Gary Young, a self-proclaimed "fake doctor" who drowned his own baby and operated an unlicensed clinic in Spokane, founded Young Living Essential Oils in 1993 with wife Mary. Exploiting the 1994 DSHEA Act passed by Senator Orin Hatch, the company marketed unproven cures for cancer while Young pursued erratic vanity projects like a $250 million theme park. Ultimately, the narrative exposes how regulatory loopholes enabled a con artist to profit from dangerous medical fraud and deceptive health claims. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:02:20
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When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
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I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budginista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never, ever taught.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
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On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversation about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
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The entire season two is now available to bench, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
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I'm Robert Evans.
This is Behind the Bastards, the show where every week I try a new introduction, and Sophie tells me it does not work out.
This is also the show where we talk about the very worst people in all of history.
And with me today is Billy Wayne Davis, comedian.
That's...
I see why you wanted more.
I get it.
I get it.
We usually introduce a show or something.
Yes, I get it.
They're like, do you want some more?
I was just say comedian, but now I fucked up your thing.
You can plug anything you want.
Just random process.
Just see me live.
How about that?
See Billy Wayne Davis live.
Yeah, bwdtour.com.
BWDTour.com.
See, there we go.
Now that's a plug.
There we go.
That's a plug.
Damn.
Solid.
See why I'm probably not more famous than I am.
Well, maybe the story of the guy we're about to talk about today will teach you how to self-promote because we are speaking today about one of the great all-time self-promoters.
A man who would not give up on his dream of being a doctor without ever getting any sort of training in how to do medicine.
Oh, he just wanted respect.
No, he just really wanted to try out stuff on people's bodies.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
We're talking about Gary Young.
You ever heard of Gary Young?
No, I'm excited about this.
No, I haven't.
You ever heard of Young Living Essential Oils?
I've heard of essential oils because I live in Los Angeles.
Right, right.
And the reason you've heard of essential oils, the reason they're like a big thing in our culture in this country is Gary Young.
He's generally considered to be the father of essential oils.
You know, they obviously go back thousands of years, but he's a good idea.
Did he come up with that too?
Huh?
Was that his line?
Yeah.
But it's accurate, too.
Like, he's a scammer, but he did start the first big scam essential oil company that they have all descended from.
Like, he turned it into a trend.
So he is the father.
Okay.
Yeah.
That's one of the few things he's like, I'll be damned.
I am.
Yeah.
I can say this.
I am.
I am.
He's not the father of...
Well, we'll talk about what happened to his baby in a little bit.
On June 19th, 2018, the Christian Broadcasting Network published an obituary for a dude most people listening to this have not heard of until now, Donald Gary Young.
Here's how the CBN described his life.
Quote, Young spent 35 years studying the benefits and perfecting the extraction of essential oils while building a billion-dollar global business designed to share what he deemed the gift of essential oils with millions of people.
Sharing his gift.
Sharing his gift.
That's how you get to be a billionaire.
You do.
By sharing your gift for a nominal fee.
Yes, it's that part.
I always forget the last part.
I'm like, here's my gift.
And often by like sharing access for people to be able to sell your gift.
Or really what it is is about, it's about letting people sell access to selling your gift to other people.
Yes.
Because that's where the real money is.
He's the father of that.
Yeah, but for essential oils.
You know, that scam's been going on longer than him.
But he was like, what if we apply that to things that smell nice?
That's not dumb.
I'm not mad at him.
He's not a dumb guy.
He did recognize a market.
He did recognize a market.
That was his true talent.
And as you will find out, his talent was not medicine.
The obituary described Young as a modern pioneer, part inventor and part historian.
In the June episode of The Essential Edge, the magazine for Gary's company, Young Living, his wife wrote, quote, God was his foundation and his word was his bond.
To let anyone down was to disappoint God.
And he wasn't about to do that.
He called the Bible his owner's manual.
What does he mean by owner's manual?
That God owns him.
Yeah, is that what that means?
Or is it like this?
I'm God and this is my owner's manual.
Oh.
You know, actually, considering the story we're about to tell, that seems like a little more fitting to the actual life Gary Young lived.
But I'm going to guess the literal meaning is that, like, you know, I'm a servant of God and this is the book that tells me what he wants me to do.
Well, that's what he's saying, but he's in my head.
He's like, I'm the dude.
I'm the dude.
And this book tells me how to be.
Yeah, he definitely believed he was the dude.
Now, we don't know a tremendous amount about Gary Young's early life.
I picked him for this episode because multiple fans on Twitter and Reddit suggested him.
They all linked to lurid Reddit threads and personal blogs that alleged a string of fucked up crimes by Gary Young.
I was intrigued, but there was a problem.
Most of the evidence about Mr. Young was held in thoroughly disreputable corners of the internet.
So I had to do a lot of weird digging on this guy to figure out exactly what I could back up and what I couldn't.
And I'm stating that up front because it was a pain in the ass, and I hope everybody appreciates it.
Yeah.
It was frustrating.
There was a lot of cool details I couldn't report on because it's like I couldn't find any backup for that.
To this day.
To this day.
I just couldn't find any evidence of.
Of like, these are stories, but no one knows if it's true.
Exactly.
There's a lot of that.
Like the stuff I could verify is fucking crazy.
But like, there's other stuff that I would love to be able to talk about that we just can't get into.
That's kind of impressive.
Yeah.
Like to be alive and die in 2018 and like most of your past not be available.
Yeah.
Some of it may just be that I don't think the state of Washington has done a bang-up job digitizing all of their records from the 80s.
But yeah, we'll talk about that a little bit later.
So Gary was born in 1949 in Idaho.
He grew up dirt poor.
Literally, his cabin had a dirt floor and no running water or electricity.
He and his parents and his five siblings lived in a 30 by 30 foot cabin.
Five?
Five.
Okay.
Yeah.
I'm guessing it was a...
Build a mental image here.
Yes.
As a young adult, Gary bought a small farm in Spokane and started working the land there.
In his early 20s, he was doing some logging when a tree fell on top of him.
