Part Two: Sylvia Browne: Fake Psychic Detective

Oh my gosh, look at the time.

It's behind the bastards, 45. It's actually 2-11 pm, otherwise known as 8am in the morning for me. Because I let my sleep schedule get disastrously disordered, and it is slowly destroying me and my life, but you know who it's not destroying,

is our wonderful guest for these episodes. Cal, Penn, Cal, how are you doing? I'm doing well, I was going to make a joke about just perpetually being awake, but I had no, I had no good punchline. I'm good, I am awake, more of a morning person,

but very excited to be here. I was just telling you before we came on, what a fan I am, and so, especially remember. Can we talk about Sylvia's voice? Sorry, I'm just jumping the gun a little bit.

We'll be hearing more of it, don't you work?

Okay, okay, yeah, but no, I'm excited to be here.

So thank you for, thank you for having me. Yeah, let's put it back, because I do want,

“I do want to hear what you have to say about our voice,”

but let's give the listeners like a minute or two of it, what they're going to get in a minute, and then we can really, we'll have something to sync our collective teeth into. We'll dive in, yeah. This isn't "I Heart Podcast."

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starting on February 24th on the "I Heart Radio" app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. So in case you're coming into part two of this episode like a maniac, we're talking about Sylvia Brown, who is not named Sylvia Brown yet, because she hasn't married the guy that she takes the last name from,

but we're going to call her Sylvia Brown anyway for the sake of making this simpler. She has a psychic who has found out that if you have our sick or die in a war, that's because you chose to do that in a past life.

She's gotten out of her first marriage to an abusive cop.

She's moved to California. She has started a psychic foundation where she is working to create her own new religion. So by 1975, things are really starting to come together for Sylvia. She's getting more and more famous.

She's getting paid to speak it events by local organizations in southern California. And usually what this means is like an Elx Club or something,

“like hire as like entertainment and they'll channel her, right?”

Or she'll channel francy, right? So she'll bring in and they'll get to ask francy and questions about aliens or the other side, or whatnot, right? Like it's a game, you know? Yeah, it could be fun, right?

Yeah, if this isn't evil, this is just a hoot. It's the stuff that comes later that gets to be evil. This is also the period where she claims she starts working as a pro bono consultant for cops and, quote, several medical and psychiatric professionals that she knew. Now, this is one thing that's interesting to me about this book.

It tells you what a different era Sylvia came from where she has to reiterate several times.

I'm always only brought in if they've already consulted a medical professional or already talked to the police

and that didn't work. I'm just there to help if they've already tried traditional methods. Never go to a psychic before you go to a doctor, which is like a responsible thing to say

“and she would absolutely not be saying if she were like doing this griff today, right?”

Like today, you can just do away with doctors all together. It's just interesting to me how even back in her day, you had to be like obviously go to a doctor first. It's kind of even the psychics, just doctors, less than they used to. My question about this is why not go to you first, like the cost, both in the actual,

what you're paying the doctor and the time you got to take off work and if she's so great

and you can solve something in 20 seconds, why would we not go to you first?

I, you know, logically you're right, it does make no sense. If she's a legitimate psychic, she shouldn't be saying that, right? I think it's just that that was too much, like it was too crazy to tell people to do that in the 80s. People who've been like, you're telling people not to go to the doctor, that's fucked up, right? Oh, like, I think the disinfo ecosystem has just advanced so much now,

but you're right, like if she's a real psychic, you would want to go to her before a doctor.

“Because doctors fuck up all the time and God doesn't, right?”

Like the spirit room, though, where you're doing it, yeah. So, yeah, she's consulting and whatnot with all sorts of agency associate claims and she also starts to show up on television, right? This is when the beginning of her TV career starts and she gets an ass to come to San Francisco, where she, well, for the next, like, decade, like almost 20 years,

will be a semi-regular guest on the local TV show, people are talking. This is like a San Francisco, like local access show or something like that, and finding episodes of local TV shows from the 70s is very hard. There's a ton of lost media from that era, which is actually really unfortunate. Like, there's, there are efforts to archive a lot of that stuff that I'm very supportive of,

because it's a serious problem that's so much of a very important American culture has been lost from that era. So, I can't show you her appearances on people are talking from the 70s. I just haven't found any, but I did find a 1991 episode of People Are Talking with Sylvia Brown. And I think it's fair to assume that this is similar to the stuff she would have been doing in the

70s and the 80s. So, we're still in the 70s. I'm going to play this clip from the 90s, because I want you guys to get an understanding of like, what her TV appearances are like in the early stage of her career, right? I hope that makes sense. And this was this, this is 20 years into her doing this show. She, well, she starts in like the late 70s. She's been doing it for like a decade, a little over a decade.

“She'll be on the show off and on, I think, for like 20 years, right?”

Okay. This is about a decade into her run, something like that. And before you ask, since this is from 1991, yes, if you can't see all of the women in this clip are wearing a thick shoulder pads and everyone's hair looks terrible, just terrible, terrible hair. The age of big earrings as well.

Yeah, I love the whale eye ball earrings. It's beautiful. Yeah, Sylvia looks incredible.

Well, she's got a scout said earrings that look like whale eyebrows. So, the episode starts with very low-stake story, right? Some guy wanted to buy, Sylvia's talking about a thing that had happened previously, where some guy paid her to consult because he was going to buy an apartment with his wife. And he wasn't sure about it. So he asked Sylvia for a good idea. And she said, no, don't buy the apartment. It's a horrible idea. And then sometime later,

that guy's wife calls in and leaves a voice message, thanking Sylvia for telling them not to buy the apartment because of what had happened in it. And here's that voice mail. And by the way, I do think the person leaving the voice mail isn't toxicated, but you can make your own opinions up on that. People that know me, I really don't beat around the voice chat. Much I probably was a little bit nicer than that truthfully, but I said it's a bad idea.

It's negative that something wrong with it. I feel all kinds of negative energy around it. And I came on very strong about it. Now, he then called our producer Kathy Turmal and left a message on her answering machine. And this is the message he left after he talked to Sylvia. I can see it 30-year time. Just wanted to tell you that the apartment that Eric Hopkins

chids fell out of the window. I don't know if you already has killed the apartment that Billy, you know, and I have been looking at forever that he just lost today as someone else brought. So until he calls and says, maybe you're psychics right after all because you're psychics of their major problems with that apartment. So for this word, he's a big believer again in your psychic, can you believe that? And he went, "But you don't want to know."

