Part Two: The Grifters Behind The Fake Autism 'Cure' Industry

Robert concludes the story of the Fake Autism Cure Industrial Complex and tells Mangesh about a doctor who tried to get rich selling spoiled blood to deranged parents. 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.

• 0:03Robert Evans?

  Hi everybody, it's James here. If you didn't listen to what could happen here, you might not recognise me. My name's James Stout and I am the guy who pops onto this feed every few months to tell you something very sad and then ask for your money. And that's why I'm here today. A terrible earthquake struck Myanmar today, the day I'm recording this, which is Friday the 28th of March. It was 7.7 on the Richter scale. We know of more than 100 deaths, but it's likely the death toll is much, much, much higher. Lots of telegraph and internet infrastructure has been taken out by the earthquake and the Hunter restricts internet and social media access. So we don't really know the full extent of the death, but we can imagine it will be very high as one of the areas

• 0:47Robert Evans?

  most affected was Mandalay, which is the second largest city in Myanmar. I've spoken to half a dozen sources in Myanmar today, people who Robert and I have interviewed before. They're all okay, but they all shared how terrible things were. They said things were as bad as they were at the time of Cyclone Nargis, which was a terrible disaster in 2008. If you would like to support the people of Burma who are currently fighting against a tyrannical dictatorship as well as dealing with the consequences of this natural disaster, there are a couple of ways you can do so. I was actually already running a fundraiser on my Patreon for Mobie PDF. They are a casualty evacuation team in southern Shan

• 1:28Robert Evans?

  State, right at the fiercest part of the fighting right now. They don't fight. What they do is they go and they evacuate people who have been injured and they provide medical services to internally displaced people. They've been doing this since 2021. They're incredibly brave people and they've saved more than 300 lives. You can read more about them by going to my Patreon post, which also includes all the links for donation. The website for that is tinyurl.com/help-Myanma. That's

• 1:58Robert Evans?

  tinyurl.com/help-myanmar. If you'd like to donate somewhere else, an organization that you can donate to is the Free Burma Rangers, freeburmerangers.org. They're a fantastic NGO. They've been doing a lot of medical work in the liberated zones of Myanmar for a very long time. They've also worked in Rajava and lots of other places around the world where people need help. I spoke today from FBR today as well, and he told me that they're already starting to respond to disaster. So to donate to them, freeburmerangers.org. Thanks very much. We appreciate your support. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where, you know, Mangesh, our great guest for today.

• 2:44Robert Evans?

  Do you know that you ever heard that, that, that, that quote, cometh the time, cometh the man?

• 2:50Speaker 01

  I haven't.

• 2:51Robert Evans?

  Okay. Well, it's a quote people say, and, and I'm saying it now because I've decided, I had a dream last night.

• 2:58Speaker 02

  Are people you and you when?

• 3:03Robert Evans?

  I was not, excuse me, Sophie. Let's cut that out.

• 3:09Robert Evans?

  No, come at the time, come at the man. And I, I had a vision last night while I was dreaming.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was gonna say, you're really not helping this theory.

• 3:17Robert Evans?

  No, no, I had a vision. While I was dreaming about how to save America. And, and so I'm, I'm gonna, I've decided I'm running in 2028. And I'm, I'm running on a platform of, look, one of the big problems the liberals and the progressives have, they all think if you make education better, you know, if you get enough dunks on people in public debates or whatever, you can stop parents and the like from like putting poison into their kids to try to treat ill-understood conditions, right? And you can't, you can't stop people from wanting something to do. So let's give them something to do that's basically harmless. And that's why, as, as a presidential candidate, my entire platform is going to be legalized

• 3:58Robert Evans?

  and subsidized using federal money, a $7 bar of Xanax the size of a Snickers bar. You just get them over the counter, any grocery store. Any pharmacy, just a Snickers bar of pure Xanax. You can lick it like a horse. You can do whatever you want with it. Seven dollars flat, you know? That's how we're gonna fix things in this country. Look, every problem, the seven dollars Xanax Snickers bar solves, right? You got a guy walks into a fucking public building wanting to do a mass shooting, reaches for his gun, finds a seven dollars Snickers bar of Xanax, bites it, forgets why he's there. Problem solved. You know, everything could be this way.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  I'm so glad you're coming with the solution.

• 4:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah, this is, this is how we save America. I'm convinced everyone vote Evans 2028 for your seven dollars Snickers bar of Xanax.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  I mean, we went to both the RNC and DNC and, you know, at least somebody's got a big idea.

• 4:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah, again, we won't have any more elections. There are gonna be like three votes that make it in every election, and none of them will have a legit, like a readable name. It's just gonna be scribbles on a piece of paper. Who's the president? Oh, no, fuck it. Uh, so, let's get back into this less, less happy story of medicine.

• 5:24Speaker 03

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• 5:28Robert Evans?

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• 6:35Robert Evans?

  The Autism Research Institute and our buddy Dr. Remland rode in to defend Doctors Usman and Carey after Tariq's death, writing in a post on the institute's website that Tariq had died not because of chelation therapy, but because of an error that had seen him dosed with a "look-alike" drug, Disodium edtA, instead of Calcium Disodium edtA. Now, first off, I don't think the argument "We didn't kill him with bad medicine, we killed him because we cruelly administered a deadly dose of the wrong drug" makes things better.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a weak argument.

• 7:12Robert Evans?

  That's like, "No, no, no, I didn't give him fentanyl, I just shot him up with way too much heroin." Like, "Yeah, I don't really see how that helps." This is also untrue. Tariq was administered with the normal kind of edtA used in chelation therapy, which is the only kind the clinic had stocked. In subsequent publications, Dr. Remland bragged that chelation therapy had consistently "good" results, as rated by paramedics who were surveyed by ARI. In fact, it was the number-one pick out of 88 approved interventions.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  What?

• 7:47Robert Evans?

  Yes. They love this, because it clearly is serious medicine, right? It doesn't help, it makes things worse generally, but it has a massive visible effect. I think that's honestly the whole reason why, right? A subsequent statement put out by Dan claimed that chelation was "one of the most beneficial treatments for autism and related disorders." Now, aluminum, lead, and mercury aren't the only metals that got blamed. I found a Chicago Tribune piece that gives the story of a boy named Jordan King who was chelated for high levels of mercury and tin. This is weird, there's a quote in there from like, an expert on tin poisoning, who's like...

