

  It's, it's really complicated.

• 14:40Speaker 01

  The maternal figure, uh, battling with his caretaker.

• 14:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  Like the, where's his loyalty?

• 14:48Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  In all of that, and the abuse.

• 14:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  Is, is, is sort of justified in some way or attempt, you know?

• 14:55Robert Evans?

  He tries to, sure, yeah.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  Or, and the, and the, the maid.

• 14:59Robert Evans?

  It's like his maid, yeah, yeah.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  Nanny or whatever. Wow, that's wild.

• 15:04Robert Evans?

  It's, it's, it's wild. And like, you have to assume this nanny is like more of a mother figure than his mom at age three, because she's just not there, right? Like, it's, yeah. And after this, his mother is going to be increasingly like, David experiments a lot with himself, and his mom will punish him violently whenever she catches him, right? Which kind of compounds his feelings of anger towards his mom. This comes to a head when he's six years old, and she catches him yet again, like, experimenting. And quote, "She brought out a wash basin, a little bowl and a knife, and told me she was going to cut it off," right? She threatens to like, circumcise him, basically.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  When you say experimenting, he's just like masturbating?

• 15:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And like, his mom is, basically threatens to like, cut him as a result, which is bad parenting, right? So this, this kid is stacking a lot of trauma. We're, we're at age seven at this point, right? Which is when he has a confused sexual encounter with a cousin of the same age, right? Who's also seven. So, these are two kids playing around. This is not like, an abuse scenario, right? They're both the same age. But his uncle catches them, and like, watches. And he's horrified, because he realizes that his uncle is like, kind of voyeuristically doing this. And his uncle never tells his mom. He never tells his mom. So what we've got by this point, is this

• 16:26Robert Evans?

  very confused kid, who's had a lot of sexual trauma before age 10, and is learning from an early age, that like, this is the most positive attention he's gotten in his life, and it's also the thing that he's most punished and frightened of, right? Yeah. He's going to grow up, and his main takeaway from the experience will be frustration at the fact that his parents judged him for all of this, right? That they punished him for this kind of stuff.

• 16:54Robert Evans?

  And it so you have to kind of think of this energy within him around this is this kind of building pressure inside of him that's going to at a certain point be released with pretty catastrophic consequences for a lot of people. He also is really frustrated as a kid that his mom is usually the one punishing him. He thinks his dad should be doing that. He sees his dad as like kind of weak and being dominated by his mom. He would later write that the times he most respected his father were when his dad quote, "picked up a board and hit me so hard on the fanny, he lifted me right off the ground." So he's like, "Well, at least my dad hit me sometimes," you know, and was like a real father. Um, you know, we're talking about the twenties here. So not a healthy upbringing.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. The irony is irony is that he's right that

• 17:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  his parents shouldn't have punished him, but it doesn't, but it seems like he thinks they should have like nurtured this toxicity, whereas they should have intervened in a in like a healthy way.

• 17:51Robert Evans?

  Should have intervened, been like, "This isn't your fault."

• 17:54Speaker 01

  Right. Exactly. All of that.

• 17:57Robert Evans?

  But this isn't okay. Yeah.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  It's both not your fault and not okay.

• 18:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  And

• 18:03Robert Evans?

  And

• 18:04Speaker 01

  he seems to have walked away with all the wrong.

• 18:06Robert Evans?

  All the wrong things and, you know, it is hard to imagine a couple of parents in the twenties having gotten this kind of situation right, you know, like, yeah.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  Not a lot of tools. They didn't have a lot of tools.

• 18:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. Um, so once he gets a little older, he's kind of moving into adolescence. The family starts to move with regularity and at this point they kind of are on the road and he's on the road with his family pretty constantly. They go around the US, they live in like a dozen states, they spend some time in Canada. His mom is becoming increasingly prominent. She has like a ministry, which means she's a known preacher. She's getting invitations from dozens of churches to come. And the way this works is it's honestly, the evangelical preaching business works a lot like stand-up comedy does today where a venue invites you or you get hooked up through an agent and you take like half of the offering. So you give a preach, people donate money, you split it with the venue, right? That's kind of how these people are making a living.

• 19:02Robert Evans?

  And she's like, she's like a high level stand-up like person, right? Like, if you want to think of it that way, they're making pretty good money for a while. And in fact, they're making good enough money that when he's like, I think 12 or so, the family settles down in Miami because Virginia is able to actually start her own church, right? Where she is now operating a venue. And for a time, things are getting better for the Bergs, but then the depression hits, right? And this is just as David's entering his teen years and Virginia's church goes out of business, right? Which is not usually a term we use for churches, but that's what these kind of ones are, right?

• 19:37Speaker 01

  So interesting. Yeah. I wonder if they had tax exempt status?

• 19:41Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah. No, these people aren't paying taxes.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  And I'm just, I'm so curious what her presentation was. Like, what was her energy? What was her tone? What was the, the message, I assume, was fire and brimstone? Or was it more?

• 19:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  I don't like.

• 20:00Robert Evans?

  It's both this mix of like fire and brimstone. You always start with a like, here's how bad I was when I was younger, you know? There's a, there's a really good, there's an Oscar winning documentary from 1973 called Marjoe, M-A-R-J-O-E, with this dude who was a kid, when he was like five, his parents were traveling preachers like David's, and they had him, like, they billed him as like the youngest preacher. They like taught him, wrote how to do stuff, like perform weddings. And as an adult, he like came back undercover with like a film crew to like expose how this business worked. And if you want to see like how this whole like industry worked, Marjoe's a really good depiction of it. He also wound up as an actor on the A-Team as an adult. It's weird.

• 20:38Robert Evans?

  But, uh, so after the business goes under, the Heilmann and Virginia start going on the road. The marriage is not doing well because Bunny's not good, so they split up and they split the kids between them. And David stays with his mom. And his mom kind of uses him as, in her words, her quote chauffeur, secretary and singer. I don't know if they had, he shouldn't have been driving. He's like 13, but. It was the 30s?

• 21:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah, fuck it. Why not?

• 21:09Speaker 01

  Not as much traffic.

• 21:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah, not as much traffic. No one's got seatbelts, so you're just vibing in there. They wind up in California, Southern California, where David attends Monterey High School. And so this is kind of the second time in his life that he's really stable for any period of time. He would later claim to have been bullied for being a preacher's kid by the other students who, quote, "threw his books around, tore his papers, and even broke his left arm." He's a sickly kid, and he claims to have figured that the only way he could beat them back was, quote, "in the classroom with pen and paper," and that he did this by graduating with, quote, "the highest scholastic record in the 80-year history of the school." Now, there's no evidence of this. Like, we know he graduated in 1935, but I've never heard, like, the school doesn't claim that

• 21:53Robert Evans?

  he did the best of anyone there, so he's massaging stuff a little bit. By this point, he's seen what the life of a traveling preacher looks like, and he's also seen how hard it is to live that life. So he tries to make a living in the secular world and applies to go to the Elliott School of Business Administration. This, I think, is in Washington, DC, but it may have been, there may have been another business school by the same name that's since got out of business, but he's only there for, like, a couple of months before he drops out. So, and I think this is just part of, he hasn't had a normal education. He doesn't know how to do anything but what his parents do, right? And so, within a couple of months, he drops out of school and decides to go into

• 22:35Robert Evans?

  full-time evangelical work, like, doing the same thing his parents has done, living as a traveling preacher. And it's kind of a question mark what he does in the first six years after his graduation, but this is probably it. He's probably traveling around preaching.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  And what year are we talking?