It shattered his skull, ruptured his spinal cord, and broke 19 bones.
He fell into a coma, like you do.
And when he woke up after a couple of days, the doctors were like, you're never going to walk again, brah.
So next, Gary did what a lot of people would probably do in his position, and he tried to kill himself twice.
He failed.
So next, he did the sort of thing nobody does and decided to go on a fast and consume nothing but water and lemon juice for a hundred or 243 days.
Why 243?
That's just how long it took until he started to feel his toes again.
No shit.
So if you, dear listener, have been paralyzed from, I don't even know if he ever had an accident.
This is just the story he tells.
There's no outside verification of this.
But this is the story that Gary Young tells about his life.
Okay.
Okay.
That makes more sense.
That makes way more sense.
Me believing everything you were saying just then, where I was like, what the fuck?
I do know.
I know a lot of, like I said, we both did grow up in the South.
I'm sure you do too.
Know a lot of people who had farming accidents, and mostly they just get addicted to Oxy.
Yeah, now.
Now, back then, it was just like, just that old, it was just cigarettes and beer.
Yeah, cigarettes and beer.
Never ran into anyone who drank nothing but water and lemon juice and regained feeling in their toes.
It does sound like it.
Also, why I believed it.
I was like, it's the fucking Northwest.
Yeah, yeah.
Then they're like, yeah, well, if you eat this plant for 48 days, you grow a new nose.
That is a very Washington thing to hear.
Now, according to Gary Young's incredibly humble biography, D. Gary Young, the world leader in essential oils, quote, that he walks today is a miracle that defies his medical prognosis.
Now, the book, D. Gary Young, the world leader in essential oils, was written by his wife and published by the company he founded.
This is what we in the journalism biz call a conflict of interest.
Tragically, heartbreakingly, I was not able to find a copy of this book on Kindle or as an e-book.
Can I interrupt real quick?
Absolutely.
I just want to say, I don't feel like the focus should have been on him walking as much as what happened inside that shattered skull.
Shouldn't that be what we're watching?
He's like, how you doing, though?
I'm really less concerned about your toes than what's going on up there.
Or how do you see everything?
What has that convinced you of, Gary?
Yeah.
How motivated are you right now about anything?
I feel like the shattered skull and deciding not to consume anything but water and lemon juice for 243 days.
I feel like there's a straight line between those two.
Where he's like, I figured out a solution.
Hold on, we should listen to what he thinks the solution is.
Yeah, maybe he shouldn't be making decisions for a little while.
You know, his brain got bigger, but his skull got bigger, too.
So now he can walk.
Now, yeah, I haven't been able to find copies of this book that I could access.
There are some copies on eBay for like 60 bucks, so fuck that.
I did find a mom MLM saleswoman's blog review of the book, and that review is quite the treasure, but we'll get to it later.
I also found a summary on Goodreads that provided some context.
I'm going to read a selection from that.
Quote, as the pages unfold, you will be amazed to read about the devastation he felt when told he would be confined to a wheelchair for life, and then how with sheer determination, he defied all medical prognosis and 13 years later ran in a half marathon, finishing 62nd out of 960 participants.
During this crucial time, he was introduced to essential oils, which changed his life forever.
Working on the farm with his family, growing and cultivating crops for survival, enabled him to make an easy and exciting transition to growing and cultivating aromatic crops.
His desire to learn mechanics and the art of distillation have taken him all over the world and have driven him to develop and expand his farms and eventually build the largest privately owned distilleries of aromatic crops around the world.
That is the company line on Gary Young.
Sounds impressive.
Sounds impressive.
So, you want to hear about how he drowned his baby in a hot tub?
I mean, yeah.
Kind of.
So, in the early 1980s, Gary Young moved to Spokane, Washington, as I stated, and started operating a small and unregulated medical practice in addition to his farm.
Now, his medical practice was focused on aiding people in delivering their babies.
Gary had no training in medicine or obstetrics.
He was not a midwife either and had not gone through any of the grueling apprenticeships that those people go through.
What he did have was a bold dream of delivering infant human beings into hot tubs and then holding them underwater for extended periods of time, trusting that the umbilical cord would deliver them oxygen.
This was in order to gain them vague and unclear health benefits.
So that you don't think that's a good idea?
I just believe that we're going to go back to the crux of the problem is when the tree fell on his head, you guys.
Yeah, I believe the head injury.
I think something happened.
I don't know that I believe he broke his legs, but I believe the head injury.
I do think it fell on his head.
He's like, no, hot tubs.
Hot tubs.
I got it.
The problem with doctor.
The problem with modern medicine is we don't drown the babies enough.
Well, like, we both grew up around farms.
Like, my grandpa had a farm down the street, so I grew up on a farm more or less.
And there's like a community with farms.
Absolutely.
So there had to be like some other farmers when he was like, I'm a doctor now.
Everybody was like, no, I don't think you're a doc.
I don't think this is going to end well.
Hey, old tree head said he's a doctor.
Yeah, I'm going to guess the people who he was convincing that he was a doctor were like people in the city.
Yeah.
They were like kind of the woo-woo types in Spokane rather than.
Yes, all the farmers are like, they're going to let that dude deliver.
No, no, sir.
Okay.
I'd like to read from an October 17th, 1982, Spokane Spokesman Review article titled, Babies, Homestyle Birthing Continues to Generate Controversy Here.
Quote, It's because he's killing them.
Yeah.
Four infant deaths over the past year have infuriated some Spokane doctors and raised questions about the wisdom of homestyle birthing.
Why forsake the safety of hospitals for a homey atmosphere?
Is it prudent to do so?
If it isn't, is there any way to stop people from having babies at home?
Or is there a place for medical safeguards and homespun aesthetics to meet midway?
One of the births in question occurred in a Spokane Valley hot tub.
Another took place in a South Hill home.
The most recent was the most unusual.
Gary and Donna Young's daughter was born September 4th in a hot tub at their health club in the Spokane Valley.