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Is tin poisoning really a thing?

• 8:27Robert Evans?

  It is, for like, industrial workers who are welding tin for a living, you know? Like, but not little kids. There's no way to get enough exposure to tin, really. Is your kid welding a shitload of tin?

• 8:47Robert Evans?

  Then we have other issues. Autism's not the problem. You're letting your five-year-old well.

• 8:55Robert Evans?

  What are you doing? Take that torch away from them. Now, the actual explanation for why this kid-

• 9:03Speaker 01

  All the way for productive, like, you know?

• 9:04Robert Evans?

  Sure, why not? Why not? Yeah, it's good for kids to have a hobby. At least they're touching. If they can't touch grass, they might as well teach him to touch heated tin.

• 9:16Robert Evans?

  Now, again, they do a test which shows high levels of mercury and tin in this kid's blood. But that's not the whole story. You hear about that and you're like, oh, well, maybe there was something going on. Why would they have elevated levels? Well, the explanation for why, and for why all of the kids that get tested in order to justify this therapy have elevated levels of different heavy metals, is because of the very, the distinctly a-scientific kind of lab test that they give these kids, right? You would think, if you're like, this kid probably has high levels of heavy metals, we might want to administer chelation therapy. You're not a doctor, Mangesh. What would you do first? What would you do first if you thought they might have high levels of heavy metals?

• 9:59Speaker 01

  Get a blood test?

• 10:00Robert Evans?

  Right. Very basic science, right? Okay, you think this is true? Let's test their blood. No, no, no. No, no, no. I'm so afraid. I'm so afraid. I'm so afraid. Is first you chelate the child. You shoot them up with this thing that strips heavy metals out of their blood and makes them pee it out, right? And then you test them. Why? So you give them a drug that provokes them to excrete heavy metals and then test them, and then you know what? You're gonna find some heavy metals.

• 10:36Robert Evans?

  Because you gave them the drug that makes them excrete them.

• 10:41Robert Evans?

  And here's the thing, there's no accept- because this isn't the way science, where you don't do this otherwise. There's no accepted understanding for what normal results on a test given after chelation would be. So there's no actual medical case for like drugging people and then testing them like this. So the lab just shows back charts that show scary spikes of different metals and the clinician says, "Look, kid's got it, you know? We need to keep doing this." Now, Doctor, in case you don't believe me, and you shouldn't, not a doctor, Dr. Carl Baum, Director of the Center for Children's Environmental Toxicology at the Yale New Haven Children's Hospital, calls this, quote, "Exactly the wrong way to do it."

• 11:26Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 11:27Robert Evans?

  Now, Dr. Usman did ultimately face mild consequences. In 2009, the Chicago Tribune featured her in their "dubious medicine" investigation, which helped push for a probe by the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation. They alleged that she had provided "medically unwarranted treatment that may potentially result in permanent disabling injuries to two boys," quote from the Tribune. In reaching a consent order with Usman, medical regulators alleged that Usman failed to disclose to her patients her financial interests in the company supplying the hyperbaric oxygen chambers and in the compounding pharmacy that filled prescriptions for her patients. The state said that she also failed to obtain informed consent for the chelation therapy and did not keep adequate medical records for her

• 12:11Robert Evans?

  patients. Usman, who practices out of the True Health Medical Center in Naperville, neither admitted nor denied the state's allegations. In signing the consent order, she agreed to pay a $10,000 fine. Great. I love that this is the punishment.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  I know, I know. It's crazy.

• 12:28Robert Evans?

  Now, the other boy that she's accused of harming, in this case, was a Chicago child, the son of James Coman. We don't get this kid's name, because they're a kid, who was engaged in a custody battle with his ex-wife over their kid, who was a child with autism. Now, the kid's mom is a believer of these biomedical interventions for their son's autism. James is not. James recognizes this is pretty dangerous, and he gets trapped in this nightmare of trying to advocate for his son against the wishes of the boy's mother. Here's how a different article by the Tribune, titled "Autism's Risky Experiments", describes his regimen of treatment. Quote, "James Coman's son has an unusual skill.

• 13:08Robert Evans?

  The seven-year-old, his father says, can swallow six pills at once. Diagnosed with autism as a toddler, the Chicago boy had been placed on an intense regimen of supplements and medications aimed at treating the disorder. Besides taking many pills, the boy was injected with vitamin B12 and received an intravenous infusions of a drug used to leach mercury and other metals from the body. He took mega doses of vitamin C, a hormone, and a drug that suppresses testosterone."

• 13:36Robert Evans?

  They're just doing everything to this kid. Again, none of these treats-

• 13:40Speaker 01

  He can swallow seven pills at a time.

• 13:43Robert Evans?

  He's able to take so many pills.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  That's not America's Got Talent.

• 13:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Now, the Comen boy also suffered extreme negative side effects from chelation, although thankfully not fatal ones. This provoked his father to sue, and his mother responded by complaining that any interruption of his complex nonsense therapeutic routine would have a disastrous impact on the boy, setting him back, you know? That Tribune article, written in 2009, summed up the scope of the biomedical movement at the time. Studies have shown that up to three-quarters of families with children with autism try alternative treatments, which insurance does not usually cover. Doctors, many linked to the influential group "Defeat Autism Now!", promote the therapies online and books in at conferences. Intensive regimens are so common that one doctor recently joked at an Autism One conference

• 14:31Robert Evans?

  in Chicago, "You know you have a child with autism if your child takes more pills than your grandmother." He's joking about all the drugs you're giving kids.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  I love that, like, "You know you're a redneck if..." Like, it's the format for this.

• 14:45Robert Evans?

  Sure, man, that makes you sound good. Sounds like you're a doctor. Great.

• 14:52Robert Evans?

  It also made a point of discussing how the social media era had provided oxygen to the hyperbaric chamber fire that is the biomedical movement. Quote, "Parents trade stories and advice about chelation on large internet groups. One Yahoo group has more than 8,000 members. The treatment takes many forms, including creams for the skin, capsules, suppositories, and intravenous infusions of powerful medicines usually reserved for people with severe metal poisoning." The hype was so big around this stuff in 2006 that the National Institute of Mental Health announced a randomized control trial of chelation as an autism treatment. So, an actual legitimate medical body says, "Let's do a trial. So many people are saying this helps their kids, let's look into it," right?

