Part One: The Naturopathic Doctor Who Bombed a Plane

Robert tells Brandie Posey the thrilling tale of Dr. Robert Spears, a man who was not a doctor but was a trailblazing Naturopath. And when I say "trailblazing", I mean he committed terrorism on a plane. https://books.google.com/books?id=70oEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA13#v=onepage&q&f=true https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbooks.google.com%2Fbooks%3Fid%3D70oEAAAAMBAJ%26pg%3DPA13%23v%3Donepage%26q%26f%3Dtrue&data=05%7C02%7CSophieLichterman%40iheartmedia.com%7Cb0e48676bd9d43d29ef408deafbf7531%7C122a527e5b714eba878d9810b495b9e3%7C0%7C0%7C639141434189855796%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=QP1jXh7JYuHvs7Pp9g8wk%2BVX78jchp4GgNJLLr5ynOc%3D&reserved=0 https://time.com/archive/6888850/national-affairs-the-naturopath/ https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Ftime.com%2Farchive%2F6888850%2Fnational-affairs-the-naturopath%2F&data=05%7C02%7CSophieLichterman%40iheartmedia.com%7Cb0e48676bd9d43d29ef408deafbf7531%7C122a527e5b714eba878d9810b495b9e3%7C0%7C0%7C639141434189895263%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=ntK7yj%2FXYlZuxrDMNf2qtUocDiVItFyltFENFP0xrdQ%3D&reserved=0 https://www.nytimes.com/1960/01/22/archives/explosives-found.html https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F1960%2F01%2F22%2Farchives%2Fexplosives-found.html&data=05%7C02%7CSophieLichterman%40iheartmedia.com%7Cb0e48676bd9d43d29ef408deafbf7531%7C122a527e5b714eba878d9810b495b9e3%7C0%7C0%7C639141434189918431%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=vkHsdP2lmdcqwmiCdhd46NuvvvJpZx%2Bo%2FP44Zv6w3YM%3D&reserved=0 https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-odessa-american/82054980/ https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newspapers.com%2Farticle%2Fthe-odessa-american%2F82054980%2F&data=05%7C02%7CSophieLichterman%40iheartmedia.com%7Cb0e48676bd9d43d29ef408deafbf7531%7C122a527e5b714eba878d9810b495b9e3%7C0%7C0%7C639141434189937404%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=D%2F7ejkVXqdyqPyDwscNG2%2Fy9429tt%2BcmHdJgEjS7fr0%3D&reserved=0 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7219457/ https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Farticles%2FPMC7219457%2F&data=05%7C02%7CSophieLichterman%40iheartmedia.com%7Cb0e48676bd9d43d29ef408deafbf7531%7C122a527e5b714eba878d9810b495b9e3%7C0%7C0%7C639141434189967538%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=a0x%2BVNND7%2BWs%2BbJy2kGRNTjBvNQYoUB3%2F0roNWkuEeA%3D&reserved=0 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7219462/ https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Farticles%2FPMC7219462%2F&data=05%7C02%7CSophieLichterman%40iheartmedia.com%7Cb0e48676bd9d43d29ef408deafbf7531%7C122a527e5b714eba878d9810b495b9e3%7C0%7C0%7C639141434189998900%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=pu9WLv1JpjfdjJVv0uvPJvrMneFvAuXv12JNMtuW3OM%3D&reserved=0 https://wearepressingmatters.com/blog%2Farticles/f/a-brief-history-of-naturopathy-in-the-united-states https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwearepressingmatters.com%2Fblog%252Farticles%2Ff%2Fa-brief-history-of-naturopathy-in-the-united-states&data=05%7C02%7CSophieLichterman%40iheartmedia.com%7Cb0e48676bd9d43d29ef408deafbf7531%7C122a527e5b714eba878d9810b495b9e3%7C0%7C0%7C639141434190021716%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=wrmtEhC9WmEzPLIJt%2Bfwtua%2FmEhvOSPB%2FxPLv6V3ctA%3D&reserved=0 https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/benedict-lust https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebsco.com%2Fresearch-starters%2Fhistory%2Fbenedict-lust&data=05%7C02%7CSophieLichterman%40iheartmedia.com%7Cb0e48676bd9d43d29ef408deafbf7531%7C122a527e5b714eba878d9810b495b9e3%7C0%7C0%7C639141434190045939%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=RVHeCDF4Unx1cBCaRu%2FIyIeeIvkLITIRmqFeWEG58k8%3D&reserved=0 https://ndnr.com/past-pearls-the-trials-of-benedict-lust/ https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fndnr.com%2Fpast-pearls-the-trials-of-benedict-lust%2F&data=05%7C02%7CSophieLichterman%40iheartmedia.com%7Cb0e48676bd9d43d29ef408deafbf7531%7C122a527e5b714eba878d9810b495b9e3%7C0%7C0%7C639141434190069708%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=qqSh344JtXSfXU0MDneBcFqEQidsjnlzYWFmZRugjBM%3D&reserved=0 https://www.futurelearn.com/info/courses/fundamentals-of-naturopathic-medicine/0/steps/372463 https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.futurelearn.com%2Finfo%2Fcourses%2Ffundamentals-of-naturopathic-medicine%2F0%2Fsteps%2F372463&data=05%7C02%7CSophieLichterman%40iheartmedia.com%7Cb0e48676bd9d43d29ef408deafbf7531%7C122a527e5b714eba878d9810b495b9e3%7C0%7C0%7C639141434190089901%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=%2FPg%2FDGmgipApK2oVpH2fO45ckbGhJlzo9jxC1CadAVw%3D&reserved=0 https://www.ndhealthfacts.org/wiki/Benedict_Lust https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ndhealthfacts.org%2Fwiki%2FBenedict_Lust&data=05%7C02%7CSophieLichterman%40iheartmedia.com%7Cb0e48676bd9d43d29ef408deafbf7531%7C122a527e5b714eba878d9810b495b9e3%7C0%7C0%7C639141434190108894%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=MOAYOuCIgwMYGYv6KsSPx6xSVrf0gN6rMCZ%2FPDrjQF0%3D&reserved=0 https://quackwatch.org/related/naturopathy/ https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fquackwatch.org%2Frelated%2Fnaturopathy%2F&data=05%7C02%7CSophieLichterman%40iheartmedia.com%7Cb0e48676bd9d43d29ef408deafbf7531%7C122a527e5b714eba878d9810b495b9e3%7C0%7C0%7C639141434190125832%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=pg0SK92xVQH7CDSL829hvRqG3xG0pqHu7LnifLpzQss%3D&reserved=0 https://www.amazon.com/Self-Styled-Chasing-Robert-Vernon-Spears/dp/1734204915 https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FSelf-Styled-Chasing-Robert-Vernon-Spears%2Fdp%2F1734204915&data=05%7C02%7CSophieLichterman%40iheartmedia.com%7Cb0e48676bd9d43d29ef408deafbf7531%7C122a527e5b714eba878d9810b495b9e3%7C0%7C0%7C639141434190142895%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=jugAtAUAh4jxQ9wQNY4PhC71oqV%2ForNTKDfo0wWZmS8%3D&reserved=0 https://www.amazon.com/Vanishing-Act-Airliner-Backroom-Abortions/dp/B0D9PTQK7L 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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 we've got, we've got a fun one for you this week, folks. I know it's been a rough year. We've, there's been a lot of pedophiles. I'm not just talking about the US government. I'm talking about on the podcast. We've been covering a lot of pedophiles, in part because there's a lot of pedophiles in the US government, to be fair. But this week, thank God, we're handling just an honest, simple grifter, you know, one of the, one of the good decent con men who makes this podcast and this nation possible. And to talk with me about just a, just a corn-fed, good old fashioned, down-home con artist,

• 0:50Robert Evans?

  Brandie Posey. Brandy, you're a comedian and you run your own comedy record label and you've got an album, Milk Job, that's out right now, right now?

• 0:59Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Right now. Right now, baby. Hell yeah.

• 1:03Robert Evans?

  Welcome to the show, Brandy. How you, how you doing? How you been since last we talked?

• 1:07Speaker 01

  Um, I've been good. Also, keeping up on the pedophile news and probably, you know?

• 1:13Robert Evans?

  Keeping up with the pedophiles.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, grinding my teeth as much as you, I imagine.

• 1:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, uh, it's frustrating to be aware of the world these days. I don't recommend it. Instead, why don't you, why don't we all just sink into a story of days gone by and talk about a con man from like a family of con men. This, this will be a nice one, everybody. I hope, I hope you all enjoy it.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  Is this about a Beagle Boy? It feels like you're about to tell me the story of the Beagle Boys.

