Part One: Sylvia Browne: Fake Psychic Detective

Robert and Kal Penn discuss the life and times of Sylvia Browne, the first famous psychic detective who spent most of her life committing crimes rather than stopping them. 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.

• 0:05Robert Evans?

  Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history. And if you're listening to this, we've had a heavy start to the year, doing four episodes on some of the new releases in the Epstein files. It's been dark. And whenever things get dark, I like to go back to like a lighter kind of fare, you know, something a little more fun. Now, since this is still a podcast about the worst people in history, we're still going to be talking about horrible things. But yeah, this is all a preamble to say, we're talking about a kooky psychic today. You're welcome, everybody. I know these are a lot of people's favorite episodes. And to hear about this person, we've got a great guest for you this week, Cal Penn. Cal, welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

• 0:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, obviously, people, I'm sure most people listening are very well aware from you for your, aware of you for your career in film and television and your time in the Obama White House. But you are now a podcaster. You've gotten dragged into the podcasting trenches.

• 1:10Speaker 02

  Your life has been upgraded, some might say.

• 1:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, there weren't enough podcasts until I had one, too.

• 1:18Robert Evans?

  That's right. It was a real problem. We were, we were all worried about it. But thankfully, you've, you've, you've filled the gap. You want to talk about the show you're doing before we get into our episode?

• 1:28Speaker 01

  Thank you. Thanks for the shameless plug opportunity. It's a, it's a podcast called Here We Go Again, that looks at the past, present, and future of things in pop culture. So we've had Bill Nye, the Science Guy, to talk about things like the space race, had on Mehdi Hassan to talk about the lack of trust in mainstream news. Even like, one of my favorites, right after he was done being Transportation Secretary, we had Pete Buttigieg on. And technically, I was supposed to talk about infrastructure, but I really wanted to understand why, when your flight is early, there's not a gate available. Like, it's almost never early, but if it's early, what's the problem here? They always say that we, they didn't know we were coming. Yes, they did. That's how it works.

• 2:13Robert Evans?

  How do you not?

• 2:15Speaker 01

  So now that I have a podcast, I get to ask all of those.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  That rocks.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, all of those kinds of questions.

• 2:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah, Transportation Secretary seems like one of those, like every time I'm in an airport, I'm like, oh, if I had that power, the things I'd change. And then the second I leave the airport, it's like, oh, I can't imagine wanting to think about airports for another second when I'm not in one.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  Totally agree. Yes. Yes, exactly.

• 2:40Speaker 03

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• 3:12Robert Evans?

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• 4:18Robert Evans?

  Well, Cal, I'm gonna start by asking a question that we ask all of our guests. Are you psychic?

• 4:25Speaker 01

  I am not sad. Well, see, if you were psychic, you would know the answer to that question.

• 4:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  Uh, I'm not psychic.

• 4:31Robert Evans?

  I knew that. Yeah. Have you ever heard of a famous TV psychic named Sylvia Brown?

• 4:38Speaker 01

  Yes, of course. She was on, wasn't she on all those daytime talk shows?

• 4:40Robert Evans?

  Everywhere, everywhere. She was on Larry King. Montel was the big one she was on.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  There were all those viral clips of her, right?

• 4:47Robert Evans?

  Yes. She's been going viral with the Gen Z or Gen Alpha. I'm split as to which Gen has rediscovered her, but one of the younger ones has rediscovered her in clips on TikTok. And she's, it has a, I think a lot of people like, when you, when you get little clips out from someone and maybe she sounds like kind of motivational in that one, uh, or optimistic in another and kind of encouraging, you get a different picture of the woman than I think is, is accurate to her. Because Sylvia Brown is, she was like the first crime fighting psychic. And that's how she built, she didn't actually fight crimes, she committed them.

• 5:26Robert Evans?

  But she was like the first TV psychic to be like, I work with police and the FBI to help like solve missing persons cases, right? She was the one who kind of turned that into a trope. And in fact, I think you could probably argue that she's like, uh, you know, the TV show Psych kind of played that idea for laughs, but I think it, like Psych probably wouldn't exist if Sylvia Brown hadn't have been around in the 90s. Like, you know, making that into a thing. Otherwise it'd be like, well, with psychic detectives, that's like, that's just a weird concept. You know?

• 5:57Robert Evans?

  What's interesting about Sylvia is that while she's this person who claims to be helping the police, who claims to be finding people with her powers, she's not just bad at it. She's so bad that she like adds harm to situations that were already disastrously dangerous. And we're gonna start these episodes as we usually do with her early life and childhood. I'm, I've got her, she wrote an autobiography, thank God, which I always love when a grifter writes an autobiography.

• 6:26Robert Evans?

  You learn so much about how they want to be seen. But part of the problem is she kind of paints herself as a very sweet and reasonable person in that. And it might seem like as it goes through, we're kind of being unfairly mean to her. So before we get to her autobiography, I want to actually open with a later chapter from her life to kind of set the stage and make sure people knows there's a reason why we're talking about this lady, right? This isn't just like a harmless, a harmless crank. In 2004, Sylvia Brown made one of her many appearances on The Montel Williams Show. At the time, Amanda Berry, a 17-year-old girl, had been kidnapped about a year earlier. Amanda goes missing in 2003.

• 7:08Robert Evans?

