Robert Evans and Sophie interview Billy Wayne Davis on "Behind the Bastards" regarding Samuel Hahnemann, the controversial inventor of homeopathy. They dissect his dangerous self-experiments with poisons like mercury and strychnine to prove "like cures like," noting how extreme dilution created a placebo effect that allowed him to become a millionaire by 1843 despite an ineffective 1835 Nuremberg study. While modern science attributes his findings to a quinine allergy, Hahnemann's ideology transformed transient frauds into established medical offices, leaving a legacy where public belief persists even after proof of ineffectiveness. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:02:43
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
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, trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I got you.
I got you.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Groban.
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.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Mode of 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 Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's absent my machetes?
I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards, the podcast where we talk about the worst people in all of history.
And today is a very sad day because we've been kicked out of our regular recording studio by an unnamed person and we forgot to get the machete out.
And I am very sad, as is Sophie, as is my guest today.
Mr. Billy Wayne Davis.
Hello.
The Machete Incident00:04:32
It's not, it's in the building, so we're okay.
It's not like it's, we left it at home, which would be like, that's a bummer.
That would be tragic.
That's why that's the dedicated podcast machete.
That makes sense.
And then you guys, Robert gave me the best gift.
It's just, it's a tactical.
Can I say the brand?
Yeah, yeah, oh, yeah.
Gerber.
I was very excited about that, which is a Portland USA-made knife.
It just...
Now, describe the thing I've already forgot exactly.
Yeah, it's designed as a survival knife.
So the hilt is made out of a glass composite, which the purpose of that is so that if you're in a, in a vehicle that crashes or in an airplane that's crashed, it was originally designed for pilots.
You can cut your way out of the plane without electrocuting yourself if you hit a live wire.
And there's also a big glass breaking thing on the hilt.
It's a solid knife.
It just, and it feels good in the hand.
Like a lot of these knives like this are, they're not.
There's a lot of different kinds of knives, and that's a metal stabbing knife, which is a special kind of knife.
Yeah.
It's a knife that's meant for going into what is essentially other knives.
It's got that thing that a good knife has where you're like, I don't want someone to come at me.
Now, and what I like about that is because I don't want to give someone a nice knife and not give them a reason to use it.
So, once we get the machete out of the room, I have something else that I found while I was up in ⁇ I found a VHS copy of Basic Instinct by Paul Verhoeven, the original director's cut.
Oh, wow.
With a fake signature by Paul Verhoven inside the cover of the VHS tape.
I found it by a trash pile.
He sincerely wrote that.
He sincerely wrote that.
He really did.
And just so people know, this VHS copy is the widescreen letterbox edition.
That's critical.
It includes the theatrical trailer too hot to be shown in movie houses.
And I figured what we do once we get to the ship.
That's a criterion collection before the criterion collection.
It really is.
See it the way it was meant to be on a VHS tape that's been hanging out near a dollar on a TV that's got a box.
Still smells a little bit like trash.
But it's in incredible shape.
Really incredible shape considering what it is.
And did you fly from with it?
Yes, I flew with it because I knew that this was the only acceptable thing for us to use in a game of tennis.
Now, Billy, I don't know how to play tennis, but I know it involves two people with stick-shaped things batting an object in between them.
So I figured I'd use the machete, you'd use the knife, and we'd have us a game of tennis over this recording station.
Yeah, this is like a white trash version of it.
Yes, Sophie can be the ump.
Nope, that's not what it's called.
What is it called in tennis?
I think an umpire.
Ref.
In tennis?
I don't know.
Official?
I don't think ump is it.
Sophie's going to look up what it's actually called as if tennis is played with a copy of Basic Instinct and two knives.
There's like a judge involved, right?
Line judge?
I don't know.
I'm okay with all this.
I don't know about tennis.
I'm not a fan umpire.
Shit.
But it'll be fun to hit.
Now, there's going to be a lot of plastic shards, and we don't have eye protection.