• 15:34Robert Evans?

  And ultimately, they cancel that trial in 2008 because they can't find any evidence that there's benefit to it, and there's a lot of evidence that even trying this will put kids- At risk, right? Significant risk because chelation is not good for you if you don't need it. So like, it's actually unethical for us to study this. Because there's zero evidence it's helped anybody and we know it hurts people. So we just can't do this to kids. Now, they also, they have, they've done some studies on lab rats that have showed that drugging lab rats needlessly with chelation therapy causes cognitive problems, right? So they're like this, we just really can't justify doing this. And this is good logic for ethical scientists.

• 16:17Robert Evans?

  But the crazed parents and con artist doctors of the biomedical movement take this as evidence that Big Pharma has killed another attempt to uncover the truth, right? That's why they don't care about hurting kids. They just wanna, they wanna keep selling us expensive medicine that actually isn't as expensive as the fake medicine.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  That's so awful.

• 16:40Robert Evans?

  You see similar stories wherever you look at these nonsense treatments for autism. In 2007, the Cochrane Collaboration, an independent evaluator of medical research, reviewed the efficacy of casein and gluten-free diets as treatments for autism, which had become another bugbear for biomedicine. The idea that some of these biomedical people have is that gluten and casein interferes with kids' brain receptors? And advocates would cite studies which prove that proper diet could eliminate the symptoms of autism. But, per Scientific American, Cochrane identified two very small clinical trials, one with 20 participants and one with 15. The first study found some reduction in autism symptoms. The second found none. A new randomized controlled trial of 14 children, reported this past May by Susan Hyman, an

• 17:22Robert Evans?

  associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, found no changes in attention, sleep, stool patterns, or characteristic autistic behavior. Slowly, the evidence is starting to accumulate that diet is not the panacea people are hoping for, says Susan E. Levy, a pediatrician at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia who has evaluated the evidence with Hyman. Now, of course... Logic and evidence never drives the reactions you want to see in cases like this, right? Fitzpatrick's book includes a quote from an anti-Mercury campaign in the US, Generation Rescue. This is a, what's her name? The Oprah ladies, Jenny McCarthy's organization.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 18:01Robert Evans?

  And this statement was made initially in response to Tariq Nadama's death. You might want to recall here that Tariq was diagnosed with like high aluminum levels, not mercury, but whatever. Quote, "We are not desperate parents willing to try anything. We are educated, caring parents who have done thousands of hours of research and administered dozens of medical tests on our own children under the care of knowledgeable physicians."

• 18:22Speaker 01

  Wow. Great. Wasn't Jenny McCarthy's kid also like, like she said he was autistic and then he wasn't autistic?

• 18:31Robert Evans?

  She said she scared him. She says she scared him. Yeah. I hope that kid is okay. I don't know. Now, this kind of talk, it's like, well, we've actually, we're the experts. We've done so much, you know, to understand this. It's very common among the loudest mouthpieces of the movement, which includes Jenny McCarthy. We've discussed before her appearances on the Oprah Winfrey Show, which played a massive role in igniting the anti-vax movement in the US. McCarthy, whose son Evan was diagnosed with autism, describes herself as having a PhD in Google. She does not. But she did have a role to play in the death of that five-year-old who burnt alive in a hyperbaric chamber. In 2016, Jenny pivoted from her successful anti-vax campaign and started advocating

• 19:13Robert Evans?

  hyperbaric oxygen therapy as a treatment for ASD. The scientific argument she used was that people with ASD have, and this is Autism Spectrum Disorder, right? The scientific argument she used was that people with ASD have inflammation in their brains, which is true. You can, if you, like, one thing you can see is that, like, there's a level of inflation in the brains of people with autism, inflammation in the brains of people with autism. We don't know why. We don't know, like... How this relates to the like, we just know it's there, right? So there's a lot of debate about this, but it is something you see. And it is true that hyperbaric therapy has decreased other kinds of inflammation, but not in the brain.

• 19:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:54Robert Evans?

  Different like, stuff doesn't always, it's not all the same, right? You know?

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Even the, right, the microbiome being different of autistic kids and diet not being able to affect it. Right?

• 20:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  Like, it's hard.

• 20:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And so it's this thing where like, you are taking two unrelated facts and using them to put kids in these death tubes. Now, actual analysis of the evidence, because there have been studies on this, shows that the only basis for hyperbaric therapy as a treatment for autism was one flawed study that showed a benefit. Per PubMed, quote, "HBO2," that's the name for hyperbaric therapy, "should not be recommended for ASD treatment until more conclusive favorable results and long-term outcomes are demonstrated from well-designed controlled trials." A write-up from this time by the American Council on Science and Health states, "Despite all of this caution and doubt, McCarthy believes that she knows better. Her organization Generation Rescue is holding the Third Annual Autism Education Summit

• 20:53Robert Evans?

  this weekend in Addison, Texas, just north of Dallas, to promote HBO2 therapy for ASD." Now, this conference included an expert panel of chiropractors and osteopaths, as well as, along with those august medical experts, a YouTuber named Lily, who made a video about hyperbaric treatment, helped her little sister. McCarthy was joined on the panel by Dell Bigtree, producer of the movie Vaxxed, and one of the ladies from The Real Housewives of New Jersey. Truly, a symposium of the greatest minds in medicine. Awesome. Another conference expert was Dr. Anju Usman, whose husband sells hyperbaric chambers.

• 21:35Robert Evans?

  Oh my god.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  I was not expecting that twist.

• 21:41Robert Evans?

  Oh yeah, baby. Now, this is all made especially infuriating because four years before this conference in 2012, a four-year-old boy and his 62-year-old grandmother died after the hyperbaric chamber the boy was in caught fire at the Ocean Hyperbaric Center in Florida. Francesco had cerebral palsy, which hyperbaric therapy does not treat. And he had traveled to South Florida from Italy, where the treatment is illegal, with his grandmother. And he caught on fire as he tried to save them. They both die, nightmarish deaths, four years before this conference, where Jane McCarthy's saying, "Everybody should do this for their kids." Now, none of these deaths, none of these injuries, none of the illnesses caused by all this bullshit treatment, means anything to most of these people.