Isn't that something? Wow. First off, I do think that lady struck. But second, that's a true story. Eric Clapton's son did die falling out of a window in a new

was in the building that Eric Clapton's son fell out of, which like, I mean, first that's a tragedy,

“obviously, like, it's horrible. But also doesn't mean that anything was wrong with his apartment.”

He wasn't buying Eric Clapton's apartment. And the child didn't die because the apartment was bad. The window was left open while it was being cleaned and the kid hadn't realized and he like ran towards what he thought was a close, plate glass window to like put his face against it or something and he fell over the side. Like it's a really sad story. But again, it's nothing wrong with the apartment. Like, they wouldn't have died falling out of the apartment window. Or like, again,

whatever. It's just, there's this, and I have no idea at this point how much of this is even manufactured. Like, if that was like an a completely fake story because Eric Clapton's son dying was so in the news, it's kind of unclear to me. The producers would they fact check calls that came in. We don't know. No, no. And I don't know that they would, but also this is like a show. Like, it's about entertainment. They're not, yeah, report. So I don't actually know what's going on here.

That said, as we established last episode, Sylvia has a history of deciding homes are cursed and not wanting to be in them. So I can believe this just happened to be the same apartment Eric Clapton lived in, right? So the next question here, they go to break and when they come back,

the hosts note that they're having weird electrical issues with the broadcast, which always seems

to happen when Sylvia comes by. And she's like, oh, every time I'm on TV, there's, there's electrical issues somewhere. You know, it's the spirits. The ghosts mess with the equipment. The recording and the video looks pretty clear to me from, you know, recording from 1991, but who knows next, they take questions from the audience. So she's being asked. Now, this is a series of questions about celebrity marriages and celebrities trying to have kids and whether or not

their, their relationships work out. And she gets a couple of right. She's first asked, if Mori Povitch and Connie Chung are going to have a child together, and she says no, which we will call partially correct. The couple had fertility issues and we're not able to conceive together, but they did adopt a child not long after this broadcast. So partially, we'll give her like a half score on that one, right? After that, they ask about Bruce Willis and

Demi Moore's second child. Now, she does correctly predict that their second child will be a daughter, which is like a 50/50 guess, but okay, we'll give her that one, right? She's, she's, she's right about this. The next one she's asked about is Rosanne Bar and Tom Arnold, and they were at the time attempting to have a child through artificial insemination. And she goes on a real rant here, her whole mood changes because she thinks God hates artificial insemination. I can't think of anything

worse. She is so angry at the fact that they're getting, having artificial insemination. And there's also some weird like fat shading parts of it too, because when they, they talk about, do you think they'll have a kid like the audience starts to laugh as they show pictures of

“Tom Arnold and Rosanne Bar, and I think they're just like laughing at the fact that they're like”

heavier people, right? Like it's shitty. It's kind of gross, but I guess TV in 1991. So the last question she asks about, and it is weird to me that she's so negative about IVF, but the next question we get to is my favorite, because she's asked about Tom Cruise and the Cole Kidman, who had recently gotten together in 1991. And she's asked like, is this relationship

going to last? And here's what she says. How about Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman? They're cute,

and I think that they're fun for each other, and I think they're going to make it. And I'll tell you why, because she's a real strong woman, and I think he needs a strong woman, and I think that's why it's going to be good, because she's got the strength, because he's got that sort of charming, little boy way about him. He really does, and I think she's good for him, and I think she'll whip him in the line.

No, that one did not correct. Yeah, they got divorced in 2001, citing a reconcilable differences. And you know, when you look at this, what you're seeing here first off, this is a great situation to be a TV psychic again, because you're all, it's a bunch of 50, 50 guesses, right? Sure. And your accuracy is pretty good. First off, if you're being asked, will these celebrities who are already famous for having a tumultuous relationship,

which was the case with a lot of these relationships, he's actually going to stay together, it's a pretty good bet to be like, well, probably not, right? Because like, they're already having a bunch of problems. Also, at the same thing with like, they've had one daughter.

“Do you think their next child will be a daughter? 50, 50 shot, pretty easy guest to get it, right?”

But in 1991, cruise and kidman had just gotten married. They had not had any sort, there wasn't anything in the media about the relationship having like problems yet, right? Every all the press about them was positive, so Sylvia guessed that they were going to last. Like, she's not, it just really makes the case of what she's doing here. She can get it right when it's kind of a thing, anyone could guess well, but when there's less to go on, she's going to be wrong,

50, and you hate a VF. Right, and you're really against the TFR officially. Yeah, God hates it.

Anyway, this episode is from the early 90s, but she's doing this stuff like this by, like, from the late 70s up through the 80s, and so we can safely assume a lot of her TV appearances during that period are kind of similar to this. And she's, she's a good performer for what

“that show is, right? Like, she's, that's why they keep bringing her on. She does the job.”

She's being brought on to do, and the hosts of the show know what they're getting out of her, right? And they're, they're pretty smart about tailoring, because she likes to talk about metaphysics and aliens and dead people. That's more heavy than you want on, like, a daily talk. You know, that's celebrity marriages and babies, right? Yeah. So this is kind of her at her

most public facing, like, media, like, like, this is like the most digestible Sylvia tends to get.

She is a hit, though. She's starts doing fairly well enough that she's able to rent a larger office and start hiring employees to handle her correspondence. She brings in two full-time researchers for the Nirvana Foundation and even an early computer system, because they're they're trying to map out all of the realities of the other side, and, you know, how the, the ranking angels and how angels work and trying to figure out the science of all of this stuff

“that she believes. Sylvia starts hosting regular hypnosis sessions and psychic readings,”

and begins advertising that she can help clients quit smoking, lose weight, or fix their life in any number of ways. Sylvia says that at first, these sessions were just a way for her to fund

her foundation for psychic research. Quote, "It never occurred to me that these hypnosis sessions

would contribute far more than money to the foundation, and it's efforts to prove the spirit survives death." So the way these sessions prove that life exists after death is that she starts having clients who start telling her about their past lives. This begins with a guy named Frank, who just, he comes in because he wants to lose weight, but when you know it, when she puts some down and hypnotizes him, he starts talking about, quote, "his life in Egypt as a pyramid

builder." Oh, we're going to talk about Frank at the baravids in a second. But before we continue with Frank, we need to make a quick detour to the history of past life regression therapy. This starts

“like the origins of this kind of shit or like the late, the end of the 1800s, early 1900s,”

you get these occultists and scientists and London who are kind of like Sylvia says she's doing the trying to, they set up foundations to try to find evidence of life after death, and it'll be a mix at this point of like spiritualists and scientists because they're not that different in 1890. You know, like there's not a real strong reason to be like, well ghosts don't exist based on the science of 1890. It's like an arguable point really to a lot of scientists at that time.

