Part One: The Naturopathic Doctor Who Bombed a Plane

[MUSIC] >> Cool, so media. [MUSIC] >> Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history. And we've got a fun one for you this week, folks. I know it's been a rough year. There's been a lot of pedophiles. I'm not just talking about the US government. I'm talking about on the podcast. We've been covering a lot of pedophiles. And part because there's a lot of pedophiles in the US government to be fair. But this week, thank God we're handling just an honest, simple grifter. One of the good decent con men who's makes this podcast in this nation possible. And to talk with me about just a corn fed, good old fashioned down home, con artist, Brandy Posey, Brandy, your comedian, and you run your own comedy record label and you've got an album, Milk Job, that's out right now. >> Absolutely, right now, right now, maybe hell yeah. >> Welcome to the show, Brandy. How you doing? How you been since last we talked? >> I've been good also keeping up on the pedophile news and probably, you know. >> Keeping up with the pedophiles. >> Yeah, grinding my teeth as much as you I imagine. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah, it's frustrating to be aware of the world these days. I don't recommend it. Instead, why don't you, why don't we all just sink into a story of days gone by and talk about a con man from like a family of con men. This will be a nice one, everybody. I hope you always enjoy it. >> Is this about a beagle boy? It feels like you're about to tell me the story of the beagle boys. >> The beagle boys? Who the hell are the beagle boys? >> From Duck Tales. >> Oh no, no, no. This is much worse. >> Okay, great, great. >> This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. >> Hey guys, it's us, the Jonas Brothers, I'm Joe. >> I'm Kevin. >> And I'm Nick and guess what? >> We created our own podcast called Hey Jonas. >> We invented a podcast? >> Well, we didn't invent it. We just contributed to it. >> We're the first people to do podcasts. >> We get to ask other people questions because we're sick and tired of being asked questions. >> Well, sick and tired is a strong way to put it, but you know, tired and sick. >> Tired and sick. >> Listen to Hey Jonas on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Just listen, we don't care where you hear it. >> Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy, not quite on humor me with Robert Smigel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenker to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and Head Writer, Streeters Side L, helped Anaka and the Bella Band with their between songs banter. There's no more singer in the group. >> The worst? >> Yeah. >> Me. >> Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. >> [LAUGH] >> That's the group. >> The yard. >> The yard. >> The yard. >> That's the name. >> The yard. >> The yard with their open. >> Yeah, your name's suggestion. >> We're open. >> Since you guys are middle age, one erection. >> [LAUGH] >> Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. >> You're the me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. >> If you're seeking to try to understand the forensic science behind these cases that we hear about in the news, body bags is where you need to turn. There's no fluff. We do a deep dive into the forensics. Listen to body bags with Joseph Scott Morgan on America's number one podcast network. I Heart. Open your free I Heart app and search body bags with Joseph Scott Morgan and start listening. >> The story I told myself can then shape my behavior and that can lead me to sabotage the possibility of connection. >> This mental health awareness month tune into the podcast deeply well with Debbie Brown. If you've been searching for a soft place to land while doing the work to become whole, this podcast is for you to hear more. >> Listen to deeply well with Debbie Brown from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. >> We're talking about a guy named Robert Spears who was one of the first naturopaths. He was very influential figure in the first wave. You have two big waves of naturopathy as a discipline, one that goes up from the start of the century until polio vaccines become a thing and people are like alternative medicine. Why would we ever not want modern vaccinations and the like? You've got one that kind of crops up more recently in the 70s. There's like a split between the two. We'll be talking about both this con man who spoilers, winds up committing some pretty serious plane crimes at the end of his life. This ends in a fun slash mass murder replays. But before you get to the mass murder, there's a lot of cons. This should just be a fun episode for everybody. We're talking about, have you ever heard of Robert Spears? >> No. >> No, old Bobby has not crossed my path. >> That's good. >> We're going to talk about him. But before we talk about him, we've got a little mini BTB episode because I want to talk about the birth of naturopathy as like a field of endeavor, of work, of quote unquote medicine. You really got to keep the quote unquote there when you're talking about this period of time for share. The guy who most often gets credit for starting naturopathic medicine as a discipline was a German-born American with an amazing name. The guy most often described as the founder of naturopathy was Dr. Benedict Lust. >> Oh, amazing. >> Dr. Lust. >> No, he wasn't really a doctor. And to be fair, he didn't claim to be a medical doctor, but Dr. Lust is just really funny. I prefer that. I'll give him the stolen valor if I get to say Dr. Lust a bunch. >> Does this whole thing start with boner pills? Is that where we start? Is that that's not genuinely? >> No, I mean, I'm sure he sold some weird boner medicine. Don't get me wrong. He was selling like quack medical treatments in the early 1900s. He must have been. But I also think he was a legitimate believer. That's something. This first couple generations of guys who become like the naturopathic like movement, the first naturopathic crusaders are like true believers. They're not guys selling snake. Well, I mean, they're selling snake while a lot of the time, but they truly seem to believe in it generally. Well, I guess like at the same time, like what is actual medicine doing? >> Right. >> We're past these. >> We're past these. >> We're past these. >> But we're like, yeah, we got the nails from the skulls. >> As we'll talk about, they are still doing some skull nailing. One of the problems with modern medicine at this period of time is we've just now. By the time you're starting in like the early 1900s, you're really starting to get the first wave of mass-produced, high quality, pharmaceutical drugs. Unfortunately, you don't have like the basis of knowledge about like when those are good and when those like wind up being worse for everybody in a lot of cases. So you have a shitload of people being over prescribed like, oh, you're four year olds coffin. Here's some heroin. That'll get him right back to baseline. >> Yeah, just not. >> You're down side and giving a four year old heroin. >> So people just, if you're someone who's saying, I'm against, I think doctors use too many drugs. Like a non drug solution in the 1900s. A lot of times you'll be doing better by going with like a quack doctor just because they're only feeding you homeopathic medicine as opposed to straight heroin and cocaine, which has some negative health consequences. So it is more blurry when you're talking about the difference between alternative medicine, whatever, that kind of shit and like the AMA. Like there's not as much of a gap between them as there will come to be in the modern era. >> That makes sense. >> So doctor Benedict Lust, again, not a doctor, was born in middle-box, bottom in Germany in 1872. So he's like a year younger than Germany itself. As a young man or child, it's a little unclear in my sources. Let's get sick. He contracts tuberculosis. And at the time, by 1872, it's not as much of a death sentence as it had been like a generation before, but a lot of people are still dying from tuberculosis. So if you get diagnosed with it, you know there's a pretty good chance you're not coming through the other side. But Lust takes a treatment that's becoming vogue at the time, it is known as the water cure. This was largely the invention of a priest named Sebastian Nipe. But Nipe had discovered a book that some even older guy had written on curing disease via cold water pludges. You can see this today in a lot like the podcast, right? Health influencers, everybody. RFK loves the cold plunge. People have been doing this for way more than 100 years. Like almost 200 years, there have been guys advocating for cold plunges basically as a treatment for different illnesses. Now in Nipe's time, which is again the mid-1800s, tuberculosis was even more so a death sentence. And