• 1:42Robert Evans?

  The Beagle Boys? Who the hell are the Beagle Boys?

• 1:45Speaker 01

  From Duck Tales.

• 1:46Robert Evans?

  Oh, no, no, no. No, this is much, this is much worse.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  Okay, great, great.

• 1:55Speaker 02

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• 2:29Robert Evans?

  Picture this: You're listening to the Sniffy's Cruising Confessions podcast, and suddenly, wait, what did they just say? Well, the questions raised in those show-stopping moments will be answered in the all-new bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions: Bedside Manor. Hosts Gabe and Chris will dive deep on a specific topic covered in that week's Tuesday episode, from sexual health and HIV prevention to finding the right doctor. Listen to this special bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions: Bedside Manor, now on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get podcasts. Sponsored by Healthy Sexual from Gilead Sciences. Dude wipes remove what toilet paper leaves behind. Flushable, plastic-free dude wipes are made with 99% water and plant-based ingredients. They're gentle enough for sensitive skin but tough enough for methods of historical proportions. Unlike baby wipes, dude wipes are

• 3:14Robert Evans?

  flushable and designed to begin breaking down when flushed. No battle's there. They come in a range of at-home and travel-friendly formats, from individually wrapped singles to 48-count big daddies. Don't let skids be your lasting legacy. Grab a dude wipe and destroy the evidence. Dude wipes, best clean, pants down. Available at major retailers nationwide.

• 3:37Robert Evans?

  So, um, we're talking about a guy named Robert Spears, who was one of the first naturopaths. He was a very influential figure in, like, the first wave. You have two big waves of naturopathy as, like, a discipline, one that kind of goes up from the start of the century until polio vaccines become a thing, and people are like, "Alternative medicine? Why would we ever not want modern vaccinations?" and the like. And then you've got one that kind of crops up more recently. Recently in the seventies. So there's like a split between the two. And we'll be talking about both this, this con man who spoilers winds up committing some pretty serious plane crimes at the end of his life. This, this ends in a fun slash mass murdery place.

• 4:21Robert Evans?

  But before you get to the mass murder, there's a lot of cons. Um, so this should just be a fun episode for everybody. We're talking about, have you ever heard of Robert Spears? Is that name ring a bell?

• 4:31Speaker 01

  No, old Bobby has not crossed my path. I can't wait.

• 4:35Robert Evans?

  Well, we're going to talk about him, but before we talk about him, we've got a little mini BTB episode because I want to talk about the birth of naturopathy as like a, a, a field of endeavor of work of quote unquote medicine. And you really got to keep the quote unquotes there when you're talking about this period of time for sure. The guy who most gets often gets credit for starting naturopathic medicine as a discipline was a German born American with an amazing name. The, like the, the guy most often described as the founder of naturopathy was Dr. Benedict Lust.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 5:10Robert Evans?

  Amazing, amazing.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  Dr. Lust, haba.

• 5:13Robert Evans?

  Now, he wasn't really a doctor. And to be fair, he didn't claim to be a medical doctor, but Dr. Lust is just really funny. Like I, I had, I, I prefer that. I'll give him the stolen valor if I get to say Dr. Lust a bunch.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  Does this whole thing start with boner pills? Is that where we start?

• 5:29Robert Evans?

  No.

• 5:30Speaker 01

  Is that, that's not, Dr. Lust doesn't?

• 5:32Robert Evans?

  No, I, I mean, I'm sure he sold some weird boner medicine. Don't get me wrong. He was selling like quack medical treatments in the early 1900s. He must have been. But I also think he was a legitimate believer. That's something this first couple generations of guys who become like the naturopathic like movement, the first naturopathic crusaders are like true believers. They're not guys selling snake oil. I mean, they're selling snake oil a lot of the time, but they truly seem to believe in it generally.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  Well, I guess like at the same time, like what is actual medicine doing? It's like we're past leeches, but we're like, yeah, we got nails and skulls.

• 6:07Robert Evans?

  As we'll talk about, they are still doing some skull nailing. One of the problems with modern medicine at this period of time is we've just now, by the time you're starting in like the early 1900s, you're really starting to get the first wave of mass-produced, high-quality pharmaceutical drugs. Unfortunately, you don't have like the basis of knowledge about like when those are good and when those like wind up being worse for everybody in a lot of cases. So you have a shitload of people being over-prescribed like, "Oh, your four-year-old's coughing. Here's some heroin. That'll get him right back to baseline."

• 6:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, just nod him out.

• 6:41Robert Evans?

  "Give him a four-year-old heroin."

• 6:45Robert Evans?

  So people in this... If you're someone who's saying, "I'm against, I think doctors use too many drugs. I want like a non-drug solution." In the 1900s, a lot of times you'll be doing better by going with like a quack doctor just because they're only feeding you homeopathic medicine as opposed to straight heroin and cocaine, which has some negative health consequences. So it is more blurry when you're talking about the difference between alternative medicine, whatever, that kind of shit, and like the AMA. Like, there's not as much of a gap between them as there will come to be in the modern era.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  That makes sense, yeah.

• 7:23Robert Evans?

  So Dr. Benedict Lust, again, not a doctor, was born in Mittelbach Baden in Germany in 1872. So he's like a year younger than Germany itself. As a young man or child, it's a little unclear in my sources, Lust gets sick. He contracts tuberculosis. And at the time, by 1872, it's not as much of a death sentence as it had been like a generation before, but a lot of people are still dying from tuberculosis. So if you get diagnosed with it, you know there's a pretty good chance you're not coming through the other side. But Lust takes a treatment that's become in vogue at the time. It is known as the water cure. This was largely the invention of a priest named Sebastian Niip.

• 8:05Robert Evans?

  But Niip had discovered a book that some even older guy had written on curing disease via cold water plunges. You even see this today in a lot like the podcast, right? Health influencers, everybody.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  This is back, yeah.

• 8:17Robert Evans?

  K loves the cold plunge. People have been doing this for way more than 100 years, like 150, almost 200 years. There have been guys advocating for cold plunges, basically, as a treatment for different illnesses. Now, in Nyip's time, which is, again, the mid 1800s, tuberculosis was even more so a death sentence. And so he had gotten sick before Lust gets sick. The guy who treats him also gets tuberculosis as a young man. And he like finds this book and writes, quote, "I clung to it like a drowning man." He later wrote, "It became in a short time the staff supporting the invalid. Today, it is the lifeboat that was sent to me by immersiveal providence in the nick of time, in the hour of extreme peril."

• 8:59Robert Evans?

  And so Nyip gets given what he thinks is a death sentence, this tuberculosis diagnosis, and he gets better. And he gets better while taking the water cure. Now, does he just, does he recover because of that? Or does he just recover while he's do that, does that? You know, Nyip obviously credits his recovery to the water cure because he makes his whole life about that. From here on out, the rest of his days, he's like a practitioner of this thing.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  And now, is this, is it?

• 9:25Speaker 03

  Oh, I was just gonna, and just FYI to the listeners, if you want to look into this guy, his name is spelled K-N-E-I-P-P. So, just a-

• 9:34Robert Evans?

  Nyip.

• 9:34Speaker 03

  Nyip.

• 9:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  Gotcha, gotcha. Now, is the water cure just drinking water, a thing that I think that we-

• 9:42Robert Evans?

  Okay.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  Oh, okay, okay.

• 9:43Robert Evans?

  Plunging, it's like, again, like guys are doing today, right? Where you get like this bucket of ice water and you plunge yourself in for whatever period of time. From an article in the Journal of Integral Medicine by Susanna Serenko, quote, "Building from this little book, Nyip eventually modified the cold water baths to what became his signature treatment, the shower baths or gushes, which he administered with a simple garden watering can. By pouring water on the subject, a quicker reaction is brought on than by bathing. Pouring was Father Nyip's special method. The object of all cold water applications is to cause a stimulation in the circulation of the blood, and they must last only long enough for this reaction to take place. Nyip paid close attention to the primary and secondary reactions caused by cold water on warm skin." And part of why this is so popular is that ice bathing, or what he's doing, which is

• 10:28Robert Evans?

  like pouring cold water on you, because he says it causes the reaction faster. It has a physiological effect. It does measurable things to your body, right? That said, it is never, neither ice bathing nor any other kind of cold water exposure has been shown to treat or cure tuberculosis. There's no documentation of this working. However, there's a couple of things going on because both NiP and LUST will credit getting better from TB to this cold plunge type thing, basically. And first off, in the 1800s, a lot of people are misdiagnosed when they're diagnosed with TB. A lot, a lot of deaths that are just credited to tuberculosis were something else and doctors were worse at diagnosing stuff back then, right?