As opposed to, I mean, it's still an argument, I guess you can say an arguable point now, but a lot of mainstream scientists are willing to explore the idea of the will maybe their spirits, right? And maybe there's a way that we can like figure out scientifically how spirits work. That's very much the invoked at the time. In the 1930s, a researcher at Duke University tries to systematically study the experiences of people with past lives and start documenting them.

And then in the mid-1950s, Mori Bernstein writes a book titled The Search for Britty Murphy. This is a fiction book inspired by a real story of a woman named Virginia Ty, an American lady who came to believe she was the reincarnation of a 19th century Irish woman. The book was made into a movie that was fairly popular. And this obviously reincarnation is like a major aspect of a number of world religions, but this is this book helps popularize the idea in a secular sense for westerners.

Reincarnation, not as part of an existing belief system, but as something you can take all the cart and if you're Christian, you can stick it in your Christianity. If you believe in psychic powers and something you know, weirder than that. If you're an occultist or a pagan or a wicked, you can stick some like American starts seeing reincarnation of something. I can just grab this. Take the set of the grad bag of world beliefs and stick it into whatever I already believe. That kind of

starts to really hit in the '60s and '70s and part is a result of this book. So by the '70s, you get a number of psychologists and psychiatrists offering what they call past life regression services, where they'll hypnotize or otherwise like put people down and to try to bring up their past lives. The idea that a lot of psychosomatic illnesses and ailments are really caused by if you if your foot hurts a lot and the scientists can't figure out why the doctor can't figure out why

it's probably because in the past life you like lost your leg to a mortar and world war one or something like that or got hit by a horse, you know, back on the prairie in the cowboy days. And so you got to if you can access that past life and that past life can explain what happened to it, you can fix the ailment. That's the idea that a lot of these people are going into in the '70s.

So Sylvia is heading down very well-trod ground when she starts doing this.

“Question. I don't know if you mentioned it in part one. Do we know what kind of religion”

if any she was raised with? Yeah, she's raised Catholic. She goes to a Catholic school. Yeah. And she respects it and she believes in God, but she also has notes. Sure. Some of the IVF stuff could stem from that, um, they're very well-being. Yeah, IVF and yeah, it's just interesting. I don't know. It's interesting to see like some of the Catholicism bleed into her beliefs here.

You can even see it in the idea that, well before we're born, we're these fully sentient spirits that take out our entire lives, right? Like you can see pieces of that there, too. Yeah. So back to Frank. This guy wants to lose weight and then starts talking about his life as a pyramid builder. What Sylvia puts on there? Oh, I'm flying. Yeah. Now Sylvia says that the way he talks about his pyramid building is quote,

"so unremarkable and current to him that you would have thought he'd stop to see me on his

“lunch break and would be heading straight back to put some finishing touches on King Tut's tomb."”

And this is where I got to stop us for the first time because King Tut was not buried in a pyramid.

King Tut is buried on the ground. Simply simply not in a pyramid. Not at all in a pyramid. The opposite of a pyramid. He's in kind of a basements. Like, um, now you could have just picked the one that we've all heard of. She could have just picked the one that's exactly right. That's exactly right. Now I did want to look into a couple of things to try to parse out the actual history here. Because maybe a pyramid builder might also make tombs, too. But that's also seems to be unlikely.

Because Tut died around in the 1300s BC. Yeah. Pyramid building kicks off in Egypt in the 2600s BC and it evolves over time. But by the 1700s or so, the practice isn't pretty steep decline in Egypt. One of the last significant pyramids was built for the Pharaoh kinder somewhere around 1760. And by the time King Tut died, because of how all the pyramids keep getting birdled, Egyptian royalty are being buried underground. So,

Frank's recollections of pyramid building don't bear a lot of resemblance to what we know of the practice. For one thing, when she asks him, "How did you build the pyramids?" He says that we had anti-gravitational devices that we used in their construction, which is not how pyramids were built. So he's definitely on the, we have like alien technology

things. And at one point, when she's down, Sylvia says that Frank lapses into what she first

describes as a steady stream of fluent Martian. She thinks it's Martian. And she records him talking. She says she does this with his permission, I hope. And she sends the tape to a psychology friend at Stanford, who calls her back and is like, "Where did you get this tape?" And she's like, "What do you mean?" This was just one of my patients. And he's like, "Those nonsense syllables you said you heard?" That was a fluent monologue in an obscure seventh

century BC, a Syrian dialect that would have been common among pyramid builders. So now I got to look into this. First off, the Syrian research you had to do as we were reading this. She says, "You got to do way more research to bust the line. Were you on a plane or mid-Mardi Gras when this was happening to you?" Yeah, I'm doing this during Mardi Gras. That makes really, really similar. Yeah, because the, and the Syrians did build Ziggarots,

which are different from Egyptian pyramids, but close enough that I guess you could call you yourself a pyramid builder. However, there's not like a dialect of a Syrian. I found no evidence that there was like a dialect that pyramid builders would have used, because these would generally like public projects, and also like you would have a lot of like artisans who would get brought into the work on these projects, but they had other skills. There's not like a language that the pyramid

guys use. Was there a citation of who it's Stanford this person was? No, no, no. She doesn't even say a professor. She just says a psychology friend. Also, I don't trust that you're a psychology friend that's Stanford. No, it's a Syrian. Who is he doing? Is he playing it to the Syrian? I guess, let's just take it over to the, it could be a little tighter of a story of this story on her behalf. You can zip it up a little. I have an tutorial notes for her, yeah.

Yeah, you can zip this up a little bit tighter, Sylvia. So the next several pages of her autobiography are just like a list of past life progressions that she does, and she, all the different illness that she cares by finding out people's past lives. So, since this is working so well, so

“I think that's the first second of a question. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Does she ever mention, I think one”

of the things I think is so interesting whenever I've read about things like this, is that like almost nobody seems to break gender with their past lives? Yeah, interesting. Is there any example of like one of her patients? It's like, oh, yes, when I was a, is a dude and he's like, okay, when I was a 14-year-old girl back in Mali, is there anybody, and everybody in this book who breaks gender, any of her patients? I haven't, I don't remember perfectly, but everyone I

Now, when I will say, Cal, that did interest me about the past lives of her patients. A lot of them were like commenters, normally you get a lot of past lives to like, oh, everybody was like a king, huh? Everybody's like a great warrior. This guy's like, I don't pyramids or whatever. It was just like a dude, a laborer. And you actually do get a weird amount of that with Sylvia's pit, which I kind of like, oh, that's an interesting spin on the grip. Like a lot of these are just like normal past time jobs.