so he had gotten sick before Lust gets sick. The guy who treats him also gets tuberculosis as a young man. And he finds this book and writes quote, "I clung to it like a drowning man." He later wrote, "It became in a short time the staff supporting the invalid. Today it is the lifeboat that was sent to me by a merciful providence in the nick of time in the hour of extreme peril." And so Nipe gets given what he thinks is a death sentence, this tuberculosis diagnosis, and he gets better. and he gets better while taking the water cure. Now, does he just, does he recover because of that or does he just recover while he's do that? Does that? You know, Nipe obviously credits his recovery to the water cure because he makes his whole life about that. From here on out there, rest of his days, he's like a practitioner of this thing. - And just, is this, is it, oh, it was just gonna, and just FYI to the listeners, if you wanna look in this guy's name is spelled K-N-E-I-P-P. So, just a, - Nipe. - Nipe. - Nipe. - Yeah. - Gotcha, gotcha. Now, is the water cure just drinking water? A thing? - No, it's like a cold, okay. - Oh, okay, okay. - It's like getting, like guys are doing today, right? Where you get this bucket of ice water and you plunge yourself in for whatever period of time. From an article in the Journal of Integral Medicine by Susanna Serranco, quote, "Building from this little book, Nipe eventually modified the cold water baths to what became his signature treatment. The shower baths are gushes, which he administered with a simple garden watering can. By pouring water on the subject, a quicker reaction is brought on than by bathing. Pouring was father Nipe's special method. The object of all cold water applications is to cause a stimulation in the circulation of the blood and they must last only long enough for this reaction to take place. Nipe paid close attention to the primary and secondary reactions caused by cold water on warm skin. And part of why this is so popular is that ice bathing or what he's doing, which is like pouring cold water on, you can see it causes the reaction faster. It has a physiological effect. It does measurable things to your body, right? That said, it is never neither ice bathing nor any other kind of cold water exposure has been shown to treat or cure tuberculosis. There's no documentation of this working. However, there's a couple of things going on 'cause both Nipe and Lust will credit getting better from TB to this cold blunge type thing basically. And first off, in the 1800s, a lot of people are misdiagnosed when they're diagnosed with TB. A lot of deaths that are just credited to tuberculosis were something else and doctors were worse at diagnosing stuff back then, right? And secondly, without treatment, a decent number of people survive tuberculosis. I'm not saying don't get your tuberculosis treated, but I did find a 2023 article in the Journal of tuberculosis and lung disease, which notes that about 40% of TB patients in 2021 weren't diagnosed or treated. And that 10-year survival rates without any kind of medical treatment are about 40%. Which is less, people who don't seek medical care are a lot less likely to survive tuberculosis. Please, if you get TB seek treatment, but it's not crazy that two dudes might have gotten sick and just gotten over it more or less intact 'cause that happens sometimes, right? That's just, the human body be doing shit. People don't respond the same way to every disease. We're a powerful little machine that wants to live. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a good time. Your body just pulls through. Yeah, yeah. And cool people did cool stuff listeners are very familiar with part of the pod tuberculosis because almost every episode it comes in and either kills our villain or kills our hero. That's what life was like before modern medicine. And we're going right back to that period of time. Don't you worry, you give RFK another year or two. Yeah, so it makes sense for-- I'm really rather not. Yeah. I'm excited for the white handkerchiefs that people cough a little bit. But what in tune now to be made out of plastic? I'm already stopping. Yeah, yeah. Gone are the days of the cotton hanky. No, no, it got to be plastic for a baby. So cold water immersion does because this is something people are advocating today. It does, again, have observable and measurable physiological effects. Some studies have suggested can help treat chronic immune inflammation and have a beneficial impact on stress, however, number one, there's negative health consequences. It can raise your heart rate to a degree that can cause cardiac events in people. There are like health nuts who have died doing cold plunges because it shocks their heart. Also, per an article in the International Journal of Circumplular Health, quote, "Many of the health benefits claimed from regular cold water exposure may not be causal and may instead be explained by other factors." In other words, most of the studies that suggested a benefit are flawed in some way. I'm not saying there's no, but there are maybe some benefits, and especially because of the way it affects your heart and circulation, people with certain conditions might benefit from cold water plunges. But the science today is far from certain on this, and it's surely not curing tuberculosis, right? No. But they have a lot less data back then, so it is more forgivable. I don't think NIP is a con man. I think he truly believes this saved his life and he's doing his best to help other people, right? And I think the same is going to be true of the future doctor, not a doctor lust, because he falls in love with this stuff. When he goes to NIP's clinic, which is basically a spa, NIP's doing these cold water exposure things. He's also giving people herbal medicine. There's a lot of teas involved. And doctor lust falls in love with this. This is his first hit of what we today called alternative medicine. This is the very first gaspings of that. And lust is immediately like, oh, this is my whole life, right here, baby. I'm going to make this everything to me. Well, and it also makes sense because at that time, it was like that or chimney sweep, right? So it's also good to do with your time. I mean, Jesus Christ. I mean, just television really going yet. Exactly. I'm just sitting at a nice place that has some nice teas and things like that. It's like, I'm going to maybe feel better than when I'm doing a 20 hour shift in the factory. Now me, I would live at the pharmacy. I would be buying that heroin cough syrup every day of the week. Oh, man. If only, if only. So lust moves to the United States near the end of the 1800s. And by that period of time, before we're really into the 1900s, even the US, particularly New York, has become kind of this globally recognized mecca for nonsense medicine. Like we Americans, we were on the ground floor of selling bullshit to people and claiming it cures disease from 1896 to 1901. Lust, because as soon as he moves there, and he starts training in a couple of different like quasi-medical fields, one of which, so he trains as an osteopath, an osteopathie. An osteopathie is a difficult case to talk about. We're not going to be giving it enough attention. Today, if you run into someone who is an osteopath, they're probably a real doctor, right? Probably, or it is largely a real type of medicine today. But it was founded decades ago by an untrained amateur who felt that all disease was caused by misplaced or deranged bones, quote, from Quackwatch. Quackwatch writes, quote, "And most diseases were curable by manipulation of deranged, displaced bones, nerves, muscles, removing all obstructions, thereby setting the machinery of life moving." His autobiography, the founder of osteopathie, states that he caused a bald-headed man to grow hair three inches long in one week, and that he could shake a child and stop scarlet fever, group, dysphoria, and cure whooping cough in three days by a ring of its neck. He was antagonistic towards the drug practices of his day, and regarded surgery as a last resort, rejected as a cultist by organized medicine. He founded the first osteopathic medical school in Kirk's Bell, Missouri, in 1892. This will not be the last time Missouri shows up in these episodes. (laughing) That's something-- - He just showed me that kid. - He just showed me that kid. - Extremely true. Wow. - Your baby's got whooping cough. Let me ring their neck. That'll fix them. - Absolutely. - The James Bond of Doctors. - It's crazy how many people who call themselves doctors still think like, oh, your kid's coughing too much. I gotta basically break their spine. You gotta let me get my hands around that fucking neck and just really throttled it like a son of a bitch. Like, that's still a lot of guys who say that they're doctors today, they can paralyze kids all the time. - Abuse the child