Part One: Sylvia Browne: Fake Psychic Detective

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 when everything's get dark, I like to go back to like a lighter kind of fair. 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 this is all we're preamble to say. We're talking about a cookies 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 Pen, Cal, welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on. Thanks for having me.

I appreciate it.

Yeah, obviously people, I'm sure most people listening are very well aware

from you for a where of you for your career in film and television.

“And you're time in the Obama White House, but you are now a podcaster.”

You've gotten dragged into the podcasting trenches. Your life has been upgraded, some might say. Yeah, the weren't enough podcasts until I had one, too. That's right. It was a real problem.

We were all, oh, where you'd have had it. But thankfully, you've you've you've filled the gap. We want to talk about the show you're doing before we, we knew it was out. Thank you. Thanks for the channel's plug opportunity.

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 and I, the science guy had to talk about things like the space race had on Medi 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 people to judge 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, we they didn't know we were coming.

Yes, they did. That's how it works. How do you not? Yes, so now that I have a podcast, I get to ask all of those, uh, that rock, all of those, those, yeah, all of those kinds of questions.

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 changed." And then the second I leave the airport, it's like, "I can't imagine wanting to think about airports for another second when I'm not in one." Holy, yeah, yes, that's exactly.

This isn't "I Heart Podcast." Guarantee to human. In the middle of the night, Sasuke awoke in a haze. Her husband Mike was on his laptop. While was on, his screen would change Sasuke's life forever.

I said, "I need you to tell me exactly what you're doing." And immediately, the mask came off. You're supposed to be safe. That's your home. That's your husband.

Listen to betrayal season five on the iHeart Radio app, apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nancy Glass, host of the burden of guilt season two podcast. This is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two families. Late one night, Bobby Gumpride became the victim of a random crime.

The perpetrator was sentenced to 99 years until a confession changed everything. I was a monster. Listen to burden of guilt season two on the iHeart Radio app, apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Ready for a different take on Formula One? Look no further than no grip. A new podcast tackling the culture of motor racing's most coveted series. Join me, Lily Herman, as we dive into the under-explored pockets of F1. Including the story of the woman who last participated in a Formula One race weekend,

the recent uptick in F1 romance novels. And plenty of mishab scandals and sagas that have made Formula One a delightful, decadent dumpster fire for more than 75 years. Listen to no grip on the iHeart Radio app, apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

In 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor. But here's the thing. Bachelors fans hated him. If I could press a button and rewind it all I would. That's when his life took a disturbing turn.

A one-night stand would end in a courtroom. The media is here, this case has gone viral. The dating contract. A great a date mean, but I'm also suing you. This is unlike anything I've ever seen before.

I'm Stephanie Young, listen to love trapped on the iHeart Radio app, apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Well, Cal, I'm going to start by asking a question that we ask all of our guests.

I am not, set. Well, see if you were psychic, you would know the answer to that question. Yeah, yeah, uh, I'm not psychic. I knew that.

“Yeah, have you ever heard of a famous TV psychic named Sylvia Brown?”

Yes, of course she was a lot. Yeah, she had all those daytime talks everywhere, everywhere. There he came. Montel was the big one. She was like, oh yeah.

They're all those viral clips of her. Yes, she's been doing viral with the jinnsey or jinn alpha. I'm split us to which jinn has rediscovered her, but one of the younger ones. This is rediscovered her in clips on TikTok. And she's 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, or optimistic in another and kind of encouraging you get a different picture of the woman that 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 crime. She committed them. But she was like the first TV psychic to be like, I work with police in 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”

shows psych kind of played that idea for laughs, but I think it, like, psych probably wouldn't exist if Sylvia Brown hadn't even around in the 90s. Like, you know, making that into a thing. Otherwise, you'd be like, well, a psychic detective. That's like, that's just a weird concept, you know?

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 going to start these episodes as we usually do with her early life in childhood.

I mean, I've got her, she wrote an autobiography, thank God, which I always love.