Sylvia, however, does not have normal past lives, because she starts to interrogate her own, and she comes to the conclusion that, quote, "I'd once been the most beautiful, high priestess in all of Africa." And then in a later life, I'd been the first Eskimo to use shoelaces.

Now, I don't know how much debunking I need to do. Like, Africa has never been one political entity,

like a priestess of what there's a bunch of religions that have existed on that continent. So many of them over history, high priestess of what, most beautiful, who who decided that, who voted on it, like, um, and then the whole thing about the fucking first off, Eskimo is like a slur. It's a colonial slur that generally refers to, there's a couple of different groups of people that it refers to, like, the Inuit and the U.P. But it's not a term that you would have used for

yourself if that was your past life. You wouldn't call yourself that. Even in the 90s. Even in the 90s, we knew that. I did look into when these, like, those different peoples had shoelaces, developed shoelaces, just to say in your research. Yes. Go on. I had, I had to know. I don't think we don't know when shoelaces first came into being, but the peoples who eventually wound up in that part of the world probably took shoelaces with them, because we've had the concept for very,

“Oatsy the Ice Man had shoelaces. Right. And there's actually, I think the oldest shoelaces we've”

ever found were in an Armenian, or someone buried in Armenia. I don't know if they were a Armenian, or because, you know, people's move. We had shoelaces as a lot for a long time. I don't think there was a first girl who was like, I'm invented shoelaces. I really enjoy that she in the section you just read must have smoked such a beautiful little bowl before she penned those sentences, right? She's like, Anna had shoelaces. And you're sitting here sober just doing the research on when

shoelaces made it to Native Alaskan communities. She's like, they always had them. Yeah. She

like is like, I'm Helen of Troy, but with shoelaces. Yeah. Exactly. Okay. This has just researching this as good to me. Like, if anyone ever starts talking about past lives to me, the first thing to ask is what was your name? And then you just look up as that in name those people had, or is it a Greek name? Yeah. Speaking of Greek, our sponsors could be Greek. You don't know. Neither do I. We don't ask. Why hasn't a woman formally participated in a Formula One race weekend

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What can we learn from all of the new F1 romance novels suddenly popping up every year? He's still smelled of podium champagne and expensive friction. And how did a 2023 event called Waga Getting change 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 mishaps 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 iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The people with some was up, it's Quest Love. So recently, I had the incredible opportunity to have a real conversation with actors and

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I can honestly say I've never done an interview like that before, you know, at one point I

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starting on February 24th on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcast. 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. So 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. You're a dangerous person who prays on a vulnerable and trusting people. You're in private or make a love and good. Listen to the trail season 5 on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So Sylvia claims that her relationship with law enforcement began in the

1970s, like her professional relationship. But she doesn't give any detail. She doesn't talk about cases solved. She doesn't say that talk about specific interactions. She just says that she'd been helping and the police valued her, but she gives us nothing else to go on. And so we don't really get any details about how she used her so-called psychic powers to help solve crimes until one day in 1993, her friend Ted Gunderson, who she describes as an FBI agent. Keep that in mind, Kel. She calls

Ted Gunderson an FBI agent. Gives her a call. A writer truck filled with explosives had just been detonated under the World Trade Center, killing six people. And you know what happens a few years later as a result of that. That attack is the 93 World Trade Center bombing. And so Ted Gunderson, FBI call Sylvia and is like, we need your help tracking down the terrorists who did this, you know, FBI can't do this without Sylvia. She writes, quote, "I'd worked with Ted on other cases and my

respect for him wasn't his unparalleled. Whatever I could do to help him, if I could help it all, no matter what, all he had to do was ask. By the time he called me, I'd read that three of the Islamic terrorist bombers had been arrested and Ted wanted my psychic input on any others who might be involved. I told her there were five, maybe six men involved, including the three in custody.

Now, I gotta dig into this, Cal, because since we'll talk about Ted in a second. But since

a total of six terrorists were arrested, Sylvia Clems victory, right? I knew that we're going to be five or six. They arrested six. I'm right. Look at how psychic I am. But that's not quite accurate. That's not quite an accurate picture of how many people were involved in making that bomb, right? There were six guys arrested, but there was a seventh person involved. One of the governments key witnesses when they bring these guys to trial was an FBI informant, former

Egyptian Army officer, Amad Salem. With the FBI's help and direction, Salem infiltrated the group that bomb the World Trade Center, and he built bombs for them and taught them how to build bombs using bomb-building techniques the FBI gave him. We don't talk about this a lot. We probably should. It's a pretty big fuck up. We're going to interview with him in history.com. Ibrahim Elga Brownie invited me and this is, uh, uh, sorry. This is Amad Salem talking about his

time infiltrating this group. Ibrahim Elga Brownie invited me into his house and blasted the radio loud because he was thinking of the FBI was monitoring his apartment and he asked me,

“"Can you build big bombs?" I said, yes, I can. He asked, "What do you need to build big bombs?"”

Because 12 bombs, he built 12 pipe bombs for these guys already, are not really making me happy. I wanted something big. I said, "I need a detonator and I gave him some demands." So they switched gears from 12 small pipe bombs into a big massive bomb similar to the Oklahoma City bomb.

idea to do one big bomb because I told them it would work better than 12 pipe bombs." Which already, I would say, "If I'm a psychic, that makes him involved." In the creation of this bomb. Now, what happens next is a little unclear to me. But per 1993, New York Times article by Ralph Blumenfall, it looks like the FBI found out that there was a cell of terrorists in New York who were working to build a bomb to attack the world trade center. So they come up with an initial plan

to infiltrate Amad into the group and have him basically provide them with fake ingredients.