until they're okay. (laughing) So now that said, as wild as that last paragraph was, from this point, osteopathy develops after this and to again, what is today a largely real field of medicine. There are still some quacks who call themselves osteopaths, but over time, the good osteopaths who cared about evidence-based care one out over the bad ones, I think. That's how the articles I've read make it seem. I'm not a doctor except for in New Jersey, right? But doctor lust is studying osteopathy when it is still firmly in its quack era. He also studies chiropractic medicine and takes classes on that. And if you remember our episodes on the history of chiropractic, it was founded by a guy who learned the secrets of spinal manipulation from a ghost. That is where chiropractic medicine comes from. - Oh, wow. - Yeah. - Yeah. - Amazing stuff happening in the early, late 1800s and early 1900s. So yeah, lust gets into chiropractic, osteopathy and he starts exploring botanical medicines, what people would call plant-based medicines. And it gets interested in the emerging field of what it comes known as physical culture. Bernard McFadden, who we've done episodes on, is a major factor in this. He and lust are kind of contemporaries and they're writing about health and about. A lot of the shit RFK is in is like, how can you stay looking buff longer if you're a dude? How can you get big biceps? Like what kind of chemicals will make it easier for me to keep muscle on? - I feel like you're trying to convince me that RFK Jr. might actually be a time traveler from this area. That's the only way he actually makes sense. - Right. - This ideology is firmly rooted in the early, first 20 years of the 20th century. Now, lust is one of those guys who binges on fringe medical treatments. He's not discriminating. He likes it all. He's taken sun baths. The modern equivalent would be, modern equivalent would be those guys who expose their assholes to direct sunlights for health reasons. He's exploring electotherapy. He's like shocking himself to make it easier. himself feel better. And crucially, what kind of makes lust a trailblazer is he's putting all of these different quack treatments together and he's mixing them with cold water therapy and herbalism and he's looking at it all as one connected field, not a bunch of separate things, right? And that's a new idea. Previously, most of these old-time medical grifters aren't seeing themselves as part of a large movement that includes a bunch of different kinds of treatment. They're like, no, the secret is electropheropathy. The secret is water therapy. The secret is they've got their thing and that's the thing that they're trying to sell. And lust is like, no, no, this works a lot better if everybody's connected. And we're all part of like a united front pushing all these fringe treatments that the real doctors don't want you to have access to, right? He's unionizing the quacks. He's kind of unionizing the quacks. Yeah, that's basically Dr. Lust story. In 1901, Dr. Lust starts collaborating with a group of fellow travelers to set out the underlying theory behind their new discipline, which doesn't have a name yet. But they're they're firmly in opposition to what they call the drugists, right? Today, the term that like these folks uses allopaths to refer to like real doctors, what we call real doctors, but they're calling them basically drugists, right? And the critique they're making, which is to a degree valid in the time is that real doctors just want to dope you the fuck up. And a lot of real doctors are just doping you the fuck up. That's not an unfair critique of the day that doesn't make what they're selling work any better, but it is sometimes less harmful, right? Sometimes if you're doctors prescribing you like fucking arsenic and you're fake doctors prescribing you fucking homeopathic arsenic, which is just water, you're better off with homeopathic arsenic, you know? 100 percent. Yeah. So the central tenet that Dr. Luston his colleagues land on is this, the body can repair itself, and that rather than treating sickness, physicians should seek to restore balance to the body so that it can cure its own illnesses, right? And it can avoid getting sick because of the body stays in balance than it won't get ill. The website Indy Health Fact has a good summary of what a lust eventually comes to believe and push to make the center of naturopathy as a discipline. Dr. Lust was opposed to the processing of foods because such manufacture tends to destroy their true nutritional values. He was opposed to the administrations of all drugs and narcotics because they are a natural elements which the human body is not capable of assimilating. He's opposed to the regimentation of the American people under medically controlled experiments because such legislation will wipe out other methods of treatment and bring in estimable damage to the health of every man, woman, and child affected. He's opposed to any legislation which in practice would prevent a family from attending to its own ills or the choosing by such family of any type of treatment. It might desire because such legislation restricts personal liberty and tends to take from the American people the right to use the beneficial home spun, efficient remedies, which have been handed down from generation to generation. He is, that's a lot of word. It's just RFK. It's just RFK, right? I don't think you should be able to tell people that anything they believe as medicine is medicine. That's a crime. That's the only crime. Not selling nonsense is medicine. Now the name naturopathy is actually coined by a married physician capital, the doctors, John and Sophie Sheel, who are kind of colleagues and contemporaries of doctor lust. They come up with the name in 1902 and lust buys it from them. He purchases the naming rights because as soon as he hears naturopathy, he's like, I can't beat that. That's the best marketing name for this thing that we're doing. I don't know why, but like, 1902 seems really early for buying naming rights. Yeah. No, this man is committed. He's convinced and honestly, it works. He is a visionary when it comes to this shit. So less opens a school for naturopaths and he opens what's probably the first health food store in the world. I think it's in New York, but yeah, he opens like a health food store in like 19, oh, dot, right? Like in the fucking start of the century. So that stuff goes back quite a while. God, I don't even want to think about how bad this guy's deodorant was. Oh my god. Just a solid crystal, just a solid crystal. No, it's literally, it's literally immoral. He's just rubbing it in there to do anything. As naturopathy evolves, it becomes clear that its practitioners all share one curious trait, a distrust or even a hatred of medical drugs, in an often heedless embrace of every conceivable non-drug therapy, often to absurd ins. Now, again, in the way less frames, this is like people have a right to use the home spun treatments that their ancestors have been using for generations. That's not what's primarily being marketed by the naturopaths. They're into a lot of expensive insane quack treatments. Take ariopathy. Ariopathy is a treatment that starts from the premise that and this is true, he can reduce pain, right? We've all probably experienced this in some way. It's a pretty common thing to like, you know, deal with like inflammation, joint pain, all that sort of stuff. People have known this basically forever. It's the if you've ever heard of like an old-timey treatment, the mustard plaster, where they'll put like this plaster of mustard on your naked chest. It's because that like burns and the heat offers like a relief from some kind of like chest cold symptoms and stuff. And I think it I've never had it performed on me, but I'm sure it does like feel like it helps at least. Ariopathy takes this concept up to 11 and incorporates what was literally called the name of the device used for Ariopathy is a human-bake oven as a treatment. They're literally putting people into actual ovens and at like oven temperatures. I need to show you. So if he's going to put on screen if you're watching this, a 1912 ad published in the Calgary Herald and I'll read the ad to you. It's got a picture in the center of it looks like a fucking iron lung, but it's an oven that everything but the person's head goes inside and it says rheumatism positively killed by the human-bake oven. Can you take 500 degrees Fahrenheit? Try it. 500. That's crazy. You shouldn't take 500. No, absolutely not. I was like, okay, okay, okay, 500. You're burning your face off. That's well and excessive. What I've read most of these treatments were usually people seem to be slow cooked from anywhere from like 280 degrees Fahrenheit, which seems to have been like the most common 283 degrees is like a normal temperature. And most for most people doing