• 22:51Robert Evans?

  35 to 41.

• 22:52Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 22:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So David doesn't make any additional direct claims about what he's doing until December 7, 1941, which, as I think most people know, is when Pearl Harbor happens, right? And he claims to have joined the Army. And he says he failed the Army's physical requirements, but they let him in anyway, and that he served as a conscientious objector, because he didn't- Believe it would be ethical to go and kill Japanese soldiers because they hadn't had a chance to hear the gospel. Right? That's his claim. And the army did admit conscientious objectors and noncombat roles in World War II. But there's no evidence that Berg was one of them, or that he served in any way, shape or form.

• 23:32Robert Evans?

  We have some records of his background from like different evangelical organizations he was a part of that were keeping track of what he was doing in the early 40s. And there's just no evidence that he ever served at all. If he did, it was maybe for a month or two. He claims that he caught double pneumonia and got so sick that the army discharged him because they thought he was going to die. And in his account of events, obviously, he gets miraculously saved by God and promises to spend the rest of his life preaching as a result. Right? And he's instantly healed. So that's his claim. I think the likelier claim is that like, he's just making it as a preacher from the late 30s to the early 40s. Right? Doing the thing that he understands how to do, traveling with one of his parents at a time and kind of making his way around the circuit.

• 24:17Speaker 01

  And, and he added this sort of military bullet point on his, on his resume just for some added credibility?

• 24:25Robert Evans?

  Or, or just kind of spin the story a little more? You gotta spin the story. You can't have said, especially, you know, in the 50s, 60s that like, you didn't do anything during World War II. So you had, you gotta have some explanation as to like how you were patriotic, but he's also going to be a big anti Vietnam War guy. So you wanna, he wants to be able to be like, but I was a conscientious objector, right? I didn't want to fight also. So that's kind of why I think he cooks that up. There's not really evidence of it.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  Okay. So, so is that, is that something easily disproven by military records? Or, or is it still kind of an open question? Cause you, the way you're talking about it, it sounds like, like you, you sound convinced he made it up.

• 25:06Robert Evans?

  I found a, a good study on him by a like PhD psychotherapist who like goes through his backstory and found his records with these different, a couple of different evangelical, like the British American Ministerial Federation and the Christian and Missionary Alliance, which are two different groups that he works with. And they have like Of his background up through the early 40s that don't list any time in the military. It's possible, like I have not seen, no one's ever like filed and gotten a DD 214, which is like the discharge paperwork you get from the army for him, but also this at this point in time, if he had just been in for a few months, like he claims, they might not have given him one, right? Because this is kind of a chaotic period. The army didn't work then like it does now, right?

• 25:53Speaker 01

  I mean, without the DD 124, like what, we don't know anything.

• 25:57Robert Evans?

  No, like we can't prove one way or the other.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  We gotta get the DD 124.

• 26:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  The paperwork.

• 26:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we know, and we just don't have it. So we don't really know what he was doing. But it's not, it's not impossible either way. But I think this just kind of fits into the other stories he tells about himself. Like it's, it's really convenient.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:15Robert Evans?

  The other thing that's convenient, Ed, is the products and services that support this podcast.

• 26:22Robert Evans?

  This ad is brought to you by ViiV Healthcare, the makers of Devoto, Dolutegravir, Lamivudine. If you're living with HIV, do learn about Devoto. Devoto is a complete HIV treatment by prescription only for some people 12 and older. Your doctor will determine if Devoto was right for you. Most HIV pills contain three or four medicines. Devoto is as effective with just two. No other complete HIV pill contains fewer medicines than Devoto.

• 26:45Speaker 06

  It is unknown if Devoto is safe and effective if you have HIV and hepatitis B. If you have Hep B, don't stop Devoto without talking to your doctor, as it may get worse or harder to treat. Don't take Devoto if you're allergic to its ingredients or taking Dofetilide due to serious or life-threatening side effects. If you have a rash or allergic reaction symptoms, stop Devoto and get medical help right away. Other serious or life-threatening side effects include severe liver problems and lactic acid buildup. If you're female or obese, you may be more at risk. Tell your doctor about your medicines or supplements, medical conditions, liver or kidney problems, pregnancy, breastfeeding, or planned pregnancy.

• 27:21Robert Evans?

  Do ask your doctor about fewer medicines. Visit devoto.com or call 1-877-844-8872.

• 27:28Speaker 04

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 27:56Speaker 05

  This January, bare-knuckle fighting championship takes over the ocean. The inaugural Brews Cruise sails from Miami to the Bahamas aboard the Norwegian Jewel. Three straight days with pool deck bare-knuckle fights in the Caribbean. Massive parties, beach events, DJs, cigars, tequila tastings, and non-stop action. The lineup reveals coming soon. Cabins are disappearing fast, and the prices won't stay this low. Reserve your spot with just $200 down at B K F S E A dot com.

• 28:26Robert Evans?

  You love the Sniffy's Cruising Confessions podcast, but you've got questions. Don't worry, everybody does. To answer them, hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson-Rosso just dropped a new bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions: Bedside Manor. For all your burning questions, the guys turn to the experts, including Dr. Dimitri Duskalakis, an infectious disease doctor, public health honcho, and big-time advocate in LGBTQ+ health, HIV prevention, and health equity. Think of it as the after-show to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, where the crew dives deep into topics and stories from that week's Tuesday episode. Episodes cover topics including testing and why are they swabbing there? Finding a doctor who's not so judgy, and so much more.

• 29:11Robert Evans?

  It's all about busting sexual health myths and helping listeners better understand the topics they may want to explore with their own doctors. Listen to this special bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions: Bedside Manor, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get podcasts. Sponsored by Healthy Sexual from Gilead Sciences.

• 29:31Robert Evans?

  And we're back. All right. So at this point in Ed's, or sorry, at this point in David's story, he's been miraculously healed from double pneumonia. The army has let him go and he's decided to get back into the business of preaching. And he spends the rest of World War II, you know, traveling around doing preaching with his parents. In 1944, he meets a young woman named Jane Miller and the two get married. They start touring because he brings her in and is like, now you're a preacher, right? Which is kind of what his mom had done to his dad. And the couple starts having kids in quick succession. They have Deborah in 1945, Aaron a couple of years later, Jonathan a year after that.

• 30:14Robert Evans?

  And then their fourth kid, who has my favorite name of their children, Faithy in 51. Just faith with a Y.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  Huh.

• 30:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I haven't heard that one. I haven't heard that name.

• 30:25Speaker 01

  That's one you gotta spell every time.

• 30:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Faithy.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  Faithy. It's like.

• 30:30Robert Evans?