• 11:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 11:12Robert Evans?

  And secondly, without treatment, a decent number of people survive tuberculosis. I'm not saying don't get your tuberculosis treated, but I did find a 2023 article in the Journal of Tuberculosis and Lung Disease, which notes that about 40% of TB patients in 2021 weren't diagnosed or treated and that 10-year survival rates without any kind of medical treatment are about 40%, right? Which is less, people who don't seek medical care are a lot less likely to survive tuberculosis. Please, if you get TB, seek treatment. But it's not crazy that two dudes might have gotten sick and just gotten over it, more or less intact, because that happens sometimes, right? It's just, you know, the human body be doing shit. People don't respond the same way to every disease.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're a powerful little machine that wants to live.

• 11:59Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:00Robert Evans?

  Sometimes your body just pulls through.

• 12:02Speaker 03

  Cool people did cool stuff. Listeners are very familiar with front of the pod tuberculosis because

• 12:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 12:10Speaker 03

  Almost every episode, it comes in and either kills our villain or kills our hero.

• 12:15Robert Evans?

  That's what life was like before modern medicine and we're going right back to that period of time. Don't you worry. You give, you give RFK another year or two.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:23Speaker 03

  I'd really rather not.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  I'm excited for the white handkerchiefs that people cough a little bit of blood into now to be made out of plastic.

• 12:32Robert Evans?

  I'm already stockpiling.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Gone are the days of the cotton hanky.

• 12:38Robert Evans?

  No, no, it's gotta be plastic for my baby. So cold water immersion does, because this is something people are advocating today, it does again have observable and measurable physiological effects. Some studies have suggested it can help treat chronic immune inflammation and have a beneficial impact on stress. However, number one, there's negative health consequences. It can raise your heart rate to a degree that can cause cardiac events in people. There are like health nuts who have died doing cold plunges because it shocks their heart. Also, per an article in the International Journal of Circumpolar Health, quote, "Many of the health benefits claimed from regular cold water exposure may not be causal and may instead be explained by other factors." In other words, most of the studies that suggested a benefit are flawed in some way.

• 13:21Robert Evans?

  There's not, I'm not saying there's no, but there are maybe some benefits and especially because of the way it affects your heart and circulation, people with certain conditions might benefit from cold water plunges. But the science today is far from certain on this and it's surely not curing tuberculosis, right?

• 13:39Speaker 01

  No.

• 13:40Robert Evans?

  But they have a lot less data back then, so it is more forgivable. I don't think NiP is a con man. I think he truly believes this saved his life and he's doing his best to help other people, right? And I think the same is going to be true of the future doctor, not a doctor, Lust. Cause he falls in love with this stuff. When he goes to NiP's clinic, which is basically a spa, NiP's doing these cold water exposure things. He's also giving people herbal medicine. There's a lot of teas involved and Dr. Lust falls in love with this. This is his first hit of what we today called alternative medicine. This is the very first gaspings of that. And Lust is immediately like, oh, this is my whole life. Right here, baby. I'm going to make this everything to me.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  Well, and it also makes sense because at that time it was like that or chimney sweep, right?

• 14:22Robert Evans?

  What else are you going to do with your time? I mean, Jesus Christ. I don't even have television really going yet.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  Exactly. If I'm just sitting in a nice place that has some nice teas and things like that. It's like, I'm gonna maybe feel better than when I'm doing a 20 hour shift in the factory.

• 14:39Robert Evans?

  Now, me, I would live at the pharmacy. I would be buying that heroin cough syrup every day of the week. Oh, man, if only, if only. So Lust moves to the United States near the end of the 1800s. And by that period of time, before we're really into the 1900s even, the US, particularly New York, has become kind of this globally recognized mecca for nonsense medicine. Like, we, Americans, we're on the ground floor of selling bullshit to people and claiming it cures disease. From 1896 to 1901, Lust, because as soon as he moves there and he starts training in a couple of different, like, quasi-medical, uh, uh, fields, one of which, so he trains as an osteopath, in osteopathy.

• 15:24Robert Evans?

  And osteopathy is a difficult case to talk about. We're not going to be giving it enough attention. Today, if you run into someone who is an osteopath, they're probably a real doctor. Right? Probably. It is largely a real type of medicine today. But it was founded decades ago by an untrained amateur who felt that all disease was caused by misplaced or deranged bones, a quote from Quack Watch. Quack Watch writes, quote, "And most diseases were curable by manipulation of deranged, displaced bones, nerves, muscles, removing all obstructions, thereby setting the machinery of life moving." His autobiography, The Founder of Osteopathy, states that he caused a bald-headed man to grow hair

• 16:07Robert Evans?

  three inches long in one week, and that he could shake a child and stop scarlet fever, croup, diphtheria, and cure whooping cough in three days by a ring of its neck. He was antagonistic towards the drug practices of his day and regarded surgery as a last resort. Rejected as a cultist by organized medicine, he founded the first osteopathic medical school in Kirksville, Missouri in 1892. This will not be the last time Missouri shows up in these episodes.

• 16:33Speaker 01

  Something tells me that's extremely true. Wow.

• 16:38Robert Evans?

  Your baby's got whooping cough, let me wring their neck. That'll fix them.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  Absolutely. The James Bond of doctors.

• 16:45Robert Evans?

  It's crazy how many people who call themselves doctors still think like, oh, your kid's coughing too much. I gotta basically break their spine. You gotta let me get my hands around that fucking neck and just really throttle it like a son of a bitch. Like, that's still a lot of guys who say that they're doctors today. They paralyze kids all the time.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  Abuse the child until they say they're okay.

• 17:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So now that said, as wild as that last paragraph was, from this point, osteopathy develops after this into, again, what is today a largely real field of medicine. There are still some quacks who call themselves osteopaths, but over time, the good osteopaths who cared about evidence-based care won out over the bad ones, I think. That's how the articles I've read make it seem. I'm not a doctor, except for in New Jersey, right? But Dr. Lust is studying osteopathy when it is still firmly in its quack era. He also studies chiropractic medicine and takes classes on that. And if you remember our episodes on the history of chiropracty, it was founded by a guy who learned the secrets of spinal

• 17:48Robert Evans?

  manipulation from a ghost. That is where chiropractic medicine comes from.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 17:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Amazing stuff happening in the early, late 1800s and early 1900s. So yeah, Lust gets into chiropracty, osteopathy, and he starts exploring botanical medicines, you know, what people would call like plant-based medicines. And he gets interested in the emerging field of what becomes known as physical culture. Bernard McFadden, who we've done episodes on, is a major factor in this. He and Lust are kind of contemporaries and they're writing about health and about a lot of the shit RFK is in. It's like, how can you stay looking buff longer if you're a dude, you know? Like, how can you, how can you get big biceps? Like, what kind of chemicals will make it easier for me to keep muscle on?

• 18:33Speaker 01

  I feel like you're, you're trying to convince me that RFK Jr. might actually be a time traveler from this era. That's the only way he actually makes sense, right?

• 18:41Robert Evans?

  His ideology is firmly rooted in the like, early, first 20 years of the 20th century. Um, now Lust is one of those guys who binges on fringe medical treatments. He's not discriminating. He likes it all. He's taken sun baths. You know, the modern equivalent would be, modern equivalent would be those guys who like expose their assholes to direct sunlight for health reasons. He's exploring electrotherapy. He's like shocking himself to make himself feel better. He's, he's, and crucially, what, what kind of makes Lust a trailblazer is he's putting all of these different quack treatments together. And he's mixing them with like cold water therapy and herbalism. And he's looking at it all as one connected field, not a bunch of separate things, right?

• 19:22Robert Evans?

  And that's a new idea. Previously, most of these old timey medical grifters aren't seeing themselves as part of like a, a large movement that includes a bunch of different kinds of treatment. They're like, no, the secret is electrotherapy. The secret is water therapy. The secret is they've got their thing and that's the thing that they're trying to sell. And Lust is like, no, no, this works a lot better if everybody's connected and we're all part of like a united front, pushing all these fringe treatments that the real doctors don't want you to have access to, right?

• 19:54Speaker 01

  He's unionizing the quacks.

• 19:56Robert Evans?