  And the last time Amanda had been heard from was at 8:00 PM on April 21st. She called her sister to say she was getting a ride home from her job at Burger King, and then she's just gone. The FBI initially describes her as a runaway, which I think is generally what they do in cases like this. But a day or two later, an anonymous person calls Berry's mother using her daughter's cellphone and says, "I have Amanda. She's fine and will be coming home in a couple of days." Amanda was not fine. She was not home in a couple of days. And as the months go on, her family gets understandably desperate, and her mother decides she's willing to do anything to keep public interest up about her daughter's case, obviously, right? Like, what other, what else can you do in this sort of situation? So she's willing to talk to anybody, and she's willing to go on any show to keep Amanda's

• 7:53Robert Evans?

  name in the news. So in 2004, she decides to get on The Montel Williams Show. For years, Montel Williams had had a profitable arrangement with Sylvia Brown, who was a popular psychic reader and had, in fact, worked with law enforcement on several missing persons' cases, or at least, that's how she billed herself. She was brought in to do a reading on Amanda's distraught mother, Luana Miller. Sylvia very bluntly tells Luana, "Your daughter is not alive," based on her psych, my psychic event. She's like, "I looked into it psychically. Your daughter's dead." And she says, "Your daughter's not the kind who wouldn't call." Basically, because she hasn't contacted you, like, she's definitely gone. So she's, she's very blunt about this. And the whole interview was pretty brutal. It's hard to find full episodes of, of the show from that period of time online, but

• 8:38Robert Evans?

  we've got a little, a little segment, just a couple of seconds Sophie's gonna play, to give you an idea of how Sylvia is talking to this woman.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  Don't think I'll ever see her again?

• 8:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, in heaven, on the other side.

• 8:52Robert Evans?

  So she's like, am I gonna see her again? And Sylvia says, in heaven, which is pretty, you can see on her mom's face, like, just how devastating that is. And this is really fucked up because Amanda's not dead. She is in fact alive. And aside from being kidnapped and locked in a basement, she is in good health at the time of this Montel Williams broadcast. It turns out she was one of three women, or, I mean, they're women after a period of time, but I think they're mostly girls when they're kidnapped by a maniac. You've all heard of this case, a guy named Ariel Castro kidnaps three women and imprisons him in the basement of his Cleveland home. This is the, you know, that guy gets like recorded talking about the case when they

• 9:35Robert Evans?

  escape and it gets like auto tuned and stuff and turned into like, it's an early meme. Like, this is that case, right? I mean, I don't mean to distract from the severity of it, but this is the, yeah, this is why, I mean, it's a very famous story. And Amanda actually escapes in May of 2013. She's the one who gets out of the prison that he's built for them and calls for help and gets them all rescued. This is a story you've heard, obviously, it's fairly famous, but what you probably hadn't heard is that Amanda's mom had been told by a TV psychic 10 years earlier that her daughter was dead. And when Luana goes home after appearing on the Montel Williams show, she tells a friend that she has been devastated by Sylvia's prediction.

• 10:15Robert Evans?

  She calls Sylvia 98% credible and she accepts that her daughter has died. Her friends and family say that she kind of stops her efforts to find Amanda. She basically gives up. She's hospitalized a year later with pancreatitis and she dies believing her daughter was dead. So that's bad, like awful. I mean, just, what can you say? Other than, I think that sets the stage of like, this is not a harmless psychic. This is not someone who's like playing around and pretending to have powers and talking to aliens and not doing any danger. At the time at which you're inserting yourself in a missing persons cases, you've become a monster, kind of, right?

• 10:56Speaker 01

  This is terrifying.

• 10:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's terrifying. It's interesting how she gets to this stage because it's not kind of what I would expect. Like, the version of her life that she told people is not very accurate to like, how she actually gets on television. Because she portrays herself as like, someone whom the police come to and start using in the 70s as a resource. And that's very much not true. So, let's talk about the reality of Sylvia's life. Sylvia Celeste Shoemaker, she's not born brown, was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1936. In her autobiography Psychic, she states that she believes, this is like, because she

• 11:39Robert Evans?

  lays out in this book, kind of, her, it's almost a religion that she's kind of trying to put out. She has her own, like, set of spiritual beliefs that she's trying to get people to embrace. And based on that, she believes that when we're born, we come from the other side, and we plan out our new incarnation before, like, we come into the world. So our spirit laboriously plots out every step of our future lives to, quote, "help guarantee that we accomplish the goals we set for ourselves." So Sylvia says, "We choose our families," which I'm sure will come to a surprise to people with abusive relatives, "we choose our enemies," which I'm sure is a real shocker to the victims of genocide, "and we choose our careers," which I assume will at least come as a surprise to the guy I saw mucking out the slurry of old booze, urine, and trash

• 12:22Robert Evans?

  in the streets of New Orleans after Mardi Gras. "We pick all of that when we're in the, when we're on the other side." Like, it's the kind of thing, I guess if you're happy with your life and who you are, that's a comforting thing to believe. But like, you have to imagine somebody sitting back in the spirit world being like, "What am I gonna do with this next life?" You know what would be great? Having like, a crippling substance dependency, and working a series of marginal jobs until I die at age 29 from meningitis. And then another guy, spirits, like, "Yeah, you know what? I'm gonna grow up in the Congo and get maimed by a landmine at age 11. That sounds awesome!" Like, that's literally what she believes.

• 13:00Speaker 02

  That's like, such a crazy level of, like, privilege and entitlement.

• 13:06Robert Evans?

  It's kind of inherently victim blamey.

• 13:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:08Robert Evans?

  Right? Like, how can you, if that's what you believe, how can you sympathize with people who are suffering?

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. You chose this before you even got here. You pre-ordered your meal.

• 13:20Robert Evans?

  Right. Yeah, it's like you're picking an in-flight meal, but it's like, hmm, pancreatic cancer sounds good at like age 45, you know, right in the middle there.

• 13:29Speaker 02

  I was like, you know what? Podcaster.

• 13:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that that makes sense. I think podcasters are picked before birth.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  Anointed.

• 13:40Robert Evans?

  And there's also like some inconsistencies that I just can't like square out in here. Like, for example, she says that you pick your parents, right? And you pick their good and their bad traits. But presumably, didn't your parents also start off as spirits that like picked their life? So then like, how does that all work, right? Like, what room is there for you?

• 14:02Speaker 01

  I enjoy that you're trying to rationalize this. This is good, yeah.

• 14:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you have to think about these things, right?

• 14:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. The math is not mathing is what you're saying.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  No, exactly.