  Faithy. Yeah. Yeah. Berg and his wife settle down in the Los Angeles. It's usually said as the Los Angeles area. They're in Huntington Beach, right? Which is like the kind of center of the evangelical movement in Southern California at this period of time. And he starts going to California's Southern Bible College in 1948 to continue his education. In between classes, he's on the move a lot. He'll sleep in his car or a tent, you know, in order to save money so that he can keep his family going. Because money is tight. It's not until 1949 that he gets his first stable job preaching at a church for the Christian and Missionary Alliance in Arizona. And by this point, he'd started calling his wife Jane, Mother Eve. And in an early show of kind of how his charisma worked,

• 31:14Robert Evans?

  people around them just sort of went along with it, even though I think it's kind of sacrilegious to call your wife Eve. I don't know. That's just a little weird.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  Maybe it was kind of just like a nickname.

• 31:25Robert Evans?

  It's like a nickname and it's sort of a, he's got that charisma where like if he gives someone a nickname, everyone picks it up, right?

• 31:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:32Robert Evans?

  Like people just kind of listen to what he says about stuff like this. Um, now, here's what his church bio, which is, he probably writes, paints, uh, of this period of time in his life. "His congregation was a mixture of southern whites, Indians, and Mexicans, who didn't like each other, and eventually the wealthy family which controlled the church board urged the denomination to send him elsewhere. They didn't like David because of his integration policies and his preaching that they should share more of their wealth with the poor, beginning with him and his little family." So, I do love that even in that, there's a little bit of griftiness that comes out, right?

• 32:07Speaker 01

  It's so funny. It's so magnanimous. It's such an, such an intrinsically wholesome thing to advocate and preach.

• 32:15Robert Evans?

  Integration, sure, great, yeah.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  But then it has a little bit of...

• 32:18Robert Evans?

  Give me a little bit of money.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, if some of that cheddar falls on me, what's wrong with that?

• 32:23Robert Evans?

  What about old David, huh? Didn't David get a cut?

• 32:26Speaker 01

  You're gonna cut Mother Reeve out of this? Come on!

• 32:29Robert Evans?

  Now, I don't, this does not seem to be, the whole, they just didn't like that I wasn't racist, doesn't seem to be the true story. His eldest daughter, Deborah, would later tell journalists, no, he got accused of sexual misconduct. He started an affair with a married woman in his church while he was married, and when it got found out, like, that, they were like, "Well, you're fired. This is the thing that, this is like, the one thing you can't do," right?

• 32:54Speaker 01

  A lot of them do it.

• 32:56Robert Evans?

  A lot of them do it. Uh, but yeah, he gets in trouble for this. His family would also claim that during this period of time, when he was on the road, he would regularly pay sex workers, uh, while he was preaching. Um, his children also accused him later of having slept with all of their housekeepers. So, this is a guy who's got a lot of, his personal life is messy, and I think that's probably why he gets fired, right? Um, and maybe just the adultery was kind of the last straw.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  Is Mother Reeve still in the, in the picture?

• 33:25Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. She's never happy with him. Um, they do not have a great marriage, although, a lot of that seems down to be, he just cheating, like, constantly on her.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:36Robert Evans?

  Now, he gets really angry when this missionary alliance lets him go. Berg declares for the first time that organized religion is corrupt and that the powers that be within the evangelical movement were holding him back. He starts referring to the leaders of these major churches as "the system" and accused them of fostering "churchianity" rather than "christianity", right? So, they're serving their churches rather than serving the faith, which is, in a large extent, for a lot of these guys, a fair criticism. It's also like, he's not any better, right?

• 34:12Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 34:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 34:13Speaker 01

  Also, I do love the word "churchianity".

• 34:16Robert Evans?

  "Churchianity"?

• 34:17Speaker 01

  "Churchianity".

• 34:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  It seems like something that the, uh, that someone would advocate at the annual

• 34:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  church, like, 4th of July potluck. Guys, we need more "churchianity" around here.

• 34:28Robert Evans?

  More "churchianity".

• 34:29Speaker 01

  "Churchianity".

• 34:30Robert Evans?

  He's got a gift for like, words, right? It's also, it's very modern, almost, like, deciding to frame your enemies as "the system", like, that, people do that all the time today, right? Like, whether they're on the left or the right, everyone wants to be like, there's a system that I'm against, right? And like, you can be a rebel too.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  What's the great movie, uh, what's, is it Pacino or somebody that's like, "I'm gonna put the system on trial"?

• 34:53Robert Evans?

  Oh, yes, Serpico.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  Serpico, yeah, exactly.

• 34:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, and then it's kind of reminiscent of our, uh, our last discussion about old Kurtie Yarvin.

• 35:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  The cathedral, right?

• 35:07Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes, exactly.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  Everything, you gotta have a cool name for the, for the, for the enemy.

• 35:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah, or how Andrew Tate will call it, "The Matrix", right? Like, it's, it's all of these, yeah, you gotta, you gotta have this big system that like, you're the, you're the lone Luke Skywalker character trying to blow up the, this Death Star of, in this case, churches that you used to work at until you got kicked out for adultery.

• 35:32Robert Evans?

  So whatever the truth behind why he was fired, the experience inspired him to attempt another move into secular life. So he goes to Arizona State University in 1951. I think it's not a party school at this point, but don't quote me on that, where he claims to have studied communism and walked away with the belief that it was a good idea, but it could only work if everyone was also Christian. Right? So he starts to see the early Christian church. And when I say early, I'm talking about like before the Roman Empire was Christian. Right? So when it's still kind of this underground organization as essentially the ideal communist community. And modern evangelism is corrupt because it's obsessed with money. So he's starting to pull in and write like this is the 50, early 50s

• 36:17Robert Evans?

  when this is happening. So the hippie movement's not coming together yet, but you can see how when it does, he's going to be drawn towards some of the things they're talking about.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 36:26Robert Evans?

  Right?

• 36:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:28Robert Evans?

  That said, the same year he goes to ASU, he's just there for a couple of terms. And then he goes back to Southern California to go to Bible school again. So his mind may not have been quite as made up at this point as he'd later claim. For much of the early 50s, he's working odd jobs. He has a gig at the DA's office. He works in construction. He's teaching junior high school at a private Christian school, trying to do anything but what his parents did. Right? Because it sucks.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  There's something interesting here, which is that if you're struggling to kind of like maintain stability in your life and make ends meet in general, communism sounds pretty damn good.

• 37:09Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. Especially if you're like working with all these corrupt guys who are like, oh, it's all about the money for you. Right? And like, yeah, I get it. But he's not, he's not gonna stick with these beliefs in like egalitarianism. Right? When he starts, when he starts getting money in his cult, the money goes to him. Right?

• 37:32Robert Evans?