• 22:26Robert Evans?

  Their only interest is their children. And one of the issues here is that, because of the way autism works, for most people who have autism, you see, around the time symptoms become evident, it seems like they're regressing, right? They stop making eye contact, they stop engaging as much. And this can be very dramatic and very shocking to parents, right? But most people with autism, their symptoms then improve over time because they grow up and they get used to dealing with and engaging in the world, right?

• 22:54Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 22:54Robert Evans?

  They just, that's just life, you know? This is gonna be the case with the majority of people who get diagnosed with autism. You will see the symptoms get alleviated. So even if you're just dosing them with every random drug you can get your hands on, they will likely show improvement in some ways, just as they grow up and people convince themselves, "I saved my kid," you know? "At least they're better because of all of this shit I did." When like, you could've just loved him. Dealt with the help, you know, maybe gotten some treatment for the GI issues or whatever, but like, you could've just loved him, you know? Didn't have to do all this other shit. But it's just like, you know, life. People find ways to interact and deal with the world, like David Lynch, you know?

• 23:37Robert Evans?

  This is, again, because people with autism are people. But yeah, as a result of this fact, many of these parents will go to their graves secure in the belief that they stood up for their kid and helped save them, even if all they did was make the world more comfortable for the kind of con men who encourage children to avoid getting vaccinated for measles. And, speaking of con, nope, speaking of ads, here they are.

• 24:02Robert Evans?

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• 24:47Robert Evans?

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• 25:04Speaker 04

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• 25:38Robert Evans?

  Ah, we're back. Good stuff, good stuff, good stuff. So every now and then, when you read about the biomedical community, you do hear about the rare wins, right? These cases where a parent gets pulled into this, they treat their kid with nonsense for a while, and they realize, I fucked up. And they pull back, and they take accountability, and those are good stories. There's a great article in The Atlantic about autism's fringe therapies, and it gives a story of Emma Zercher and her family. Emma was born in 2002, when she started to show signs of autism at like age two and a half, right around the time Tariq would have died, right? Her mother, Ariann, later described the realization of her daughter's diagnosis as being like, quote, "descending into hell." "I was desperate to save my daughter. We went to everybody. We tried everything."

• 26:23Robert Evans?

  Per The Atlantic, quote, "She and her husband took him to neurologists, gastroenterologists, behavioral, speech and occupational therapists, nutritionists, naturopaths, a shaman and a homeopath, a craniosacral therapist and a Qui-Gong master. A developmental pediatrician who didn't take insurance charged at least $200 per visit and had a months-long waiting list, recommended they call a psychic in Europe. The psychic ironically refused payment because she didn't pick up a signal from them when the psychics are more honest than the doctors." Holy fuck!

• 26:54Speaker 01

  That is an unbelievable list.

• 26:59Robert Evans?

  The psychic's like, "No, I don't want to rob you." You know, like, holy fuck. They tried dozens of treatments that claimed to have recovered children with autism, including numerous vitamin supplements, topical ointments, restrictive diets, chelation, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, brain scans, a so-called detoxification system and stem cell therapy. In other words, she went through all the con therapies we've covered in these episodes and a bunch more. She describes her mind state after each failure as, "I thought I didn't do it right. Let me do it again." And this is the consequence of this, it's not unreasonable to say like, well, if your kid has a condition or an illness, part of treating it properly is the parent needs to be an advocate for their kid and involved in the treatment.

• 27:44Robert Evans?

  Not an unreasonable statement. But there's this attitude that that means that like, the parent is responsible for figuring it out and like, well, but you're like a, you're like a fucking accountant or something. Like, you don't know how to, you're not a medical expert, you don't know what you're doing? Like, you shouldn't be diagnosing your kid here.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  Also, you can see how like, you like slip from one to the next to the next because you're increasingly desperate, but like, once you're dealing with like a shaman and like, it feels like someone in your life would tell you.

• 28:17Robert Evans?

  You're calling a shaman?

• 28:18Speaker 01

  A psychic?

• 28:19Robert Evans?

  I don't know if the shaman knows how to cure autism.

• 28:25Robert Evans?

  The ultimate result of all these specialty diets was that Emma shed body weight at a dangerous pace, losing 15% of her weight in six weeks. Now, Emma's mom had by this point come to believe that her daughter had something that is another common line in biomedical hooey, that GI problems like leaky gut might help cause symptoms of autism. It doesn't. None of her attempts to fix Emma's microbiome worked. Ariane kept going, quote, "I thought any treatment was better than doing nothing at all." It's this, "I can't think of anything else to do, better press the gas," you know?

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:59Robert Evans?

  That's just not, it's not smart.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  So heartbreaking.

• 29:02Robert Evans?

  I have a friend who's in ER news, she says, "Sometimes the best thing to do at the sight of a disaster is like, smoke a cigarette and just kind of think things out for a second before you get in there, right? And that sounds horrifying to a lot of people, but this is a person who deals with emergencies every day. Sometimes your best bet is like, give it a sec.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, especially when like-

• 29:23Robert Evans?

  Take it through.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  Everyone in the autism community is telling you that like, there's a ticking clock, right? Like, you're trying to race and beat the clock.

• 29:29Robert Evans?

  And this is also, it's another thing, it's a thing that gets people killed in war zones, you know? I've seen it, like this, this desire, this feeling a need to do something when, again, the people who are the real veterans, the people, number one, they also do react when they need to, but they also don't react all the time when they don't need to. They, they tend to keep to watch it, to think, you know? Because otherwise you die horribly. You know?

• 29:58Robert Evans?

  Anyway, her kid loses a disastrous amount of weight and none of these attempts to fix Emma work at all. This is the state of mind, this idea, "I've got to do something." That's most of what these parents find themselves in. And the market for quack cures has only grown. I stated in 2009, about 75% of parents of children with autism reported using alternate medicine. Today, it's about 88%, nearly all of them. If you have the money, there are a truly dizzying number of options available like SPECT, a $3,500 treatment that scans a child's brain to diagnose them and derive targeted treatments for their individual autism. This is in spite of the fact that brain scans like SPECT can't reveal autism. They don't. You don't see it that way.

• 30:41Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 30:42Robert Evans?