• 14:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's a pretty, it's a pretty like hard to kind of draw a logical line between all of this. And obviously, you know, religion is never perfectly consistent with what we'd call human logic. That's kind of the point. God works in mysterious ways and all. But I think we can all agree, this is pretty incoherent, right? Like, when you're saying like victims of of human trafficking, like sat down at some sort of celestial D and D table and like picked that out as a trait? Like, that's just kind of messed up. Even in her own autobiography, which opens with her wedding to husband number five in her 70s, kind of makes funny about how silly this idea is. She writes, quote, "Obviously, when I was on the other side writing my chart, it seemed like a great idea to wait until I was in my 70s to meet the real Mr. Right.

• 14:57Robert Evans?

  I repeat, what the hell was I thinking?" Yeah, because maybe that's a really dumb way to think about life.

• 15:04Robert Evans?

  Oh, man. Back to her story. Sylvia has a good relationship with her dad. She really likes him. She kind of describes him as a scumbag, but she has a good relationship with him, I guess. Like, he's constantly cheating on her mom, but she hates her mom. So she winds up sympathizing with her dad over it.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  Well, look, she chose it.

• 15:24Robert Evans?

  She chose it.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:25Robert Evans?

  Right. Yeah, and her mom must have chosen to have a bad husband. She describes her mother Celeste as basically the devil herself. Quote, "She was physically abusive when my father wasn't around, and she delighted in telling me about lying awake at night, trying to figure out if she could kill me and get away with it." And It's hard when you're dealing with an autobiography of someone who is like talking about their horrible child abuse and then talking about like the fact that they can see the future or talk to aliens. And you're like, well, I know a lot of this isn't true. How much of it is true, right? I tend to try to take some of that, like the stuff about her, the basics of her life at face value, just because usually even when people

• 16:08Robert Evans?

  are kind of like manufacturing a backstory for themselves, they don't make everything up out of whole cloth. And this is all like fairly consistent. The consistency of her anger towards her mother means that I, it seems pretty believable to me that they had a really fraught relationship. Sylvia has concluded that her mother is something called a dark entity. Dark entities are those who, because they've turned away from God and abandoned his light, choose to spread nothing but darkness in their lives. By their own choice, when they die, their spirits don't transcend the sacred perfection of the other side. Instead, they enter what's known as the left door, plunge through a godless, joyless abyss, and cycle right back into some poor unsuspecting fetus again. If one of these days you read about someone in their late teens triggering a violent uprising in some historically peaceful

• 16:53Robert Evans?

  country, you can confidently say to yourself, oh, look, it's Sylvia's mother.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  Is that from her autobiography?

• 17:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah, really doesn't like her mom.

• 17:04Robert Evans?

  Wow. It's interesting, too, because that's like, she's basically saying that, I guess, kind of the normal way, like reincarnation is what happens, like if you're a bad person and the good people get to sit down as spirits and pick out what they're going to do. Otherwise, you're just kind of like, it happens at random, seems to be more or less how she's saying it goes down. Yeah. Her earliest childhood memories. Also, she's angry at her mom, but she also says that her spirit picked the bad traits of her mother before birth. So how much anger could you really have? I don't know. Uh, her earliest childhood memories are all about her mom being me like just terrible. Um, and she tells one story in here called the time she tried to burn my foot off.

• 17:49Robert Evans?

  And I'm not actually sure if this is just like a story of Sylvia's mom sucking or a story of like a mother getting distracted during bath time. I was three years old. It was bath time. What I distinctly remember is mother putting me into the tub, turning on a full blast of scalding hot water and leaving the room. My feet had to be treated for some second degree burns. Um, and yeah, uh, like that is the kind of thing I can believe happened. Uh, her mom says it was like a maintenance issue. She didn't realize the water heater heater was broken. Sylvia is convinced from an early stage that her mom tries to murder her. I kind of wonder if maybe this all she starts feeling about her mother this way, just because of like a fuck up with like the heating, but it's really impossible to say.

• 18:31Robert Evans?

  Sylvia's main positive female influence in her life is her grandmother Ada Coyle. Uh, it was Ada who seems to have first told Sylvia that she was a psychic and not just a psychic, but one of a very long line of psychics. She was in fact, quote, "another link in a 300-year psychic family history." So she's got like, uh, she's like the Mayflower of, of, of psychic families. Grandma Ada doesn't tell her about this history at first because she doesn't want to unfairly prejudice the baby into thinking she was psychic because not all the kids in the family get to be psychic. If you're Grandma Ada, you know that you don't want to disappoint the ones who wind up not being psychic. Uh, this is the way Sylvia writes it at least.

• 19:12Robert Evans?

  And then kind of at age six Sylvia predicts the birth of her baby sister and the death of her grandfather. Um, and then the deaths of several other family members in short succession. And this starts to freak her out because she's, she's worried she's causing these deaths until grandma sits her down and tells her it's not your fault and talks to her about her gift. After this point, she starts to see ghosts on a regular basis and she'll begin like warning, stopping strangers on the street and saying like, "Your gallbladder has a problem. You need to go to a doctor about your liver." Um, I don't, you know, I don't think this is real. I think this is her. Working backwards and inventing a psychic backstory for herself. But this is at least what she wants us to believe about her life. That like as a child, she's trying to like save people, you know,

• 19:57Robert Evans?

  warn them about like their random health issues and whatnot. She she tells several stories of her powers saving the day. Like the time she made her dad leave a movie with her and they got home just in time to save her sister, who had come down with pneumonia and get her to a hospital. Oddly enough, none of her relatives beside her grandmother seems to find this in any way noteworthy. They don't seem to realize that she's psychic, even dad, just grandma. When she's eight, Sylvia says that she's visited for a spirit for the first time. And this is going to be her spirit guide.

• 20:27Speaker 02

  And all this, all this information is coming from her autobiography. There isn't like a second source on this?

• 20:33Robert Evans?

  We had, we hit some second sources for pieces of this, but no, from her, like when she's eight, I don't have a secondary source.

• 20:39Speaker 02

  Sure, sure.

• 20:41Robert Evans?