They used a Russian method designed to make birth less traumatic by letting infants swim from the mother's amniotic fluid into a warm, saline solution before servicing into the world.
While underwater, oxygen is supplied through the umbilical cord, but the cord's oxygen flow evidently stopped before the young's newborn surface.
The infant died of oxygen deprivation.
Spokesman County Coroner Lois Shanks said, The young baby was born normal and healthy and would have breathed through a hospital delivery, according to Shanks and others.
When contacted by phone last week, Gary Young's only comment was, There are more damn hazards in the hospital than out of the hospital, and there are enough damn statistics to prove it.
So, Gary Young.
So, I do like that it took four deaths for there to be a lot of people.
Well, back then, back then, like even doctors are like, Listen, some of them are going to die.
That's just how it is.
But this seems like more than normal.
This seems like a lot of babies are dying in Spokane.
You're going to lose a baby or two.
That's just part of the business.
But you can't.
Hot tubs are for fucking.
Not for hot tubs are for fucking, for smoking cigars and watching the sunset, for cocaine.
Not for babies.
Not for having a baby.
Not for having a baby.
That's a hard line for me.
You have that baby before prom, and then you go to the after part.
Exactly.
Now, that article sounds pretty bad, but additional reading into the subject of Gary Young's dead baby makes it seem even worse because he didn't just try to do some weird Rutchen birthing ritual that got fucked up due to like an oxygen flow defect in the umbilical cord that occurred over a few seconds.
Gary Young kept his newborn infant child submerged in a hot tub for nearly an hour because he was just that sure that his alternative birthing nonsense was the way to go.
An hour.
Was there somebody else there going like, I don't, can we?
And he's like, hold on.
I think it was just him and his wife.
Now, Gary Young didn't go to prison after this for reasons which baffle and infuriate me.
He was arrested the next year, though, for practicing medicine without a license.
The next year.
The next year.
He kept right on being a doctor, a fake doctor.
Yeah.
He was like, I think for a lot of men, getting your own baby killed, you would reevaluate a number of things about your life.
I think so.
I think if I killed my own baby, even if like it was a total accident, I would reevaluate most of my life.
Maybe it's 58 minutes and not 60.
It's 58 minutes.
That's where I was 45.
Yeah.
Start with 20.
Start the first baby at 20.
Pull it out.
Okay.
Put it back in.
You're doing good?
Get like a consent check from the baby?
Just do the science.
Pull it out.
Put it back in.
Do you say start with 10 minutes for the first baby, 20 for the second?
By the time you get up to five or six, maybe try an hour.
But if we're being honest, he doesn't have the patience for the scientific method.
No, or he would have become a real doctor.
He would have done it.
So he's just like, no, just do it.
Just do it.
I think this will work.
If it doesn't, I know how to make another one.
It's Russian.
If there's one country that knows how to keep babies alive, it's Russia.
Yeah, there's like one Russian dude in town.
He's like, that's not.
No.
We have hostilities.
Not our thing.
No.
Now, so Young was arrested the next year, according to the New Yorker.
Quote, Young said in the presence of undercover detectives that he could detect cancer with a blood test.
He was arrested for practicing medicine without a license, according to the spokesman, sports, Spokane Spokesman Review, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge.
Next, Gary Young did what all good American accidental baby murderers slash quack medical practitioners do.
He moved to Mexico and started operating an unlicensed clinic to treat cancer patients with a drug called latril.
According to Dr. Eva F. Briggs, a Fulton New York family medicine doctor with 35 years of experience, quote, litril is a useless and dangerous drug that can harm or kill people because it forms cyanide in the body.
It is illegal and it's something which Young should be ashamed rather than proud.
Jesus.
Yeah.
I think.
Kills his baby, gets arrested for practicing medicine without a license, moves to Mexico and starts giving people cyanide for their cancer.
The Quack Doctor Scandal00:04:11
But they didn't send him to jail.
They're like, hey, stop.
And he was like, no.
No.
I'm going to go do it somewhere else.
I'm going to go do it somewhere else.
So Dr. Briggs wrote the first credible article I could find on Gary Young's life.
She evaluated some of the writings from his company and his wife about his life and provided good medical context about exactly why he's a scammer.
After Young's Latril business tapered off, probably because it's poison.
Because he kept killing people.
Probably because more people die.
We don't have a body count on that one, but I guess it ain't zero.
Not everybody's good at what they do.
Like, there's a learning curve with being a doctor, you know.
You got to learn by doing.
Just, it's, I'm apprenticing right now.
I'm an apprentice doctor to myself.
God damn.
Yeah.
I like that he just keeps going.
He really, he's a confident man.
What years are this, though?
This is like 1983, 84 right now.
I feel like up until like 20 years ago, you could get away with a lot more.
You really could.
The 80s were a golden age to just have confidence and nothing else.
It was as a stand-up when I started doing stand-up was like the beginning of my space.
So I saw this old guard of comedian, not like well-known comedian, but like road comedian that had been doing it in the 80s and 90s.
They lived a certain terrible lifestyle and awful people.
And then the internet happened and it was like, they all disappeared because people were like, hey, you're under arrest now.
It was fascinating to watch.
You hear him talk and you're like, you know, that's not how the world works anymore.
So that's so fascinating.
That's so recent he's doing this.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So after Young's latrial business tapered off, he moved to California and opened another cancer clinic.
He started claiming he was an MD again at this point.
He was not, and I found another article about Young on the Skeptical Inquirer written by William London, a professor of public health at Cal State.
He noted, quote, according to his personal achievements page on his website in 2017, D. Gary Young studied various science subjects and the historical significance of essential oils in various countries and universities.
The page indicated that he attended Bernadian University between 1982 and 85, entered a doctorate in naturopathy.
What are you going to call it?
Burnadium?
Bernadian?
Well, Bernadian University is a male-order diploma mill, which has never been authorized to operate or to grant degrees.
So that's where he got his.
He did get a fake degree this time.
That's a step back.
He ordered it.
He's like, I'm tired of people calling me out on them as bullshit.
I want to have a piece of paper.