  He's kind of unionizing the quacks. Yeah, that's basically Dr. Lust's story. In 1901, Dr. Lust starts collaborating with a group of fellow travelers to set out the underlying theory behind their new discipline, which doesn't have a name yet, but they're, they're firmly in opposition to what they call the druggists, right? Today, the term that like these folks use is allopaths to refer to like real doctors, what we call real doctors. But they're calling them basically druggists, right? And the critique they're making, which is to a degree valid in the time, is that real doctors just want to dope you the fuck up. And a lot of real doctors are just doping you the fuck up. That's not an unfair critique of the day. That doesn't make what they're selling work any better, but it is sometimes less harmful, right?

• 20:39Robert Evans?

  Sometimes if your doctor's prescribing you like fucking arsenic and your fake doctor's prescribing you fucking homeopathic arsenic, which is just water, you're better off with homeopathic arsenic, you know?

• 20:51Speaker 01

  100%, yeah.

• 20:53Robert Evans?

  So the central tenet that Dr. Lust and his colleagues land on is The body can repair itself and that rather than treating sickness physicians should seek to restore balance to the body so that it can cure its own illnesses, right? And it can avoid getting sick because if the body stays in balance, then it won't get ill. The website Indy Health Facts has a good summary of what Lust eventually comes to believe and push to make the center of naturopathy as a discipline. Dr. Lust was opposed to the processing of foods because such manufacture tends to destroy their true nutritional values. He was opposed to the administrations of all drugs and narcotics because they are unnatural elements which the human body is not capable of assimilating. He's opposed to the regimentation of the American people under medically controlled

• 21:37Robert Evans?

  elements because such legislation will wipe out other methods of treatment and bring inestimable damage to the health of every man, woman, and child affected. He's opposed to any legislation which in practice would prevent a family from attending to its own ills or the choosing by such family of any type of treatment it might desire because such legislation restricts personal liberty and tends to take from the American people the right to use the beneficial homespun efficient remedies which have been handed down from generation to generation. He is

• 22:03Speaker 03

  That's a lot of words.

• 22:04Robert Evans?

  It's just RFK. It's just RFK, right? I don't think you should be able to tell people that anything they believe is medicine isn't medicine. That's a crime. That's the only crime, not selling nonsense as medicine. Now, the name naturopathy is actually coined by a married physician couple, the Doctors John and Sophie Scheel, who are kind of colleagues and contemporaries of Dr. Lust. They come up with the name in 1902 and Lust buys it from them. He purchases the naming rights because as soon as he hears naturopathy, he's like, I can't beat that. That's the best marketing name for this thing that we're doing. Like, that's gonna work really, and it is a good name.

• 22:40Speaker 03

  I don't know why, but like, 1902 seems really early for buying naming rights.

• 22:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah, no, this man is committed. He's convinced and honestly, it works. Like, he is a visionary when it comes to this shit.

• 22:54Robert Evans?

  So Lust opens a school for naturopaths and he opens what's probably the first health food store in the world. I think in, I think it's in New York. But yeah, he opens like a health food store in like 190 dot, right? Like in the fucking start of the century. Um, so that stuff goes back quite a while.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  God, I don't even want to think about how bad this guy's deodorant was.

• 23:14Robert Evans?

  Oh, my God. Just a solid crystal. Just a solid crystal. No, it's a literal, it's literally emeralds. He's just rubbing it in there. It doesn't do anything. Uh, as naturopathy evolves, it becomes clear that its practitioners all share one curious trait, a distrust or even a hatred of medical drugs and an often heedless embrace of every conceivable non-drug therapy, often to absurd ends. Now, again, and the way Lust frames this is like, people have a right to use the homespun treatments that their ancestors have been using for generations. That's not what's primarily being marketed by the naturopaths. They're into a lot of expensive, insane quack treatments. Take areopathy. Areopathy is a treatment that starts from

• 23:58Robert Evans?

  the premise that, and this is true, heat can reduce pain, right? We've all probably experienced this in some way. It's a pretty common thing to like, you know, deal with like inflammation, joint pain, all that sort of stuff. People have known this basically forever. It's the, if you've ever heard of like an old timey treatment, the mustard plaster, where they'll put like this plaster of mustard on your naked chest, it's because that like burns and the heat offers like a relief from some kind of like chest cold symptoms and stuff. And I think it, I've never had it performed on me, but I'm sure it does like feel like it helps at least. Areopathy takes this concept up to 11 and incorporates what was literally called, the name of the device used for areopathy is

• 24:39Robert Evans?

  a human bake oven as a treatment. They're literally putting people into actual ovens and at like oven temperatures. I need to show you, Sophie's gonna put on screen if you're watching this, a 1912 ad published in the Calgary Herald, and I'll read the ad to you. It's got a picture in the center of what looks like a fucking iron lung, but it's an oven that everything but the person's head goes inside. And it says, rheumatism. Positively cured by the human bake oven. Can you take 500 degrees Fahrenheit? Try it.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  500?

• 25:11Robert Evans?

  That's crazy. You shouldn't take 500. No, absolutely not.

• 25:15Speaker 03

  I was like, okay, okay, okay. 500? You're burning your face off.

• 25:22Robert Evans?

  That's well in excess of what I've read. Most of these treatments where usually people seem to be slow cooked from anywhere from like 280 degrees Fahrenheit, which seems to have been like the most common 280 to 300 degrees is like a normal temperature. And most for most people doing this, the higher temperature is up to like 400 degrees. But obviously as that ad shows, some people are going way further than that. And it's not always the whole body ovens. Some smaller contraptions were used to try to get a single part of the body like this easy leg bake oven. Sophie's gonna show you, which just, I mean, it almost looks like one of those cuffs you put your arm in and it's on a, but I can see how you just kind of jam your leg in there and it just like bakes the shit out of it.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, turn my knee into a brownie. Let's go.

• 26:03Speaker 03

  Wow, what a choice.

• 26:05Robert Evans?

  This must have hurt and killed people. I haven't run into stories of that. You shouldn't be baked. Like there definitely are people getting burns because again, you shouldn't be baked. Every doctor I think will tell you that now is that like 500 degrees is too much for any part of your body.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  You cook meat. I don't even know that my oven actually goes up to 500 degrees.

• 26:27Robert Evans?

  You probably shouldn't be cooking meat at 500 degrees. That's crazy.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  Broil your babies off out of their chest.

• 26:34Robert Evans?

  I rarely go above like 400.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  No, seriously, that's crazy. Like, I like a hot sauna. I like a sauna. That is a whole different ballgame from this. This is crazy.

• 26:45Robert Evans?

  That's another fucking level of batshit. Now naturopaths were also known to advocate astral healing and zodiac therapy, uh, which is basically someone giving someone tea based on their horoscope. And there were a bunch of weirder treatments that Quack Watch collected for an article on this, like quote, blood washing with herbs, autotherapy, which is quote, treatment with potions made from the patient's infected tissues or excretions and autohemic therapy, which involves a solution made by modifying and potentizing a few drops of the patient's blood. Great stuff.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  Wow. Man, honestly.

• 27:19Robert Evans?

  Great stuff.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  But seriously, shout out to him for being able to sell somebody's shit back to themselves.

• 27:24Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah, absolutely.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  That is a hell of a salesman.

• 27:27Robert Evans?

  Your own blood, selling your own blood. Man, you made that, bro.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:31Robert Evans?

  That's crazy. Yeah.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 27:34Robert Evans?

  Now, to be totally fair to Dr. Lust and his colleagues, it's like 120 something years ago. Again, real doctors aren't always a lot better than the quacks. And the naturopaths, you know, they have some points in this era, but what's happening is you're going to start not long after this period, seeing the development of like real medical science, like thinking people, doc, medicine from 1900 to like 1960 probably gets better faster than it has at like any other point in history. Like you'd be hard pressed, I mean, maybe the like 60 years after that, but even then, I don't think we had jumps quite as big as that leap from in 1900. A lot of people are still basically living the same with similar medical access to what

• 28:18Robert Evans?

  they would have had in like the 1600s, right? In a lot of parts of the world, there's not massive differences from how shit would have been in like the Enlightenment era in terms of the average person's access to good medicine to by 1950 to 60, even people out in the sticks have a much better access to real quality medicine and to doctors who actually know something meaningful about how disease spreads and you have the ability to actually prevent a lot of these diseases for the first time. And that's going to be disastrous for this first wave of naturopaths, right? Is that especially from like 40 to 60, it becomes really impossible to deny that like, okay, well, the people who use the naturopaths are still getting sick and dying from all of like the weird plagues going around and the people who are getting vaccinated don't.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  Are living, yeah. Well, it's also funny, we've got World War II happening during this time period too, right? And the idea of being like, ah, here's like a tea for your leg that got blown off is not.