this, the higher temperature is up to like 400 degrees, but obviously is that ad show. Some people are going way further than that. And it's not always the whole body of some smaller contraptions were used to get a single part of the body like this easy leg-bake oven. So if he's going to show you, which just I mean, it almost looks like one of those cuffs you put your arm in and it's on a, but I can see how you just kind of jam your leg in there and it just like bakes the shit out of it. Yeah, turn my knee into a brownie. Let's go. Wow. What a choice. This must have hurt and killed people. I haven't run into stories of that. You shouldn't be baked. Like, they're definitely our people getting burns because again, you shouldn't be baked. Every doctor, I think we'll tell you that now is that like 500 degrees is too much for any part of your body. You cook meat. I don't even know that my oven actually goes up to 500 degrees. You probably shouldn't be cooking meat at 500 degrees. That's really your babies cough out of their chair. I'm really going up like 400. No, seriously. That's crazy. Like I like a hot sauna. I like a sauna. That is a whole different ball game from this. This is crazy. That's another fucking level of batshit. Now, naturopaths were also known to advocate astral healing and zodiac therapy, which is basically someone giving someone tea based on their horoscope. There were a bunch of weirder treatments that Quackwatch collected for an article on this like quote, "blood washing with herbs." Auto therapy, which is quote, "treatment with potions made from the patient's infected tissues or excretions." Auto hemic therapy, which involves a solution made by modifying and potentizing a few drops of the patient's blood. Great stuff. But seriously shout out to him for being able to sell somebody shit back to themselves. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. A hell of a sense. Your own blood, selling your own blood. Man, you made that, bro. That's crazy. Yeah. Wow. Now, to be totally fair to Dr. Luston is colleagues. It's like 120 something years ago. Again, real doctors aren't always a lot better than the Quacks. And the naturopaths, you know, they have some points in this era, but what's happening is you're going to start not long after this period seeing the development of like real medical science, like thing that people dot medicine from 1900 to like 1960, probably gets better faster than it has at like any other point in history. You'd be hard pressed. I mean, maybe they're like 60 years after that. But even then I don't think we had jumps quite as big as that leap from in 1900, a lot of people are still basically living the same with similar medical access to what they would have had like the 1600s, right? You know, a lot of parts of the world. There's not massive differences from how shit would have been like the enlightenment era in terms of the average person's access to good medicine to by 1950 to 60, even people out in the sticks have a much better access to real quality medicine and to doctors who actually know something meaningful about how disease spreads and you have the ability to actually prevent a lot of these diseases for the first time. And that's going to be disastrous for this first wave of naturopaths, right? Is that especially from like 40 to 60, it becomes really impossible to deny that like, okay, well, the people who use the naturopaths are still getting sick and dying from all of like the weird plagues going around. And the people who are getting vaccinated don't are living. Well, it's also funny. We've got a world or two happening during this time, - Right. - Right, right. And the idea of being like, "Here's like a tea for your leg that got blown off." - Your figure's not. - Oh my, that's a kinetic. (laughing) - Oh good, okay, what about this, "Econdation is that good?" It's been reduced by a thousand gallons of water. Oh no, you're dead, you're blood out. You're blood right out, huh? That was a femoral hit. - Did I, did I review that, Skides and Aldeid in the last month or so that was like a combination of making fun of the Maham movement, but also like the pit, it's literally this. - No. - It's literally this modern time and you would love it. - Oh, okay. - You would love it. It's great also, Harry Styles isn't it? - Hell yeah. - Great, good for Harry Styles. So, you know, and it's also important note that one of the key differences, one of the reasons that like osteopathy becomes more of a real discipline. And the reason that medicine, you know, in 1900 and 1920, maybe a lot of doctors aren't really much better than the naturopaths. But that changes too. And part, because the real doctors, even if they start from position of believing a lot of bullshit, are doing what you ought to do, which is you document, okay, we prescribe this treatment to this many people. And oh, it actually turns out that after a year or two, there was no difference between them and the people who didn't get a treatment. Or between them and the people who got this other treatment that's cheaper. Or, you know, whatever, you prune away, you find out, oh, some stuff we can see isn't working. So we're not gonna do that anymore. And some stuff, the consequences of getting people these medicines, even if they work immediately, is worse than, you know, giving them this alternative. So we're gonna do that. And the field gets better. And we get a lot better at medicine over time. Naturopath is problem. And the reason why it doesn't really go down this same road is that it was fundamentally created and always run primarily by a bunch of weird little guys and girls, who each had their own specific kind of alternative or quack therapy, like water therapy or blood washing. And they were primarily getting into the naturopathie not because they saw themselves as, they're mostly not like lust. They don't see themselves as scientists who are part of a movement. They've got a thing to sell. And if that's the attitude you approach your discipline from, that's not conducive to good science. 'Cause you're coming at it. Yeah, scientific method versus the vibe. Right, that's what we're talking about. And versus I'm already, if this doesn't treat this disease, I'm out a shitload of money, like I'm ruined. I have to be able to sell this. Even if I realize it doesn't work after a while, 'cause I'm pot committed to this shit. Speaking of pot committed, you know who's pot committed to this podcast? Our sponsors. Oh, very nice. That's all. Yeah, they can't get away from us now. Hey, it's us, the Jonas Brothers, and guess what, we have some big news. What's the news, Nate News? We created our own podcast called, Hey Jonas, we invented a podcast? Well, we didn't invent it. We just converted to a-- We were just people to do podcasts. Pretty wide range of podcasts right there. We're starting a trend. But this one's extra special. So how do we actually come up with the name, Hey Jonas, guys? I honestly don't remember. I think it was on a call about what we should call it. And-- Oh, we are thinking I'm originally calling it one of the early names of our band before Jonas Brothers. Well, this is how you guys remember it going down. Yes. I have a very different memory of this. We were talking about a thing, a bit for the podcast. We would call it in and say, hey, Jonas. And then I broke down in my little note pad, Hey Jonas, and offered it up as a potential title for the podcast. But thanks for remembering that, guys. Listen to Hey Jonas on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Just listen. We don't care where you hear it. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy, not quite on humor me with Robert Smigel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan, to Bob Odenker, to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and Head Writer, StreetersideL, helped an Acapella band with their between songs banter. The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in? Because your parents made a huge donation. [LAUGHTER] You don't get in the group. The yard hurts, right? That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open. Do you believe suggestions? We're open. Since you guys are middle aged, one erection. [LAUGHTER] Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. You love me. I need some girls to make me seem funny. Jacob Kingston grew up in an isolated polygamous sect. We were God's chosen Kingdom on Earth. He felt destined for greatness. So when a swaggering Armenian businessman had a pulse Jacob into an extraordinary world, he doesn't look back. For our reason, Lamborghini's private jets meeting the president of Turkey, Amish Al-Makfi, and this is one of the most shocking criminal conspiracies I've ever come across. When Jacob met Levant, this went to a billion-dollar fraud. But with two kings from entirely different worlds, just how long can their empire survive? The largest tax investigation in American history. You need to tell me what you know is somebody coming after me. Jacob told Levant, you're ruining my life. Listen to Kingdom of Fraud on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The French Open is one of the toughest tests in tennis. And I know firsthand because I competed there myself. I'm Renee Stubbs, and on the Renee Stubbs tennis podcast, I'm breaking down everything happening at Roland Gers. Every match, every upset, and what it really takes to win on clay. - Gentleman. - Gentleman. I mean, she went down to three to revocqueena, but I'm delighted. She's an outsider to win the French way. And she likes clay. Listen, Lena Revocqueena is arguably the best player in the world right now. And I actually went on any surface because if she's serving, well, good luck. Consider this your court side seat to the French Open. Listen to the Renee Stubbs tennis podcast on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of iHeartWomen Sports. And we're back. We're back, and we're talking about naturopaths. So the AMA guys and Dr. Lusty have a lot of teeth. And they do not take kindly to a bunch of weird ass, hippie types, taking patients and claiming to treat disease. The AMA declares war on Dr. Lust. And they manage to score some real hits. Pern article in the Journal of Applied Natural Medicine, Lust was arrested 14 times and find what's $500 because a dirty woman's sleuth of the medical trust, the American Medical Association, with an unspeakable name took an electric light bath in his institution. Now that's from a naturopathic publication, quoting an naturopath. I wanted to know more about this story, this dirty woman's sleuth of the medical trust. They call it the medical trust because trust busting is popular in this era, right? This is the Teddy Roosevelt era. When some of this is going or when a lot of these people's like political awakening is. So you know, that's why they're framing it that way. But I looked into this and it turns out that in 1921, Dr. Lust was arrested for committing criminal libel against Francis Benzerriky or Benzekri. That's the unspeakably named woman who worked as a detective for the AMA. Lust wrote that she was a disgrace to American womanhood and to the free soil of America on which she treads. I don't want to hear her story, man. Yeah, I hear her. Sounds like you've become a medical researcher. She's a woman. Wow. Well, because she's, they've got her trying to bust, trying to prove that Lust and his followers are representing themselves as doctors, right? Are illegally claiming to be treating diseases in a way that exceeds what they're, what they're free to do, right? Obviously, freedom of speech and shit, you have some room. We have a lot more room today, even, to sell like quack treatments. But you can't say certain things, right? Just to say, just to say that quote, a disgrace to American womanhood and to the free soil of America on which she treads hot, loving. Yeah. Great tattoo. Great t-shirt. Yes, every woman I've ever loved. Yeah, I want to see a film noir movie about this woman just like in her office smoking a cigarette and just like somebody comes in with a bag of their own blood and was like, I need help detective. Let's go. [LAUGHTER] Yeah. So these guys are all getting arrested as shitload for practicing medicine without a license, which is actually why Dr. Lust buys the rights to the word naturopathy. So his people will have something else. They can call themselves that's decidedly not a doctor and thus much more defensible. And that actually works really well. Do they have a seal? The way that like doctors have a seal is a shocker in the middle of the studio. They've got a logo. Yeah, they've got a logo. They've got paperwork that they're issuing. Because he's handing out licenses for naturopathic doctors, right? And once they start branding themselves that way, judges tend to agree. Even when they're still sentencing him, he was told by one judge, there's no evidence that you practice medicine or held yourself out as a physician, but we find you just the same. And the naturopathic point is like, look at the injustice of the system. And I see this as a judge being like, yeah, man, you technically figured out how not to say the words that would have definitely been illegal. But you were for sure representing yourself as a doctor and selling medicine. And I'm just going to find you anyway, because I know you're guilty, because you are. Because you were Dr. Lust, by the way. No matter how much flack the AMP, through his way, Naturopathy kept struggling forwards. From the 20s to the 30s, roughly half of US states passed laws that allowed naturopaths and other drugless healers to practice. Per quack watch, however, as modern medicine developed, many of these laws were repealed and all but a few male-order schools see stopperations. The doctor of naturopathy, indeed degree, was still available at several chiropractic colleges, but by 1957, the last of these colleges stopped issuing it. The National College of Naturopathic Medicine was founded in 1956 in Portland, Oregon, but until the mid-1970s had very few students. From 1968 to 1968, the average enrollment was eight, and the total number of graduates was 16. So again, there's a gap of like a generation from between the first and second wave of naturopaths. It makes, by the way, Portland, Oregon, where naturopathy, like the second wave, started, the seeds of its rebirth, just had an outbreak of measles traced to a safe way. And it's not because people can't afford vaccines. That's not, if you look at where the fucking viral outbreaks of cured diseases occur, and Portland, it tends to be more affluent neighborhoods who are choosing not to take vaccinations. You can always kind of Oregon to come up if it's like a weird medical thing. Some obscure, very tiny cult, bullshit, medicine stuff, weird home, ancient white supremacy, modern white supremacy. I love my adopted home. Oregon's like, hey, hey, how you doing? Hey, hey, hey, we're keeping it weird, man. Hey, you're crazy, aren't you? Welcome to Portland. Yeah, but our weather rocks. It is nice, great weather. So we hate this one. Yeah. The weather today is so good, you guys. It's awesome. It's like it's like a 65-year-old recent sunny. It's great. It's perfect. I'm wearing t-shirts. Some are fire season this year's going to be a nightmare though. Yeah. Anyway, that's an important point. Just if you're talking about naturopathy today, there are some differences because there's like a break of a generation between two fields. I think a lot of the same problems are still present. An issue of, you know, at least with this first wave, the very first naturopaths like Dr. Lust, I think really believed in what they were doing. A big part of the problem is a huge amount of like the second wave, Argers people who realize, oh, this movement, it has like connects me to a huge base of people I can sell nonsense to. And that's what they, and that's definitely a lot of the founders too. It's, it's, I, maybe I'm wrong about Lust being in this genuinely. Like, I honestly can't tell with him, but it seems like he's somebody who like really does think this all works. And that's not going to be the case with our actual subject of this week. Robert Spears. Yeah. Yeah. Who again is the guy we're talking about this week. Yeah. Or the very least like Lust believed it at the very, for some year, it's time it clearly, he clearly was a believer and who knows what happened later. But, you know, I mean, you're not going to go through all of this trouble necessarily if you don't have true belief behind that for some point. Right. Right. That's, that's, that's tends to be how I think about it too. And yeah. So Robert Vernon Spears, the guy we're actually talking about, was born on June 26th, 1894 in Casville, Missouri. See? I said we get back to Missouri and we sure as hell did. It's actually got to show up a few more times in these episodes. He does not, however, born under the name Robert Vernon Spears. This is one of our classic conman stories where this guy has like 30 or so serious names, by which I mean a name that he had like, he had took real efforts to falsify his own. He's got documents for these names. He's got dozens of them. This guy goes through so many fucking names. He was probably born Clyde Stringer or Clyde Porter. But even that, I have to put it probably on because Clyde/Robert's mother is a woman we just know of as Matilda. And she writes her kid name. She gives him a different name on different government documents because she's also a conwoman. And so from the beginning, she's like setting her son up for success, being like, I'm going to make sure nobody ever knows what your name is boy. Like this will be this will really benefit you down the line. There's not a clean paper trail for your