So they're going to build a real bomb. But the explosives inside it are fake. So the mechanics of the bomb would be real, but there'd be fake stuff inside of it. So the bomb doesn't work when they

“set it off and then they arrest everybody, right? That's how you'd think something like this should”

go, right? If you're going to do this. However, that plan was called off at the last minute by an FBI supervisor who had a different plan about how to use Mr. Salem. And it's unclear what his plans were. A lot of this is very murky because it's the FBI. Lame may have had a feud with his supervisor, ultimately he's pulled off the case. And when he's not in the group, they succeed in finishing the bomb that he'd help them start building and they detonate it in the world trade center.

It is unclear how much Salem actually helped them and how much of the, how much of what the bomb

they used he had had a hand and we really don't know. But the evidence we have does suggest that he helped them figure out some aspects of bomb making. Either way, Sylvia's psychic powers gave her no hint that this guy existed whatsoever. For her part, Sylvia takes a lot of pride in the fact that during her recorded interview, which is a real interview, she told her friend Agent Gunderson, quote,

“"One of the men you need to, and I'm doing the psychic hand thing here. If you can't see,”

one of the men you need to look for has a short build. Why are he black hair? Black eyebrows. There's an M on there, an S, S, A, L, Z, E, M, something, Salzeon, Salzemon, Mon, okay, Salzemon. And she predicts one of the men is named Salzemon. Now, one of the men who had already been arrested at that point was named Muhammad A Salama, which isn't really all that similar to Salzemon. They start with an S. Otherwise, very different names. I would say you got it wrong. It's like if I was, I was like,

I'm going to have a guest for a podcast. I'm reading a K. Kevin, Calvin, oh cow, I got it right. Perfect. No, I didn't. I didn't, I didn't. For seeing anything. And this is cold reading. That's the technique she's using. This is where it's a very old psychic fraught. You start with, I'm hearing a, and you start going through a couple of different, and someone of the adults who be like, "Oh, I had an aunt who was, if you said M was Mary,

or my cousin, Mike, you know, and then you kind of, you, you, you zero in from there, and you

“kind of refine the grift a little bit." This is cold reading. That's what she's doing in this interview.”

She writes about getting this wrong. No doubt about it. I was off by a few letters, but when Ted told me they had arrested someone named Solomon, it was this close enough that I screamed, "You got him." Obviously, she accomplished nothing at all, but she carts this around as he, again, he was, they had him in custody when she's interviewed. She doesn't do shit. That said, I need to point out here. It's not accurate for her to say, "You got him to Ted Gunderson,

because, and here's the fun part," Ted Gunderson wasn't an FBI agent in 1993, and had nothing to do with arresting them and who bombed the world. "Oh, Ted." Yeah, who was he? "The fuck is this guy?" This is a great question. Ted Gunderson was a retired FBI agent at the time, portrayed center attacks. He'd had a successful career. He'd at one point run the Los Angeles branch, like the branches there on where he'd run the LA FBI office, right? But in the 1980s,

he retired, and he went into private practice where he became an insane crank. He becomes a major figure in the satanic panic. He's the guy doing the McMartin pre-school trial. He's the guy like digging up stuff in the, the fucking yard of McMartin pre-school and making public statements about I can tell from that children were sacrificed here. Babies were murdered, right? He's that fucking lunatic, right? He is cool guy. He's figure in American conspiracism, like Ted Gunderson,

because he used to be in the FBI has all of this unearned credibility. And so when he says stuff like that, oh, I've seen a lot of satanic ritual abuse. I know there's thousands of babies being trafficked for the devil in this country. People trusted him, right? That's who fucking Ted Gunderson is. She's not working with the FBI. She's working with a crank who used to be in the FBI.

Wow. Perfect. Incredible. It's a little chef's kiss moment there. Yeah, what? Beautiful.

Of all the XFBI agents that had to be Gerald Ted. I would mean, at first I took it at face value. Like, yeah, maybe the FBI brought her in for an interview. They've done crazy

for a little more on Ted at a 1995 conference in Dallas. He alleged that the new world order controlled the U.S. government and was performing 4,000 human sacrifices in New York City every year. He also claimed that the Oklahoma City bombing was carried out by the U.S. government to slander the far right. Later in life, he wrote copiously about child slave labor in underground alien controlled facilities. He's like, there's a white, a big part of Q and on as the belief there's

these underground, like evil military bases where the aliens are like sucking a dream of chromatic kids heads. Ted Gunderson helped start all that. Like, he is a foundational figure in American conspiracyism. So that's good. Yeah. Good that he, she's working on this guy. Um, I wouldn't even gladly bounty each other. Question mark. Yeah. Yeah. It's nice when two grifters do. I want to know what their friendship was like outside the interview. Like,

what did they just kick it and talk about conspiracies or did they have a normal? Did they just like have beers and play ping pong and it wasn't weird? Like, that was the, yeah, what, like, do you watch movies together or do you just like sit alone together, listen to numbers, stations or something? Like, what is your friendship with Ted Gunderson? Look like. So Sylvia has a lot of pride in her long history of collaboration with the FBI. And you'll hear her

bring it up in her book and in most interviews where she talks about her work with law enforcement. The skeptical inquireer actually filed a series of requests for FBI files because they wanted to

“know, did she have any relationship with the bureau whatsoever? Did she do anything for them?”

And the FBI, the short answer is no. The FBI is no record of her ever helping any agent on any case. That doesn't mean they had no record of her though. Quote. Recently obtained FBI files shatter her insinuation that she had a relationship with federal law enforcement and showed that the only interest the agency had in Brown was investigating her for fraud. So she was involved with the FBI, but not in a good way. Yeah. Oh, Sylvia. In her book Sylvia claimed that the

interview I quoted from had been conducted by the FBI, but no FBI record exists that she ever spoke with them about the world trades and her bombings. The inquireer then filed a FOIA request for any documents or video the agency had about Brown's interviews regarding the attack and the bureau responded. We conducted a search of the central record system. We were unable to identify the

main records response of FOIA. Ultimately, the inquire concluded there is no documentation released

by the FBI to support the claim that Brown conducted any psychic readings for the FBI either directly or indirectly. Moreover, Gunderson's name appears nowhere in her FBI file and the topics in the FBI release do not discuss working with the FBI. Thus, there is no evidence from the records that Brown was involved with the agency. That said, she has a criminal record herself. There's a criminal complaint that gets filed against her in Santa Clara County, California on May 26th of 1992,