  So in 1954, he gets hired to work in Texas for a guy named Fred Jordan, who was one of the first wave of TV. Ministers. So he's like one of the first big ministers to have like a live TV like church program. He's also training missionaries for foreign work and Berg starts working in television effectively, right? And for 13 years, he's Jordan's right-hand man. He's marketing for the show. He's helping to produce it on a technical level. And this is the most stable job he's ever had, right? He's doing this for more than a decade. Most of his kids are raised to adulthood during this period of time. And, you know, Fred is his mentor. And this is kind of one thing that's sort of noteworthy about this is that Fred had had a church before the

• 38:16Robert Evans?

  one that he starts and gets a TV program on, that he'd basically gotten fired from because he started cheating with one of the members of his congregation on his wife. And that had caused his church to leave him, right? So that's sort of like, David knows that and kind of sees a kindred spirit in this guy, because the same thing sort of happened to him. He would later refer to Fred as King Saul and credit him as a mentor. But he was also unhappy with his kind of humble position in this other guy's organization. He's middle aged now. And as he later wrote, "I felt I was passing my prime, but had not yet found God's perfect will for my life." He admits he was desperate for greater power, which is an unsettling thing to say, right?

• 39:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah, remarkably self-aware. Yeah, it was just about the power. Yeah. Yeah. Now, this doesn't come out until a long time later, but his daughters would later claim that he was also sexually harassing them during this period. Harassing or?

• 39:17Robert Evans?

  Both. So he tries first with his daughter Deborah when she's a young adult. And this doesn't go beyond harassment. Like, she refuses and he seems to have stopped. She's an adult at this period of time. So like, she's like, he tried and I refused him. He does start molesting his daughter, his youngest daughter Faithy, when she's about 10 years old in 1961. And one of the, a writer for Rolling Stone, who I, Wilkinson, who wrote a really good bio on this guy, also describes Faithy as the daughter who resembled him the most, which is Like it's, it's, so this is a guy who, at this point, he's kind of fully turned,

• 39:59Robert Evans?

  right? He's now passing on the same kind of abuse that he had experienced as a kid. He's also channeling his ambition at Fred's program into trying to kind of take it into the modern era. He becomes convinced early on that color television is the future. And so he tries to convince Fred, you gotta move on from black and white and like the mid 60s and make this a color program, right? And this is expensive. It's not cheap to go color in this period of time. And Fred really fights him on it and eventually agrees. And despite David's best efforts, they can't sell the show to any stations. So Fred fires him in 67. So it's, it's this kind of, you know, his life seems like it's falling apart at

• 40:40Robert Evans?

  this point. He's abusing his kids. He's lost his job. He would later tell, like, his version of events is that, once the show fails, he thinks Fred's going to fire him. But then he has a dream where everything's fine and God tells him to have faith. And he says the dream was signed by Fred himself. So he has a dream that his boss is cool with him. But the real boss doesn't get the memo about the dream boss. And this is what David writes next. "He wasn't completely sure if they should stay there or not. So as a test of the will of the Lord, he wrote and asked Fred for total control of their property and to even have it put in his name. Fred only said no, but fired David again, this time for the last time." So his like, his move is, well, I had a dream that things were fine. I'm just gonna

• 41:25Robert Evans?

  ask you to sign over all your property to me. Is that cool? Can we, can you do that?

• 41:30Speaker 01

  No, you're, you're re-fired.

• 41:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 41:34Speaker 01

  You're, you're double-fired. I don't even know what that means. You can't fire someone twice. It doesn't, it's like, I guess, I guess you just say, he just had to like, say the words twice.

• 41:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  Cause it just wasn't-

• 41:45Robert Evans?

  You are really fired. No, no, no. Seriously. Get out of here.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  Oh my gosh, this is actually, this is starting to sound, I mean, it was sounding up until this point like he was a very troubled and troubling person, but mostly coherent and exploitive and kind of dastardly, but this is starting to sound untethered to reality.

• 42:11Robert Evans?

  He's increasingly like losing his connection to reality, right? Like the fact that you would have this dream after your boss is like, man, I think I'm gonna have to let you go, you fucked up so bad. And then you're like, actually, I had a dream that it was fine. You wanna sign over all your property to me? Is that cool? Like, no, absolutely not.

• 42:31Robert Evans?

  So yeah, this is a bold move and it fails. So David has to take his family back to Southern California where his mom, Virginia, has a very big church in Huntington Beach and she is super successful at this point. And she's like, you should come here and start preaching. There's all these hippie kids, right? Who had gotten involved in the anti-war movement, started experimenting with drugs. And this is a major thing happening in the US at the time where you've got, it's 68, 768, 69, the hippie movement reaching like kind of critical mass. But also people keep falling out of it, right? They'll have really bad trips, they'll run out of money, like something bad will happen to them. And there's also all these kind of new evangelical offshoot programs.

• 43:13Robert Evans?

  They're called the Jesus Freaks, kind of colloquially, who start taking in these former hippies. And a lot of churches start as a result of this. And there's also a couple of different cults that start as a result of this, right? It's like people gathering up the shrapnel of the hippie movement.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  Manson.

• 43:28Robert Evans?

  Sort of, yeah, Manson, exactly. A great example of that, right?

• 43:32Speaker 01

  And, and, sorry, did you say that, that his mom was now, now running a church in Huntington Beach?

• 43:38Robert Evans?

  Yes, a big one. She is successful at this point.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  She, she's like super successful and he's just sort of dinking around trying to figure it out. But she invites him back.

• 43:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 43:48Speaker 01

  And how old are his kids at this point, by the way?

• 43:51Robert Evans?

  Three of them are adults, I think, and one of them is like late teens, like Faithy's like nearly adult, so his kids are mostly grown at this point, right?

• 43:59Speaker 01

  And has Faithy weighed in, like as an adult, is she?

• 44:03Robert Evans?

  You know, obviously, like, that's, you don't have to say anything just because your dad's a famous monster, right, after he abuses you, but like, we don't have a lot from her. Deborah is the one who talks a lot about what he did. So US involvement, obviously, in Vietnam's in full swing at this point, and David, he finds himself on the anti-war side of things. Maybe he is legitimately anti-war, right? Like, you can be a bad person and have like one or two good opinions, but maybe he also just sees it as like, oh, I want to, like my mom said, I want to get kids from this hippie movement, right? And so you kind of have to be on that side of things, right? It also may just have been natural, because like mainstream American society is this,

• 44:45Robert Evans?

  like, the pro-war side of things, and he has always found himself kind of on the outskirts, right? And he also really finds himself drawn to a lot of the values of the hippie movement, radical acceptance and peace and love, the anti-war stuff. So he starts a new organization with his children, his oldest kids, called Teens for Christ. Now, he is 50 at the time, so that's your first problem, right? Probably shouldn't be running a teens organization when you're 50. But his goal is to reach all of these newly awoken hippie kids in Huntington Beach, at the apex of the hippie movement in Southern California, and convince them that the real path to radical change is a Christian revolution that can sweep away the corruption of like

• 45:27Robert Evans?

  the war mongering administration and usher in a better future. He's got no church at first, and in fact, he doesn't have much in the way of resources at all, so he preaches out of a coffee house called The Light Club. And I'm going to quote from a 2005 Rolling Stone article by Peter Wilkinson here. "Reject society," he implored them. "With his long, white beard and prominent Adam's apple, Berg evoked a crazed Santa. To his followers, he was mesmerizing. 'Who are the real rebels of today?' he asked. 'We are the true lovers of peace and love and truth and beauty and God and freedom, whereas you, our parents, are on the brink of destroying and polluting all of us and our world if we do not rise up against you in the name of God and try to stop you.'" He came to be known to his children as Moses David, or simply Mo.