• 29:12Robert Evans?

  You're a homeopathic medic?

• 29:15Robert Evans?

  I guess this, okay, what about this echinacea? Is that, is that good? It's, it's been reduced by a thousand gallons of water. Oh, no, you're dead. You bled out. You bled right out, huh? That was a femoral hit.

• 29:24Speaker 03

  Did I, did either of you see that Skid SNL did in the, in the last month or so? That was like making, that was like a combination of making fun of the Maha movement, but also like the pit. It's literally this.

• 29:39Robert Evans?

  No.

• 29:39Speaker 03

  It's literally this modern times. You would love it. You would love it. It's great. Also, Harry Styles is in it.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  Hell yeah.

• 29:45Robert Evans?

  Great. Good, good for Harry Styles. So, you know, and it's also important to note that one of the key differences, one of the reasons that like osteopathy becomes more of a real, becomes a real discipline and the reason that medicine, you know, in 1900 and 1920, maybe a lot of doctors aren't really much better than the naturopaths. That changes too, in part because the, the real doctors, even if they start from a position of believing a lot of bullshit, are doing what you ought to do, which is you document, okay, we prescribed this treatment to this many people. And oh, actually it turns out that after a year or two, there was no difference between them and the people who didn't get a treatment or between them and the people who got this other treatment that's cheaper or, you know, whatever. You prune away, you find out,

• 30:27Robert Evans?

  oh, some stuff we can see isn't working, so we're not going to do that anymore. And some stuff, the consequences of giving people these medicines, even if they work immediately, is worse than, you know, giving them this alternative. So we're going to do that. And the, the field gets better and we get a lot better at medicine over time. Naturopathy's problem and the reason why it doesn't really go down the same road is that it was fundamentally created and always run primarily by a bunch of weird little guys and girls who each had their own specific kind of alternative or quack therapy, like water therapy or blood washing. And they were primarily getting into the naturopathy, not because they saw themselves as, they're mostly not like lust. They don't see themselves as scientists who are part of a movement.

• 31:12Robert Evans?

  They've got a thing to sell. And if that's the attitude you approach your discipline from, that's not conducive to good science.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're coming at it. Yeah. Scientific method versus the vibe method is what we're talking about.

• 31:25Robert Evans?

  And versus I'm already, if, if this doesn't treat this disease, I'm out a shitload of money. Like I'm ruined. Like this, I have to be able to sell this, even if I realize it doesn't work after a while. Cause I'm, I'm pot committed to this shit.

• 31:41Robert Evans?

  Speaking of pot committed, you know who's pot committed to this podcast? Our sponsors.

• 31:47Speaker 01

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• 31:48Robert Evans?

  Huzzah. Yeah, they can't get away from us now.

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• 33:22Robert Evans?

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• 33:33Robert Evans?

  And we're back. We're back and we're talking about naturopaths. So, the AMA guys in Dr. Lust's day have a lot of teeth, and they do not take kindly to a bunch of weird-ass hippie types taking patients and claiming to treat disease. The AMA declares war on Dr. Lust, and they manage to score some real hits. Per an article in the Journal of Applied Natural Medicine, Lust was arrested 14 times and fined, what's $500, because a dirty woman sleuth of the medical trust, the American Medical Association, with an unspeakable name, took an electric light bath in his institution. Now... That's from a naturopathic publication quoting a naturopath? I wanted to know more about this story, this dirty woman sleuth of the medical trust.

• 34:17Robert Evans?

  They're calling it the medical trust because trust busting is popular in this era, right? This is the Teddy Roosevelt era when some of this is going, or when a lot of these people's like political awakening is.

• 34:28Robert Evans?

  So, you know, that's why they're, they're framing it that way. But I looked into this and it turns out that in 1921, Dr. Lust was arrested for committing criminal libel against Frances Binzerke, or Binzekri. That's the unspeakably named woman who worked as a detective for the AMA. Lust wrote that she was a disgrace to American womanhood and to the free soil of America on which she treads.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  I want to hear her story, man.

• 34:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Sounds like he's got some issues with women.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 34:56Robert Evans?

  Well, because she's, they've got her trying to bust, trying to prove that Lust and his followers are representing themselves as doctors, right? Are illegally claiming to be treating diseases in a way that exceeds what they're, what they're free to do, right? Obviously, freedom of speech and shit, you have some room, we have a lot more room today even, to sell like quack treatments, but you can't say certain things, right?

• 35:18Speaker 03

  Just to say, just to say that quote, "A disgrace to American womanhood and to the free soil of America on which she treads." Hot, love it.

• 35:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 35:28Speaker 03

  Great tattoo, great T-shirt.

• 35:30Robert Evans?

  Every woman I've ever loved.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I want to see a film noir movie about this woman, just like in her office, smoking a cigarette and just like somebody comes in with a bag of their own blood and was like, "I need help detective, let's go."

• 35:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So, um, these guys are all getting arrested a shitload for practicing medicine without a license, which is actually why Dr. Lust buys the rights to the word naturopathy. So his people will have something else they can call themselves that's decidedly not a doctor and thus much more defensible. And that, that actually works really well.

• 36:05Speaker 01

  Do they have a seal? The way that like doctors have a seal, is there's like a shaka in the middle of just like...

• 36:10Robert Evans?

  They've got a logo. Yeah, they've got a logo, they've got, they've got paperwork that they're issuing because he's handing out licenses for naturopathic doctors, right? And once they start branding themselves that way, judges tend to agree, even when they're still sentencing him, he was told by one judge, "There's no evidence that you practice medicine or held yourself out as a physician, but we find you just the same." And the naturopathal point is like, look at the injustice of the system. And I see this as a judge being like, yeah, man, you technically figured out how not to say the words that would have definitely been illegal, but you were for sure representing yourself as a doctor and selling medicine, and I'm just going to find you anyway, because I know you're guilty, because you are, because you were Dr. Lust, by the way.

• 36:52Robert Evans?

  No matter how much flak the AMA threw his way, naturopathy kept struggling forwards. From the 20s to the 30s, roughly half of US states passed laws that allowed naturopaths and other drugless healers to practice, per Quack Watch. However, as modern medicine developed, many of these laws were repealed, and all but a few mail-order schools ceased operations. The doctor of naturopathy, ND degree, was still available at several chiropractic colleges, but by 1957, the last of these colleges stopped issuing it. The National College of Naturopathic Medicine was founded in 1956 in Portland, Oregon, but until the mid 1970s, had very few students. From 1960 through 1968, the average enrollment was eight, and the total number of graduates was 16. So again, there's a gap of like a generation from between the first and second wave of naturopaths.

• 37:36Robert Evans?

  It makes, by the way, Portland, Oregon, where naturopathy, like, its second wave started, the seeds of its rebirth, just had an outbreak of measles traced to a Safeway. And it's not because people can't afford vaccines. That's not, if you look at where the fucking viral outbreaks of cured diseases occur in Portland, it tends to be more affluent neighborhoods who are choosing not to take vaccinations.

• 38:03Speaker 03

  You can always count an organ to come up if it's like a weird medical thing, some obscure, very tiny cult.

• 38:10Robert Evans?

  Bullshit medicine stuff, weird cult.

• 38:12Speaker 03

  Hey, ancient white supremacy, uh, modern white supremacy.

• 38:16Robert Evans?

  Portland, baby, I love my adopted home.

• 38:18Speaker 03

  Organs like, hey, hey, how you doing?

• 38:21Robert Evans?

  Hey, hey.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  We're keeping it weird, man.

• 38:25Robert Evans?

  Hey, you're crazy, aren't you? Welcome to Portland.

• 38:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, but our weather rocks.

• 38:30Robert Evans?

  It is nice, great weather.

• 38:32Speaker 01

  We hate the sun.

• 38:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  The weather today is so good, you guys. It's awesome.

• 38:37Robert Evans?

  It's like 65 degrees and sunny. It's great.

• 38:40Speaker 01

  It's perfect. I'm wearing a T-shirt.

• 38:42Robert Evans?

  Summer fire season this year is gonna be a nightmare, though.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:46Robert Evans?

  Anyway, that's an important point. Just if you're talking about naturopathy today, there are some differences because there's like a break of a generation between two fields. I think a lot of the same problems are still present. An issue of, you know, at least with this first wave of the very first naturopaths like Dr. Lust, I think really believed in what they were doing. A big part of the problem is a huge amount of like the second wave are just people who realize, oh, this movement has like connects me to a huge base of people I can sell nonsense to. And that's what they and that's definitely a lot of the founders, too. It's it's I maybe I'm wrong about Lust being in this genuinely. Like, I honestly can't tell with him, but it seems like he's somebody who like really does think this all works.