Or maybe it's an official.
I've seen it in three different.
They serve as the.
Oh, no.
Oh, no.
I would like the title of chief umpire, which is apparently a thing.
Okay, so Sophie's going to be the chief umpire.
Cool.
Billy Wayne will be taking on the role of.
Is Roger Federer a tennis guy?
Yep.
Nailed it.
And I will be taking on the role of Serena Williams.
Ooh, that's.
Nailed it.
That's big shoes to fill.
Those are the only tennis players I can name.
And I was not sure about Federer.
I thought there was a 50% chance he'd played with.
I always go with Agassiz, but he hasn't played.
Andre Agassi, you're right.
That's a name.
Yeah.
He's bald.
He kind of went with it.
What was the really angry dude's name?
John McEnroe.
John McEnroe.
He's pretty funny, too.
Don't know any of these people.
What I do know is that we're going to have a lot of fun once we get our machete.
Yeah, I'm botched.
I mean, I'm just going to hold the knife the whole show.
Now, Billy Wayne, because you're here as the guest, I think everyone can know what that means.
And it means that we're going to talk about a fake doctor.
Fuck yeah, we're in this case, a lot of fake doctors.
A lot of them?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
See, today, Billy Wayne, we're not just talking about a fake doctor.
Our subject this week might well be the king of all fake doctors.
Do you know the name Samuel Hahnemann?
No.
I'm excited about it.
Well, he is the man who invented homeopathy.
Okay.
Yeah, that's where we're going.
He's largely responsible for the birth of what's called alternative medicine.
Fake Doctors and Liquor00:02:42
And surprisingly, I'm not sure he qualifies as a bastard.
So we're going to get into him part one.
And then part two, we will definitely be talking about some bastards.
Would he be?
Can I predict he might be a bastard because he opened a certain door for other bastards?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think he meant well.
That's like, it's like manslaughter of bastards.
If that makes sense.
It's like, you fucked up, but not on purpose, but it was bad.
It's like those in the South, large chunks of the South, in Texas, and I think also in Louisiana, I know they have drive-through liquor stores.
Yes.
And you're not supposed to drink and drive, but a lot of people do because it's a drive-through liquor store.
Because you didn't get out of your truck.
Yeah, you don't even have to get out of your truck.
He's like the drive-through liquor store of medicine, where you can say maybe he just wanted to make the process of buying liquor more convenient.
But as a result, a lot of people rammed pedestrians.
They had to fix a lot of fences because of that man.
There were a lot of problems, God.
Yes.
Okay, I got you.
I got you.
Yeah.
He's the...
No, you put a piece of tape over the straw.
Yeah, exactly.
Then it's not an open container.
Taxed in the straw.
We fixed it.
People may not know that, but you can buy margaritas in your car if there's tape over the straw.
And daiquiris are the big one in Louisiana.
Oh, God.
Just a 32-ounce styrofoam cup full of pure grain alcohol.
Pure grain alcohol and a slushy.
And then they hand it to you with tape over it, and they're like, don't move that tape.
Don't do what you're going to do.
Yeah.
Wink.
It has always been my dream.
I don't think I'll ever move back to the South because I hate the weather.
But if I did, I would love to operate a combination gun store, drive-through liquor store.
Oh, I mean.
Yeah.
Why not just push it?
Go all the way.
And you're like, well, if you buy two daiquiris, you get a gun.
And if you buy two guns, you get four daiquiris.
Four daiquiris.
One for your kid.
Because you get two and then your wife gets one.
You got one left of.
And ideally, we also open a pharmacy.
So it's like a pill mill drive-through liquor shop, gun store.
I mean, that's one of like as my grandpa was on his way out.
He said, we were talking one time and he was like, if I had to do it over again, pharmacy.
That's what you own.
A pharmacy.
And I was like, that is a good point, Grandpa.
That's a solid grandfather.
That is.