• 46:10Robert Evans?

  So it's all coming together. Yeah.

• 46:13Speaker 01

  Uh, so, so I'm, I'm, the only thing I'm confused by is, is that his mom invited him back.

• 46:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 46:20Speaker 01

  But, but he doesn't, he doesn't have a platform. Like he's not, he's not in the church. He's not, or he's doing this, all this on the side? Or what's the?

• 46:28Robert Evans?

  From my understanding, and a little bit of this is unclear, but he, he is initially working with her in a couple of other churches. But they don't like how radical he is.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 46:36Robert Evans?

  Cause he's like really anti-war. He's like anti-military and that's not super popular among like these otherwise kind of conservative Christian groups.

• 46:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:44Robert Evans?

  And that's kind of why he gets exiled to this coffee house. So his mom is who, one who brings him back. But you even see in that rhetoric, part of what he's drawn to the hippie movement by and why he's appealing to them is he is also very angry at like his parents. At the older generation. That's a big part of

• 47:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:00Robert Evans?

  The hippie, hippie movement. So they're kind of natural partners in a way.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. The, the other thing that really kind of weirded me out about that description was he has a long, white beard.

• 47:12Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  And a prominent Adam's apple. Now those two things are, those two things are hard to coexist because

• 47:20Robert Evans?

  You gotta keep that trim.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  The implication is that his Adam's apple is so prominent that it protrudes through his beard.

• 47:27Robert Evans?

  Through his beard. I love that you pick up on that.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  Because the beard would otherwise obscure anyone's Adam's apple.

• 47:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  So I'm picturing an Adam's apple that is so long and weird and pointy that it is disturbingly protruding.

• 47:40Robert Evans?

  It's like a goiter.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  He had an Adam's goiter.

• 47:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah. He's got an Adam's goiter.

• 47:46Speaker 01

  His, his goiter had another Adam's apple. Maybe was this, uh, was this father Adam's apple? It was, and by the way, where's mother Eve? Is, is mother Eve still in the picture?

• 47:59Robert Evans?

  She is still around. She's helping to lead Teens for Christ. Um, they are together. He says that she's constantly telling him like, you're not as holy as you pretend to be, which seems likely, given that she knows what he's been up to his whole life. So they don't have a good marriage, which is going to become relevant later because it's not going to last much longer.

• 48:17Speaker 01

  She's kind of undermining him or his psychotic.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  Agenda.

• 48:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah, she, you could, you could see, he would say undermining, mining, and maybe that's some of it. It also might be that just she was trying to be like, look, man, you need to like, I know you're not this guy.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 48:34Robert Evans?

  I know the real you, you know, I don't know entire, I can't claim to have the entire, you know, understanding, but it's not going well, the wed, the marriage. So one of his early members, one of the first people to join Teens for Christ in 1969 is a former beauty queen named Vashti, or at least that's the last name that she gives to Peter Wilkinson. And she explained kind of of her and a lot of the early people to join the organization. "Most of us were middle and upper middle-class kids who found that chasing materialism didn't work and felt that there had to be something bigger and more satisfying. Because we had it all, we were looking for the vacuum to be filled by God. We wanted to change the world." Right? And that's kind of her psychoanalysis of herself and a lot of the early members,

• 49:17Robert Evans?

  right? And, you know, at this point, Teens for Christ, this is not, this is turning into a cult, but it's not fully a cult yet, right? This is like you're meeting at a coffee house, you're handing out.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  It's a youth group.

• 49:27Robert Evans?

  He's got you in the street. It's a youth group. He does have you like handing out pamphlets and raising money, but the cult stuff kind of gets in, comes in gradually, piece by piece, right? You're not all living together immediately. And you're, you're feeling like if you'd come out of the hippie movement, that you haven't really left the counterculture, right? The hippie movement, you know, by the kind of 69, 70, especially by like 70, it's starting to become clear that it has failed in a lot of its goals and a lot of people who are kind of traumatized or left in the wake. What separates David Berg from all the other groups, like you mentioned Manson, but also like Tony Alamo, Alamo, who we've talked about, he has a ministry that's kind of part of this Jesus freak movement.

• 50:09Robert Evans?

  What separates Berg from these other groups picking up these people is that he, well, I guess with the exception of Manson, it's that he and Manson actually have a lot in common because they, they, they are the ones who are like, we're going to pull in a lot of this evangelical rhetoric, but we're also, we're going to bring in a lot of central tenants of the hippie movement. And with Berg, that's going to eventually include free love, right? Not immediately, but he- He's already is as early as like sixty eight, sixty nine. He's starting to think, maybe the hippies have a point about this. People shouldn't be getting married and just having sex with one person thing, right? Like this should be like, maybe that's like part of the system, right?

• 50:47Speaker 01

  Right. Maybe there's a, maybe there's a belief system or a way of thinking, a way of believing that that validates all of my insane behavior. And antisocial psychotic sexual exploitation. Maybe there's a construct we, I can subscribe to and get others to subscribe to that. That makes all that just, just fine.

• 51:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I've been doing a lot of fucked up sex stuff in my life. Maybe that's because that's what God wants, right? Yeah, that's kind of where he goes.

• 51:15Speaker 01

  And that, by the way, which is, which is even, I would say, I would call what he's doing even a different lane than free love. Sixties free love.

• 51:24Robert Evans?

  Yes. He, I, I should be clear that like, and we'll talk more about this. Free love is the branding he's going to use. It's not that. Right, right.

• 51:32Speaker 01

  All right. That, that tracks.

• 51:33Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. Um, he also does preach a lot at this point at the coffee house. He starts preaching about the system. He refers to people in mainstream society as systemites, right? And he seeks, he's cloaking himself in the language of rebellion to gain followers and it works. Wilkinson's article describes how Berg used his early followers to recruit more. Ashes smudged on their foreheads, clad in red sackcloth robes and carrying shepherd staffs, members of Teens for Christ hit the streets and cities across America. From New York to Washington DC to Chicago, what they referred to as the mission field. Strumming guitars, they handed out stacks of literature to passersby in exchange for donations. In those early days, money raised on the mission field went primarily to charities.

• 52:14Robert Evans?

  Our duty is to the lost souls, intoned Berg, who traveled in a Dodge motorhome with his wife Jane and their four children. So again, you're seeing some cultier elements here, but they're giving away most of the money. And they're getting, when they get media coverage, it's kind of a lot of it's positive. It's like, oh, these kids are, this is part of the anti-war movement. They're trying to make the world, they're raising money for charity. Um, his mom, however, is horrified. Uh, she accuses him of being a carbon copy of Fred Jordan, the guy who'd fired him, and mocks his obsession with the system because she's done really well in the system.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  She's, she's like, churchianity, not so bad.

• 52:50Robert Evans?

  Churchianity, it's great.

• 52:51Speaker 01

  Sign up for more churchianity.