• 39:30Robert Evans?

  And that's not going to be the case with our actual subject of this week, Robert Spears. Yeah.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:36Robert Evans?

  Who, again, is the guy we're talking about this week.

• 39:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, or at the very least, like Lust believed it at the very for some period of time, it clearly he clearly was a believer and who knows what happened later. But, you know, I mean, you're not gonna go through all of this trouble necessarily if you don't have true belief behind that for some.

• 39:54Robert Evans?

  Right, right. That's that's tends to be how I think about it, too. And yeah, so Robert Vernon Spears, the guy we're actually talking about, was born on June 26th, 1894 in Cassville, Missouri. See, I said we get back to Missouri and and we sure as hell did. It's actually gonna show up a few more times in these episodes. He was not, however, born under the name Robert Vernon Spears. This is one of our classic con man stories where this guy has like 30 or so serious names, by which I mean a name that he had like he had took real efforts to falsify as his own. He's got documents for these names. He's got dozens of them. This guy goes through so many fucking names. He was probably born Clyde Stringer or Clyde Porter, but even that, I

• 40:39Robert Evans?

  Have to put a probably on because Clyde slash Roberts mother is a woman we just know of as Matilda and she writes her kid's name. She gives him a different name on different government documents because she's also a con woman. And so from the beginning, she's like setting her son up for success, being like, I'm gonna make sure nobody ever knows what your name is, boy. Like, this will be, this will really benefit you down the line. There's not a clean paper trail for your life.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  That's not gonna be SEO for 150 years.

• 41:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. Trust me, being able to become a new person by skipping counties is going to be much more beneficial than name recognition in the life you're going to lead, my son.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  Well, and it's fine. I will say if this kid was born a Clyde, I have a little bit of respect from out of the gate.

• 41:27Robert Evans?

  Born Clyde, Clyde, Clyde, Clyde to the bone.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love to hear, I'm excited to hear about a Clyde who identifies as a Robert. This is great.

• 41:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah, well, it comes to later. Alan Logan, author of the Spears biography Self-styled, just notes that Matilda, his mom, was, quote, "A woman who also used many names and changed her own identity as circumstances dictated." She claimed her child was the son of a farmer named George Stringer from northeast Oklahoma, which is where George was born and where he was raised for the first three years of his life. They got married when he was three after moving to Missouri. So they raise him for the first few years of his life in Oklahoma, then they move up to Missouri. And his mom uses the surname Smith on her marriage certificate to George, but she had been using the name Jenkins most of the time prior to that. So

• 42:17Robert Evans?

  even her husband knows she's given two different options as to her maiden name. And her headstone would give yet another last name. This was a slippery woman and she would pass those traits on to her son. Her marriage to George did not last long. After a year, she was caught having an affair with some other dude, and so she takes Clyde in the night and abandons George, who files for divorce. This is also going to leave a mark on Clyde. He's going to not have the best record of sticking around for marriages, as we'll talk about. And he kind of inherits that from his mom. Yeah.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  I love this woman as like the Moriarty to the medical detective lady. I would really like to see their paths crossed.

• 43:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah, these two characters were born for each other.

• 43:08Robert Evans?

  So after leaving her husband behind, Matilda would tell her son that George had, quote, "died of pneumonia." But Alan Logan writes, "It is not entirely clear who she was telling Clyde had died of pneumonia because we don't actually know who Clyde thought his father was." Right? Like, we just have some old paperwork, so it's not entirely clear who Clyde's dad was or who she told him it was. Matilda moved through men at a rapid pace. Right? So.

• 43:36Speaker 01

  Hell, yeah, Matilda. I mean, don't, you know, you got a little kid, so I got questions, but also like-

• 43:41Robert Evans?

  It's not great for Clyde. Yeah.

• 43:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 43:43Robert Evans?

  She's living it up, though. She's living it up. A lot of men are having the male version of this life, which is much more common. So you have to stand a woman who's willing to, like, break free from tradition and, and really, like, really just be like a very masculine kind of scumbag. And honestly, I appreciate that, you know? It's nice to see.

• 44:02Speaker 01

  The glass gutter is just as important as the glass ceiling, I think.

• 44:05Robert Evans?

  The glass gutter matters just as much as the glass ceiling.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  Gorgeous.

• 44:09Robert Evans?

  Women have the right to be scumbags, too. Matilda, we salute you. You know who else is a scumbag? Nope. Hmm, that's not good.

• 44:20Speaker 03

  I like the roof over my head.

• 44:23Robert Evans?

  Sure. Well, anyway, here's ads.

• 44:27Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 44:30Speaker 02

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• 45:01Robert Evans?

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• 46:00Robert Evans?

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• 46:11Robert Evans?

  And we're back. And we're talking about whether or not our advertisers are scumbags. Sophie says no. I say, I don't know. Who is right? Probably Sophie. Legally, I think I have to say that. So, in 1899, Matilda, who was just going through this carousel of men in cities with her young son. In 1899, she marries an elderly farmer.

• 46:35Speaker 03

  I stand Matilda.

• 46:36Robert Evans?

  She's pretty cool. Not a great mom. Doesn't do a good job raising this kid, but pretty cool to read about.

• 46:43Speaker 03

  But she's not her thought in trotting, and I appreciate that.

• 46:46Robert Evans?

  She marries a Civil War veteran with lifelong injuries and a drinking problem to match. And he's got, like, a kid that she winds up... Well, she winds up having a kid. I don't think it's his. I think she cheats on him, and she has a kid with somebody else, and he gets pissed. So, he bounces in 1902, and now she's a single mother of two. As a result, Clyde experiences deep poverty for basically his entire childhood. His mom is only able to keep them fed and sheltered by moving constantly from town to town and conning strangers to stay alive. I want to read a quote from the book Self-Styled. "As they moved from place to place, he saw Matilda retelling their story and remaking her identity. She used different names when it suited her. Clyde may have absorbed more from his mother than she realized,

• 47:31Robert Evans?

  including the seeds of his own restless wanderlust and the ease of taking on..." Aliases. This is just, he was like made in a lab to be a con man, basically. Matilda eventually marries again and the family settles in prior Oklahoma, merging the families of two single parents who now had six kids between them. This marriage doesn't work out either. And when things get bad enough that Clyde doesn't want to be there anymore, he realizes kind of by his adolescence, I can just leave. Like, there's a train station in town and he figures out when he's like 12 or 13, I just bounce on a train and go away for a couple of days or a couple of weeks. Like, if I don't want to be around here and I can just visit new places and then I can come back whenever I'm ready. They'll take me back. And he loves the freedom of the road.

• 48:13Robert Evans?

  And he starts, in order to fund these trips, he doesn't want to work, so he starts committing petty crimes while he's away to pay his way. You know, I know a lot of friends who have gone through versions of this period in their life.

• 48:26Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, we've all got a couple of crusties in our past, right?

• 48:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 48:32Robert Evans?

  Now, this behavior ultimately gets him in trouble when he's like a teenager and he gets sent away to a reformatory school for some time. However, long he's at this reform school, by age 16, he is out because he gets in trouble for passing bad checks and then using the ill-gotten money to buy nice clothes and stay in hotels. And he's like paying in check for hotel stays and for clothes for more than they're worth, so he can get cash back, basically. That's a big part of the scam. It's a lot easier to do this stuff, although he still gets caught every single time, right?

• 49:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 49:03Robert Evans?

  That said, this is a time in which the authorities are a lot likelier to look the other way at formal charges if people can work things out themselves. Basically, if you get caught, a cop is likely to just kind of like drop things. As long as you're both white people, right? If like two white dudes are willing to agree, okay, he made it right. We don't need to go any further. Usually they'll just be like fine with it, right? That's, that's a lot more common in this era.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  So he's like a raptor testing the fence, too. So he's just like, okay, where can I, what is the move here?

• 49:35Robert Evans?

  What can I get away with? And part of what he learns is he's really charming. Clyde is deeply charismatic. And so people are kind of like often willing to forgive him. Cause as soon as he gets caught, every time he'll say, oh, yep, I did it. This is what I did. And he'll like apologize. And as a result, I think that in his youth kind of keeps him from catching serious charges until he turns 18. So Clyde, one of the things about Clyde is he fucking loves trains. Very relatable, right? Unfortunately, he loves trains because of the crime potential inherent in those trains. And he's been observing employees at the local railroad company, M K T, cash checks. And he also, one of his friends, I think, works for M K T and his dad, his friend's dad had worked there for a while.