  Other than that, a lot of her family members don't seem to have believed this stuff, right? Like, there's some evidence from people who are kin to her that like Sylvia was not always like this. But nobody else like writes about her as a little girl. So this, this spirit guide comes down in a beam of light and it tells her not to be afraid. And Sylvia is, of course, afraid until her grandmother finds her and explains what all this is about. Quote, "A spirit guide, it turns out, is someone who, when we decide to come to earth for another incarnation, agrees to be our vigilant companion and helpmate while we're away from home. They've studied our charts and know what we intend to accomplish here. And it's their assignment to support and advise us along the way without depriving us of our free will."

• 21:21Robert Evans?

  And, you know, I, I find the whole script your life before birth thing to sort of rob people of free will. And it also doesn't, if you think about like the history of it, like, so theoretically Hitler, like scripted out being Hitler back before he was born and was like, okay, I'm gonna do this. And he must have gotten like 80 million other people to be like, oh, great idea Hitler soul. And we're all gonna die in the horrible war that you start. That's what I'm writing out for my chart. This'll be cool. Like, how, like, what, how else could it possibly be functioning? Unless all of the people who suffer in wars are these dark souls like her mother? And then they kind of deserve it, right? There's no, there's a kind of sinister side if you think too much about what all this stuff means.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, who was Hitler's spirit guide? That's my question.

• 22:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah, who was Hitler?

• 22:08Robert Evans?

  Right. Now Sylvia's spirit guide-

• 22:11Speaker 02

  Oh, it was Sylvia's mom. That's who. That's right. I forgot.

• 22:15Robert Evans?

  That was the first incarnation of Sylvia's mom.

• 22:18Speaker 02

  Jesus Christ.

• 22:21Robert Evans?

  So what's interesting to me is she talks about who her spirit guide was in life, because her spirit guide had originally been a person. And Sylvia praises this guide for its wisdom and whatnot, and talks about her throughout the entire book, and also shows no respect for her guide's past life and identity. Like, listen to this. "She lived her one incarnation on earth as an Aztec Incan, who at the age of 19 was killed by a spear in 1520 while protecting her infant daughter during the Spanish invasion of Colombia. She told me her name was Elina. I apparently either didn't care for or couldn't remember it, because I promptly renamed her Francine and have never called her anything else." That's kind of offensive, right?

• 22:59Robert Evans?

  You're like, spear's a genocide victim? And you're like, "I'm gonna call you Francine." It's kind of bonk- the whole thing is bonkers. Yeah. And this is supposed to be enticing to people. You're supposed to read this and be like, "Wow, this is how the world works." Like, you're really- you've convinced me. I want to believe the things you believe, Sylvia. Now, because I'm me, I had to dig in to the backstory of her spirit guide to see is like, any of this even plausible? So first off, she claims that Elina is an Aztec Incan name. Elina is a Greek name. It's a variant of the word Helen. So right off the bat, we're having some trouble. Also, the fact that Elina was apparently an Aztec Incan woman makes no sense,

• 23:41Robert Evans?

  because despite the fact that both the Aztec and Incan empires existed contemporaneously, they were very far from each other. And there's very minimal evidence for direct contact between the two empires. There's indirect trade between them, but there's not a ton of cross-pollination. And I haven't found any evidence of like, Aztec Incan people. Like, that's not like a- that's not like a thing that- that really happened. Also- When I looked into like Colombia during this period of time, the area we now call Colombia was not settled by the Aztec or the Inca. It was primarily settled by the Teyronas and the Muiscas peoples, right? So, none of this makes sense. Like, this is like a, this is a white lady who doesn't know anything about Aztec or Inca history, trying to, wanting

• 24:25Robert Evans?

  to have a connection to like shamans and like the mystique of like, uh, South America. And so she's just like bullshitting and made, didn't even bother to be like, is Alina a Greek name? Or is it a name someone might have had from this period?

• 24:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, she just wanted an ayahuasca trip pre-internet.

• 24:41Robert Evans?

  Right. Oh, yeah. She would have, if she'd come up a little later, she would have really been a big advocate of the ayahuasca therapy, I suspect. Um, so Sylvia grows up, you know, talking to Francine in her head. She goes to Catholic school and she gets in trouble with the nuns because nuns don't like it when you claim that you're channeling spirits. Not a thing nuns tend to be huge fans of. Um, she gets in trouble because she talks up in class and because Francine has a lot of disagreements about the way God works. And so when the nuns will say something, she'll be like, well, actually, the, the voice in my head says something very different. And this does not go over well. Um, she tells the nuns that hell doesn't exist. They're not thrilled about that. Nuns are kind of

• 25:25Robert Evans?

  big on hell. So she has a tough time in her early school career. Sylvia herself actually gets pissed at her spirit guide Francine a few years later when her grandmother gets sick because Francine refuses to fix the illness. She just keeps telling Sylvia, everything will work out as it's meant to work out. So she kind of will go dark on Francine for periods of time as a kid when she gets angry at her. Um, she, in general, doesn't seem to have had a super happy, like, early childhood. She doesn't like living at home. She doesn't get along with her sister because she thinks her mom programmed her sister into being sick and introverted. I think maybe she just had a different personality than you Sylvia. Uh, so at age 16, she decides to free herself from her family via a foolproof

• 26:07Robert Evans?

  plan. She's going to get married. She convinces one of her male friends to, to get hitched with her and she doctors her birth certificates that it says that she's 18. Then she and this guy Joe cross state lines and get married by a justice of the peace. This works as well as you'd expect. When she comes back home and is like, I got married. Her dad says, the fuck you did. And they annulled the hell out of that marriage very quickly.

• 26:33Robert Evans?