life. That's not going to be SEO for 150 years. Yeah. Trust me, being able to become a new person by skipping counties is going to be much more beneficial than name recognition in the life you're going to lead my son. Well, and I will say if this kid was born Clyde, I have a little bit of respect from out of the game. Oh, born Clyde Clyde. Clyde to the bone. Yeah. Yeah. I love to hear. I'm excited to hear about a Clyde who identifies as a Robert. That's as great. Yeah. Well, it comes to later. Yeah. Alan Logan, author of the Spears Biography Self-styled just notes that Matilda, his mom was quote, a woman who also used many names and changed her own identity as circumstances dictated. She claimed her child was the son of a farmer named George Stringer from Northeast Oklahoma, which is where George was born and where he was raised for the first three years of his life. They got married when he was three after moving to Missouri. So they they they raised him for the first few years of his life in Oklahoma. Then they move up to Missouri and his mom uses the surname Smith on her marriage certificate to George. But she had been using the name Jenkins most of the time prior to that. So even her husband knows she's given two different options as to her maiden name. And her headstone would give yet another last name. This was a slippery woman and she would pass those traits on to her son. Her marriage to George did not last long. After a year, she was caught having an affair with some other dude. And so she takes Clyde in the night and abandons George who files for divorce. This is also going to leave a mark on Clyde. He's going to not have the best record of sticking around from marriages as we'll talk about. And he kind of inherits that from his mom. Yeah. I love this woman as like the Moriarty. She's amazing. The medical detective lady. I would really like to see their abs crossed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. These two characters were born for each other. So after leaving her husband behind, Matilda would tell her son that George had quote, "died of pneumonia." But Alan Logan writes, "It is not entirely clear who she was telling Clyde had died of pneumonia because we don't actually know who Clyde thought his father was." Right? Like we just have some old paperwork. So it's not entirely clear who Clyde's dad was or who she told him it was. But till to move through men at a rapid pace. Right. So hell yeah, Matilda. I mean, you got a little kid, so I got questions. But I like for Clyde. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. She's living up in your life. She's living up. A lot of men are having the male version of this life, which is much more common. So you have to stand a woman who's willing to break free from tradition. And really just be like a very masculine kind of scumbag. And honestly, I appreciate that. You know, it's nice to see the glass gutter is just as important as the glass rolling. I think the glass gutter is just as much as the glass ceiling wouldn't have the right to be scumbags too. Matilda, we salute you. You know who else is a scumbag? No, that's not good. They I like the roof over my head. Sure. Well, anyway, he's ads. Okay. Hey, it's us, the Jonas Brothers. And guess what? We have some big news. What's the news? News news. We created our own podcast called Hey Jonas. We invented a podcast. First people to do podcasts. Pretty wide range of podcast. So how do we how do we actually come up with the name Hey Jonas? Guys. And what we are thinking, I'm originally calling it one of the early names of our band before Jonas Brothers. This is how you guys remember going down. Yes. We could call in and say, Hey Jonas. And then I broke down on my little note pad, Hey Jonas, and offered it up as a potential title for the podcast. Listen to Hey Jonas on the iHeart Radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Everything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The yard. That's the name. The Harvard yard. But they're open. Do you have any suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle age, one erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the iHeart Radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. You love me. For our reason, Lamborghini's private jets meeting the president of Turkey. I'm Michelle McFeigh and this is one of the most shocking criminal conspiracies I've ever come across. - When Jacob Metlevon this went to a billion dollar fraud. - But with two kings from entirely different worlds, just how long can their empire survive? - The largest tax investigation in American history. - You need to tell me what you know. Is somebody coming after me? - Jacob told Levant, "You're ruining my life." - Listen to Kingdom of Fraud on the Y-Hart Radio app. - Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. - The French Open is one of the toughest tests in tennis. I'm Renee Stubbs and on the Renee Stubbs tennis podcast, I'm breaking down everything happening at Roland-Gurves. - Jen Chowin. - Jen Chowin, I mean, she went down in three to revocqueena, but I'm delighted. - And she likes clay. - Listen, Lena Revocqueena is arguably the best player in the world right now. - Consider this your court side seat to the French Open. Listen to the Renee Stubbs tennis podcast on the I-Hart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. - Presented by Capital One, founding partner of I Heart Women's Sports. And we're back. And we're talking about whether or not our advertisers are scumbags. Sophie says, "No, I say I don't know." Who is right? Probably Sophie. Legally, I think I have to say that. - You do. - So in 1899, Matilda, who is just going through this carousel of men and cities with her young son, in 1899, she married an elderly farmer. - I understand Matilda. - She's got a pretty cool. Not a great mom. She doesn't do a good job raising this kid, but pretty cool to read about. - I heard that in Trotten, and I appreciate that. - She marries a civil war veteran with lifelong injuries and a drinking problem to match. And he's got like a kid that she winds up, well, she winds up having a kid. I don't think it's his, I think she cheats on him and she has a kid with somebody else, and he gets pissed. So he bounces in 1902, and now she's a single mother of two. As a result, Clyde experiences deep poverty for basically his entire childhood. His mom is only able to keep them fed and sheltered by moving constantly from town to town and conning strangers to stay alive. I want to read a quote from the book's self-styled. As they moved from place to place, he saw Matilda retelling their story and remaking her identity. She used different names when it suited her. Clyde may have absorbed more from his mother than she realized, including the seeds of his own restless wanderlust and the ease of taking on aliases. This is just, he was like made in a lab to be a con man, basically. Matilda eventually marries again and the family settles in prior Oklahoma, merging the families of two single parents who now had six kids between them. This marriage doesn't work out either, and when things get bad enough that Clyde doesn't want to be there anymore, he realizes kind of by his adolescence, I can just leave. Like there's a train station in town, and he figures out when he's like 12 or 13, I just bounce on a train and go away for a couple of days or a couple of weeks. Like if I don't want to be around here and I can just visit new places and then I can come back whenever I'm ready, they'll take me back. And he loves the freedom of the road. And he starts in order to fund these trips, he doesn't want to work, so he starts committing petty crimes. Well, he's a way to pay his way, you know? I know a lot of friends who have gone through versions of this period in their life. Oh yeah, we've all got a couple of crusties in our past, right? Yeah, yeah. Now this behavior ultimately gets him in trouble when he's like a teenager and he gets sent away to a reformatory school for some time. However long he's at this reform school by age 16, he is out because he gets in trouble for passing bad checks and then using the ill-gotten money to buy nice clothes and stay in hotels. And he's like paying in check for hotel stays and for clothes for more than their worth, so he can get cash back, basically. That's a big part of the scam. It's a lot easier to do this stuff, although he still gets caught every single time, right? That said, this is a time in which the authorities are a lot likelier to look the other way at formal charges if people can work things out themselves. Basically, if you get caught, a cop is likely to just kind of like drop things, as long as you're both white people, right? If like two white dudes will agree, okay, he made it right. We don't need to go any further. Usually they'll just be like fine with it, right? That's a lot more common