• 50:20Robert Evans?

  And so he like talks to that guy and applies him for information about how the checking, check writing process works for M K T employees at the M K T bank. And then he forges the name of his friend in a check payable to himself. And I'm going to quote from Alan Logan's book here. "His real audacity wasn't taking that forged check to his friend's father, the M K T railroad agent who cashed it for him. The check was only for $9, $233 today, but the thrill of it was priceless. The M K T railroad was enraged by the outrageous stunt. They deployed Special Agent Porum to give chase as Spears made his first known headlines, described as the Gilded Youth. Clyde Stringer from Pryor, Oklahoma. When they finally caught up with him in June, 1913, the newspapers reported how Special Agent Porum had traced him

• 51:04Robert Evans?

  from Kansas City to Oklahoma City and across the state east and west. He was finally found at Murdock, Kansas, hunting for work in a harvest field." First off, that's a long way to chase a guy for $9. Really says a lot about how little there was to do back then. Like you are going to the ends of the earth for nine bucks? It's the principle, I'm sure, is what that guy would say.

• 51:26Speaker 03

  It's giving comic book, the Gilded Youth.

• 51:29Robert Evans?

  The Gilded Youth, yeah, no, that's, he does have a comic booky style nickname.

• 51:34Speaker 01

  Very Catch Me If You Can of him, too. It feels, yeah, yeah, yeah. I am picturing Leo Dio, like, this is like a Leo Dio type guy.

• 51:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, although again, Frank Abagnale, the real guy behind Catch Me If You Can, was an absolute fraud. Like that, the stuff in the movie didn't happen. It was mostly just creeping on ladies.

• 51:52Speaker 01

  Well, you know, movie is the biggest con of all, so.

• 51:55Robert Evans?

  That's right, that's right. It's the final level of cons. So Clyde does more than a year behind bars. He's sentenced to prison and he's not released until August 31st, 1914. And as soon as he's free, he establishes a pattern of behavior that's going to be with him for the next half century. He'd kind of consider going straight, maybe briefly toy with the idea, and then he would immediately commit a series of daring frauds in assorted small towns, the cities across Oklahoma and the middle states. And he's just going to like, commit a bunch of fraud and then fucking get arrested periodically in a pattern. This becomes like, the normal, like, tempo of life for him for the next several years, right? Is, he'll commit a bunch of petty fraud, mostly passing bad checks and stealing merchandise from like, different retailers he worked with

• 52:38Robert Evans?

  over the years. Then he'll get caught and he'll get in some trouble. He'll either talk his way out, or he'll do a little time, and then he's back on the road.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  I imagine he also has like, a bunch of babies and baby mamas all over the country during this, too.

• 52:51Robert Evans?

  It may be. Well, he does, he has some. He does have a couple of kids that he abandons. Like, I think like, three over the course of the story. Um, he also has a lot of wives that he abandons, as we'll talk about. So within three years, by 1917, he's a wanted man again. So when he moved to Collingsworth, Oklahoma, he changed his last name to, from Stringer to Porter and figured, that'll be good enough. Nobody's gonna guess that Clyde Stringer's Clyde Porter. That's not gonna, that's impossible for people to suss out. Um, and then he passes another series of bad checks and he has to steal a car to flee town. Clyde drove the car to a train station and left it parked outside with a note being like, here's who this car belongs to. I'm sorry I had to take it. You know, this is

• 53:34Robert Evans?

  where you should return it to, you know? So the cops ultimately raid Clyde's home, and they find a bunch of stolen property and a huge number of forged checks. These were of such high quality that businesses started posting copies of Clyde's bad checks to warn their employees about what to look for when trying to spot bad checks, right? That like, these are the archetypal bad checks, so you should, you should familiarize yourself with them.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  Wow, okay.

• 53:59Robert Evans?

  Clyde, he goes on the run for a few more months, but as is always the case, he can't avoid the temptation to visit his family and friends, and he gets caught in Toledo, operating under yet another fake name. I think he's visiting a sister, and that fake name is Charles Howard. He shows up in court, dressed per the Tulsa Daily World, to the nines in a dark suit, white turned down collar and multicolored silk tie. It was his second attempt to win a reputation in the bad check line. So they're always kind of, he's handsome and he's well dressed and the newspaper is always right about that. And it starts to, there's this big, it's gonna be even bigger in the 30s, this like gentleman bandit archetype that's huge in American pop culture. And because Clyde is handsome and he's mostly robbing banks and he's not doing it violently,

• 54:44Robert Evans?

  a lot of people kinda like him. Like, the news is interested in any Clyde crime story because he's this really likable criminal figure people wanna hear about.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  When does Bonnie and Clyde happen? Cause that's a different Clyde that robbed banks.

• 54:59Robert Evans?

  That's gonna be in the 30s. Totally different Clyde.

• 55:01Speaker 01

  That's later in time.

• 55:02Robert Evans?

  This Clyde's going by Robert by then. That's the spot. You gotta get out of the Clyde business by the time there's that other Clyde.

• 55:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. He's just like, hack.

• 55:10Robert Evans?

  I think there's a strategy here. I think he knew he was gonna get caught when he stole that car to get away. And I think the note he leaves is part of his, his image campaign, basically. That like, if I leave a note in there telling him how to return it to its owner, that'll go better for me when I ultimately wind up in front of a judge. And it does work for him. He winds up in front of a judge. In his biography of Clyde, Logan notes, Alan Logan notes that most of Clyde's victims in this period didn't press charges. And many who did still described him as basically a good guy. Like, they were like, well, I think he's a really good guy. He just fucked up here and I, I'm still pressing charges. In keeping with tradition, these recent charges are ultimately dropped, which Logan claims

• 55:52Robert Evans?

  was due to a technicality. I'm not sure if that's accurate. Vanishing Act, which is another book about Robert Spears slash Clyde, the author of that, Jerry Jamison, suggests something different. Quote, "The judge let Charles Howard off easy, citing the thoughtful note he had left in the stolen car. This time, however, he suggested the young man join other American patriots fighting in Europe during the Great War." So basically Clyde gets off, but on the condition that he join the army and go fight in World War I, right? That's kind of what happens here is this judge is like, "You're a good young man. What if you just go into the trenches for a little while? How does that sound to you?"

• 56:28Speaker 01

  Let's see how your stationery gets you out of this one, buddy.

• 56:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. I think he's trying to be nice. Not traditionally a nice thing to do, make someone go to World War I. But Clyde does join. He signs up, he joins the army, and he uses a fake name to join the army. And this name he picks, I think because he's like, this gives me a chance to establish the name I'm going to be known by for the rest of my life. So when he's joining the army, he goes by the name Robert Vernon Spears, which is absolutely a fake name, but that's most of his life. He's going to keep going by Robert Vernon Spears. As soon as he signed up, just a few days before he reported for duty, Spears befriended another recruit, C.S. Gilbert, and the two went partying before handing their lives over to the army. True to form, Spears told his new friend, hey, this is crazy, but I'm like broke right now.

• 57:16Robert Evans?

  Is there any chance you could like front me some money so we could like party? I'll totally get you back. And Gilbert's like, of course, man, we're going to be fighting in the trenches together. I've got like two grand in my pocket. I'll take care of us. And the two spend like two days partying and drinking and going to strip clubs. And at the end of it, when they're like sleeping in their hotel at night, Robert Spears steals his friend's cash and runs like fuck, just as far as he can get before the cops catch him, which they do immediately. Spears confesses and he hands over the money, but Gilbert refuses to press charges. And in fact, he begs the cops to release his friend, saying, I guess I like the guy. And besides, I'll be serving in the trenches with him. Which like if he got went to prison, you wouldn't. But Gilbert seems to be a very nice dude.

• 58:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. Poor Gilbert. You need to go, you need a Coda meeting, buddy.

• 58:05Robert Evans?

  You deserve a better friend, man. This guy is not your friend. There's like a local news story at the time with the title, Lad Freeze, The One Who Robbed Him. Very cute, very fucking 1917. I don't know much about what Spears actually did with his time in World War I, because he mostly lies about it later, right? We get very little detail about what his actual service is. It looks like he probably spent the last year of the war as an aviator sergeant in the 314th Aero Squadron, which was attached to the precursor of the British RAF. There's no evidence that he was a fighter pilot, but he pretends to have been a fighter pilot as soon as he gets back. If you're going to be a con man, what better job than fighter pilot, right?