  Sylvia graduates and gets accepted to St. Teresa's College in Kansas City. She majors in education and theology. And it's at around this time that her grandma takes a final turn for the worst and passes on in the hospital. Francine assures Sylvia everything's fine, but she doesn't believe her spirit guide until she and her boyfriend are driving home and her boyfriend sees grandma's spirit in the car, which convinces her that not only is everything fine, but that her psychic gifts are definitely real. So she comes into adulthood, she goes to college and she's, she's training to be a teacher. She's never wanted to do anything but teach. Her spirit guide tells her she's there to be a teacher. Her grandma says she's there to be a teacher and she, she takes that very literally, that she's meant to like teach kids in a school. So she's on her own now.

• 27:18Robert Evans?

  She knows she wants to be a teacher, but she doesn't really know what kind of like, she thinks she wants to be like, school teacher is the thing that she's supposed to be. But her grandmother had always told her that like, she needs to use her gifts to speak to large groups of people. And she's not sure like which direction to go in. And you might say, wouldn't a real psychic know what the future held in store for her? But Sylvia's come up with a workaround to that. As Francine informed her, none of us is allowed to read our own charts while we're here on earth, which is why there's not a psychic on earth who's psychic about themselves, which is an extremely convenient way to work this out. Yeah. It's kind of a load bearing part of Sylvia's narrative that she can't read her own future.

• 28:00Robert Evans?

  But I can read your future listeners and it's going to send you to the advertisers of this podcast right now.

• 28:09Speaker 07

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• 29:09Speaker 08

  If there's a million times more digital intelligence than there is biological intelligence, it's hard to imagine humans being in control in that scenario.

• 29:17Speaker 09

  I'm Walter Isaacson, host of the new podcast, The Builders. Right now, we're living through an A I arms race. So I went directly to the people shaping that future. Elon Musk, Dario Amede, Alex Carr, Fei Fei Lee, Almer Lucky. Because I wanted to understand what the most consequential builders believe, what they fear and where they think this is all headed.

• 29:42Speaker 10

  Silicon Valley is always saying the cliche thing about the way to predict the future is to create it. Well, yeah, it's up to us.

• 29:51Speaker 11

  But when you say us, who's us? Is it four hundred people that you know in Silicon Valley? Is it me down here in New Orleans?

• 29:59Speaker 09

  They're brilliant, controversial, and they're already shaping the future. The question is, whose imagination do we want to live in?

• 30:07Speaker 12

  This is going to determine the fate of nations and economies and the future of humanity.

• 30:12Speaker 09

  Listen to The Builders on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 30:25Robert Evans?

  And we're back.

• 30:27Speaker 02

  Back, back again.

• 30:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah, back again, talking about Sylvia. So she falls in love and almost gets married, wants to drop out of school to get hitched with this guy. Right? She's about nineteen at this time. But he tells her he wants her to move to a farm and like, give up her career and raise children with him. And she's down to do this until she finds out that he has a wife and children back. One of those things. And I'm kind of wondering like, okay, you can't predict your own future, but shouldn't you have been able to psychically tell that this guy had a secret family?

• 30:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:01Robert Evans?

  That seems.

• 31:01Speaker 02

  I love how often you're bringing up this flawed theory of hers. You're like, ah, girl.

• 31:07Robert Evans?

  It's very inconsistent, the way these powers are supposed to work. Yeah. You can tell a guy's got liver cancer, but not that like a dude who's hitting on you has a wife and kids back home. Yeah. So during her time in college, she becomes increasingly fascinated with the workings of the human mind, and she signs up for a class in abnormal psychology, which like, who didn't? She takes this evening. I did. Yeah, a lot of people do this. She also starts taking classes in hypnosis. And just so we're clear, because I don't think a lot of people know this, hypnosis is like a thing with like demonstrable effects that's written about by like actual like mental health like professionals. There's an, I found an article in the Journal of the APA by Kirsten Weir that notes, "Hypnosis

• 31:49Robert Evans?

  is as old as the field of psychotherapy itself, but today advocates pointing to its evidence say it deserves a fresh look and a much wider audience. Hypnosis has a certain historical mystique that can sometimes make it difficult for practitioners to understand its modern relevance," said David Godot, PhD, a clinical psychologist in Long Beach, California. "In fact, clinical hypnosis has clear benefits in psychotherapy, improving outcomes in areas such as pain management, anxiety, depression, and sleep." And there's, so what I want to say is that like, this is a, this is like a real thing, and there's very real evidence that hypnosis has impacts on people, which is part of why it's very dangerous when people get trained in it and like fuck around with it. Because you can actually like really mess people up by screwing with this stuff.

• 32:31Robert Evans?

  It's, it's a, it's a potentially like dangerous thing to, to mess with. And I'm not qualified enough to go into like the weeds of how all this works, but it's enough for you to know that it is a potentially powerful tool for therapy. And Sylvia decides she likes this, and she's enthralled with her abnormal psychology course. But once she gets further along in the course, she starts to get scared too, because she, she starts reading that things like hearing voices in your head are potentially symptoms of like mental illnesses. And she writes that this quote, some of these illnesses, quote, "describe me too, much too closely for my own comfort." And I might be like, ma'am, maybe this is time to like self-reflect a little bit more. This is actually the only self-reflection she does in this book.

• 33:15Robert Evans?

  She writes out that she knows all the things she's described experiencing, the voices, the seeing people that aren't there are classic signs of schizophrenia. And she decides to go to a psychiatrist to like actually like talk this out and see, am I crazy? Like, that's the way she writes. She comes to the conclusion, maybe I'm nuts. And so she sits down with one of her professors and engages her professor like as a psychiatrist to analyze her, which you're not supposed to do. I looked around a little bit and per the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, health professionals who provide psychiatric and psychological care to medical students must have no involvement in the academic evaluation or promotion of students receiving those services. You are not supposed to teach

• 33:56Robert Evans?

  someone and be their psychiatric analyst. It's considered a very bad idea. And I think this anecdote like really makes the case as to why, because this teacher clearly likes Sylvia that she makes the appointment with, and he's not going to be very critical towards what she says to him. So right before she meets with her professor about this, Sylvia says goodbye to Francine. She's like, look, I've decided you're just a figment of my imagination and I'm going to cut off contact because I don't want to be crazy. But if you're not a figment of my imagination, I'll give you one last chance to appear in person before me, which had not happened before. And she starts to like show up in person in front of Sylvia and her whole family, Sylvia claims. And Sylvia runs out of the

• 34:41Robert Evans?

  room because she gets so scared by this. And unfortunately, none of her family members were alive by the time of this book being published for me to like, did anyone else see this lady? Has anyone else told this story? But this convinces Sylvia that Francine is real. So she goes to her appointment with Dr. Rinnick and she tells him what happens. And for some reason, this psychologist and professor is like, oh, this is all perfectly normal. The fact that you're scared that your psychic powers might make you crazy means that you're definitely sane. Oh, my gosh. And he writes down the diagnosis on a piece of paper, "Normal, but has paranormal abilities?"