I was like, that's a good point.
It's too late for me.
One day, Billy Wayne.
One day you'll start that pharmacy.
Pharmacy.
Grandpa's Pharmacy Dream00:13:51
So, I guess we should get into the story now.
Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann was born on April 10th, 1755, in the city of Meissen, which I'm probably mispronouncing.
One of his modern-day followers says that it was, quote, so close to midnight that there is debate as to the date.
His church apparently registered his birthday as the 11th, but he celebrated it on the 10th.
This website, which is like the homeopathic fan site for Samuel Hahnemann, notes, as the story of his life unfolds, this is a pertinent fact to bear in mind because arguably it sets a pattern that continued throughout.
I actually have no idea what they mean by this.
But he's inconsistent?
No, I think they're positive.
I think they're saying that like, ah, the authorities said that like this is his birthday, but he like said it was a different day.
He's like, I know better.
I know better.
Exactly.
I think that's what they're getting at, but it's very silly.
They're like, no, you were born here.
He's like, no, as I remember.
And they're like, okay.
You really fucked that up.
I would celebrate both days.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, I don't think people got presents back then.
I think they just got cholera.
It's your birthday.
Shit yourself to death.
Yeah.
Classic German 1700s birthday.
Samuel was a weak and sickly child.
He was christened on the 13th of the month, like two days after his birth, out of the expectation that he would die soon.
And so he needed a name before he went to heaven or hell.
I think babies went to hell at that point.
But alas, Samuel grew stronger, and gradually it became clear that he would, in fact, survive being a baby.
Samuel was one year old when the seven-year war broke out, a slap fight between Prussia and Austria for Silesia, all of which is basically considered Germany to Americans today.
This war had a disastrous impact on the porcelain and cloth trades.
And since Samuel's dad made his living as a porcelain painter, the family finances took a real hit.
He was educated at home, which was not particularly uncommon, or any kind of statement at the time.
That homeopathic fangirl website I found on this notes that Samuel's father, Christian, quote, sometimes locked his son up with a problem when he went to work, expecting him to have solved it or to have some insight into it by the time he got back.
Now, ah, that's a frugal babysitter right there.
Just give your kid a problem and lock him in a room.
What's the answer?
Hell, I don't know.
Yeah, her depiction of it makes it seem like, ah, this is like how you raise a genius baby.
No.
Yeah, I found another depiction of this parenting practice in a 1900 biography of Samuel that does make it sound a lot shadier.
Yeah, it sounds like, yeah, it's like a hillbilly would be like, well, you got a TV, don't you?
We're going to go watch that and we're going to go.
Turn it up.
Yeah.
You hear noises, turn it up.
Put him in front of the shiny box.
It'll be good.
Handman's father, before going to the factory, used frequently to lock his son in a room, close the shutters, and give him a difficult sentence to ponder over, of which he had to give an account on his father's return.
This contributed to making the son an original thinker.
I think that's what Trump does every morning on Twitter, is he just gives us a difficult sentence, and all day we're like, what does that mean?
What does that mean?
Why did he capitalize the letters he captured?
That doesn't make any sense.
Yeah, he's just trying to raise us like Samuel Hondman's father.
Now, once he was older and the family fortunes had recovered somewhat, Samuel was allowed to go to the local elementary school.
His teacher, Johann Muller, recognized him as a uniquely brilliant pupil.
Alas for Samuel, his father pulled him out of school at age 15, reasoning that he'd spent more than enough time learning and it was well past time for him to get a full-time gig.
In fairness to Christian, you were legally an adult at 14 in that part of the world at that time.
So Samuel really got a whole extra year of childhood.
Yeah.
Kind of luxury childhood there.
So that's good for him.
Yeah.
Christian set his son up with a job at a grocery store in Leipzig.
Samuel did the job for a while, but he grew tired of it quickly and was convinced that the world had something greater in store for him.
So he ran away from home.
Sort of.