• 58:48Robert Evans?

  You're not going to lie and say you fought in the trenches like a schlub. You want to be a pilot, baby. That's the sexy job, man.

• 58:55Speaker 01

  Uh huh. They got the aviators. Ain't nobody else got the sunglasses. Yeah.

• 59:00Robert Evans?

  It's a mark of how fucking bullshit our era is that like, even if you get trapped in one of like, these cool, like one of our modern 21st century wars, like the cool new technology is so lame to be the guy working with. Like if, if in 1917, you're like, yeah, I'm a fighter pilot in Europe. That's like, cool as hell. In like 2026, if you're like, yeah, I'm a drone pilot. It's like, get away from me, bro. That's gross. Like,

• 59:23Speaker 01

  Play video games and kill people.

• 59:25Robert Evans?

  Get out of here. I don't even want you to be in the same room as me. That's sick.

• 59:30Robert Evans?

  Like, not even cool enough to be a fighter. It's, it's, it's, it's a bummer. Um, I guess there's that Kuwaiti fighter pilot who took out two of our F-15s on accident. That guy's sitting pretty. He's the only guy with an air-to-air kill in a long time.

• 59:46Robert Evans?

  We do not do much of that anymore. Um, yeah.

• 59:50Speaker 01

  Sheesh.

• 59:50Robert Evans?

  Anyway, um, yeah. So by this point in time Spears, he goes over, he probably has pretty pedestrian service and he comes back lying that he'd served as a first lieutenant and he'd survived all these harrowing duels in the skies above Western Europe until he was finally shot down and wounded. He returns to St. Louis after the war and he starts telling the story to any woman who will listen, right? Like that's, of course.

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  Of course. I bet he had a fake cane for a while and stuff too.

• 1:00:15Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You gotta doctor house that shit. It works great. Almost as good as an eye patch.

• 1:00:22Speaker 03

  I can only imagine this man's like dating profile.

• 1:00:28Robert Evans?

  Oh, it's a nightmare.

• 1:00:30Speaker 03

  Oh my god.

• 1:00:31Robert Evans?

  Not a word of it true.

• 1:00:33Speaker 03

  He's got it. He's definitely got his fake credit score on there. Job not real. Oh my gosh. He's got some like Photoshop photos of him. Oh, it's incredible.

• 1:00:44Robert Evans?

  It's the best.

• 1:00:45Speaker 03

  Trust no man. Wow.

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. Number one Chad.

• 1:00:49Robert Evans?

  So he ultimately wins the attention and then the hand in marriage of a woman named Aura Clayton.

• 1:00:55Speaker 03

  Run, girl.

• 1:00:56Robert Evans?

  This is the start of what's going to be, no, don't worry, Sophie, she's not gonna need to. This is gonna be the start of a regular con act for Spears, which is he would entrance a young woman, he would ask for her hand in marriage, they would get married, and then in the night, he would steal everything in her house that wasn't nailed down and run like fuck for a new town and start a whole new life.

• 1:01:15Speaker 03

  What a fucking loser.

• 1:01:16Robert Evans?

  That's the grift.

• 1:01:17Speaker 03

  What a punk ass bitch.

• 1:01:21Robert Evans?

  He does that so many times. Like, I don't know how many times in total, but it's like more than you have fingers on at least one hand. It might be like two or three hands worth of fake marriages. He does it a lot.

• 1:01:34Speaker 03

  And he's just moving from city to state, or state, how far is he going?

• 1:01:37Robert Evans?

  Just down to town. He's not always even leaving the county, Sophie. It was a different time. If you move 40 miles up the road, you can live a whole new life.

• 1:01:47Speaker 03

  Prototypical fuckboy, here we are.

• 1:01:50Robert Evans?

  It is so, it's fucked up, but it's pretty funny. So days after marrying and abandoning Aura, he asks Dorothy Hayes for her hand in marriage, and then he abandons her, takes all of her shit and drives out west? He just keeps doing this? He spends the early twenties conning a series of victims, several of whom become his wives. He starts, he does this in like Seattle, he moves down to Portland, Oregon, and then like through California, Nevada, Idaho, and ultimately winds up in Denver, Colorado. Like, he is just leaving, he's leaving a trail of heartbroken women who are also broke because he took all their money wherever he goes. And then...

• 1:02:31Speaker 03

  He's the Tinder Swindler.

• 1:02:33Robert Evans?

  He's the Tinder Swindler.

• 1:02:35Speaker 03

  He is the Tinder Swindler.

• 1:02:37Robert Evans?

  But things, he kinda gets a reverse thrown at him. When he, in Denver, he meets maybe his only real match, which is a young lady named Laura Myers, and she seems perfect for him. She's beautiful, she's got a rich family that he can fleece for all their worth. So they get hitched and they book an expensive vacation, and Spears is like heading upstairs to get their luggage from the hotel that they'd been staying in for the last couple of weeks, and Laura flips the script on him. And by the time he comes downstairs with their luggage, she's stolen all of his money and run for the hills. This is an hour after they get married. Like, he gets turned about, it's fair play, motherfucker, Lauren got your number.

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  Ooh, ooh, man.

• 1:03:14Robert Evans?

  Takes all his shit and bounces.

• 1:03:16Speaker 01

  Laura Myers, feminist icon.

• 1:03:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah, Laura Myers, feminist icon.

• 1:03:21Speaker 01

  We love Laura Myers. Wow. And that he, that's the moment he actually fell in love.

• 1:03:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, that's the moment.

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  The first time in his life.

• 1:03:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It is beautiful. You love to see, you know, the story end that way. Well, it middles that way. We haven't even gotten to him becoming a fucking naturopath yet. There's a lot more left of the Robert Spears story, but not today. Cause we're at about an hour. So, yeah, I think, Brandy, you wanna go out with any plugs here?

• 1:03:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, I, I have a new album. It's called Milk Job. I'm a standup comedian. It's out on my record label that I started called Burn This Records that is trying to bring more equity into the comedy space for DIY comedians all over the United States and world. A big thing that you could do to help our label out is if you went to youtube.com slash Burn This Records and followed our label so I can monetize video, that would be a huge, huge, huge help. I would really appreciate it. My album is gonna be a special that comes out in April, so you'll be able to see it there as well, too. And then I'm on Van's Warp Tour all summer long doing comedy. So, uh, yeah, come say hi. Awesome.

• 1:04:29Robert Evans?

  Excellent. All right, everybody. Well, that's gonna be all of it for all of us for it today at Behind the Bastards, a podcast that you just listen to. Why not listen to another one? Why not, on all of your different devices, just constantly have episodes of this show playing on random loops? You don't even have to listen to it. Just always be playing our episodes. You know, break into your friends' houses, do that with their electronics, too. You know, that's, it's, it's a, it's a fun way to do us a solid that will have no consequences for anybody. Breaking and entering is fine if you do it for a good cause. That's the, uh, our official Behind the Bastards stance.

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  No, it is not. Goodbye.

• 1:05:10Robert Evans?

  Okay, well.

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  We're done.

• 1:05:11Robert Evans?

  Sophie and I disagree on this.

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  Bye.

• 1:05:16Speaker 03

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 and our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com/AtBehindTheBastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

• 1:05:51Robert Evans?

  Dude wipes remove what toilet paper leaves behind. Flushable, plastic-free dude wipes are made with 99% water and plant-based ingredients. They're gentle enough for sensitive skin but tough enough for methods of historical proportions. Unlike baby wipes, dude wipes are flushable and designed to begin breaking down when flushed. No battles there. They come in a range of at-home and travel-friendly formats, from individually wrapped singles to 48-count big daddies. Don't let skids be your lasting legacy. Grab a dude wipe and destroy the evidence. Dude wipes, best clean, pants down. Available at major retailers nationwide.

• 1:06:23Speaker 05

  Honestly, honestly, honestly, no one wants to think about HIV, but there are things that everyone can do to help prevent it. Things like PrEP. PrEP stands for pre-exposure prophylaxis, and it means routinely taking prescription medicine before you're exposed to HIV to help reduce your chances of getting it. PrEP can be about 99% effective when taken as prescribed. It doesn't protect against other STIs, though, so be sure to use condoms and other healthy sex practices. Ask a healthcare provider about all your prevention options and visit findoutaboutprep.com to learn more. Sponsored by Gilead.

• 1:06:53Speaker 06

  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.

• 1:07:27Speaker 06

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

• 1:07:54Speaker 07

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.