• 35:18Robert Evans?

  Sir? I don't think you're supposed to do that. Good for you. Good for you. Yeah. Sir? She's gonna keep this diagnosis her whole life. Like, this is, he just, this is like handing liquor and a loaded gun to an angry 15-year-old. Like, there you go. There you go, Sylvia. You've got, like, your backup from a professional. Now go out into the world and mess with people.

• 35:40Robert Evans?

  That was dark, Robert. That was really dark. It's not great. This professor seems to really give her, like, a wide purview. He lets her channel Francine in class for her classmates in the abnormal psychology class. What the fuck is wrong with this guy? Genuinely? They question her spirit guide for hours on end, while Sylvia is apparently insensate. Quote, "There was unanimous agreement that even though it was my voice they were listening to, the speech patterns, the terminology, the rhythms, and everything else that came out of my mouth sounded absolutely nothing like me at all. And gee, here's the good news. Everyone loved her and wanted her to come back soon." Everybody clapped. It's a great experience for them. Okay. This, I'm pretty hesitant to believe a lot of what she says. If you think back to,

• 36:25Robert Evans?

  like, the 60s, and think back to, like, the science fiction of the 60s and 70s, even, like, early Star Trek episodes and stuff, there was this fairly widespread acceptance, even from very scientifically-minded people, that there was something to psychic phenomenon, that this was real, that there was some reality behind claims of psychic powers. And so it's not actually weird to me that, like, a college class in, like, the 60s and 70s would let someone get up and channel, and people might take it seriously. Like, that kind of stuff wasn't as kooky then as it seems now, in part because we've had another, like, 50 years of psychics trying to prove their psychic powers and, like, not doing it on television.

• 37:05Robert Evans?

  So maybe this really happens. Sylvia claims in her autobiography that she graduates shortly after this at age 19 and starts teaching at a small school near Kansas City. This is a lie, and it's here that I can bring some outside evidence finally into her autobiography. Because in 2007, one of her ex-husbands made a public claim that she had lied about her higher education experience and her teaching experience. In order to kind of disprove his lies, she sends her college transcripts over to a critic who had published his claims. And the transcript she sent accidentally reveals that like she did attend college, but she never graduates and she never gets a teaching degree. And she probably never works as a teacher. Which is good because I don't have to go through the long section of the book where she does like

• 37:49Robert Evans?

  a stand and deliver and she talks about, I knew which kids were being abused and I would like secretly help them and talk to them and like, you know, maneuver to help them out. It's all lies. She never teaches kids.

• 38:00Speaker 02

  I'm pretty glad she never worked with children because can't even imagine, can't even imagine the harm she would have caused.

• 38:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, like especially imagine like somewhat with as wrong as she was about things, her just like going up to a random kid with a normal whole life and being like, your dad's hitting you, isn't he? I can see it psychically.

• 38:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:20Robert Evans?

  Ms. Brown is really scary, Dad. I don't understand what she's saying.

• 38:25Speaker 02

  Teacher comes up to you, did you know that your mother murdered that man? And you're like, what?

• 38:30Robert Evans?

  There's a dark vibe to your house. There's a ghost in it.

• 38:33Speaker 02

  By the way, the dog did not get sent to a farm.

• 38:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So the next thing we can verify in her life is that she starts dating, in fact, the ex-husband who later reveals that she didn't graduate college, uh, who was a police officer at the time, a guy named Gary Dufresne. Uh, so she meets this cop and they start dating and they get hitched on October 19th, 1958.

• 38:57Speaker 02

  Mary's a cop?

• 38:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he's a cop. It's a start for her.

• 39:00Speaker 02

  That doesn't feel compatible to me.

• 39:04Robert Evans?

  He gets fired presumably for being a crooked cop. She doesn't say that, but they like have to move. Oh.

• 39:12Robert Evans?

  It's bad.

• 39:14Speaker 02

  And this is, this is what the.

• 39:16Robert Evans?

  What year is this?

• 39:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was gonna say.

• 39:17Robert Evans?

  This is 58. Okay. Into 58.

• 39:19Speaker 02

  You gotta be pretty bad to get moved as a cop in the 50s, bro.

• 39:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah, in 58, yeah. Now, and she also says that almost, he's very sweet when they're dating, but as soon as they get married, he starts becoming physically and mentally abusive, which I have no trouble believing.

• 39:35Speaker 02

  No.

• 39:36Robert Evans?

  It's not just that it's the 50s, but like, you know, 40% of police households experienced domestic violence. This is a credit. And also he publicly hates her, like her whole life. Um, now she's also pretty bad, but I don't doubt that he abused her in any way, shape or form. Like everything she writes here seems very credible. Um, and yeah.

• 39:55Speaker 02

  Brutal.

• 39:57Robert Evans?

  That's what I will note is that Sylvia gives us some hints that she herself was not an easy partner, which doesn't justify anything, but she tells a story that is incredibly frustrating if you put yourself in the other person's shoes, where they buy a house. They go through the whole process of buying a house, the huge expense, all the nightmare of signing all the paperwork, and the day they move in, she panics and says there's an evil spirit in the house and like, something's wrong, we can't live here. Oh, God. And like, you didn't figure that out during the walkthrough? Yeah, exactly. During the inspection? That there's a ghost? So they have to live in the house for a while because like, they can't just leave. They don't have enough money. She concludes the house was built on an old native burial ground.