He actually just ran away from his dad and his job and had his mom hide him while he worked up the courage to confront his father about the fact that he wanted to go back to school.
Where did she hide him?
I don't know.
It's not really specific about that.
I'm guessing a closet.
Just like in the house still.
I think so, or maybe, yeah.
They had some money, so she might have like rented him a room or something.
Yeah, like a storage place.
It just says that his mom had a storage place.
Yeah.
What an interlike told the dad that he ran away.
Yeah, I think it was an issue of the way it's I've read it is that like she hid him because she wasn't going to go to bat for her kid against her father because you don't do that.
I understand that.
1700s Germany.
Yeah.
Basically Germany, essentially Germany.
But at the same time, he didn't like he had to work up the courage to like tell his dad, I don't want to work at a grocery store.
I want to finish school and be an educated man.
I understand now.
It was more of like, neither of us want to get whacked by dad yet.
Because eventually Samuel did confront his father and he was apparently successful in convincing him that he should be allowed to go to grammar school.
She just sent him to a box and room.
She's like, just learn to take a punch and then you can tell him.
You're going to have to let your dad hit you.
He's going to hit you.
He's going to hit you a lot.
So just get used to, just learn how to take that.
You talk to dad, he's going to throw a couple of punches.
Just to keep him at himself.
He enjoys it.
It's, you know, he gets back from work.
He's been punched all day.
He's going to throw a couple of punches.
Watch his left.
It's better than you think.
Oh.
So yeah, Samuel went to grammar school.
He studied science and languages and he wrote a dissertation on the structure of the human hand.
He was quite successful during this period and he earned himself admission into Leipzig University to pursue a medical degree.
But his course of studies was exhausting and he would later write that it convinced him young people should not be allowed to go to school.
Quote from Samuel, mental exertion and study are unnatural occupations for young people whose bodily development is not yet complete, especially for those who are endowed with sensitive feelings.
This nearly cost me my life during the period from 15 to 20 years old.
I can't progressive thinking man.
Board with that?
I mean, that's just...
Yeah, he's like, yeah, 15 to 20.
Just throw them in the woods.
We should have a big field for them.
I kind of like that idea.
I've always been a big advocate of like once kids get old enough to talk back, just driving them into a field and leaving them there.
I think they'd get feral and then we'd have they were they're smarter than we think though.
Yeah, you're right.
It would be like a hog problem and then the sort of flies would happen way quicker than we want to think it would.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, it's like the wild boars.
Yeah.
That's what would happen.
They'd grow tusk.
You'd have to kill them with drones.
Yeah.
I guess there's no perfect solution to teenagers.
No.
No, you just watch them and hope they don't team up.
Yeah.
Hope they don't team up.
The good thing is they'll throw each other under the bus because they're so horny.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That is their sense.
They try to fuck the bus.
It is weird to think like, oh, thank God they're horny.
Thank God they're too horny to be smart.
Yes.
Or we'd have a problem with all that energy they got.
Yeah.
We'd have to be like, well, we do wars.
Yeah.
We just do a war every couple years.
It is, that was a nicer era in warfare back when like most of them were just like, we got to do something with all these fucking teenagers.
Yeah.
Give them guns.
Put the dumbest ones in the front.
And then let them walk towards each other.
Let them walk towards each other until they're tired.
Until we got the best ones.
The smart ones duck.
At age 19 in 1774, a penniless Samuel Hohnman left Meissen to go to Leipzig.
He worked as a translator to make ends meet.
Depending on which source you read, he was either incredibly good at this, a brilliant linguist in great demand, or he was completely mediocre and he barely succeeded in avoiding abject poverty.
I found like five different variations of how this period of his life went.
I don't know which is accurate.
Maybe none of them.
One thing they all seem to agree on is that during his years studying theoretical medicine, which was the degree program track he was on, he became disillusioned with the medical establishment, which is understandable of the medical establishment in 1774.
Yeah.