Feels like a technicality.
Yeah.
Now, in 1986, while still operating in California, Dr. Not a Doctor, Gary Young, opened another clinic in Baja, Mexico, the Rosarita Beach Clinic.
Here's how the Spokane Chronicle covered one of their native sons expanding his business.
Quote, title is, Does he relieve people of pain or of their wallets?
It's the second one.
Should Donald Gary Young be half the healer?
He claims there is someday maybe a market for little plastic statues of the guy to stick on automobile dashboards.
That's exactly what happened to the last great physician.
According to Young, founder of the Rosarita Beach Clinic in Tijuana, Mexico, his blood crystallization test and orthomolecular cell therapy are the long-awaited remedies for most pains.
He claims $6,000 will bring a cancer patient into remission.
A cure can be affected for $10,000.
He claims a 90% cure rate for lupus and says only 63 have died out of the thousand patients treated in the last four years.
If you know my history, that's pretty good.
That's pretty good.
I'm doing used to be a 1-1.
It used to be real bad, you guys.
Now, if he was really, if these people were coming to him with actual diseases, 63 out of 1,000 wouldn't be a bad death rate.
But there's some reason not to believe that any of those thousand people had anything wrong with them.
And he might just have killed 63 healthy people.
He's killed some idiots.
Yeah.
See, Gary Young and his clinic catered to Americans, mostly wealthier people who were into alternative medicine and lived in Southern California.
Now I feel no empathy.
No, I'm fine with them dying.
Well, now that our empathy has been boiled out, it's time for ads.
Yay!
Not my smoothest transition.
Addiction To Acceleration00:04:06
That post pretty good.
Thank you.
I thrive on praise.
Products!
Services.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey, what did it?
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
They scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon, and I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged you a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Musicians Play Together00:02:26
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
Hey!
You know what I'm about to pop into?
We're looking for, we've been trying to get Dorito sponsorships for a while now.
And, you know, I think I'm just giving up the ghost.
You know, there's a couple of reasons for that.
I love the flavor of Doritos.
I hate the multiple civil wars that they've helped back in order to lower food prices to make cheaper chips.
So what?
Wow, I'm not a great fan of that.
Yeah.
Maybe that's a little bit extreme.
You know, I think there's a lot of room in the world to enjoy chips that are made by people that, you know, push the government to institute regime change in the global south and order to, but, you know, delicious.
But I think I found a new snack.
But we got to make profits.
We do still have to make profits.
Every day.
And so if the Doritos people come back in, I will take back everything that I've said and pretend that they didn't do what they did in Latin America.
But up until that point, I think I have a new, I think I have a new brand of chip that I want to plug because I just had these yesterday.
I got them at 365, which is one of the whole food stores.
They're lesser evil is the brand, which is pretty our brand for behind the bastards.
I don't trust it immediately.
You're not going to lie.
I'm just going to ask.
I'm going to put all my credibility on the line as the host of this show that I've gained.
They're called grain-free paleo puffs, and they're vegan, so there's no cheese in them, but they taste exactly like an aged cheddar.
I don't know.
They're really fucking good.
Like they're legitimately some of the.
Is there the one in Silverlake?
Because that's on my way home.
No, Silver Lake is too.
I mean, I assume they have them, too.
I live a little bit further west.
Yeah, that is.
Okay.
But they're fucking delicious because they've got like they're puff-based, so you expect kind of like a Cheetos puff, but they're as crunchy as crunchy Cheetos.
So they're like a little like nugget of crunchy, cheesy goodness.
They're so fucking tasty.
Can I ask a follow-up question?
Yes, absolutely.
Sativa or Indica?
I don't smoke anymore, but when I did, I just chain-smoked marijuana and never...
Just whatever.
Yeah, just whatever.
Yeah.
Grain-Free Paleo Puffs00:14:56
No, it is a...
It's fun.
Sophie is walking around with a laptop showing it to our audio guy, Dan.
It's a terrible logo.
I'm sorry.
Don't attack the logo.
They might give us money.
It's like a bear was a boner.
I think it's a good logo.
You wouldn't want a bear to talk about it.
A bear with an erection doesn't make you think of chips.
Because when I think of the crunchy goodness of a delightful happy time snack, I think of a bear with a massive heart on.
Yeah, that cheesy bear dick.
That's what everybody says about bear dicks.
It's cheesier than you think they're going to be.
You're hurting our chances of a sponsorship, Sophie.
This is off the rails.
I'm trying to do a nice ad plug for the people at Lesser Evil.
Backdoor your way into a Doritos ad.
Dorito's like, here's money.
Keep telling us.
This is a disaster.
Speaking of disasters, Gary Young had a clinic in Rosarita Beach.
Well, it was in Tijuana, but it was called the Rosarita Beach Clinic.
Tijuana and Rosarita are separate towns.
Rosarita is a lovely place.
You can buy tram it all there.
It's great.
So he has this clinic, and he bragged that only 63 out of 1,000 of his cancer and lupus patients died, which would be a pretty good rate of success if any of those people were actually sick.
See, the reason that he says that they had cancer and lupus is because he performed blood tests on them, and those blood tests came back positive for cancer or whatever it was he was treating them for.
Now, the LA Times tasked John Hearst, a great journalist, with investigating the clinic in 1987.
What Hearst and his team did next is one of my favorite stories in all of journalism.
So Hearst sent away for a blood testing kit from the clinic.
He's glowing right now.
I'm so excited to see this.
His whole demeanor changed as soon as he got to this paragraph.
I just have to say it was very, it was like, you could see it happen.
It was a frustrating time in the history of journalism.
No, I understand it.
But I love to run into stories like this that just remind you of how powerful the medium can be.
And this is a great one.
So you didn't have to go to Tijuana, to the clinic itself, to get your blood tested.
You could send away for a kit.
And so Hearst did that.
He sent for a blood testing kit from the clinic, and Gary Young sent him a kit, which included several sharp pins and two glass slides.
The patient was supposed to puncture their own finger and basically make blood slides out of it.