• 40:42Robert Evans?

  And when she, I do, Gary's a bad guy, but I love his response to this because she's like, this house was built on an Indian burial ground. And Gary says, so what? I'm sure someone's buried pretty much everywhere. Where are we supposed to live? In midair? Not a bad response. So, per Sylvia, there's a bunch of storms that hit the house and then Gary loses his cop job and the family moves to California. Her parents move with them and they like, live next door in a duplex, but the marriage continues to degrade. Sylvia has an emotional affair with a creative writing professor who's into the occult and who starts giving her occult books like Helena Blavatsky's Theosophy books to read

• 41:23Robert Evans?

  and tells her like, you're a great psychic and you have to use your powers to change the world. And then he dies very suddenly and tragically. I have no idea. I can't verify this guy's existence, so I don't know if he was real or if she just invented him because he was narratively convenient. But after this point, she leaves Gary, they get divorced, and she takes their now two children with her. She meets a new man shortly thereafter, a guy named Dow, and they move into a house together while she completes her hypnotism classes to become a master hypnotist. And she's starting to practice primarily as like a psychic. She's not doing a lot of like, professional hypnotism right now. She's doing readings on people and she's sometimes giving like, speeches and stuff to classes. And that's kind of how she's making her living.

• 42:08Robert Evans?

  I think Dow is primarily supporting her at this point, but she's starting to build up her career. And we'll talk about what comes next, but first, ads.

• 42:19Speaker 04

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• 43:17Speaker 08

  If there's a million times more digital intelligence than there is biological intelligence, it's hard to imagine humans being in control in that scenario.

• 43:24Speaker 09

  I'm Walter Isaacson, host of the new podcast, The Builders. Right now, we're living through an AI arms race. So I went directly to the people shaping that future. Elon Musk, Dario Hamad, Alex Carr, Fei-Fei Li, Palmer Lucky. Because I wanted to understand what the most consequential builders believe, what they fear, and where they think this is all headed.

• 43:49Speaker 10

  Silicon Valley is always saying the cliche thing about the way to predict the future is to create it. Well, yeah, it's up to us.

• 43:59Speaker 11

  But when you say us, who's us? Is it 400 people that you know in Silicon Valley? Is it me down here in New Orleans?

• 44:06Speaker 09

  They're brilliant, controversial, and they're already shaping the future. The question is, whose imagination do we want to live in?

• 44:14Speaker 12

  This is going to determine the fate of nations and economies and the future of humanity.

• 44:19Speaker 09

  Listen to The Builders on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 44:32Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So my favorite detail from this period of time after she moves in with her new husband is that one day Sylvia is cooking dinner for her family and she starts a massive grease fire that nearly kills her and she's rescued from the grease fire by a spirit that looks to be a young woman in her 30s. Francine informs her that the spirit was really Grandma Ada. And I gotta read, this is my favorite chunk of her whole stupid book. I gotta read this to you guys.

• 44:59Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 44:59Robert Evans?

  I impatiently pointed out to her that Grandma Ada's hair was white. It was blonde when she was 30, she said. All spirits on the other side are 30 years old. Why are they 30? Considering all the years I'd been communicating with her, I should have seen this answer coming. Because they are. I couldn't argue with that.

• 45:17Speaker 02

  30, flirty and thriving.

• 45:19Speaker 01

  30?

• 45:21Robert Evans?

  30.

• 45:21Speaker 01

  Because they are.

• 45:23Robert Evans?

  Because they are. God was like, you know what the right age is? 30.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  30.

• 45:28Robert Evans?

  30.

• 45:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's giving Jennifer Garner. It's giving, it's giving 13 going on. 30, 30, flirty and thriving.

• 45:37Robert Evans?

  30.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  I think that shows us that she actually believed this.

• 45:43Robert Evans?

  It, she has to have to some extent, right?

• 45:46Speaker 01

  She must have believed that because if you're, if you're not gonna bother to justify it with anything other than they said, because, just because, that's how it is. Like, damn, you're in deep.

• 46:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's such a, it's also just objectively like, you know what age people wanna be when they're on the other side forever? The age when their knees started to give out.

• 46:12Robert Evans?

  That's the, that's the perfect age. Not in their early twenties when you could like drink like a sieve or whatever, like 30. Yeah.

• 46:20Robert Evans?

  So not long after this, she and Dal go to see a famous psychic give a lecture. Sylvia very decently doesn't name the psychic because they were still practicing at the time the book came out and she didn't want to start beef. But Sylvia is very offended at how ignorant this psychic is. And she's particularly offended because the psychic takes credit for her gift, for having, for their gift, right? That like, this is my gift. I'm special as the psychic. And Sylvia believes that you have to give God credit for everything, right? So she's kind of offended at that. And she's just in general angry that this woman's getting a lot of important details wrong. So she turns to her husband Dal and she expresses fury that this woman has, quote, "a whole audience sitting there looking for answers, looking for comfort about their deceased loved ones. All they got back was a bunch of double talk, lies and half truths."

• 47:05Robert Evans?

  Which is a very ironic sentence to come out of the lady whose whole career is going to be lying to people about their dead loved ones later. And sometimes there are lie of loved ones who aren't dead. Her husband Dal, I don't know, maybe he just wanted to like, get her to stop yelling, but he's like, why don't you do something about it? If you're so much better of a psychic than this lady, you know, why don't you become a big psychic and start giving psychic lectures? And so Sylvia does. She founds the Nirvana Foundation of Psychic Research, a registered nonprofit in California in 1974. Her stated goal with this is to create a new religion, right? To like, or at least to augment the existing world religions. You get the feeling, part of, she wants to like, correct the other religions. She thinks they all got pieces right, but they don't know that you're 30 forever when you're dead.

• 47:50Robert Evans?

  You know, that's not in the Bible. We gotta, we gotta pencil that in, right?