  And of course, they can't like figure out this specific treatment is how to help your kid, right? But parents love that shit. Like the, oh, I'm gonna get the exact kind of therapy for my individual kid. No, that's just, you're not doing it this way. Sorry. Maybe the therapy your kid needs is for you to just like them.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  Well, also, also, once your kid has autism and, and then you get a scan, you can point to anything and say like, this is the cause of it, right?

• 31:08Robert Evans?

  Sure. Look at this thing. I don't know what it is, but it says autism, you know?

• 31:10Speaker 01

  100%.

• 31:12Robert Evans?

  Probably the most costly of these new interventions is stem cell therapy. And this might actually be, there might be treatment derived from this in the future. It's very far from clear at this point, right?

• 31:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:22Robert Evans?

  At the moment, it is not approved as a treatment in the US. There are several trials gathering data on whether it's safe or effective. But again, the parents who think their kids have this ticking clock before their life is ruined, don't want to wait. And as The Atlantic reports, quote, "Several foreign clinics offer it for around $10,000." Sarah Collins credits the adult stem cell injections her two children received in Panama City, Panama, with the recovery of her older son and improvement in her younger son, both of whom were diagnosed with autism. Her experience led her to co-found the "Stem Cell Therapy for Autism" Facebook group. She says one reason parents might not want to take part in clinical trials in the US is that their child might wind up in the placebo arm of the trial. They won't mess with that. They'll go right to Panama instead.

• 32:06Robert Evans?

  Again, you get both the psychology of like, well, I don't want my kid to be, I want them to get the medicine now, but it's like... Ultimately, your desire to do something now is making your kid and everyone else you love, everywhere in the world, less safe. Because good medicine relies on good, double-blind studies with placebos. That's how you do medical studies. And by delaying this, number one, you are slowing down the process by which science will get done. But also, by going to Panama to get whatever the fuck shot into your kid, well, say that clinic doesn't have good standards. Say your kid gets hurt, and maybe it's not even because of actual stem cell therapies,

• 32:50Robert Evans?

  because something else fucked up happened. But there's this horrible public death or illness associated with it, and that shuts down research into a thing that may one day lead to treatments that help people, right? That alleviate some symptom or something. You are doing nothing but harm by doing this, out of this desire that like, well, but I gotta focus on my kid. And it's like, no, it's this fucking, no, no, no! Emma's mom eventually made the right decision, after about seven years of trying this carousel of treatments, to reach out to an adult with autism and talk to them about her kid. This adult was Julia Bascom, who has a blog called Just Stemming. This, talking to Julia keyed her in on the fact that, well, maybe autism isn't like,

• 33:35Robert Evans?

  doesn't mean my kid has no life. Maybe they can be happy as a person with autism, and I should focus on that, because it's just the way they are. Emma's mom wrote, quote, "My entire focus changed. Instead of fighting against Emma's neurology and trying to cure this heinous disorder, I started finding ways to help her flourish." And that's it, really, right?

• 33:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:55Robert Evans?

  Like, that's the ballgame!

• 33:57Speaker 01

  I mean, just robbing yourself of like, the joy of being able to enjoy your kid and see them, you know, is stunning, because you're so worried.

• 34:08Robert Evans?

  Yep, yeah. I mean, and it is tragic, like, the amount of the wasted years. You're so obsessed doing this, that you're not actually having a relationship with your kid as your kid, you're having a relationship with your kid as a sick... Thing you need to fix.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, as a guinea pig.

• 34:24Robert Evans?

  It's sad.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:26Robert Evans?

  Now, in this case, you know, so one of the first things she does when she has this shift in mindset, she realizes like Emma's not great at talking. This is a big problem for her that like her kid can't really talk and like communicate verbally. And so instead of trying, shooting her up with more drugs and shit, she tries a different kind of intervention. She gives your kid a keyboard setup so Emma can type out her thoughts. And suddenly Emma starts communicating very clearly with people and the rest of the world. She gets on track to get her high school diploma. The fact that she now, they figured out how she individually needs to communicate, gives her a chance to advocate for herself and to live a life. While Zercher told the Atlantic that she now views the money she wasted on quack treatments as insane,

• 35:11Robert Evans?

  and Emma herself insists that only occupational therapy provided her with any benefit. And occupational therapy is a real thing that can help. She also insists she's not angry at her mom. Quote, "You thought my autism was hurting me and that you needed to remove it, but you did not understand that it is a neurological difference. Fear caused you to behave with desperation."

• 35:31Speaker 01

  What an incredibly mature way to respond.

• 35:34Robert Evans?

  Jesus, yeah. And that would be a beautiful note to end on, Mangesh.

• 35:43Robert Evans?

  This is behind the bastards. So we're not gonna end on that uplifting note. Instead, I'm gonna tell you all a whole nother story about one of these quack bastards. One of the worst of these sons of bitches, an asshole named James Jeffrey Bradstreet. Three names, real serial killer shit for James Jeffrey Bradstreet.

• 36:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, this, this episode, and part one, just the names.

• 36:09Robert Evans?

  The names, always the worst. Born in July 1954 in Florida, Bradstreet was at one point a Christian preacher who got a medical degree from the University of Florida. We're doing great. Knocking it out of the park so far. His postgraduate research was in aerospace medicine and his actual career was as a family doctor. But in 1997, after he'd been practicing for a little over a decade, his son was diagnosed with autism. As Fitzpatrick writes, Jeff Bradstreet abandoned his career as a family doctor to become a radio talk show host.

• 36:43Robert Evans?

  Great, great start, great start. He immediately met up with the biomedical activists and founded the International Child Development Resource Center in Florida, or the ICDRC. In 2001, he appointed Andrew Wakefield to be head of research there. Brad Street was a big believer in merging his evangelical Christian faith with his treatments for autism, and so he created the Good News Doctor Foundation. Now, again, Brad Street's training was two years of residency in obstetrics and some added training in aerospace medicine. He was not board certified in any specialty, yet he advertised himself as a biomedical expert in autism treatment who specialized in correcting biochemical imbalances, as well

• 37:27Robert Evans?

  as detoxification. Again, this is a guy who's like qualified to help your kid with the flu, you know, right? Not to like downplay family medicine, but this is not a guy who's qualified to cure, because, among other things, nobody is. It's not a thing. That's not a thing that happens. In the book Deadly Choices, Paul Offit describes Brad Street's clinical approach this way. Brad Street had promoted several cures for autism, including secretin, chelation, immunoglobulin, administered by mouth and by vein, and prednisone, a potent steroid that suppresses the immune system. He also prescribed dietary supplements he sold in his office. As one expert put it, "The nutritional supplements prescribed by Dr.