A lot of leeches.
A lot of leeches, a lot of poison.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Described cocaine.
That's a real medicine, Billy.
I have some friends that will agree with you too.
Good for what I else eat.
Now, the pro-homeopathy biography of Hondman I found is written by someone called Sheila.
That's the only name she's given on the site.
And she's a British homeopath whose website links back to a website about how autism isn't real.
So just so we're aware of this particular source.
Yeah.
What is it?
Autism?
If it's not real.
I think it's a bacterial infection.
I don't know.
There's a bunch of crazy theories about that.
It's like the bleach people.
Gotcha.
I do feel like she's one of the bleach people.
That makes sense.
Yeah.
No, that's the thing where I know better.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Quote from Sheila, the homeopath.
He paid for his studies by teaching German and French and by translating Greek and English into German for better off students.
Help came from an anonymous benefactor in Meissen who paid for some of the lectures.
It is in Leipzig that the seeds of Samuel's discontent with the medical profession of the time were sown because he was not satisfied with some of the lectures and attended them only selectively.
He was also unhappy with the lack of practical facilities.
So that's the positive homeopathy version of this is that he just he realizes that medicine at the time is flawed and he doesn't like attending all of his lectures, which you could also write as just like him being a bad student.
That's what I was going to say.
Sometimes it's hard to listen and stuff like that.
It is.
And then to be justified with like, I just, this, you guys are wrong.
I'm going to fix medicine.
I mean, I will say even a stop clock is right every couple of centuries.
And in this case, ignoring mainstream medical lectures was a good idea.
Yeah.
But at the same time, like, don't you have to learn what's wrong?
But if you're learning what's wrong and they're telling you it's right, that might not be good either.
I don't know.
That's a weird.
This is a weird story.
Yeah.
It's going to get confusing.
Yeah.
Morally.
The second part is just going to be bastards all the way down.
So, but first we got to get this muddy waters and not the good kind of muddy waters.
He just feels like.
I understand that feeling.
I mean, in college, because there was a part of me that like, a lot of this feels like a scam.
Yeah.
Like, why do I have to take bowling?
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Like, I was like, and then the business side of my major, mostly was communications.
But the business side was like just prepping everyone to work at a corporation.
And I was already like, oh, I don't want to do that.
Yeah.
And all my teachers are like, what do you mean?
That's where the money.
That's how you make money.
That's what's what you're here for.
I'm going to make my money.
Yeah.
Like, I don't want people giving me, I don't want to have to depend on that.
And you're making robots.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It just made me, so I understand what he's thinking.
We're like, oh, yeah.
Like, if I was going to be like a scientist, this makes sense.
Or a lawyer.
But I learned more about business at the UPS store than any of you fuckers have taught me.
I learned more about business hanging out with my friends who sold weed than I ever learned in college.
Yes.
And more practical stuff about business, like how to replace the airbag in your car's steering wheel with a bag of marijuana.
It's a good place.
It's a good place to hide it.
That's a free tip for everybody out there still living in one of the states where it's illegal.
Sophie, are we allowed to give people tips on drug smuggling?
Sophie is making a gesture that I cannot interpret.
Do it.
I'm just going to plug my ears.
Oh, she's just going to plug her ears.
Okay.
Okay.
Also hide drugs up your butt.
Both work.
Now, back to Samuel Hahnman.
So I just read kind of the pro Samuel Hahnman as the founder of the most valuable medical revelation in the history of the world.
That's that angle on it.
I've had a very different account of this period in his life in an article written for the American Council on Science and Health, a 501c3 established in 1978 to promote evidence-based science and medicine.
Here's what they say.
Although he tried to earn money as a translator, making ends meet was very difficult for him.
On the brink of starvation, he was introduced to an opulent Transylvanian baron, Samuel Bruckenthal, the head of the Madgeburg Freemasons Lodge.
Hondman was initiated into the lodge in Hermannstadt, Transylvania, in October 1777.