And then put it in the mail?
Yeah, and then mail it back.
Gotcha.
Sounds scientific, right?
Yep.
That's super scientific.
Checks out.
So, Hearst and his colleagues went ahead with the process.
Quote.
That's a fun conversation.
Just fucking do it.
All right.
Yeah, yeah.
A Times reporter prepared two slides using blood from a healthy seven-year-old 20-pound tabby cat named Boomer that belongs to Glendale veterinarian Ahmed Kalik.
The slides were presented at the clinic by the reporter who identified himself as a prospective client.
Sharon Reynolds, a health educator at the clinic who also casts horoscopes for patients at $50 each, examined the slides under a microscope that projects an image on a television monitor.
She said she found evidence of aggressive cancer in the cell as well as liver problems.
The cancer, she said, had been in the reporter's system for four or five years.
Oh, shit.
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
You must have suspected something, she said, gazing up with sorrowful eyes.
I did.
I definitely suspected something.
I did.
Next, the reporter had another blood test performed that day at the clinic using his own actual blood this time.
And this time, Sharon Reynolds claimed to have found latent cancer, but thankfully not aggressive cancer.
You're a cat.
This one says you're a cat.
She also stated that the liver dysfunction she'd found evidence of in the cat's blood was still present in his human blood.
Well, he'd been fucking that cat.
He'd been fucking that cat.
Did you fuck a cat?
He's like, okay, well, now we're getting weird.
Now you're asking questions I didn't want answered.
She suggested another test.
In the report she provided the journalist, she wrote, quote, elevated level of toxicity must be reduced in order to promote assimilation, increase oxygenation, and prevent degeneration.
We recommend a supervised program of cleansing, detox, and rebuilding.
It sounds like a lot of their advice is based on that Adam Sandler character, the Cajun man.
It's just say aitian after a lot of fancy words.
And people are like, oh, okay, shit.
Oh, yeah.
That sounds about right.
That sounds like a doctor thing.
I do feel like that at the doctor sometimes when they oxygen's good.
I just realized that you didn't tell me anything because I don't know anything.
That's why you really rely on the fact that medical schools have their shit together.
It is.
Ospreys are flying past us right now.
I saw those at the...
They're out by the Burbank airport.
I flew out the other day.
Bunch of fucking crayon eaters in the sky.
But those are the presidential seal on it.
Is it?
Oh, Pensas or Trump is?
Oh, okay, yeah, because I saw him the other day.
Tuesday, I guess, I flew out of Burbank.
Those are presidential seal ones, and then they had Marine one over in this barrack.
I'll always remember when fucking every time Obama would come to town and take the motorcade, it was just a nightmare on the roads.
You couldn't do anything.
No.
Oh, I don't want to drive home.
That's going to suck.
Presidents, stop visiting cities.
Just stay.
Go to the sticks.
Yeah.
Go to Duluth.
They're like, I don't want to go to Duluth.
We know.
We know, but don't come here.
No one lives there.
There's enough people.
Don't put that like Duluth.
It's fine.
It's fine.
I'm sure your traffic's great right now.
Oh, yes.
I'm sure what you call traffic is wonderful.
So the detoxification program that they suggested is not cheap.
It cost $2,000 a week, and payment was required in advance.
There was, however, a less intense at-home version for $90 plus $400 in vitamins and supplements sold by the vitamin company that Young had founded in California.
So the LA Times took that route and had the vitamins sent to them.
They pretended to do the treatment, and when it came time for a follow-up blood test to see if the treatment had worked, they mailed in a third set of blood slides.
This time, the blood came from a chicken they bought from a Chinatown poultry shop.
Yes.
Yes.
Really, really putting that bit just a little further.
Well, I like there was a conversation like, where do we get, what do we do this time?
What do we do this time?
Somebody's like, I was in Chinatown.
You can buy a chicken.
You can buy a chicken.
Let's do that.
Let's do it.
This is the funnest day at work ever.
Now, as the Times noted, quote, red cells in chicken blood are oval-shaped and have no nuclei distinct from the round, non-nucleated red cells in the blood of mammals when viewed under a microscope, experts say.
Nevertheless, the Rosarita Beach Clinic diagnosed the chicken blood as if it were from a human.
There's inflammation in the liver, the clinic's report said.
Your blood is indicating the possibility of prelymphomic condition.
It appears as though you've recently undergone a high upset in your life, which has weakened your immune response considerably.
Did you eat a bunch of feathers?
Were you slaughtered to provide nuggets?
What's the kind of stress we're seeing in your blood?
It feels like someone chopped your head off.
Is that what happened?
Is that what happened?
I did lose my head.
The report closed with the identical prescription for their detox treatment.
Young's people didn't even bother to type it out differently.
Next, the LA Times went to a real doctor, the head of hematopathology at UCLA, and asked her to look at the blood.
Without being told, she immediately recognized the chicken blood as chicken blood.
She immediately said, hey, go fuck yourself.
This is a chicken.
I have stuff to do.
Because that's what happens when you're a doctor.
Sharon Reynolds, the health educator at Gary Young's clinic, was eventually confronted about the fact that she'd been analyzing chicken blood as if it were human blood.
Her response is one of the funniest things I've ever read.
Quote, I have never seen chicken blood before, so I wouldn't know.
If that had been human blood, that would have been an accurate analysis of the blood.
I mean, it's a solid argument.
Solid argument.
No, that chicken had cancer, yo.
Yo, if that was a human.
Fucked up.
That chicken was a human.
I would be good at my job.
I would have nailed that, right?
Right?
Do I understand science?
Do I understand science or what?
She went on to complain that she'd analyzed the blood in good faith and that her diagnosis of the cat's blood was still legit.
Quote, it was not a healthy cat.
The cat probably has leukemia.
If the cat is acting healthy, the cat could be a carrier of leukemia.
So the LA Times went to a vet to get the cat tested for leukemia.
The cat was fine.
Thus concludes one of the greatest examples of journalistic shade-throwing in the history of the profession.
Kudos to John Hurst.
I love you.