• 38:12Robert Evans?

  Brad Street were also sold by Dr. Brad Street." Sure, that's fine?

• 38:17Speaker 02

  This guy, and this is, we're like the late 90s, right? This is when this happened?

• 38:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, this is like the late 90s.

• 38:27Speaker 02

  This guy would be on TikTok, oh my god.

• 38:30Robert Evans?

  He might have been, actually. You know what? Sophie, good news, we're gonna talk about what this guy winds up doing in the present era. It's actually the best part of the story. So, in 1999, Brad Street began treating Colton Snyder, ultimately examining him more than 160 times, and ordering a number of invasive lab tests that were not approved by the FDA. Among these were multiple spinal taps. If you've had a spinal tap, that's not a thing you fuck around with. They're just stabbing this kid in the spine with needles. See if that makes it better.

• 39:05Speaker 01

  160 times feels very, very thorough.

• 39:08Robert Evans?

  Feels like a lot of visits. Feels like a lot of visits. They also insert a fiber optic scope into Colton's stomach and colon. As Offit writes, "All these tests and procedures were expensive, potentially dangerous, and according to the opinions of expert witnesses, of no value to the child."

• 39:25Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 39:26Robert Evans?

  Now, Brad Street's, this is not said directly, but his parents have money. This is not cheap. That's why Brad Street's doing this. His medical documentation of Snyder ultimately runs to some 650 pages. He diagnoses the boy over the years with autism, yeast overgrowth, a fungal infection, unspecified encephalopathy, unspecified uteraria, and a shitload of other things. And it's so many different things that it is clear that what's going on here is Brad Street has, this is like a Munchausen's by doctor syndrome, right? And it's, he's not doing it because he's deluded. He's doing it because he is a mercenary with the goal of keeping Colton's parents paying for very expensive tests and treatments for forever, right? None of Colton's mercury tests were ever high, but still Brad Street, who believed mercury

• 40:11Robert Evans?

  contributed to autism, prescribed numerous rounds of chelation therapy. A write-up in Quack Watch summarizes, "Brad Street conceded that Colton did not respond well to chelation. The medical records, including reports from Mrs. Snyder, reflected that Colton did poorly after every round of chelation therapy. The more disturbing question is why chelation was performed at all, in view of the normal levels of mercury found in the hair, blood, and urine, its apparent lack of efficacy in treating Colton's symptoms, and the adverse side effects it apparently caused." That's another thing you encounter where they, these parents and these practitioners, the practitioners will convince the parents, "Oh yeah, if your kid's having, if they're, if they're responding negatively, that's the toxins leaving. Of course it's ugly," you know?

• 40:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. That's just so hard to listen to.

• 40:55Robert Evans?

  It's awful. It's real fucked up. These people should all have gone to prison. They should all still go to prison.

• 41:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:03Robert Evans?

  But you know who shouldn't go to prison? Our sponsors.

• 41:07Speaker 02

  Is that what we're doing?

• 41:08Robert Evans?

  I'm saying they shouldn't, Sophie. What do you want from me?

• 41:13Robert Evans?

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• 41:54Robert Evans?

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• 42:49Robert Evans?

  We're back. So in one conference in the early aughts, after Brad Street had become a Dan-affiliated doctor, he referred to parents who didn't blame their kid's condition on vaccines or subject them to dangerous biomedical experimentations as APIDS, or Autism Parents in Denial, right? If you just accept your kid and try to help them live their best life, you're in denial. You should be poisoning them. Fitzpatrick notes that other experts in the field speak in similar ways. Quote, "Jenny McCarthy is dismissive of 'woe is me' moms, though she is not above moaning about how shitty her own life is and reminding her readers that celebrities suffer like everyone else. Still, she finds it difficult to accept that other parents don't simply believe in alternative treatments.

• 43:32Robert Evans?

  Was it, she asks herself, that they didn't want to hope, or that they enjoyed the victim role?" I don't know, maybe they're just trying to do what's best for their kids.

• 43:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 43:43Robert Evans?

  When the Chicago Tribune interviewed Brad Street about his use of IV immunoglobulin, or IVIG, as an autism treatment, he told them, "Every kid with autism should have a trial of IVIG if money was not an option and if IVIG was abundant." Brad Street also became a vocal advocate for hyperbaric oxygen therapy, although he did later publish research arguing it was ineffective, perhaps because it wasn't a big moneymaker for his clinic. In 2008, more than 5,000 families enmeshed in the biomedical movement launched a lawsuit seeking compensation for vaccine-related harm in the US Court of Federal Claims. Brad Street was one of their major witnesses. He provided expert testimony, which ultimately failed because the "special masters," which

• 44:24Robert Evans?

  is the title and name for the people who are evaluating this claim, look into Brad Street in part to determine if there's credible evidence to support the idea that vaccines cause autism. They conclude it doesn't, they reject the case, and one major reason is the case of Colton Snyder, which they examine at length and hold up as like, "This is an example of how the malpractice is coming from inside the house. It's guys like Brad Street," right?

• 44:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:48Robert Evans?

  Still, by 2009, Brad Street had been in practice so long that he claimed his institute has records on more than 4,000 patients. He got a California medical license in May of that year and established a branch of the ICDRC. Two years later, he got a Georgia state medical license and opened a clinic in Beaufort. Because staying competitive in the industry of fake autism treatments required constant innovation, Brad Street became an advocate for a new autism cure late in his career, GCMAF. This stands for Globulin Component Macrophage Activating Factor. And this is a thing, it's a protein in healthy blood, that you can remove and concentrate and use it to treat certain kinds of illnesses.

• 45:31Robert Evans?

  Some kind of people are sick in a way that injecting them with this concentrated factor can help them, right? It's a real thing for stuff. Not for this, but for stuff. In August of 2012, he gave a presentation in England in which he described injecting 40 patients with autism with this shit, declaring, "I shouldn't call it shit," well, but the stuff he is selling is shit. There's a legitimate version of this, that's not what he's selling. Declaring, quote, "It's extremely potent in terms of its ability to work for children," he announced. "Many from this experiment have gone on to basically lose the label of autism. They don't have autistic distinctions anymore after sometimes as little as 20 weeks of therapy." Now, this just isn't the way this works. It's not really how anything works. But Brad Street tended to show up in the kind of crowds where he wouldn't be questioned.