When a grifter writes an autobiography, um, you learned so much about how they want to be seen. Uh, 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 know there's a reason why we're talking about this

lady, right? This isn't just like a harmless, uh, a harmless crank. In 2004, Sylvia Brown made one of her many appearances on the Montel William show. At the time, Amanda Barry, a 17-year-old girl, had been kidnapped about a year earlier. Amanda goes missing in 2003. Um, and the last time Amanda had been heard from was at 8 pm on April 21. 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 Barry's mother using her daughter's cell phone and says, "I have Amanda, she's fine and we'll 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? Um, so she's willing to talk to anybody and she's willing to go on any show to keep Amanda's name in the news. So in 2004, she decides to get on the Montel William show. For years, Montel William said 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 built herself. She was brought in to”

do a reading on Amanda's distraught mother, Lohana Miller. Sylvia very bluntly tells Lohana,

"Your daughter is not alive." Based on her psych, my second image. 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 is pretty brutal. It's hard to find full episodes of the show from that period of time online, but we've got a little, a little segment, just a couple of seconds. So if he's going to play, to give you an idea of how Sylvia is talking to this woman.

"Don't think I'll ever see her then." "Yeah, in heaven, on the other side." So she's like, "Am I going to 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 a man does not dead. She isn't in fact alive. And aside from being kidnapped and locked in a basement, she isn't 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

This is the guy gets like recorded talking about the case when they 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, 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 Lewana goes home after appearing on the Montel Williams show, she tells a friend that she has been devastated by Sylvia's prediction. 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, yeah, 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, pretending to have powers and talking to aliens and not doing any danger. At the time of what you're inserting yourself into missing persons cases, you've become a monster, kind of, right? This is terrifying. 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 Schumaker, 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 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, laborously 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 we'll

come to 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, so I'm mucking out the slurry of old booze, you're in entourage in the streets of New Orleans after Marty Graw. We pick all of that when we're in the, uh, when we're on the other side. Like, um, 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 going to do with this next life?" You know, it'll 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 at spirits like, "Yeah, you know what? I'm going to grow in the Congo and get made by a land-minded age 11." That sounds awesome. Like, that's literally what she believes. That's like such a crazy level of like privilege and entitlement.

It's kind of inherently victim-blamey. Yeah. Right. Like, how can you, if that's what you believe, how can you sympathize with people who are suffering? Yeah. You chose this before you even got here. You preordered your meal. Right. Yeah. It's like you're picking an in-flight meal, but it's like, um, pancreatic cancer sounds good. Like age 45, you know, right in the middle there.

“I was like, you know, what? Podcastor. Yeah. That makes sense. I think podcasts are picked before”

birth. Um, annoying to it. 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 a spirits that like picked their life. So then like, how does that all work? Right? Like what I chose there for you. I enjoyed that you're trying to rationalize this. This is good. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, she'll have to think about these

things, right? Yeah. Like, a math is not math things. What you're saying. No, it's a pretty, it's a pretty like hard to kind of draw logical line between all of this. Um, 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 in coherent, right?

celestial D&D table and like picked that out as a trait, like that, that's just kind of messed up.

“Um, 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. Wright. I repeat, what the hell was I thinking? Yeah, because maybe that's a really dumb way to think about life. 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 a my guess, like he's constantly cheating on her mom, but she hates her mom. So she winds up sympathizing with her dad over it. Well, she chose it. She chose it. Yeah, right. Yeah, and her mom

must have chosen to have a bad husband. Uh, she describes her mother Celeste as basically the devil

herself. Uh, quote, she was physically abusive when my father wasn't around and she delighted and telling me about lying awake at night trying to figure out if she could kill me and get away with it.

“And uh, you know, 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? Um, 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 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, the consistency of her anger towards her mother means that I, it seems pretty believable to me that they had a really fraught relationship. Uh, 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. And

instead, they enter what's known as the left door, plunged 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 country, you can confidently say to yourself, oh, look, it's Sylvia's mother. Is that from where you're going to be? Yeah, really doesn't like your mom. 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 just kind of like, it happens at random. Seems to be more less how she's saying it goes down. Um, 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 at before birth. So how much anger could you really have? I thought of her earliest childhood memories

are all about her mom being like, just terrible. Um, and she tells one story in here called the time she tried to burn my foot off. And I'm not actually sure if this is just like a story of Sylvia's mom sucking our story of like a mother getting distracted during bath time. I was three years old. It was bath time. When I distinctly remember his mother putting me into the tub, turning on a full blast of scolding hot water and leaving the room. My feet had to be treated

for some second degree burns. Um, and yeah, like that is the kind of thing I can believe happened.