And I would nominate you for a Pulitzer if it was not 1987.
That was beautiful.
Where are y'all going today?
We're going to the vet.
We're going to the vet.
I'm going to see if this cat has cancer.
She's still saying shit.
She just keeps saying shit.
Now, the year after this article was published in 1988, Gary Young was arrested in California on numerous charges, including selling bogus medical equipment and, of course, pretending to be a doctor.
He was fined $10,000 and his clinic was shut down.
It's a wheelchair.
That's a chair.
That is just a shit.
No, it's a wheelchair.
It's a wheelchair.
It's a wheelchair.
You push it.
You don't have the education to know.
That is a chair, sir.
Nope.
He was fined $10,000 and his clinic was shut down.
So Gary moved back to Washington and started practicing medicine without a license again.
He was arrested in Fife and sentenced to 60 days in Dale.
In Fife?
In Fife, Washington.
Okay, I lived in Seattle for six years, so I'm aware of these areas, which makes it even funnier.
Yeah, I could see.
Yeah.
Just straight from California to Fife, two times in the same year, busted for pretending to be a doctor.
You got to keep working.
You got to respect the hustle.
Do you think at one point he's like, I don't know what else I can do at this point.
Pretending a doctor to be a doctor is all I have.
All I know.
In 1993, Gary Young founded Young Living, an essential oil business aimed at turning his passion for healing and plants into a profitable international enterprise.
On January 10th, 1994, Gary Young was arrested for assaulting several family members or employees, or both, with an axe.
It is very hard to tell if this one actually happened.
I thought they were that tree.
Yeah.
I ain't going to let that tree win.
No, that one may not have happened.
It's in all of the different posts I find about it, but I have not been able to find any records of it in the Washington Superior Court.
But it's possible I'm using the wrong term or some records from that far back got fucked up.
Or there's just so many axe-wielding things in the Northwest.
There's so many axe crimes.
Just don't even bring it up.
It's a misdemeanor here to try to kill someone with an axe ticket.
I did look through back issues of the Spokane Chronicle, but their 94 issues weren't digitized.
So I don't know if that's true.
The only reputable source who repeats the story is Dr. Eva Briggs, and she doesn't link to any outside confirmation that has happened.
So that's all the detail I'll go into.
But it's possible he assaulted a bunch of his family members with an axe in 1990.
Definitely didn't kill anybody.
No allegations of that.
Just an axe assault, like sort of like a shining thing hitting the door.
But it's hard.
Oh, I guess.
Yeah, he was just like trying to get at them with the axe.
Okay, yeah, I guess if you swing, that is assault, even if you don't hit them.
I would say it's fair.
If like someone was coming at me and I close the door and they start hacking the door down with an axe, even if they don't hit me with an axe, I would sue them for assault.
I would report them.
Yeah.
I'd like to press charges.
It felt like he was trying to hurt me.
I feel like I was assaulting him.
Yeah, I feel like he was really trying to get at me.
No, just for legal ends, there's no verification for that.
Haven't run into evidence that it's true, but you'll hear it repeated a lot.
I felt like we had to address it just because it's like one of the more lurid stories you run into.
Now.
You just don't want those tweets.
What about the axe?
What about the axe?
I don't know, man.
I couldn't find any.
If you find evidence of the axe thing, let me know.
I would love to learn that it's true.
We can remove it from allegedly axed and just axed.
Just tried to hit people with an axe.
Now, the next part of the approved Gary Young story goes like this.
In the early 1990s, he traveled to France to study distillation.
He bought 160 acres of farmland in Idaho and filled it with peppermint.
Where does he get money?
I mean, he's been conning all these $2,000 a week to do that.
And he was only fine, like, $10,000.
You're right.
Yeah.
And if like 1,000 people paid $2,000 a week for presumably, like, that's some good money.
Yeah.
You know, he's probably doing pretty well.
Yeah, and he sounds like he's probably decent at keeping his money.
Yeah, he's just.
No overhead in the business.
No, because you don't have to pay off any medical school bills or actually do any tests.
Or do any tests.
It's a good business.
Yes, it's actually really great.
Turns out it's way cheaper to be a fake doctor than a real one.
He just looked at college.
He's like, that's a scam, too.
I know what you're doing.
$100,000.
You can just be a doctor.
You can just say you're a doctor.
For a while.
For a while.
They catch you eventually, but then you just move.
Yeah.
You just fake doctor for a while.
There's a time limit.
And then you got to move on.
God, the world was so different before the internet.
It was, yes.
And you're like, hey, you can't fake doctor anymore.
Like, why?
Because I'm Tom from MySpace.
Because it's fucking Tom.
And those goddamn Google sons of bitches.
Now, yeah, he bought 160 acres of farmland in Idaho, filled it with peppermint, tansy, and lavender.
In 1994, he married his third wife, Mary, an opera singer and businesswoman with experience in the world of multi-level marketing.
She seems to have basically said, well, what if instead of getting constantly arrested for impersonating a doctor, we just create a company that impersonates a pharmacy, but with plants?
Just.
And he was like, I knew I married you for a reason.
Take my axe.
You know what?
You tell me when it's time to hit stuff with the axe.
This head injury.
We just got some brains to this operation.
I left a lot of mine on the tree.
Yes.
We'll go back and get it.
Here's how the New Yorker describes how the Young Living Company got its start.
Quote, the couple renovated a run-down building in Riverton, Utah to use as the headquarters of Young Living Essential Oils.
Young mixed his abundance oil blend into the paint he used on the walls.
Now, the abundance oil does seem to have worked.
Over the next few years, Young Living expanded over the nation and became one of the premium essential oil producers in the United States.
In fact, Young Living deserves most of the credit for sparking our current national obsession with essential oils.
They claim to produce the highest quality products, maintaining a strict chain of custody from farm to bottle.
We will evaluate that claim in part two.
But of course, Young Living was not just selling lavender oil to people and leaving it at that.
They were selling cures and treatments for serious diseases.