• 46:16Robert Evans?

  He claimed that doctors in Japan and Italy were working on the same therapy. And he also cited a guy named David Noakes, the head of an immunobiotech which manufactures GCMAF. And he, in fact, he shouts this guy out and then offers attendees to the speech a 25% discount on GCMAF.

• 46:36Robert Evans?

  Sounds like medicine to me, bro. I love it when my doctor gives me a fucking coupon for blood factor. Great.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  Well, it's coming from him, honestly, because he's a radio host.

• 46:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah, of course. It does come, right, right. Absolutely. Per Washington Post piece by Michael Miller, quote, "What he did not disclose, however, was that much of the research he cited had already been discredited and retracted. The journal considering Brad Street's paper was the scientific equivalent of self-publishing, and Brad Street had close ties to Noakes and immunobiotech. During the same UK trip, Brad Street and Noakes made what was essentially a promotional video for immunobiotech and its brand of GCMAF called First Immune." Quote, "I'm here with Dr. Jeffrey Bradstreet from the USA, the autism expert in the First Immune GCMAF laboratories," Noakes said on camera. "Dr. Bradstreet has been using our GCMAF for an 18 months, and we'd like to thank you for, I think you've treated 900 children now."

• 47:31Robert Evans?

  "Not just children," Bradstreet boasted. "So the spectrum of my patients with autism ranges from somewhere around 18 months to goodness, somewhere around close to 40. So we've treated many adults with autism, as well as chronic fatigue patients, cancer patients. So we found application for a fairly broad number of disorders for the product." The two traded compliments for four minutes straight, just gassing each other up for four minutes.

• 47:58Robert Evans?

  Again, it sounds like medicine.

• 48:02Robert Evans?

  Now, the transcripts for this are just impossibly fucking cringy with Noakes saying, "We've never met a doctor with such an understanding at the microbiological level of how autism and cancer and other diseases work." And again, autism and cancer, not really related, not alike, not at all alike. Other diseases, again, not that I'm not saying autism's a disease, but like, that's the way this guy's talking. It's like, no, this is, this isn't medicine.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  I know.

• 48:29Robert Evans?

  Doctors are never like, "Yeah, we figure like this thing helps with the flu and I don't know, probably lung cancer, fuck it."

• 48:36Speaker 01

  And gout.

• 48:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah, gout, sure, fuck it.

• 48:42Robert Evans?

  And one of the things like Brad Street goes back to after Noakes gases him up, he's like, "This is the most sterile lab I've ever seen, the best equipment, the best people. This is the perfect like environment for doing good medical science."

• 48:56Robert Evans?

  Brad Street then pivoted to make the pitch that the greatest thing about GCMAF was that you could use it without the presence of a doctor. In other words, regular parents could just buy the stuff and shoot their children up with it. Quote, "It's accessible to anybody around the world. Through your internet sites, you've made it available very broadly. We've used it in South Africa, China, India, Eastern Europe, South America, and all over. That's been a wonderful experience to see parents have access to a therapy." And like, so there's this, um, this drug that's a cousin of Binzos that was like Soviet Union Xanax that they gave to their astronauts that is like unregulated in the US. You can order it by the kilogram.

• 49:38Robert Evans?

  I think about shit like that. We're like, "Yeah, okay, but what if we just did that for children's medicine?" You know? Oh, man, it is so funny.

• 49:53Speaker 01

  I just don't understand like how, like, it's so shameless, like going from children to like, people with autism to like everyone with cancer to like, it's just unbelievable.

• 50:03Robert Evans?

  And again, the people selling Soviet Xanax to strangers on the internet, fundamentally an honest business, you know?

• 50:11Robert Evans?

  People who buy that shit know what they're getting, you know?

• 50:17Robert Evans?

  So this that like, and you can give it to your kids. DIY was the ultimate pitch to the parents in the biomedical treatment community and the ultimate evolution of the founding principles that parents should be actively engaged, not just in caring for their child, but in diagnosing and treating them. Meanwhile, there was no real evidence that GCMAF benefited children with ASD as Baylor School of Tropical Medicine Dean Peter Hotez told The Post. And by the way, Dr. Peter Hotez also is the parent of a child with autism. Um, an initial safety test of GCMAF injections had not even been completed. It was still trying to recruit participants. So like, the actual doctors are being like, we don't even know if this is safe. We haven't been able to get enough people to volunteer to prove that this isn't dangerous, not even to show that it works.

• 51:01Robert Evans?

  And they're just selling this over the fucking internet. Even so, Brad Street bragged about dosing more than 2,000 children and claimed 85% of them improved and 15% had their autism eradicated. The initial hype was massive, but the actual comments from parents who used the treatment were standard. Some claimed small positive, while others claimed hard to rate changes like, well, he's talking more. Uh, many though, recorded disappointment. Quote, "We have recruited 20 shots of GCMAF so far. I am still waiting for the wow that everyone talks about," one person wrote. Even worse, they described side effects, including crying and pains in his chest and stomach for at least the first three. "We are doing GCMAF injections. I have not seen any gains at all," another person wrote. "I have seen worse behaviors and tantrums.

• 51:45Robert Evans?

  So after spending 1,300 for no gains and living in hell, I'm done with this."

• 51:51Speaker 01

  Wow. I can't imagine like, I can't imagine ordering something online and being like, yeah, I should, I should shoot up my kid with it.

• 51:58Robert Evans?

  I'm just shooting this into my child with a needle.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  20 times. It's unbelievable.

• 52:04Robert Evans?

  I don't know. Maybe that child abuse, I'm sorry. I know you quote unquote, love your kid, but that sounds like child abuse. To me.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  Completely.

• 52:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I like, obviously, little kids don't understand. Sometimes you have to, if they're sick, you have to give them medicine that they don't like, that may have negative side effects, because that's just necessary sometimes, right? I get it, but like, to do that for no reason. None at all.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  Also, like, like, I'm sure some of this was causing some sort of delirium, and the kids were talking as a result of that.