Her mom says it was like a maintenance issue. She didn't realize the water. He to, he to was broken. Sylvia's 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. Um, Sylvia's main positive

“female influence in her life is your grandmother, Ada Coil. 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 of psychic families. Um, 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 and then kind of it 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.

stopping strangers on the street and saying like your gall bladder 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, warn them about like their random health issues and whatnot. 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 seemed to find this in any way note where they 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 and all this. All this information is coming from her autobiography. There's like a second source on this. We had we had some second sources for pieces of this but no from her like when she's

eight I don't have a second. 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 were akin to her that like

Sylvia was not always like this but nobody else like writes about her as a little girl.

So this the 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 will be aware of a from home. They've studied our charts and know what we intend to accomplish here and if they're assignment

to support and advise us along the way without depriving us of our free will. And you know 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 just met with the history of it like so theoretically Hitler like scripted out be in Hitler back before he was born and it 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 from my chart”

this will be cool like how well 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 yeah who was Hitler spirit guide that's my question yeah who was right um now Sylvia spirit guide is Sylvia's mom that's who that's right yeah that was the first

for incarnation Sylvia's mom 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 it's but like 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 Inken who at the age of 19 was killed by a spear in 1520

while protecting her infant daughter during the Spanish invasion of Columbia 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 you're

like spirit's a genocide victim and you're like I'm going to call you a Francine it's kind of bonkers yeah and this is supposed to be enticing to people just 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 and because I mean 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 Inken 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 Inken woman makes no sense because despite the fact that both the Aztec and Inken 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 Inken people like that's not like a that's not like a thing that that really happened also when I looked into like Columbia during this period of time the area we now call Columbia was not settled by the Aztec or the Inka it was primarily settled by the Tehranas and the Muscus peoples right so none of this makes sense like this this is like a this is a white lady who doesn't know anything about Aztec or Inken history trying to wanting to have a connection to like

shamans and like the mystique of like South America and so she's just like bullshitting and made it

period. Yeah she just wanted an Iowa's Cotripe pre intern. Right oh yeah she would have if she'd come up a little

“later she would have really been a big advocate of the Iowa's got therapy I suspect.”

So Sylvia grows up you know talking to a 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 into a huge fan so 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 should be like well actually the the voice in my head says something very different and

this does not go for well um she tells the nuns that hell doesn't exist they're not thrilled about that nuns are kind of 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'd 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 maybe she just had a different personality than you Sylvia so at age 16 she decides to free herself from her family via a full proof 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 piece 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 know that a lot of that marriage very quickly um Sylvia graduates and gets accepted to sent to Reese's College in Kansas City she majors an education in 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 is sure 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 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 literary that she's meant to like teach kids in a school um so she's on her own now 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 and and you might say it wouldn't a real psychic know what the future held in store for her but Sylvia has come up with a work around to that uh 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

but I can read your future listeners and it's going to send you to the advertisers of this podcast right now in the middle of the night Saskia awoke in a haze her husband Mike was on his laptop but was on his screen would change Saskia's life forever I said I need you to tell me exactly what you're doing and immediately the mask came off you're supposed to be safe that's your home

“that's your husband to keep this secret for so many years he's like a seasoned pro”

this is a story about the end of a marriage but it's also the story of one woman who was done living in the dark your dangerous person who prays on a vulnerable and trusting people you're trying to make a love and good listen to betrayal season five on the i-heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts I'm Clayton knackered and in 2022 I was the lead of ABC's the

bachelor unfortunately it didn't go according to plan he became the first bachelor to ever

have his final rose rejected the internet turned on him if I could press a button and rewind it all I would but what happened to Clayton after the show made even bigger headlines it began as a one night stand and ended in a courtroom with Clayton at the center of a very

to date me but I'm also soaring you this is unlike anything I've ever seen before

“I'm Stephanie Young this is love trapped this season an epic battle of he said she said”

and the search for accountability in a sea of lies listen to love trials on the i-heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts I'm Nancy glass host of the burden of guilt season two podcast this is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two families late one night Bobby Gumpride became the victim of a random crime he pulls the gun tells me to lie down on the ground he identified termine Hudson as the perpetrator

germane was sentenced to 99 years I'm like lower this can be real I thought it was a mistaken identity

the best lie is partial truth for 22 years only two people knew the truth

until a confession changed everything i was a monster listen to burden of guilt season two