The company engaged in a constant game of brinksmanship with the FDA, trying to make their products sound as much like medicine as possible without breaking the law.
In 1994, one year after Young Living was founded, Senator Orin Hatch of Utah passed the Dietary Supplement and Health Education Act, or Deshia.
Disha.
Selling Cures And Treatments00:05:34
D-S-H-E-H.
Desha.
They use the acronym, which it's not like an acronym I think you'd use.
Yeah.
Dashia.
Deshia.
Sounds like diarrhea.
I'm just going to say.
Deshaues.
Makes me think of diarrhea.
Yeah, some aide came up with it and they giggled.
They're like, make him say it.
Make Hatch say this.
Make Hatch say this.
It is kind of his equivalent, like the political equivalent of Oren Hatch having diarrhea over the country because the consequences of this law have been terrible.
Oh, that makes sense.
Yeah, because the way we were going, I was like, wait, did he do something good?
Because it seems out of the ordinary for him.
No, he did something the opposite of good.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And we will get into exactly what he did.
But first, you know what's not like diarrhea?
That's a bad ad pivot.
Sophie's saying that's not okay.
I don't know.
That's a good product.
Diarrhea?
Not diarrhea.
Diarrhea.
You know what nobody likes?
Diarrhea.
Try not diarrhea.
I'll go with that.
If those are the options.
So you're giving me a choice?
Okay.
Products!
Services.
10-10 shots fired in the city hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that!
Jeffrey Hood did it.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
If you play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop.
Even if you did a lot of redistribution, you know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
We're talking about Dashia, Oren Hatch's bowels.
Bowels.
Yeah.
Dark Secrets In Studio00:12:04
So Dashia regulated dietary supplements.
But when I say regulated, I don't mean it in the sense as that it like introduced stronger controls over like their quality.
It actually just essentially one of those things where like you say you're regulating something, but you deregulate it.
Because of Dashia, the people who make dietary supplements and like natural health aids and stuff are essentially allowed to make vague health claims about what their products did without getting FDA approval to show that they worked or aren't even safe.
For money.
Yeah, for money.
This law is why a bazillion different shady companies can sell turmeric and vaguely suggest that it cures cancer.
It's also why if you analyze the turmeric pills that these people claim cure cancer, those pills might just be sawdust and lies with no actual turmeric in them.
And no one is responsible for making sure that you get what you pay for because, you know, that's what Dashia does.
It needs to be Oren Hatch.
Thank you, Oren Hatch.
I actually have that written right there.
Thank you, Oren Hatch.
You're welcome.
As a result of Deshia, the supplement industry grew to become the number one economic force in the state of Utah.
Natural remedies currently account for something like $10 billion a year in state revenue.
Really?
Really?
Yeah.
10 billion?
10 billion.
That's where you do it.
There's a couple of things that Utah's the center of.
If you're going to sell natural remedies and vaguely claim that they help with cancer, Utah is where your company is going to be based.
And if you're going to run a business where you abduct people's like misbehaving teenagers and put them in a work camp that some kids die at, Utah's where you're going to do that too.
And they're both because of Orin Hatch.
I know how to do two things.
Deregulate fake medicine and let people torture teenagers.
Get them.
Gotta get them before they get older.
Or in Hatch.
I'll vote for him.
I know his name.
He's been around forever.
That can't be good.
In 2000, Gary Young.
Utah.
It's worse than you thought.
Utah.
Really dark stuff happens here.
Ah, you just thought the Mormon stuff was bad.
Utah, our capital is filled with gay and trans kids who have been abandoned by their families and live on the streets.
Not a joke, just a serious problem Utah has.
Utah.
Thanks, Robert Redford.
Wait, what?
The Sundance.
It's in Utah.
Oh, right, right, right.
That's the only thing.
Weird to hold a major film industry event in a place where you can't get liquor.
It is.
And then the beer is like 2%.
Yeah.
That's that fucking near beer shit we had in Oklahoma.
Yes.
It ought to be a crime.
I remember when I first went there on tour, and I was like, what is I've got a serious problem?
What is happening here?
And they're like, no, no, no, it's just half.
And I was like, oh, why?
What is the point?
No one could explain it.
Yeah, it's nonsense.
In 2000, Gary Young opened the Young Life Research Clinic in Springville, Utah.
The clinic's goal was to administer essential oils and other alternative medicine to patients suffering from cancer, heart disease, depression, and other life-threatening conditions that should not be treated with oregano oil.
According to the New Yorker, quote, the clinic employed a pediatrician named Sherman Johnson, who had recently had his medical license reinstated.
About a decade later, Johnson had been investigated by the state medical board after a woman had died while he was treating her for cancer.
According to the Salt Lake Tribune, after a nurse raised questions about the woman's death, the body was exhumed.
In a subsequent probe, it was determined that she had multiple personality disorder, but not cancer.
That Johnson believed her story that she had been injected with cancer by a group of witches and gay doctors and that she had died from an overdose of dimerol administered by Johnson.
Johnson pleaded guilty to manslaughter.
So manslaughter.
Gary Young, when he starts his clinic, does hire a real doctor to run it, but it's this doctor.
Oh, man.
I like the way your mind works.
I like the way your mind works.
What was it, an oak or a redwood that fell on you?
I think it might have been a gay witch doctor now that you say it.
You got any of that dimerol?
Which, nothing against dimerol.
That's not at fault here.
We're not blaming Demerol.
Now, I took a look at your test results.
I got one question.
Have you ever been around any gay witch doctors?
Because that's what they're revealing, that you've been.
You've been infected with cancer.
Did you get injected with cancer?
Injected with cancer.
Sometimes I let people just syringe me, but I usually ask, but one time I didn't.
One time I didn't say, is this cancer?
It's not cancer, right?
I don't want any cancer.
Oh, I knew I should have asked.
To's witch doctors.
They're tricksy.
I was at Sundance.
Around all those Hollywoods.
Drinking some near beer with Orin Hatch.
This is crazy.
Oh, boy.
I'm not going to get to tour Utah.
That's a mixed blessing.
It is.
I've been there.