• 52:37Robert Evans?

  Kids not doing nothing, because, by the way, Mango, we're about to talk about where this blood came from. Oh, God. Because I know, I know, I know, the first thing I thought was like, wow.

• 52:47Speaker 02

  Jesus Christ, I don't think that's where this is going.

• 52:50Robert Evans?

  This is not just fucked up, because they're like, shooting kids full of blood that doesn't do anything, or maybe it hurts them, but also, like, blood is rare, there's not enough of any of these blood factors, people need this, and you're not getting this stuff to people who need it. The good news is, that's not an issue here.

• 53:06Speaker 02

  I'm afraid.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  So nervous.

• 53:09Robert Evans?

  I've spent a lot of these episodes talking about what a bad idea it is to make parents without medical training part of the diagnostic and treatment process in this way. But the Brad Street story does have a positive ending, due to a mom of two sons with autism named Fiona O'Leary. She came upon his scam, and she gets angry, right? She is not one of these moms who buys into the bullshit, she's like, oh, this is fucking dangerous, fuck this guy. She looks into his business, and the web of shady, undisclosed financial interests he had with Immuno Biotech. She files complaints with regulators, I think this is over in the UK, I believe she lives, I don't know if she's in the UK proper, Northern Ireland, given the name Fiona O'Leary, but she fought, she, this leads to the, the UK's equivalent of the FDA does an investigation

• 53:52Robert Evans?

  that culminates in a raid on a first immune GCMAF production facility near Cambridge. This is the lab where he filmed that video, where Brad Street films the video with notes, where they're gassing each other up.

• 54:02Speaker 01

  Which, I heard was pristine.

• 54:04Robert Evans?

  You heard that, yeah. So while Brad Street had praised the lab's sterility, UK regulators described it as making GCMAF out of, quote, blood plasma labeled not to be administered to humans or used in any drug products.

• 54:22Robert Evans?

  They're getting this out of the shit, blood. Does that make it better? Because at least regular, like, people who need blood aren't losing. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what we say here.

• 54:33Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 54:35Speaker 02

  I am sad.

• 54:37Robert Evans?

  Eventually, she succeeds. It's so fucked up, right?

• 54:42Speaker 01

  It's so fucked up.

• 54:43Robert Evans?

  Oh, my God.

• 54:45Robert Evans?

  Where was this blood coming from? She succeeds eventually in getting US regulators to look into Brad Street, which brought the feds to his door in Beaufort on June 18th, 2015. Had he been indicted properly, Brad Street might have faced 20 years in prison, according to the suspected charges on the search warrant. Rather than endure that, Brad Street fled town the next day, driving to North Carolina. As he checked into his hotel, Swiss papers reported a story from Switzerland that a first immune clinic in that country, run by Noakes, had been shut down after five patients being treated with GCMAF had died. Some had paid almost as much as 6,000 euros a week for treatment. And to be clear, we don't know that the GCMAF killed those people. These were terminal patients, right?

• 55:29Robert Evans?

  But this was billed as helping terminal conditions, and it didn't, right? So there's a big raid on his partner, Noakes. That and the raid on his own facility in Beaufort probably contributed to Jeffrey's decision to take his own life on June 19th. His body was found by a fisherman that afternoon, floating in like a river, and the gun he used was found nearby in the water. This immediately became a conspiracy for biomedical advocates, including the CEO of Immunobiotech, who insisted that Jeffrey was murdered by pharmaceutical companies for stating that the mRNA vaccine causes autism and hurting their profits with his GCMAF therapy. And unfortunately, what happens here is kind of the best-case scenario in this world. One major agent of harm faces a teeny bit of justice

• 56:11Robert Evans?

  and then makes a choice to take himself out of the picture, right? To this day, though, Brad Street remains a focus of vaccine conspiracists. And I found this in a Reddit post on the R-Conspiracy Commons Board from 2022. And it's like a picture of this guy in a suit. This is Jeffrey Bradstreet. He found the cure for autism using oxygen chamber therapy, chelation, and protein shots for T-cells. After having cured thousands, he was shot in the back twice at his mansion, and the FBI raided and destroyed his cure center the day after. Now, none of that's accurate. They raided his center the day before. He's not at his mansion. He tries to check into a hotel and like can't check in, and then he goes to the river. Like, this is just all wrong, but...

• 56:52Speaker 01

  But it's also like such a Hydra, right? Like, it feels like you cut off the head and like all these others emerge. It's awful.

• 56:59Robert Evans?

  Yep. Anyway, that's our story for the week.

• 57:08Robert Evans?

  Great stuff.

• 57:09Speaker 01

  It's super uplifting.

• 57:13Robert Evans?

  Happy trails, everybody. Mango, you got any plugs to plug?

• 57:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely. I did a show called Skyline Drive, which is about a skeptical look at astrology, and...

• 57:25Speaker 02

  It's really good.

• 57:27Speaker 01

  And I would love for people to check it out if they have the time. But honestly, Robert, Sophie, this is so fun. I know I was like just shocked and saying, "Oh, my God," more than I probably should have. But it was both horrifying and, I don't know, really enlightening.

• 57:45Robert Evans?

  Yep. Well, glad to be horrifying and enlightening. Horrifying, lightning.

• 57:51Speaker 01

  And now I need that Snickers bar of Xanax.

• 57:54Robert Evans?

  That's right. That's right. Yeah, now, again, this is the solution to all of our problems is the $7 Snickers bar of Xanax, right?

• 58:03Speaker 01

  The salt fluke.

• 58:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah, again, vote Evans. A Snickers bar of Xanax in every pocket. And honestly, none of us is gonna know what happens next, but that's kind of the benefit, right?

• 58:16Speaker 02

  Jesus Christ.

• 58:17Robert Evans?

  And look, are some people gonna die? Absolutely. And we're gonna knock down the Washington Monument and replace it with a monument that's just a four-bar. A giant four-bar in the sky.

• 58:31Robert Evans?

  Problem solved.

• 58:39Speaker 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 iHeart Radio 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/behindthebastards.

• 59:03Speaker 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.

• 59:34Robert Evans?

  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. 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.

• 1:00:03Speaker 05

  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 the 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 iHeart Radio 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.

• 1:00:34Speaker 03

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.