“on the i-heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts”

why hasn't a woman formally participated in a formula one race weekend in over a decade think about how many skills they have to develop at such a young age what can we learn from all of the new f1 romance novels suddenly popping up every year he's still smelled of podium champagne an expensive friction and how did a 2023 event called wag a get-in changed the paddock forever that day is just seared into my memory i'm culture writer and f1 expert Lily Herman and these are just

a few of the questions i'm tackling on no grip a formula one culture podcast that dives into the under explored pockets of the sport can each episode a different guest tonight will go deeper into the wacky misshaps scandals and sagas both on the track and far away from it that have made f1 a delightful decadent dumpster fire for more than 75 years listen to no grip on the i-heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts

and we're back back again yeah back again talking about silvia so she falls in love and almost gets married once 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 about one of those things and i'm kind of wondering like okay you can't predict your own

“future but shouldn't you been able to psychically tell that this guy at a secret family yeah that seems”

i love how awesome you're bringing up this flawed theory of hers you're like oh girl it's very inconsistent the way these powers are supposed to work yeah you can tell that guys 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 a human mind and she signs up for a class and abnormal psychology which like who didn't she take a statement

she helps yeah a lot of people do this uh 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 professionals um there's a and i've had an article in the journal the apa by christian weir that notes hypnosis is as old as the field of psychotherapy itself but today advocates pointy to its evidence say 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 goodo uh 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 i want to say 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 what'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 it's it's a it's a it's a potentially like dangerous thing 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 decide she likes this and she's enthralled with

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 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 like actually like talk this out and see am I crazy like that's the way she writes she says she comes

a collision maybe i'm nuts and so she sits down with one of her professors and engages her professor like as a psychiatrist to to analyze her which are 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 someone

“and be their psychiatric analyst it's it's of like 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 francy and she's like look i've decided you're just a figment of my imagination and i'm gonna 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 uh Sylvia and her whole family Sylvia claims and Sylvia runs out of the 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 didn't he one else see this lady has

“anyone else told this story but this convinces Sylvia that francy is real so she goes to her”

appointment with doctor rynec and she tells him what happens and for some reason this psychologist and uh 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 and he writes down the diagnosis on a piece of paper normal but has paranormal abilities question mark sir i don't think you're supposed to do that for you yeah 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 back up from a professional now go out of the world and mess with people that was really dope it's not great this professor seems to really give her like a wide purview he lets her channel francy in class for her classmates in the abnormal psychology class the question her spirit guide for hours on

end will 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 G here's the good news everyone loved her and wanted her to come back soon everybody clapped it's a great experience for them and I hey this I'm pretty hesitant to believe a lot of what she says if you think back

to like the 60s and think 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 in channel and people might take it

seriously like that kind of stuff wasn't as cookie then as it as it seems now in part because we've had another like 50 years of psychic trying to prove their psychic powers and like not doing it on television um 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 the college but she never graduates and she never gets the

teaching degree and she probably never works as a teacher which is good because I don't have to go

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 of it's all lies she never teaches kids I'm pretty glad she never

worked with children because can't even imagine can't even imagine the harm she would have caused yeah 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 exactly yeah Miss Brown is really scary dad I don't understand what she's saying teacher comes up to did you know that your mother murdered that man and yeah there's a

dark vibe to your house there's a ghost to it by the way the dog did not get sent to a farm

“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 who is a police officer at the time

a guy named Gary Dufran so she meets this cop and they started dating and they get hitched on October 19th 19th 19th there's a cop yeah he's a cop it's a start for he's kind of cool who gets fired he gets fired presumably for being a crooked cop she doesn't say that but they like have to move oh it's bad it's this is 58 okay in the 58 you gotta be pretty bad to give him moved as a cop in the 50s and 58 yeah so um 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 she not know it's not just that it's the 50s but like you know 40% of police households experience domestic violence is a credit and also he publicly hates her like her whole life

“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 that's that what I will notice that Sylvia gives us some hints that she herself was not an easy partner which doesn't justify anything which tells the story that is incredibly frustrating if you put yourself in the other person shoes where they buy a house they go through the whole process of buying a house the huge expense though 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 and like you didn't figure that out during the walkings 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 um she concludes the house was built on an old native burial ground and when she I do I Gary's a bad guy but I love his response to this because she's like

we built this house was built on an Indian burial ground and Gary says so what I'm sure someone's buried pretty much everywhere where we supposed to live in mid-air not a bad response so personally 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

wide writing professor who's into the occult and who starts giving her occult books like