It's actually nicer than it is.
It's a lovely state.
It's very nice.
Geographically beautiful.
And then, yeah, like every part of the United States, it's beautiful.
You start talking to people and you're like, what is happening?
What the hell is going on?
It's pretty, ain't it?
Okay.
Are you married to three of your sisters?
Yes.
Oh, no.
Yes.
Here, you want 78 beer?
There's oregano oil in it.
In case a witch doctor gave you cancer.
There's gay witch doctors down in that park down there.
Be careful.
As Young Living expanded, bringing in tens of millions of dollars in revenue, Gary Young built a farm in Mona, Utah to act as a beautiful, living, growing ad for his company.
He also built other stuff on his farm, including a replica Wild West Town and a literal castle.
He started calling himself Sir Gary and hosting jousting tournaments, which he would compete in, wearing full plate armor.
Just like the owner's manual said.
Just like the owner's manual said.
As he lowers his visor and charges someone.
This is what God wants.
I'll be right back.
Following the owner's manual.
Sorry, I got to do Leviticus real quick.
Oh, God.
As the money rolled in.
As the money rolled in.
Yeah, Gary Young's ambitions expanded well beyond the fake doctrine that had initially started him off.
He began planning a $250 million theme park called Mount Youngmore.
It would be a place where families could relax in five-star hotels, joust, and gaze upon a mountain with his face carved onto it.
Young himself would later deny any of this was ever planned, but the New Yorker interviewed David Sterling, who was Young Living's COO at the time.
Sterling confirmed that all these were real plans at one point, saying, quote, it was just crazy what they were trying to build out there.
So they.
He had nothing to do with it.
Like he had nothing to do.
He's definitely clearly trying to dissociate himself with it.
Listen, yes, they paid me a lot of money.
Yeah.
But I had nothing to do with that.
His claim is to the New Yorker is that he was trying to really just switch the company to focusing on just selling the essential oils rather than running a ridiculous vanity theme park slash unregistered surgery empire like Gary Young wanted.
So he didn't see a future in the adult jousting.
He did not think that was a great idea.
It wasn't in Mount Youngmore.
Honey, do y'all want to go to a joust resort?
We can see a guy's face carved on the mountain.
He's a fake doctor who came out.
We don't know who he is, but we get to ram each other on horses.
I'm going to be honest.
If when I was like nine, someone had said, you want to go hit your family with like lances, I would have been like, fuck yes.
Yes.
Absolutely.
Well, that's the thing.
If you did it, there would be like way, like Thanksgiving would be like, well, it's a good, it's a good business.
We just go jousting on Thanksgiving.
I feel like enough jousting could heal this country's political divisions.
Just legalize jousting.
And hemp and jousting.
That'll take care of a lot of angst and essential oil.
And essential oils.
God.
So, his mind is fast.
Like where he goes is fast.
He really has the mind of a man who was badly injured by a tree.
A giant tree fell on his head.
Yes.
That is what.
Yes.
You know, when I wrote this, I didn't think that much about the head injury, but you're right.
It really ties a lot together.
Makes a lot of the decisions.
Well, this makes, you know what?
It does make a little sense when you consider.
It's something I think about as I read through more and more of the stories of these terrible people.
How many of the worst people in history are explainable by like, you got hit in the head, like Hitler in the fucking trenches in World War I?
You got some brain damage.
Like the more that we learn about just like any of our soldiers who spend a lot of time around heavy artillery, there's like these little micro like fucking things to your brain where you get like CTE and stuff from it.
And it's like, oh yeah, he was like just hanging out next to artillery for four years.
Of course that did something.
It didn't help.
If you're a baseball fan, you know, Don Zimmer is used to play for the old Yankees coach.
He just looks like that kind of damage.
It's putting him in charge where he's just like, what?
Yeah, it's just bad for you.
Yes.
Yeah.
Well, and then we're like, he's the strongest from the war.
Yeah, but I don't think he should be saying what to do.
Yeah.
Maybe we shouldn't be listening to him all that much.
Because he's in the corner hitting stuff right now.
He's slamming his head into the wall real hard.
So this guy, Sterling, claims that, yeah, he wanted to switch the company's focus to just essential oils rather than ridiculous vanity and the unregistered surgery and stuff that Gary Young was into.
This did not work out, and Young fired Sterling.
The company claims for performance reasons, but in an email Sterling gave to the New Yorker, Young gave this explanation, quote, Satan exercised dominion over you to the point where you started thinking that you had knowledge and ability greater than anyone else, including me, the creator of the company.
Does sound like some head injury talk in there?
It sounds like, to sum up what he said, he's like, you didn't share my blurry vision.
He did not share my very blurry and distinct vision for the company.
When the New Yorker reached out to Young Living about this distinctly non-standard response from a CEO, the company spokesperson told them, quote, successful company founders are often cut from a different cloth than the rest of us, which is true of Gary Young and his pioneering cowboy spirit.
That is not technically incorrect.
A lot of people want to be doctors.
A lot of people say a lot of people say you shouldn't drown a baby in a hot tub.
But those people don't know about it.
Tiddle will stop your medical career.
But they don't know about Mexico.
They've never been to Rosarita.
I've never heard of a little thing called Mexico.
Now, we're going to have a lot more to say about Gary Young's pioneering spirit and its impact on the world, but that's all going to have to wait until Thursday in part two of our epic series, Gary Young, the fake doctor who killed his own baby.
Well, we got any pluggables to plug?
I will be on tour for the next couple of months.
I'm going to Austin for the Moon Tower Festival.
I'll be in Colorado next week, all over.
If you just go to bwdtour.com, all that shit comes up.
Check out bwdtour.com.
See him at the Moon Tower, which sounds like something Gary Young would build.
Yes.
It absolutely does.
Cures blindness.
Cures blindness.
I'm Robert Evans.
This podcast cures blindness, and you can find it on our website, behindthebastards.com.
You can find us on Instagram and on the twits at BastardsPod.
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I have a new podcast called It Could Happen Here.
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Listen to it.
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