“and it alleges that Sylvia and her husband at the time, I think this has been number three,”

had been selling securities under false pretenses. This is really good. I want to quote from the Santa Clara Chronicle here. Although telling a couple, there are $20,000 investment was to be used for immediate operating costs, the complaint stated. The Brown's transferred the money to an account for the Nirvana Foundation for Psychic Research. Just one month later, an April of 1988, the complaint stated they declared bankruptcy in the venture. So the idea is this is like a gold mine

that they're selling shares in basically. So it's like a securities fraud scam. And they're just

taking the money. And instead of investing it into this mine, they're putting it directly into the foundation and just robbing people. Like during the like the Paris arrangement, the San Francisco or the Chronicle note in quote, Sylvia Brown claimed to have strong psychic feelings that the mind would pay off. But it doesn't. And she and her husband, Kinzel, Dollzel Brown. And that's where she gets the last name Brown, plead no contest to a felony charge. And are made to pay back

their victims, right? So they each get a year of probation and now their felons. So that's good. We got a little gold common here, you know? This is kind of a law. She does a lot of Conning of people and banks to fund her foundation. Which kind of, I had just said she was

“starting to see success. And that's how she writes it. And most of the articles on her will say”

that like, yeah, in the 70s and 80s, she builds a larger, larger business. The skeptical and choirs reporting makes it look like she probably wasn't ever very successful prior to the late 90s. She's just stealing money to fund her foundation. People aren't paying her for her psychic. She's a total fraud in that regard, right? We'll talk a little bit more that I do want to note, Sylvia and Kinzel are estranged at the time that they get charged with felonies. But she keeps his name

and adds an E to it. I don't know why. I just kind of think that's funny. What's amazing?

So let's talk about this FBI files on Sylvia about her other financial fraud cases because there's a lot

starting in the 1980s and the Nevada Foundation as well for violations of federal law and applying

“for loans from FDIC institutions in the amount of 1.253 million dollars. So she is getting more than a”

million dollars in fake loans for her business. They know about the loans are real but she's lying

on her loan paperwork. They note that her fraudulent advice also caused multiple businesses sustained losses. So she's also getting money for the foundation by giving business advice that's fraudulent. Most of what she's doing is falsifying financial statements to enhance her net worth and lie that she's worth two or three million dollars when she's not worth anything close to that to get these hundreds of thousands of dollars and eventually will over a million dollars in loans.

The FBI notes that her loan proceeds went to support an extravagant lifestyle and they have her dead derights and don't prosecute because the U.S. attorney decides there's insufficient evidence of criminal intent. Basically we know she got all this money and we know she lied on her loan applications but she may have believed the business could work. Oh gosh. This goes back to the feel like she believes the things she's saying. Right. And apparently convinced a U.S. attorney

of that as well. Wow. Now, Cal, you know who never commits financial crime.

Kermeth the frog. Well, that is probably the case. I have trouble imagining him getting away with it. Although she is fun. It is fun to think of Kermeth on the witness stand and some like reading back is like text to Miss Piggy for that impressing money. Oh no. I can't do a good Kermeth voice otherwise. I was more Patrick Mahomes than Kermeth. Yeah. It was. It was. Well, think about Kermeth the frog as we go to ads. 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 and expensive friction. And how did a 2023 event called Waga Getting change the paddock forever? That day is just seared into my memory. I'm culture writer and F1 expert Lily Hermann 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 iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. The people was up with 7. It's Quest Love. So recently I had the incredible opportunity to have a real conversation with actors and

producer Jamie Lee Curtis ahead of the release of our new thriller series Scarpetta.

I can honestly say I've never done an interview like that before, you know, at one point I

set my laptop down and we just started chatting as old friends recent Oscar recipient. So we have some commonality there. I predict that by the way. And you said these words to me dust off your mantle. Yes. And I looked at you and I said what? And you said dust off your mantle. And then I left

“and that was it. And then when all of that happened, I remember the next morning I think I wanted”

to like write you and go, how did you know? Listen to the Quest Love Show on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, this is Joe Winterstein, host of the spirit dotter podcast, where we talk about astrology, natal charts and how to step into your most vibrant life. And I just sat down with a mini driver. The Irish traveler said when I was 16, you're going to have a terrible time with men.

Actor, storyteller and unapologetic aquarium visionary. Aquarius is all about freedom loving and different perspectives. And I find a lot of people with strong placements and Aquarius, like our misunderstood, a son and Venus in Aquarius, in her seventh house, spark her unconventional approach to partnership. He really has told me to embrace people sleeping in different rooms on different houses in different places, but just an embracing of the isnness of it. If you're navigating

your own transformation or just want a chart side view into how a leading artist integrates astrology, creativity and real life, this episode is a must listen, listen to this viewer dotter podcast, starting on February 24th on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your podcast. In the middle of the night, Saskia awoke in a haze. Her husband Mike was on his laptop.

what you're doing and immediately the mask came off. You're supposed to be safe. That's your home. That's your husband. So 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 the vulnerable and trusting people. You're trying to make a love and good. Losing to portrayal season 5 on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. Caller, if you're familiar with a theory that Kermit calls 9/11. No, but I'm here for it. Oh, it's fucking crazy. So in the Muppet movie that comes out like 2001, it's like basically Muppet. It's a

wonderful life. We're Kermit wonders like what would happen if I'd never been born. And in like the

normal Muppet world before, it's like New York after 9/11, right? There's no Twin Towers, but in the version when he sees life if he'd never been born, the Twin Towers are back. No. So something about Kermit's life calls 9/11. No. Wow. It's fucking crazy. Oh my gosh. All right. I got a big Muppet's fan. So I knew Kermit too. Yeah, Kermit 9/11 should bring you

“most of what you need to know. There goes my weekend. Thanks. So weirdly enough, it's only after”

her 1993 no contest plea to a felony that Sylvia Brown gains national fame and ran out. If you look at like what and what it looks like from what the skeptical inquire uncovered is that she's kind of a middleing psychic. And most of her money and its success comes from fraud until she starts getting on real TV. She's on this local channel for a while. But it's when she hits like national television that she becomes a big deal. Now she does continue. It's also where to

me after her her fraud conviction. She keeps working with police departments. There are some who hire her. In 1997, the Tibido Louisiana Police Department pays her $400 to consult on the murder of a priest. So this priest has been killed and Sylvia's broadened. She tells the authorities, the priest was killed by a young mulatto homosexual who was enraged by the priest's rejection of his advances. So basically, she blames it on a nonwhite person who was gay, who hit on this priest

and then murdered him out of rage. And she said that someone with a street name of King had had gang people do the murder, which I'm sure is also more racism, right? Now this murder is eventually solved. 10 years later, the culprit Derek Adams had murdered the priest in a robbery gone bad. Nothing, no gay stuff, no gangs. Just a guy who killed another dude in a robbery happens all the time.