“Helena Blavatski's Theosophy books to read and tells her like you're a great psychic and you have to”

use your 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 about 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 Dahl 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 uh sometimes giving like speeches and stuff to classes and that's kind of how she's she's making her living you I think Dahl 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 adds in the middle of the night

Sasuke awoke in a haze her husband Mike was on his laptop was on his screen would change Sasuke's life forever I said I need you to tell me exactly what you're doing and immediately the mask came off you're supposed to be safe that's your home that's your husband to keep this secret for so many years he's like a seasoned pro

living in the dark you're dangerous person who prays un vulnerable and trusting people you're

“trying to make a love and good listen to betrayal season five on the i-heart radio app apple”

pod casts or wherever you get your podcasts i'm Clayton knackered and in 2022 i was the lead of ABC's

the bachelor unfortunately it didn't go according to plan he became the first bachelor to ever

have his final rose rejected the internet turned on him if i could press a button and rewind it all i would but what happened to Clayton after the show made even bigger headlines it began as a one night stand and ended in a courtroom with Clayton at the center of a very strange paternity scandal the media's here this case has gone viral the dating contract agreed to date me but i'm also suing you this is unlike anything i've ever seen before i'm Stephanie Young this is love trapped

“this season an epic battle of he said she said and the search for accountability in a sea of lies”

i am done nothing to get burned it by the f*** ratsler listen to love trapped on the i-heart radio app

apple pod casts or wherever you get your podcasts i'm Nancy glass host of the burden of guilt season two podcast this is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two families late one night bobby gump ride became the victim of a random crime he pulls the gun tells me to lie down on the ground he identified germane Hudson as the perpetrator germane was sentenced to 99 years unlike law this can be real i thought it was a mistaken identity the best lie is partial truth

for 22 years only two people knew the truth until a confession changed everything i was a monster

listen to burden of guilt season two on the i-heart radio app apple pod casts or wherever you get your

podcasts why hasn't a woman formally participated in a formula one race weekend in over a decade think about how many skills they have to develop at such a young age what can we learn from all of the new f1 romance novels suddenly popping up every year he still smelled of podium champagne and expensive friction and how did a 2023 event called waga getting changed the paddock forever that day is just seared into my memory i'm culture writer and f1 expert lily herman and these are just a few of the

questions i'm tackling on no grip a formula one culture podcast that dives into the under explored pockets of the sport in each episode a different guest and i will go deeper into the wacky mishab scandals and sagas both on the track and far away from it that have made f1 a delightful decadent dumpster fire for more than 75 years listen to no grip on the i-heart radio app apple pod casts or wherever you get your podcasts 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 silvia's 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 friends seen in a form sir that the spirit was really grandma aida and i gotta read this is my favorite chunk of her whole stupid book i gotta read this to you guys okay i impatiently pointed out to her that grandma aida'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've been communicating with her i should have seen this answer coming because they are i could argue with that 30 30 and i'll directly play 30 30 because they are because they are god was like you know what the right age is 30 30 30 yeah i mean it's giving Jennifer Gardner it's giving it it's giving their team going on 30 30 30 and driving 30

“i think that shows us that she actually believed this it has she has to have to some extent right”

she must have believed that because if you're if you're knocking a bother to justify it with anything other than they said because that's how it is like damn you're in deep yeah that's such it

forever the age when their knees started to give out that's the perfect age not there early