He quickly came to esteem the many itinerant teachers of mysteries who were indoctrinating the lodges in such matters as alchemy and spiritism.
In Samuel Hahnman, his life and work, Richard Hale hinted at the depth of Hondman's involvement in the lodge.
He advanced beyond vitalism and the naturalism of Schelling and Hegel to spiritism and for a while lost his way in occultism.
In Life and Letters of Samuel Hondman, Thomas Bradford gave a much less guarded account of the time Hondman spent in the service of Herr Bruckenthal.
It was in these quiet scholarly days that Hahnman acquired that extensive and diverse knowledge of ancient literature and of occult sciences, which he afterwards proved himself to be a master.
So he learned magic.
Yeah.
He learned magic.
The homeopaths like to be like, no, he just spent so much time in lectures that he realized what was wrong with the medical establishment.
And then the other version of that is, nah, he went to work for a wizard and learned magic.
Yeah, he went to like a secret society for powerful dudes who also believe in some bullshit because they were blessed with certain opportunities that other people weren't.
Instead of realizing that, they thought they were fucking special and knew magic.
And they like to dress up in costumes.
Rituals are fun because they didn't have TV or a lot of books.
Rituals are fun, like the ritual of batting this copy of Basic Instinct.
That's why you're not supposed to find it.
Magic.
Magic.
Liberating the Podcasting Machete00:06:44
It is.
You know what else is magic, Billy Wayne?
Capitalism.
Capitalism is like magic.
It is magic.
Like magic, it transmutes a podcast that is free into money for me.
That's good.
It's good.
See?
Nobody can explain that.
Nobody knows how that works.
Product!
Service.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
Woo, My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, 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 luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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 Hood did.
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 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 Lori Siegel, and I'm 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.
We're back and we're furious.
I want the machete.
We want the machete.
Sophie's even on board.
It just feels like our episode is like, it could be one thing and it's going to be another thing if we don't have the machete.
We don't have the machete machete.
This is like a wall.
You brought that VHS from the city's name that we will bleep out.
Oh, yeah.
You don't want people to know where you live.
Well, it's a little, we could be quay about it a little bit.
Yeah, it's not how people were he lips.
It's a solid point.
You brought that.
Let's take that back.
Across the country.
You crossed the country.
Across the nation with this old VHS copy of Basic Instinct.
It's in great shape.
It's in great shape.
It does have an odor, but that's fine.
And it has a fake Paul Bear Human signature.
That odor, man.
That's funny.
Yeah, there's no way to know.
We're still sulfur.
We're still waiting for the podcast.
I'm going to go get it.
Machete.
Sophie's going to break the knife to the room.
Do you need two knives?
Fuck yeah.
You got it.
We got it.
We're back.
We're back and we have just liberated the podcasting machete.
Damn it.
We are a fucking duo.
We are a fucking duo.
We did it.
We liberated the podcasting machete.
That's great.
From an unnamed other podcast that was recording, which is very bad to do normally.
But when you need the machete.
Now we have both the machete and the Billy Wayne Davis dagger on the table.
This thing is fucking dope.
We're ready to play.
By the way, that sheath has a sharpener in it right in the middle.
I mean, so you take that, you take that strap out, you're in the field eating off the land.
Use my little Gerber.
No, I used my little spider code last night when we were eating steak, but this would have immediately was like, oh, Sean, there's lots more.
You could kill a wild cow with that.
There were wild cows all over the current.
We Are a F***ing Duo00:15:12
That could have been you.
Robert, I'm so proud of us.
I'm very proud of us.
That was a beautiful, like tag team mother-son mission that just went really well.
Really well.
We liberated our machete from the fearsome name bleeped.
And yeah, it was great.
Very fearsome.
Very fearsome.
Name bleeped.
Very fearsome name bleeped.
Anyway.
Machete.
Welcome, welcome, welcome back to this podcast.