“Do you guys do merch for this pond? We have in the past. You guys suggestion?”

Yeah, young mulatto homosexual is an amazing t-shirt. I would buy this t-shirt.

It's a solid performer name. Yeah. Yeah, or a good band name. Or a good band name. Yeah. So there's no real evidence to suggest that she had any kind of extensive long-lasting relationship and law enforcement. Again, Tipido hires her once, but not again, because they waste their money on her. And there's certainly no evidence that she catches any bad guys. But she sure starts claiming that she had once she gets famous, due to her appearances on

the Montel William show. As best as I can tell, the relationship starts in 1990, because Montel wants to do a Halloween episode about the haunting of the Queen Mary, which is like this boat. So if it's like a boat you can tour. That's like a long beach, right? And it's an older boats. There's I think supposed to be ghost on it. So she gets brought in there. Like we need a psychic Montel's people. Like we want a psychic for this episode. They bring in Sylvia. She does a really

good job on the episode, because she knows how to entertain an audience and Montel's like you're great. They hit it off and they keep saving her on, right? It's just a good match. Montel provides her with instant fame and legitimacy, treating her with cash will deference and opening her up to a whole world of major entertainment figures. She does a whole series about angels on Montel show that so successful Larry King rings her on his show to do a set the same thing.

“That's how about how to have callers tell stories about how angels save their lives and”

she'll explain how angels really work, right? It's very 90s. But like she is, you know, by the time you're on Montel and Larry King, you're pretty prominent, right? It doesn't get a lot bigger than that. You're born a line of household name if not. Yeah. Yeah, quote, no matter the situation,

the basic experience was always the same. During a crisis, a stranger arrived, seemingly out of nowhere,

had a profound impact on the crisis, carrying a drowning woman out of the sea and delivering her

laying hands on the forehead of a feverish child on the hospital seconds before the fever coincidentally

broke and the disappearing before anyone could find out who they were and thank them. And these are the angel stories people tell and I get why people believe in this as someone has had like loved ones just like die tragically and not had an angel. It does kind of render like, well why don't the angels help everybody? Yeah. Like why don't the angels really seem to like to help people like affluent kids in like western hospitals and not like kids with like gut worms and the subsaharan

Africa. It's where the angels don't like save them. Just the kids in nice hospital. Okay. So Sylvia starts writing books. I mean, she had been for a while writing books. They start to become

“best sellers. She claims she has more than 20 New York times best sellers. I think this is pretty”

much accurate. She has her book sell very well. She makes a shitload of money. And this is all after

the Montel stuff. Yeah, all after the Montel stuff is all in the late 90s, right? In 1998, she co-rites the book "Adventures of a Psychic with Antoinette May" in which she blames her 1988 bankruptcy on her husband, Kinzel's attempts to hide his criminal behavior. She does not acknowledge being convicted of a felony for gold-mine fraud. Per the Chronicle, she laments that while ignorant people say, "Well, if you're so psychic, why didn't you blank?" The answer she says is that "I'm not psychic

about myself." So she is consistent about that. But like that doesn't answer the question of why did she defraud people for a fake gold-mine. Now, despite all these very obvious lies and his history failed predictions, she's really good on TV, so she keeps getting invited on Montel's show. Also, the has to do is make sure that every word out of her mouth is a lie, per the skeptical inquireer. In her November 2004 appearance on the Montel William Show,

Brown said, "I remember when I was working on the Bundy Case, talking about Ted Bundy. Outside of this off-hand comment, there's no evidence to affirm that Brown worked on a Bundy Case. Much less the case of serial killer Ted Bundy. His capture was not connected to a psychic. So she should just start dropping this whenever a famous murderer or crime or terrorist actually say, "Oh, I helped on that. I consulted. I can't talk about it." But there's literally no evidence

to support that claim. What so ever? Cool. No. We started these episodes by talking about the case of Amanda Berry, who was abducted in 2003 and whose mother in 2004 consulted with Sylvia on the Montel William Show and got a very bad reading. As I noted, she's devastated by this, she returns home and gives away her daughter's things, takes down the pictures. And it's very sad. But what's interesting to me about this is that

Amanda Berry's mom is actually responsible for the only verified contact with the FBI that Sylvia ever had. Per the Cleveland Plain dealer. At Miller's request, FBI agents investigating Amanda's disappearance met with Miller after the show to discuss Brown's other psychic views on the case. Special Agent Kelly Liberty said. Brown said she envisioned Amanda's jacket in a dumpster with DNA on it. So she like tells them the psychic told me that my daughter's jacket was in a dumpster.

It was covered in blood and the FBI is like, "Okay, we'll look into it. That's her only real connection to the FBI." Well, that's the only one that they're actually is. Now, when the real abducter was caught, most people would be ashamed. Brown took a victory lap, even as the media

“rightly lambasted her for wrongly declaring woman dead because, well, here's the thing,”

Sylvia had gotten the fact that she was dead wrong, obviously. But she was right about who did the crime because she predicted that Amanda was abducted by a sort of Cuban-looking man.

Oh, my God. Maybe 2021 or 2022. Now, the actual culprit was first off born in Puerto Rico.

Not in second. Was in his forties. Not 21 or 21 in Mexico? Yeah, just wrong. She also described Ms. Short and he was of average height. She's wrong about everything. In a statement posted to her Facebook page, following Barry's dramatic escape, Brown acknowledged that she'd been wrong about her death, writing, "For more than 50 years as a spiritual guide in psychic, when called upon to either help authorities with missing persons cases, or to help families,

with questions about their loved ones, I have been more right than wrong. If there was ever a time to be grateful and relieved for being mistaken, this is that time. Only God is right all the time." Okay. All right. All right. Okay. Had a little something? She's got a little like

“suburban, mom, PR going. Right. I feel like, honestly, the version of this today would be like,”

oh, she's not alive. That's a fake. You know, the government planted her or something. Like, our modern grifters can't even admit to being that wrong. It's weird how refreshing it is that she at least acknowledged reality. Yeah, good point. So this is not a wrongly fuck up. In 2003, Brown gives a reading on Montel. He had again this time about the 2001 disappearance of Jerry Chussney Jr. She told that man's sister that Chussney had been hit on the

head, choked and thrown into a river and added that he'd been killed because he saw something he

drug debt. He was buried in the woods. Again, wrong about every detail in the case. Yeah. In 2005,

“she gave her reading on Montel to Tamara Ivy, the mother of a murder victim named Dustin.”