20 is when you could like drink like a civil whatever like 30 yeah um so not long after this she and dal go to see a famous psychic give a lecture Sylvia very decently doesn't name this psychic because they were still practicing at the time the boat came out she didn't want to start beef but Sylvia is very offended at how we ignorant the psychic is and she's a particularly offended because the psychic takes credit for her 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 know they got back was a bunch of double talk lies and half truths which is a very ironic sentence to come out of the lady whose whole career is gonna be lying to people about their dead loved ones later um and sometimes they're alive loved ones who aren't dead um 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 at this lady you know

why don't you become a big psychic and start giving psychic lectures and so Sylvia does she found the Nirvana foundation of psychic research a registered nonprofit in california in 1974 her stated go with this as to create a new religion right to like or at least to augment the existing world of religions you get the feelings part of she wants to like correct the other religions she thinks they all get pieces right but they don't know that you're 30 forever when you're dead

you know that's not in the Bible we got to add we got to pencil that in right so it was like somebody didn't wanna pay their taxes oh yeah oh yeah that's right Cal you you've hit the nail on the head whenever someone wants to start her legit um 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 she hates that she hates to do this she has to start charging the money and it breaks her heart

she has to get money from these people oh my gosh I have to scam the people I'm scamming there's just too many of them for me to not take their money how can I not take advantage of these people quote I'd been offering for free for so many years but for one thing it was the only way it could afford to make a full-time commitment to the foundation for another thing is more and more people who've been pointing out to be making a living putting ones gifts to work is pretty

much the definition of virtually every career you can name so long as I devoted by gifts to God's greatest good I had no reason to apologize I don't know that that is the definition of of every virtually every career you can name like I'm 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 well I wasn't college you know yeah I need something to do I can teach acting classes for free yeah so true to her word though after this point Sylvia's not going to apologize for anything she does over the next 50 years we we have now that's a sign of loss first threshold yeah and she is she is going to be from this point forward um making money full-time off of her psychic research

she's going to start hiring people bring them in and expanding the Nirvana foundation and by 1975 or so she is a full-time psychic teaching classes in extra sensory skills like dream interpretation um and becoming increasingly like prominent within like the cookie world of new age thought as that starts to kind of explode in the mid 70s to the early 80s she's one of

these people who's like in cats southern California giving clabi it's always in southern California

like giving classes and and and putting out books and pamphlets on like how the 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 cow in part two how are you feeling at the end of part one about our friend Sylvia okay what do you think of Sylvia so far 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 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 I remember just there was like the gap obviously college after once the internet comes down 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

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 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 yeah right this is this is a kid who she's got a difficult home life you know she's going to grandma who makes her feel special I don't have trouble believing because a lot of people can have experience with

like an older and though 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 find opportunities and I do think you like

“breaking bad is a more gradual experience for a lot of these people you know they're not all”

El Ron Hubbard who came out of the gate like I'm gonna con as many people as I can we can't all be LRH though we might wish we could well Cal you want to plug your show again

before you're allowed here sure I'm 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 maybe maybe like a little just tiny tiny bit of of hope about the topics that we cover tiny bit of hope sounds incredibly generous for 2020 26 so I am looking forward to that you all should be too alright everybody until Thursday this has been behind the

bastards we'll be back and like a day or so you know how this all works we've been doing this for almost 10 years please behind the bastards is a production of cool zone media for more from cool zone media visit our website coolzonemedia.com our check us out on the I hurt 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 a Netflix you don't miss an episode for clips

and our older episode catalog continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel youtube.com/at behind the bastards we love about 40% of you statistically speaking in the middle of the night soskea woke in a haze her husband Mike was on his laptop while was on his screen would change soskea's life forever i said i need you to tell me exactly what you're doing and immediately the mask came off you're supposed to be safe that's your home that's your husband

listen to betrayal season five on the i-heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts i'm Nancy glass host of the burden of guilt season two podcast this is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two families late one night bobby gump ride became the victim of a random crime the perpetrator was sentenced to 99 years until a confession changed everything i was monster listen to burden of guilt season two on the i-heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get

your podcasts ready for a different take on formula one look no further than no grip a new podcast tackling the culture of motor racing's most coveted series join me Lily Herman as we dive into the underexplored pockets of f1 including the story of the woman who last participated in a formula one race weekend the recent uptick in f1 romance novels and plenty of mishab scandals and sagas that have made formula one a delightful decadent dumpster fire for more than 75 years listen to no grip

on the i-heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts i'm Clayton neckard

“in 2022 i was the lead of ABC's the bachelor but here's the thing bachelor fans hated him”

if i could press a button and rewind it all i would that's when his life took a disturbing turn a one night stand would end in a courtroom the media's here this case has gone viral the dating contract agreed to date me but i'm also suing you this is unlike anything i've ever seen before i'm Stephanie Young listen to love trapped on the i-heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts this isn't i-heart podcast guaranteed human