• 47:54Speaker 01

  Sounds like somebody didn't wanna pay their taxes.

• 47:58Robert Evans?

  Oh yeah, oh yeah, that's right. Cal, you've hit the nail on the head. Whenever someone wants to start a religion. So she starts running ads in the newspaper for classes, and it being the 1970s, people show up. Sylvia gets so many students that regrettably, and she hates this, she hates to do this.

• 48:19Speaker 02

  Oh my goodness.

• 48:20Robert Evans?

  She has to start charging them money. It breaks her heart. She has to get money from these people.

• 48:24Speaker 02

  She's like, oh my gosh, I have to scam the people I'm scamming.

• 48:28Robert Evans?

  There's just too many of them for me to not take their money.

• 48:31Speaker 02

  How can I not take advantage of these people?

• 48:34Robert Evans?

  Quote, "I'd been offering for free for so many years, but for one thing, it was the only way I could afford to make a full-time commitment to the foundation. For another thing, as more and more people have been pointing out to me, making a living putting one's gifts to work is pretty much the definition of virtually every career you can name. So long as I devoted my gifts to God's greatest good, I had no reason to apologize." I don't know that that is the definition of every, virtually every career you can name.

• 49:01Speaker 02

  No.

• 49:02Robert Evans?

  Like, putting, like, we all like to think that that's the case, but I don't know if I think, like, most of the people I know who, like, worked as a bank teller weren't like, "I'm putting my gifts to work." They were like, "Well, I needed a job while I was in college," you know?

• 49:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:17Robert Evans?

  "I needed something to do."

• 49:18Speaker 01

  "I can teach acting classes for free."

• 49:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So, true to her word, though, after this point, Sylvia is not going to apologize for anything she does over the next 50 years. We have now-

• 49:32Speaker 02

  That's a sign of a good person.

• 49:33Robert Evans?

  -crossed the threshold. Yeah, and she is, she is going to be, from this point forward, making money full-time off of her psychic research. She's going to start hiring people, bringing them in and expanding the Nirvana Foundation. And by 1975 or so, she is a full-time psychic, teaching classes in extrasensory skills, like dream interpretation, and becoming increasingly, like, prominent within, like, the kooky world of new age thought, as that starts to kind of explode in the mid-'70s through the early-'80s. She's one of these people who's, like, in Southern California, giving, it's always in Southern California, like, giving classes and putting out books and pamphlets on, like, how the

• 50:15Robert Evans?

  psychic world is supposed to work. And there's very much this idea that, like, we're treating this like a science. And so, we'll see how this science develops, Cal, in part two. How are you feeling at the end of part one, about our friend Sylvia?

• 50:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, what do you think of Sylvia so far?

• 50:29Speaker 01

  I appreciate this backstory because I, I grew up in the '90s, so I remember, like, when you were sick, home from school, like, with a flu, on the couch, watching just bad daytime shows. She was a fixture of, of a lot of them. I guess Montel especially, I don't remember what I would watch back in the day, but I remember that. And then I remember just, there was like the gap, obviously, at college after. Once the internet comes around, YouTube, and then obviously now, social media, like these clips that circulate of her, I have that weird memory of remembering that as a kid, but then not knowing anything else about her. So all of that was very interesting.

• 51:08Speaker 01

  And I guess I didn't realize how troubled she was from such an early age. And I'm trying to use that term generously, instead of saying that she was a fraud or whatever. Like, it just sounds like, whether, whether she actually believes this, or whether it was a, it was a calculated fraud, she doesn't sound well from the beginning, right?

• 51:29Robert Evans?

  No, no. And I, I think it's probably accurate to think that this doesn't, nobody starts, or at least very few people start, you know, the way she would say, mapping it out. She's not, as a 20-year-old or whatever, mapping out, and then I'm going to lie to people about their kidnapped relatives.

• 51:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:44Robert Evans?

  Right? This is, this is a kid who, she's got a difficult home life, you know, she's got a grandma who makes her feel special. I don't have trouble believing, because a lot of people could have experienced it like an older, no, I've, I'm a little touched. I've got a little bit of the, of the gift or whatever. And her grandma probably certainly didn't say everything that she puts in her grandma's mouth, but she probably said a few things. And then Sylvia expands the lore over time, because it makes her feel special and comforted. And, you know, things snowball, and eventually you get a lot less ethical. You start making compromises to keep it going. You, you find opportunities.

• 52:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:17Robert Evans?

  And I, I do think you, like Breaking Bad is a more gradual experience for a lot of these people. You know, they're not all L. Ron Hubbard, who came out of the gate like, I'm in a con as many people as I can. Um, we can't all be LRH, though we might wish we could. Well, Cal, you want to plug your show again before we roll out here?

• 52:35Speaker 01

  Sure. I'm, uh, I'm the host of a podcast called Here We Go Again, where we look at the past, present, and future of specific topics. You can think of it as like, a place where you can have fun, make some jokes, but at the end of the episode, feel like you've actually learned a little bit of something, a little bit of, uh, maybe, maybe like a little, just tiny, tiny bit of, of hope about the topics that we cover.

• 52:59Robert Evans?

  A tiny bit of hope sounds incredibly generous for 2026. So I am looking forward to that. You all should be too. All right, everybody. Until Thursday, this has been Behind the Bastards. We'll be back in like a day or so. You know how this all works. We've been doing this for almost 10 years.

• 53:16Speaker 13

  Sweet.

• 53:21Speaker 13

  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. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind Me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips in our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com/behindthebastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

• 53:55Speaker 05

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• 54:55Speaker 11

  How do you know that Claude won't become manipulative?

• 54:59Speaker 14

  This is a constant worry.

• 55:02Speaker 12

  And you can actually catch the model thinking, I think X is actually true, but I'm going to tell the user why.

• 55:08Speaker 09

  I'm Walter Isaacson. On my new podcast, The Builders, I'm going inside the minds of the people shaping our future. Listen to The Builders starting October 13th on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 55:24Speaker 03

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.