in this era. So he's like a raster testing the fence too. He's just like, okay, where can I, what is the move here? What can I get away with? And part of what he learns is he's really charming. Clyde is deeply charismatic. And so people are kind of like often willing to forgive him 'cause as soon as he gets caught every time he'll say, oh, yep, I did it. This is what I did. And he'll like apologize. And as a result, I think that in his youth kind of keeps him from catching serious charges until he turns 18. So Clyde, one of the things about Clyde is he fucking loves trains. Very relatable, right? Unfortunately, he loves trains because of the crime potential inherent in those trains. And he's been observing employees at the local railroad company MKT cash checks. And he also, one of his friends, I think works for MKT and his dad, his friends dad had worked there for a while. And so he like talks to that guy and applies him for information about how the checking, check writing process works for MKT employees at the MKT bank. And then he forges the name of his friend in a check payable to himself. And I'm gonna quote from Alan Logan's book here. His real audacity was in taking that forage to check to his friend's father, the MKT Railroad agent who cashed it for him. The check was only for $9, $233 today, but the thrill of it was priceless. The MKT Railroad was enraged by the outrageous stunt. They deployed special agent, poor him, to give chase, as Spears made his first known headlines described as the gilded youth. Clyde Stringer from prior Oklahoma. When they finally caught up with him in June 1913, the newspapers reported how special agent, poor him, had traced him from Kansas City to Oklahoma City and across the state, East and West. He was finally found at Murdoch, Kansas, hunting for work in a harvest field. First off, that's a long way to chase a guy for $9. - Yeah, yeah. - Really says a lot about how little there was to do back then. Like, you are going to the ends of the earth for $9? It's the principal, I'm sure, that's what that guy would say. - It's giving comic book the gilded youth. - The gilded youth? Yeah, no, that's, he doesn't have a comic book-y style nickname. - Very catch me if you can of him too. It heals, yeah, yeah, yeah. I have a picture in Leo Dio, like this is like a Leo Dio type guy. - Yeah, yeah. - Yeah, although again, Frank Avognail, the real guy behind catch me if you can, was an absolute fraud. Like the stuff in the movie didn't happen. He was mostly just creeping on ladies. - Well, you know, movies the biggest con of all, so. - That's right, that's right. It's the final level of cons. So Clyde does more than a year behind bars. He sentenced to prison and he's not released until August 31st, 1914. And as soon as he's free, he establishes a pattern of behavior that's gonna be with him for the next half century. He kind of consider going straight, maybe briefly toy with the idea, and then he would immediately commit a series of daring frauds and assorted small towns of cities across Oklahoma and the Middle States. And he's just going to like commit a bunch of fraud and then fucking get arrested periodically in a pattern. This becomes like the normal, like tempo of life for him for the next several years, right? Is he'll commit a bunch of petty fraud, mostly passing bad checks and stealing merchandise from like different retailers he worked with over the years, then he'll get caught and he'll get in some trouble. He'll either talk his way out or he'll do a little time and then he's back on the road. - I imagine he also has like a bunch of babies and baby mamas all over the country during this too. - It's baby. - Well, he does have some. He does have a couple of kids that he abandons. Like I think like three of the course of this story. He also has a lot of wives that he abandons as we'll talk about. So within three years, by 1917, he's a wanted man again. So when he moved to Colling's Worth, Oklahoma, he changed his last name from Stringer to Porter and figured that'll be good enough. Nobody's gonna guess that Clyde Stringer's Clyde Porter. That's not gonna, that's impossible for people to, to suck out. And then he passes another series of bad checks and he has to steal a car to flee town. Clyde drove the car to a train station and left it parked outside with a note being like, "Here's who this car belongs to. I'm sorry I had to take it. This is where you should return it to." So the cops ultimately raid Clyde's home and they find a bunch of stolen property and a huge number of forged checks. These were of such high quality that businesses started posting copies of Clyde's bad checks to warn their employees about what to look for when trying to spot bad checks, right? That like these are the archetypal bad checks. So you should familiarize yourself with them. - Wow. - Clyde, he goes on the run for a few more months, but as is always the case, he can't avoid the temptation to visit his family and friends and he gets caught in Toledo operating under yet another fake name and he's visiting a sister and that fake name is Charles Howard. He shows up in court dressed per the Tulsa Daily World to the Nines in a dark suit white turned down collar and multicolored silk tie. It was his second attempt to win a reputation in the bad check line. So they're always kind of, he's handsome and he's well dressed and the newspapers always write about that and it starts to, there's this big, it's gonna be even bigger in the thirties. This like gentleman bandit archetype. That's huge in American pop culture and because Clyde is handsome and he's mostly robbing banks, and he's not doing it violently. A lot of people kind of like him. Like the news is interested in any Clyde crime story because he's this really likable criminal figure. People want to hear about. - When does Bonnie and Clyde happen? 'Cause that's a different Clyde that rob banks. - That's gonna be in the 30s, totally different Clyde. - That's later. - This Clyde's going by Robert by then. That's the spot you gotta get out of the Clyde business by the time there's that other Clyde. - Yeah, exactly. - He's just like a heck. And I think there's a strategy here. I think he knew he was gonna get caught when he stole that card and get away. And I think the note he leaves is part of his image campaign basically that like if I leave a note in there telling him how to return it to its owner, that'll go better for me when I ultimately wind up in front of a judge. And it does work for him. He winds up in front of a judge in his biography of Clyde Logan notes, Alan Logan notes that most of Clyde's victims in this period didn't press charges. And many who did still described him as basically a good guy. Like they were like, well, I think he's a really good guy. He just fucked up here. And I'm still pressing charges. In keeping with tradition, these recent charges are ultimately dropped, which Logan claims is due to a technicality. I'm not sure if that's accurate. Vanishing act, which is another book about Robert Spears/Clyde. The author of that Jerry Jamison suggests something different. Quote, "The judge let Charles Howard off easy, citing the thoughtful note he had left in the stolen car." This time, however, he suggested the young man join other American patriots fighting and you're up during the Great War. So basically Clyde gets off, but on the condition that he joined the army and go fight in World War I, right? That's kind of what happens here is this judge is like, you're a good young man. What if you just go into the trenches for a little while? How does that sound to you? - Let's see how your stationery gets you out of this one, buddy. - Yeah, yeah. I think he's trying to be nice. Not traditionally a nice thing to do, make someone go to World War I. But Clyde does join. He signs up, he joins the army, and he uses a fake name to join the army. And this name he picks, I think because he's like, this gives me a chance to establish the name I'm gonna be known by for the rest of my life. So when he's joining the army, he goes by the name Robert Vernon Spears, which is absolutely a fake name, but that's most of his life. He's gonna keep going by Robert Vernon Spears. As soon as he signed up, just a few days before he reported for duty, Spears befriended another recruit, C.S. Gilbert, and the two went partying before handing their lives over to the army. True to form, Spears told his new friend, "Hey, this is crazy, but I'm like broke right now. Is there any chance you could like front me some money so we could like party? I'll totally get you back." And Gilbert's like, "Of course, man, we're gonna be fighting in the trenches together. I got like two grand in my pocket. I'll take care of us." And the two spend like two days partying and drinking and going to strip clubs. And at the end of it, when they're like sleeping in their hotel at