She blamed a teenage boy and a young, dark-haired woman. One of whom was a sexual predator and had used a rock to kill Ivy. Then she promised the case would be solved soon.

There is no evidence that Dustin was sexually abused. Police ultimately charged his brother

for the murder, although his brother was found not guilty at trial. So the case is still unsolved. And she says it would be solved quickly. So again, wrong. Wrong, wrong. That same year, per the skeptical inquire, Sylvia Brown's November 30th, 2005, reading for Samantha Mater, mother of Christopher Mater, had a much clearer outcome. Brown gave the mother a name, which was again censored and claimed Christopher's murder stemmed from the killer not liking

the food at the bar he worked at. Then later, the killer saw him passing by and shot him. Brown also told the mother to start looking where he ate breakfast. Matthew Correll and

“Sean Myers were charged with the murder, and Correll was found guilty and Myers pled guilty in 2012.”

The two had attempted to rob Mater. Again, totally fucking wrong. Perhaps her most devastating

fuck-up was in 2002. An 11-year-old boy, Sean Horneback went missing while writing his bike. Sean's parents went on the Montel William show and Sylvia told them their son was dead, and that his body would be found buried beneath two boulders. Pernarticle on Grunge. Fortunately, not everyone believed her. When a boy named Ben Ounby went missing in 2007, journalist Michelle McNamara, who would later be credited for helping to identify the

golden state killer, connected Horneback and Ounby based on physical similarities and their ages when abducted. Sure enough, it was McNamara who was right. When Ounby was found by law enforcement 40s after his disappearance, they were shocked to find Horneback was still too. He was still fucking alive. She did it again. She was wrong about another person that she declared dead to their family. That's great that he was alive. It's great that he was alive. Thank fucking God.

And I'm glad that there was like an air of disbelief. Yeah, Horneback's father later told CNN, hearing Brown's prediction was one of the hardest things we've ever had to hear. And that stuck with the Guardians John Ronson. So the same year, 2007, he booked himself on a brown-led cruise and got an interview. When he asked her what happened,

“she claimed she had focused on three missing children. Two were dead, and I think what I did was”

I got my wires crossed. There was a blonde and two boys who were dead. I think I picked the wrong kid. Still, her ex has been Gary Dufran, condemned her, saying, "The damage she does to unsuspecting people in crisis situations is just a trotaceous." Yeah. Yeah, clearly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's all pretty bleak. And there's a lot of these that we could go through. Like there's so many of these different cases. The skeptical inquire has like a whole list of them.

And even in the cases where she's kind of right, we're like, she got the murder. The fact that

someone was murdered right. And more or less the call, she's always wrong about where the body is,

what happened to it, all that stuff. Now, Sylvia doesn't limit her predictions to crimes or the personal lives of her clients, either. In her 2005 book Prophecy, Sylvia wrote that, after Pope John Paul II passes, there will only be one more elected pope. And wrote, he will be succeeded by what is essentially a triumvirate of popes. That's not what happened. I don't have to bust that myth. We all live through it. We're several popes down now. We've been going through popes left and

right. You know, still the tree. It sounds fun having three popes, but but not yet. But I hope of Pelusa. Yep. In 2008, she wrote a book called Indive Days in which she predicted there would be a manned mission to Mars in 2012. And in 2011, she predicted Mitt Mitt Romney would defeat Barack Obama in that next year's potential election. All wrong. In her later years, Sylvia attracted increasing criticism for being wrong about everything. But she stayed until

the TV until late in her life and continued to give $850 readings to thousands of customers who trusted her implicitly. On her website, she claimed an accuracy rate of between 87 and 90%. A 2010 analysis of 115 predictions she made on the Montel William show, done by the skeptical inquire, rated her success as roughly 0%. Really, make that point for you, Gal. Sylvia predicts her own death. In 2003, on the Larry King show, she tells Larry that she would die on a peacefully

at age 88. She actually dies 11 years earlier. Age 77 on November 20th, 2013. Wrong. Right up to the end. Girl. Well, yeah. That is quite the roller coaster. Yeah. I knew none of this. I knew she wasn't. I knew none of this. Yeah. It's so funny that like you can really, you can really

back you up, you know. Like she never loses the core of her support despite how wrong she's

right. I guess it's a prediction for where we are today like politically and everything else. There's a massive desire that we have to want to believe things. Yeah. So I can, I can somewhat empathize with, I mean, people who want to believe something. Yeah. Also, can we just acknowledge, are you really, this is not a call out to a parent who's desperate to find their kid obviously, but yeah. Like are we really thinking that the Montel Williams show is the the apex

“of how we're solving scientific crimes. Crimes. That's what we're all just okay with us.”

And I think you're right on the money, Cal and that like it's everyone is to blame the viewers,

the people on the show, Montel, Sylvia, but the parent because you can't, like the parents can't

expect to be saved when their kids have been kidnapped. Of course. Like you see that documentary on the jury's spring or show? Yes. No. It's fantastic. It's worth a watch. It's very similar to a lot of it. Like peeling back the curtain on that just makes me think, you know, I don't know any thing about how the Montel Williams show work, but obviously it's a TV show. So yeah, to your point earlier, like it's about entertaining people, period, more than anything else.

And springer was, you know, the sort of most agreed just version of that. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, I mean, it really is like pulling back an unfortunately like a dark curtain on this part of my

“childhood that I had never really analyzed more. Yeah, their psychics on TV. And they read P. It's fun.”

And it's like, no, no, no. It could be pretty harmful too. Sometimes they also defraught banks,

which I have less of a problem with. That's not my primary issue with there. Well, do you want to plug anything? Oh, sorry. No, go ahead. Good. Oh, I was just asking if you had anything to plug at the end here because we're coming to the end. I would love to plug my podcast, which is not about psychics. It's called here we go again. And we look at topics through pop culture and politics, past, present and future of the specific topic. And hopefully leave

the audience with a feeling a little smarter about what you learned and a little more hopeful about how you, you plug into that particular issue. Awesome. Well, hopeful sounds good right about now. Yeah, check that out. Thank you, Cal, for coming all the show. Thank you all for listening for having me. That's going to be it for us today. Go wait out. Listen to something else. Bye. 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 I heard radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes with behind the bastards are now streaming on Netflix dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. It remind me of 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.

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