• 52:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that is what she's saying until the spring of 68, when Virginia dies. And David, you get the feeling, and you get the feeling because he writes about this, that this is, he considers his mom's death the first moment in his life that he's really free. And there's a, a good breakdown of this in an article for Coltic Studies Journal by Dr. Stephen Kent, who writes, Berg's lifelong resentfulness and anger burst forth shortly after his mother's death at a public meeting that he called, to which he invited many of his mother's friends, plus the press. His daughter Deborah recalls this August gathering in which he came out with his big proclamation against the system. And so, his mom is famous. After she dies, he gets a lot of her friends, members of the evangelical community together

• 53:36Robert Evans?

  with reporters, to like eulogize his mom. And instead of eulogizing her, he goes on the attack. And this is how his, his daughter Deborah describes this meeting. "The press was there and all my grandmother's old friends, and there he just blows them all away. He just dams the system and dams the church system, dams the war in Vietnam, dams the political system, dams parents for raising their kids wrong. I mean, oh, everything." So it was kind of like all this vehemence against everything that he was disgusted with or mad about. He just came out against it after she died. He just began to practice what and how he really wanted to be. And first off, this really, this alienates him from mainstream evangelical society forever. It gets a lot of press. And he will write

• 54:20Robert Evans?

  later that he felt like he, his mom and dad both needed to go away so that he could become the man he would, he was meant to be. And it becomes clear to him after this, the man he's meant to be is the leader of a new religious sect, one that merges the values of Pentecostal evangelism with radical sexual liberation.

• 54:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It's gonna go well.

• 54:41Speaker 01

  It's kinda Branch Davidian. It's like, it's a whole pattern of just like, let's have like a staunch, disciplined belief structure, but we get to fuck all we want.

• 54:52Robert Evans?

  But we get, or at least one of us does, right?

• 54:53Speaker 01

  Particularly the guy in charge.

• 54:55Robert Evans?

  This guy, this guy does.

• 54:56Speaker 01

  The guy that gets to do all the fucking.

• 54:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 55:00Speaker 01

  God.

• 55:01Robert Evans?

  And-

• 55:01Speaker 01

  Who believe, why do people think, like, why do people follow that guy?

• 55:06Robert Evans?

  Well, you know-

• 55:07Speaker 01

  I mean, I get it, he's charismatic.

• 55:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he's charismatic, and it's, it's interesting, Ed, because when it comes to guys like Koresh, I have that same question where it's like, but he's the only one who gets to do this stuff. Why do people go along with this? Berg starts that way, but as we'll talk about, eventually he's like, actually, everyone gets to have sex as long as I get to like, direct the sex.

• 55:25Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 55:25Robert Evans?

  So, it's, it's weirder than that with him, but you do see like, oh, I get why some people would be like, into this, right? Uh, we have to go to ads in a sec, but as a spoiler, Fleetwood Mac is about to come into the picture briefly.

• 55:37Speaker 01

  Oh boy.

• 55:38Robert Evans?

  Race for that.

• 55:43Robert Evans?

  This ad is brought to you by ViiV Healthcare, the makers of Devoto Dolutegravir Lamivudine. If you're living with HIV, do learn about Devoto. Devoto is a complete HIV treatment by prescription only for some people 12 and older. Your doctor will determine if Devoto is right for you. Most HIV pills contain three or four medicines. Devoto is as effective with just two. No other complete HIV pill contains fewer medicines than Devoto.

• 56:06Speaker 06

  It is unknown if Devoto is safe and effective if you have HIV and hepatitis B. If you have Hep B, don't stop Devoto without talking to your doctor, as it may get worse or harder to treat. Don't take Devoto if you're allergic to its ingredients, or taking Dofetilide due to serious or life-threatening side effects. If you have a rash or allergic reaction symptoms, stop Devoto and get medical help right away. Other serious or life-threatening side effects include severe liver problems and lactic acid buildup. If you're female or obese, you may be more at risk. Tell your doctor about your medicines or supplements, medical conditions, liver or kidney problems, pregnancy, breastfeeding, or planned pregnancy.

• 56:42Robert Evans?

  Do ask your doctor about fewer medicines. Visit devoto.com or call 1-877-844-8872.

• 56:49Speaker 07

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 57:20Speaker 05

  This January, bare-knuckle fighting championship takes over the ocean. The inaugural Brew's Crew sails from Miami to the Bahamas aboard the Norwegian Jewel. Three straight days with pool-deck bare-knuckle fights in the Caribbean. Mess of parties, beach events, DJs, cigars, tequila tastings, and non-stop action. The lineup reveals coming soon. Cabins are disappearing fast, and the prices won't stay this low. Reserve your spot with just $200 down at bkfsea.com.

• 57:49Speaker 01

  You love the Sniffy's Cruising Confessions podcast, but you've got questions. Don't worry, everybody does. To answer them, hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson-Rasso just dropped a new bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions: Bedside Manor. For all your burning questions, the guys turn to the experts, including Dr. Dimitri Duskalakis, an infectious disease doctor, public health honcho, and big-time advocate in LGBTQ+ health, HIV prevention, and health equity. Think of it as the after-show to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, where the crew dives deep into topics and stories from that week's Tuesday episode. Episodes cover topics including testing, and why are they swabbing there? Finding a doctor who's not so judgy,

• 58:33Speaker 01

  and so much more. It's all about busting sexual health myths and helping listeners better understand the topics they may want to explore with their own doctors. Listen to this special bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions: Bedside Manor, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get podcasts. Sponsored by Healthy Sexual from Gilead Sciences.

• 58:55Robert Evans?

  We're back. So at this point, his mom is dead. It's like 69 or so, 68, 69.

• 59:02Speaker 02

  His mom is dead and he's thrilled.

• 59:03Robert Evans?

  And he is, and he is, he is off the chain now, right?

• 59:07Speaker 01

  Dancing on her grave.

• 59:09Robert Evans?

  Right. This is, she had been like the last thing tethering him to some kind of reality.

• 59:14Speaker 02

  He's finally free.

• 59:16Robert Evans?

  Um, so he's got kind of a late 68, maybe a few dozen, maybe a hundred or so followers at this point. And they've started living together. They're splitting their lives between, they've got a five-story building in Los Angeles and a small ranch in West Texas. He's been, some of this is because he's been gathering money from his followers. I'm sure he inherits something from his mom that helps too. Real estate's a lot cheaper back then. Um, a journalist who'd started following them in the early days, when they'd crisscrossed the country raising money, uh, had reported in an article on them. Uh, he had like cited a passage from the Bible, Matthew 5:9. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. So this journalist, when he sees them doing their anti-war stuff, had cited this passage

• 1:00:00Robert Evans?

  from the Bible, and that really sticks in Berg's head. And he, he likes it a lot. And he starts to call, they transition from calling themselves Teens for Christ, to he starts calling his group, which is now a cult, the Children of God. Right? That's where the name comes from. Um, so as a note, reporters, don't suggest stuff like that when you're covering groups like this. It could go badly for everybody. Um, so it's still, at this point, they're living together. He's directing a lot of control for his members' lives, but it's maybe not totally clear to people outside that what's happened, the Teens for Christ has become a full-on cult. Right?