night, Robert Spears steals his friend's cash and runs like fuck, just as far as he can get before the cops catch him, which they do immediately. Spears confesses and he hands over the money, but Gilbert refuses to press charges. And in fact, he begs the cops to release his friend, saying, "I guess I like the guy, and besides, I'll be serving in the trenches with him." Well, it's like if he got what to present, you wouldn't. But Gilbert seems to be a very nice dude. Yeah. Or Gilbert, you need a code of meeting, buddy. You deserve a better friend, man. This guy is not your friend. There's like a local news story at the time with the title Land Freeze, the one who robbed him. It's very cute, very fucking 1917. I don't know much about what Spears actually did with his time in World War I, because he mostly lies about it later, right? We get very little to tell about what his actual service is. It looks like he probably spent the last year of the war as an aviator sergeant in the 314th Aerosquadrin, which was attached to the precursor of the British RAF. There's no evidence that he was a fighter pilot, but he pretends to have been a fighter pilot as soon as he gets back. If you're gonna be a hot man, what better job than fighter pilot? Right? You look at a lion, say, you fought in the trenches, like a slub, you wanna be a pilot, baby. That's the sexy job, man. Uh-huh. They got the aviators. Ain't nobody else got the sunglasses. That's a mark of how fucking bullshit our era is. Like even if you get trapped in one of like these cool, like one of our modern 21st century wars, like the cool new technology is so lame to be the guy working with. Like if, if in 1917 you're like, yeah, I'm a fighter pilot in Europe. That's like cool as hell. In like 2026, if you're like, yeah, I'm a drone pilot. It's like, get away from me, bro, that's gross. Like, you can't see the camera. Please video games and kill me. Get out of here. I don't want you to be in the same room as me. That's sick. Yeah. Like not even cool enough to be a fighter. It's a bummer. I guess there's that Kuwaiti fighter pilot who took out two of our 15s on accident. That guy is sitting pretty. He's the only guy with an air to air kill in a long time. We do not do much of that anymore. Yeah. She's. Anyway. Yeah. So by this point in time, Spears, he goes over. He probably has pretty pedestrian service and he comes back lying that he'd served as a first lieutenant and he'd served all these harrowing duels in the skies above Western Europe until he was finally shot down and wounded. He returns to St. Louis after the war and he starts telling the story to any woman who will listen, right? Like that's, of course. Of course. Yeah. Maybe had a fake cane for a while and stuff too. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You got to doctor house that shit. It works great. Almost as good as an eyepatch. I can only imagine this man like dating profile. Oh, it's a nightmare. Oh, my God. Not a word of it true. He's got his fake credit score on there. Oh, yeah. Not real. Oh, my gosh. He's got some like Photoshop photos of him. Oh, it's incredible. It's the best. Trust no man. Wow. Yeah. Number one, Chad. So he ultimately wins the attention and then the hand in marriage of a woman named Aura Clayton. Ron, girl. This is the start of what's going to be. No, don't worry, Sophie. She's not going to need to. This is going to be the start of a regular con act for Spears, which is he would entrance a young woman. He would ask for her hand in marriage. They would get married. And then in the night, he would steal everything in her house that wasn't nailed down and run like fuck for a new town and start a whole new life. What a f**k loser. What a f**k. A new loser. What a f**k. A new lady. What a f**k. A new lady. What a f**k. A new woman. What a f**k. A new woman. What a f**k. And then you have fingers on at least one hand. It might be like two or three hands worth of fake marriages. He does it a lot. And he's just moving from city to state. How far is he going? Just down to town. He's not always even leaving the county. Sophie, it was a different time. If you marry an oldie, you can live a whole new life. Prototypical f**k. Oh, yeah. It is so, it's fucked up, but it's pretty funny. So days after marrying an abandoned anora, he asks Dorothy Hayes for her hand in marriage. And then he abandons her. It takes all of her sh**t and drives out west. He just keeps doing this. He spends the early 20s conning a series of victims, several of whom become his wives. He does this in Seattle. He moves down to Portland, Oregon. And then through California, Nevada, Idaho, and ultimately winds up in Denver, Colorado. Like he is just leaving. He's leaving a trail of heartbroken women who are also broke because he took all their money wherever he goes. He's the tender swindler. Yeah, tender swindler. But things, he kind of gets a reverse thrown at him when he in Denver. He meets maybe his only real match, which is a young lady named Laura Myers. And she seems perfect for him. She's beautiful. She's got a rich family that he can fleece for all their worth. So they get hitched and they book an expensive vacation. And Spears is like heading up stairs to get their luggage from the hotel that they'd been staying in for the last couple of weeks. And Laura flips the script on him. And by the time he comes downstairs with their luggage, she's stolen all of his money and run for the hills. This is an hour after they get married. Like he gets scared about his fair play, motherfucker. Lauren got your number. Oh man, he's probably shitin' bouts. Laura? Myers, feminist icon. Yeah, Laura Myers, feminist icon. Oh, the Laura Myers. Wow. And that's the moment he actually fell in love. Yeah, that's the moment. The first time in his life. It is beautiful. You love to see the story into that way. Well, it middles that way. We haven't even gotten to him becoming a fucking naturopath yet. There's a lot more left of the Robert Spears story. But not today, because we're at about an hour. So yeah, I think Brandy, you want to go out with any plugs here? Yeah. I have a new album. It's called Milk Job. I'm a stand-up comedian. It's out on my record label that I started called Burn This Records that is trying to bring more equity into the comedy space for DIY comedians all over the United States and world. A big thing that you could do to help our label out is if you went to youtube.com/burnthisrecords and followed our label so I can monetize video, that would be a huge, huge, huge help. I would really appreciate it. My album is going to be a special that comes out in April. So you'll be able to see it there as well too. And then I'm on Vans Warped War also. I'm along doing comedy. So yeah, come say hi. Awesome. All right, everybody. Well, that's going to be all of it for all of us for it today at Behind the Bastards, a podcast that you just listen to. Why not listen to another one? Why not on all? of your different devices. Just constantly have episodes of this show playing on random loops. You don't even have to listen to it. Just always be playing our episodes. You know, break into your friends' houses. Do that with their electronics too. You know, that's, that's, it's a, it's a fun way to do us a solid that will have no consequences for anybody. Breaking and entering is fine if you do it for a good cause. That's the, uh, our official behind-the-bastard stance. No, it is not. Goodbye. Okay, well, we're done. So if you're, I disagree on this. Bye. Hey guys, it's us, the Jonas Brothers, I'm Joe. I'm Kevin. And I'm Nick. And guess what? We, we just contributed to, uh, people to do podcasts. We get to ask other people questions because we're sick and tired of being asked questions. Well, sick and tired is a strong way to put it, but you know, tired and sick, tired and sick. Listen to Hey Jonas on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There's a more singer in the group. The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, uh, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group, uh, the yard. That's the name. You have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle-aged, uh, one erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. You're seeking to try to understand the forensic science behind these cases that we hear about in the news. Body bags is where you need to turn. There's no fluff. Listen to body bags with Joseph Scott Morian on America's number one podcast network. iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search body bags with Joseph Scott Morian and start listening. Why are we also obsessed with romance? On the Radio 831 podcast, join us, Sanjana Basker and Tyler McCall as we unpack all the trending tropes, fuzzy adaptations, book talk drama, and celebrity love stories with hot takes and sharp guests. 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