Welcome, welcome, welcome.
So, yeah.
Good mission, you guys.
Yeah.
So the evidence I found makes it seem that like Samuel Hondman's, the kind of ideas that would eventually turn into homeopathy were more rooted in the occult stuff he learned when he was with the Masons than the stuff he learned in actual medical school.
And the ironic thing is that this wasn't really a bad thing.
That's what I was going to say.
There is that part.
He's like, he's learned the placebo effect of medicine and people's mental capacities of stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah, in the 1700s, medicine was mostly dangerous nonsense.
Yeah.
As this 1970 write-up on homeopathy from the University of Washington makes pretty clear.
Quotes, people dumber than Granny from the Beverly Hillbillies were pretending to be doctors.
Granny knew some shit.
Granny could go into the woods and grab a couple of herbs that did some things.
That's the point I'm making.
Yeah, yeah, people dumber than granny.
People dumber than granny.
Yeah.
Granny was a drunk.
Granny was a drunk.
In the first decades of the 19th century, medical therapy consisted mainly in bleeding, purging, vomiting, the application of leeches, and the ingestion of an array of powerful chemical drugs.
Their combined effect was often greatly debilitating and toxic to patients.
The prevailing therapeutical confusion alternated in action, doing little while waiting for the so-called healing powers of nature to take over with aggressiveness, plunging patients into acute anemias and loss of bodily fluids through the use of so-called depleting methods inherited from earlier times.
So that's medicine.
Inherited.
Inherited.
Yeah.
Yeah.
After four semesters in medical school in 1777, Samuel moved to Vienna and spent three months working with a Dr. Quarin, the personal doctor for Empress Maria Theresia.
The good doctor did not charge Samuel for his tutelage, but Sam was still chronically short of cash.
Thankfully, Dr. Quarin introduced him to the governor of Transylvania, who offered him a gig as his family physician.
At least, that's what Sheila the homeopath says.
The University of Washington, by contrast, claims his main job was working as the governor's library assistant and organizing his coin collection.
So, again, the homeopath's like, ah, he worked as the personal doctor to the governor of Transylvania.
And the more historical sources I found say that, like, no, he organized a coin collection.
So, she is taking his whole.
She takes him very seriously.
She's a homeopath.
Well, she's doing what he's doing, which is like, I know what you said, but I know a little better.
I know a little bit better.
Yeah.
That's kind of.
She gets the gig, I guess.
She gets the gig.
She has some interesting takes on autism, too, for you, Billy.
I don't want to know those.
In 1779, Samuel grew tired of organizing coins.
He moved to Erlangen and attended that university, where he finished his medical degree after his graduation.
Hey!
Hey!
Step ahead of most.
Step ahead of most of the doctors that we talk about.
He got a medical degree.
He got the degree.
So we're...
Okay.
We can see where this is getting murky.
Time for him to move to Mexico.
Start jerking off in the vials.
After his graduation, Samuel spent the years between 1779 and 1785 as a nomadic wanderer, moving more than a dozen times to different towns and cities in Germany.
He grew interested in chemistry in Dessau, largely because he started fucking the town apothecary's daughter.
According to the University of Washington.
Her name was chemistry.
Her name was chemistry.
According to the University of Washington, quote, his gradual alienation from contemporary medicine and medical practices emerged during his stay in the town of Gunern.
He was severely critical of the deplorable conditions in a nearby asylum for the insane.
In 1785, he became a health officer for the city of Dresden, where for long years he aroused only hostility and contempt from physicians and apothecaries.
He's get away.
Yeah.
And again, he's kind of in the right.
Like he sees how fucked up medicine is and he gets pissed at it.
That does seem to be true.
That like at this point, as a working doctor, he's like, things are wrong.
Yeah, this is, you're not, they keep coming back.
Yeah.
That's not what we want.
Yeah, that's not what we want.
The lucky ones come back.
The unlucky ones just die in the hole that we put them in.