• 1:00:35Speaker 01

  And how many people are we talking?

• 1:00:38Robert Evans?

  We're talking between 68 and 69, between like a hundred and a couple of hundred people over the course of that year. Right? It's going to get much larger, but this is just the start. Right? And so it's small enough that he's, he's kind of able to keep everyone together. They're moving between LA and West Texas, you know, depending on the time of year. Probably some people are permanently one place, some people are in the other. Um, but he's able to maintain a lot of direct personal control, right? Over the children of God. And while they're clad in the aesthetics of hippitydom, they're like dressing and looking like hippies, he hasn't yet had the courage to tell everyone to break free of the conservative sexual mores of the system of churches that he'd been raised in. Up to the start of the seventies, within the children of God, there was no dating or premarital sex allowed, right?

• 1:01:23Robert Evans?

  And when new members joined, because Berg was like, well, you just came out of the hippie movement, I can't trust entirely that you're ready for our rules. He would assign them a buddy who was to watch them at all times, even follow them into the bathroom to make sure they're not backsliding into their heathen ways. So there's already a lot of control and they are at the start, very conservative in terms of like sexual stuff, right?

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a question about, about the guy? Like, do we have a sense of what it's like to just be in the same room with this guy? Is he funny? Is he like, is, does he kind of have a weird warmth to him? Is he chatty, accessible, or is he kind of like a stern, you know, like patrician type? Do we have a sense of his energy?

• 1:02:11Robert Evans?

  Yes, I'll read some quotes in a bit, but to briefly answer your question, he is mercurial in a way that a lot of these guys are. So he can go from being your best friend and very charming to screaming at you and punishing you in the space of a second, right? Which you get, and that's, there's a degree to which the kind of psychological whiplash of that kind of person is almost addictive to some people, right? It's the same kind of, you get these dynamics in like abusive romantic relationships too, right? Where once they flip to the bad side, you really want to get them back to the good side. And that's part of what keeps people, you know, coming back. And Berg is a lot like that. But when he's good, it is very charismatic and he's able to make you feel like not only do you matter, but you're helping to save the world, right?

• 1:02:55Robert Evans?

  So as I said, he's still holding his cult to these kind of strict sexual norms, but his heart's not in this after his mom dies, right? He doesn't really believe this. It's kind of running on impulse for a little while. And he's also, he's having trouble like keeping himself to the same standards that he's holding his people to, right? He's, he's never been good at this. One of his early recruits, Sam Ajimian, claims that Berg acted as a dictator in this period, making every choice for the children of God, saying, quote, "Berg convinced himself and us that he was the greatest man who ever lived, second to Jesus." Now, this gives you a lot of leeway. Like Berg starts drinking in this period and he would often address his congregation while hammered.

• 1:03:39Robert Evans?

  He is like a full-on alcoholic in this point. And he also, he's able to exercise a lot of control over daily life, right? Like he has chore lists for everybody. Everybody's day is like scripted out to the minute by Berg. So he is, he's holding them in a lot of control and he starts to covet control over the bodies of his followers, particularly a young woman in her mid-20s who had joined his church in 1969. Berg breaks, like he's still married to Mother Eve at this point, but this is kind of when the dam breaks and he's no longer able to abide by these things he doesn't believe anymore. And he starts sleeping with this new member of his cult three months after she joins. Now, this is an issue, both because he's preaching against such things and because

• 1:04:23Robert Evans?

  his wife is helping him run the church and she's not gonna be happy about this. And he decides the way to get around this is to change the gospel, right? So he comes out and says, "Hey, guys, I just did some intensive research into the Bible and I found out some stuff you're not gonna believe it. God is fine with polygamy," right? So he, he sends out the first of what are called his Mo letters, right? Cause his followers have shortened Moses to Mo. And he announces that he's replacing the old church with the new church and the old wine with the new wine. And the wine in this is like the old wine is his wife and the new wine is this 19-year-old girl that he has started sleeping with, right? And he tells them that it's God's orders he does this, right?

• 1:05:07Robert Evans?

  He writes, "If you'll even take a look at Bible history, you'll make the shocking discovery that most of God's greats had oodles of wives, women's, mistresses, harlots, and what have you." Which is like, not wrong, like not incorrect, like that. There's a lot of like mistresses and stuff from like different, you know, kings and whatnot in the Bible.

• 1:05:26Speaker 01

  Concubines.

• 1:05:27Robert Evans?

  Concubines, right? And, you know, you could even find some like early Catholic figures who are like, actually, you know, maybe there's not a problem, maybe the church doesn't have a problem with sex work. There's some actually interesting stuff from like, kind of like the middle of the last century on that. And Berg is embracing this for a very selfish reason, right? Because he wants to have a bunch of different wives. And this is kind of the early 70s is when he starts putting the stuff out, when he starts saying like, actually, it's cool for me to marry whoever I want. And by this point, kind of 71 or so, there's a couple of hundred members of the cult, and they've got communal houses and farms in a bunch of different states. And Berg

• 1:06:09Robert Evans?

  is traveling around these different properties. He's not just sleeping with this 19 year old member who joined. He starts going to different, every time he spends a couple of days at a new church house, he'll pick up a woman or two there and he'll start sleeping with them, right? One of the things that starts to happen, and he's not yet saying, hey, we can all do free love stuff. But once he leaves after doing this, a different location, the house leader will be like, well, maybe it's fine if I start sleeping with people. And right? So the kind of free love stuff is almost people start mirroring him before he makes that official policy where they're like, well, he's, he's sleeping around with everybody. Maybe it's fine if we all do it.

• 1:06:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course. Yeah. So question about the Mo letters. Is he, in these letters, is he citing like sort of a divine message that he heard directly from God? Or is he citing just sort of like his hot take on biblical passages? Or, or just sort of like some new philosophy out of whole cloth? Like, what's the nature of these Mo letters?

• 1:07:16Robert Evans?

  It's a little of both. So he's, he's, he is citing passages from the Bible to justify things that he's doing, but he's also, he's a prophet, right? He has a direct line to God. So there's stuff where he'll cite a passage that like a lot of things in the Bible, you could interpret that a bunch of different ways. And he'll say, but God told me, this is what it means, right? So this is the rule now.

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  Right, right, right. Okay. Yeah. So he is claiming that he has a divine voice from God.

• 1:07:43Speaker 02

  How old is he at this point?

• 1:07:45Robert Evans?

  He's in his 50s. Um, he's claiming he's gonna help usher in the apocalypse, right? That like, when the end of days comes, he's gonna be a key part of that. And that this church is gonna be a key part of like, Jesus coming back and finding the Antichrist, right?

• 1:07:58Speaker 02

  Would this picture I'm sharing be an accurate representation of what he's looking like at the time?

• 1:08:03Robert Evans?

  That's what he looks like at the time.

• 1:08:04Speaker 02

  And for, for the audio only, uh, uh, audience, he's got a scraggly white beard.

• 1:08:12Robert Evans?

  Can't see the Adam's apple though.

• 1:08:13Speaker 02

  Can't see the Adam's apple. Uh, curly hair. Looks like he's wearing some kind of a robe.

• 1:08:20Robert Evans?

  He's almost got like a Mennonite beard, right? Where it's like shaved on the sides.

• 1:08:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, and it's kind of a monkish, uh, like hairline. It's like his hairline is receded to the top of his head. Uh, but he has sort of like a silver, silver halo almost of hair and a nice, a nice silver beard. I will say, an incredibly warm and gentle smile, uh, in this photo at least.

• 1:08:49Robert Evans?

  Um, yeah. You could see how people could see and be like, well, this must be a good man, right? Yeah. Um, so this kind of, the fact that he is sleeping around and increasingly so are the different sort of like local cult chapters, proves to be a valuable recruiting tool, right? It kind of differentiates them from a lot of these other groups pulling in shrapnel from the hippie movement. It makes it more accessible to these countercultural people. And he realizes this and he starts adopting new counterculture shibboleths to kind of extend this practice and keep pulling in this kind of, this group of people. And I'm gonna quote from Dr. Stephen Kent's article again. After the group departed from California and traveled across the continent,

• 1:09:32Robert Evans?

  ending up at Camp Laurentide in Quebec, Berg increasingly justified forms of nudity among his followers. In the Texas Soul Clinic camp from February 1970 to September 1971, Berg required women to go braless, undoubtedly borrowing the idea from a trend within the women's movement. His December 27, 1970 poem, "Mountain Maid," note the sexual allusion, gives no indication that Berg's braless policy was designed as a political statement against the balde politic, as was the women's movement's action. And this is really important, because this is the key to understanding Berg. He's talking about burning your bra. He's telling his followers they should stop wearing bras. But the actual, like, the secular version of this is really about liberation. You can't tell us what to do with our bodies or what to wear.

• 1:10:17Robert Evans?

  Berg is telling his followers, "It is an order, burn your bra," right? "It is an order, don't wear a bra." And when he's traveling around to different communal homes, and he sees a female follower, he will grab her chest forcibly to make sure she's not wearing one. So you see, there's this language of liberation. Yeah, but it's the opposite, right? It's all about control. It's so evil, but it's so interesting, that he has figured out, like, "I can use this language of freedom in order to take control away from my followers, for myself."

• 1:10:52Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:10:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And I think we're fully in cult territory here. Not hard to justify at that point. And this is, like, these are like orders, right? Like, the fact that you're not, you know, you have to dress this way, you can't do this, like, "I'm gonna touch you at whatever point." Like, these are, like, these are his orders, and not only that, but his followers have to read this, like, the erotic poetry he's putting out about stuff like this. And I just cited the poem "Mountain Maid," which I am not going to read. Entirely for you, but I will quote two like or a single stanza to give you an idea of the poem.

• 1:11:31Speaker 01

  How long is it? How long is the whole thing?

• 1:11:34Robert Evans?

  I'm saving that for the end, Ed. Don't worry. There's a reveal coming.

• 1:11:38Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:11:38Robert Evans?

  But here's a single stanza to give you an idea, and this is like a less explicit stanza. Let those mountains be more visible and their clothing more divisible, right? And again, this is like

• 1:11:49Speaker 02

  Total lyrical genius.

• 1:11:51Robert Evans?

  Poor shit. It gets, it's a lot worse.

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  What's cool is that visible rhymes with divisible.

• 1:11:56Robert Evans?

  Divisible? Bad poem?

• 1:11:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:00Robert Evans?

  You'd think a prophet would do better than that. Now, I picked those lines because they're the least explicit portion of the poem. But I do need to read this note from Dr. Berg's piece because Berg quotes 10 lines from the poem and then writes, "The poem continues in this vein for a total of 301 lines."

• 1:12:18Speaker 02

  My god.

• 1:12:19Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:12:20Speaker 02

  Alright, bro.

• 1:12:21Robert Evans?

  Oh, man. Um, so Ed, that's most of what we got for part one. As I, as I told you, Fleetwood Mac comes into, one member of Fleetwood Mac comes into the story, right? Uh, that's gonna be kind of like our fun, our fun little thing in part two. There's a couple of like weird celebrity connections here. One guy drops out of Fleetwood Mac to join this church. Um, there's also a couple of celebrities who are born into it. Um, but don't, don't seem to have like, um, Joaquin Phoenix is born into it, but leaves when he's three. Um, so you know, there's not a lot to actually say about that, but it's something you'll come across in all the articles on it. Like, I tend to not like, try to go into detail or speculate about stuff like that just because like,

• 1:13:03Robert Evans?

  you know, people have a right not to, but it's, if you run into articles about this, it's gonna be in every single one of them, right? Because it's just like a lead line for a lot of people, which will show you that like, this is going to be for a while, like a very kind of almost hip, countercultural movement, right? Like, that's what he's sort of started to build here. And in the early seventies, even while he's being very abusive, there's almost this degree to which the children of God are cool. Right? Like, and that's, that's kind of a unique thing for a cult like this to be. Not totally unique, but for it to be, to have so much appeal to people who are like prominent, right? Like, that's kind of an interesting aspect of this that we'll be getting into a lot more in

• 1:13:44Robert Evans?

  part two. But Ed, part one is done. You want to plug your show at the end here before we roll out for the day?

• 1:13:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's talk a little more about Snafu, the fabulous podcast that I do, that I'm insanely proud of. And season-

• 1:14:02Robert Evans?

  You should be.

• 1:14:03Speaker 01

  Season three is out now. I'm in production on season four, and I'm extremely excited about season four because we're breaking the format. We're doing something new and different and, and very exciting, which I'll get into more at another time. But season three is cranking along. It's, it's fully out. You can binge it. Eight episodes. And then, of course, my book. Get my book, also Snafu.

• 1:14:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah, S-N-A-F-U. All right, Ed. Well, thank you so much again for being on the show. We will be back in just a few minutes. But to you, the listener, we'll be back on Thursday.

• 1:14:40Speaker 02

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com/AtBehindTheBastards.

• 1:15:05Speaker 04

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loan amounts subject to lender approval.

• 1:15:36Speaker 05

  This January, Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship takes over the ocean. The inaugural Brew's Cruise sails from Miami to the Bahamas aboard the Norwegian Jewel. Three straight days with pool deck bare knuckle fights in the Caribbean. Mess of parties, beach events, DJs, cigars, tequila tastings and non-stop action. The lineup reveals coming soon. Cabins are disappearing fast and the prices won't stay this low. Reserve your spot with just $200 down at B K F S E A dot com.

• 1:16:05Speaker 06

  Hear every word and feel every beat with VIZIO's powerful and immersive soundbar lineup. Whether it's a streamlined all-in-one flexible surround sound with a 4.1 Pro Wireless, or pure cinematic surround sound and thunderous bass with the 5.1 Wireless Soundbar, VIZIO has the perfect fit for any room and any setup. Blast your favorite tunes and podcasts with the iHeartRadio app and hear every beat like you're sitting front row. Upgrading your entertainment has never been easier. Discover VIZIO's full soundbar collection at Walmart or Walmart.com today.

• 1:16:36Speaker 03

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.