That is true.
Yeah.
In the sick person hole.
He's like, well, I'm also the Undertaker, so I'm doing all right.
Yeah, there were a lot of those.
Dr. Undertaker?
Dr. Undertaker and Dr. Barber were probably the two most common doctor mashup jobs.
That's a.
My goal was to be a doctor bartender.
I think that's a good goal as a golf pro doctor.
Golf pro doctor.
That'd be a good one.
The reason for Hahnman's ostracization from the medical mainstream community had a lot to do with his frustration over how patients were treated by doctors.
The physicians of his day focused entirely on understanding the nature of illness.
Patients were treated more as collections of symptoms than human beings.
And Samuel became an advocate of a more whole person-focused approach to treating patients, which he believed would yield better results.
And he's not wrong.
He's not wrong.
It's interesting because he's not wrong in that that makes for a better experience for the patient and that can have a positive impact on treating them.
There's also an argument to be made that like all these years of doctors just focusing on the symptoms and like basically just like trying to figure out why people were dying and then cutting them up after they died was necessary to figure out how to perform medicine more effectively.
Like you kind of needed those kind of crappy centuries.
So it's kind of like, well, all we know about pregnant ladies and pregnancy, the Nazis did all the experimentations.
Like when we went in and we're like, hey, we found those files and we're like, hey, you shouldn't have done this, but we're going to take them right here.
That's a bit of a myth.
There were a couple of things that were found out by it, but yeah, they lost this.
Most of the Nazi, like there was some useful stuff that was discovered in the horrible experiments that were carried out in concentration camps, but the vast majority of it was nonsense.
It was just like injecting dyes into twins' eyeballs to see if it changed the other twins' eye.
Like for every legitimate thing they discovered, there were like 10 things that were like, yeah, we didn't need to even test this.
We all could have told you you're not going to change one twin by shooting poison into the other.
Yeah, but now we know.
But now we know.
It is, it is.
You guys are bad guys.
Yeah, yeah, we are.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But we found a group of us.
We'll do a whole here for the episode of Nazi Doctors.
That's going to be a fun episode of this show.
Good God.
Sophie's going to love it.
Why?
Because we get to make a lot of Sophie's choice jokes.
Oh.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Sure.
Sure.
So, in 1790, while working in Dresden, Hahnman got up to some work translating an old manuscript about chinchona bark, also called china bark, which was known to be an effective treatment for malarial fever.
Unlike most treatments at the time, chinchona bark absolutely did work.
The leading theory as to why was that the substance was an astringent.
But this reasoning didn't smell right to Hahnman.
He had tried out substances far more astringent than chinchona bark on fever patients and seen it not have any effect.
The actual reason that chinchona bark worked on fevers is that it had quinine in it, which is like an actual medicine.
It's one of the things that get people from malaria.
So like obviously chinchona bark helps with malarial fever.
Yeah.
So they knew that this thing worked and they were right that it helped with fevers.
They just didn't know why.
Well, the thing in it, yeah.
Yeah.
And Hahnman was right in that when he was like, no, no, no, y'all's reasoning for why this works is wrong.
And then he tried to figure out the real reason why it worked and became even more wrong.
Okay.
But in a weird way.
To try and figure out why chinchona bark helped with malarial fever.
Hahnman started experimenting on himself.
He had a sizable dose of the bark and noted its effect on him.
As he wrote in his notes, quote, My feet, finger ends, etc., at first became cold.
I grew languid and drowsy.
Then my heart began to palpitate and my pulse grew hard and small.
Intolerable anxiety, trembling, prostration throughout all my limbs, then pulsation in the head, redness of my cheeks, thirst, and in short, all these symptoms which are ordinarily characteristic of intermittent fever made their appearance, one after the other, yet without the peculiar, chilly, shivering rigor, briefly, even those symptoms which are of regular occurrence and especially characteristic as the dullness of mind, the kind of rigidity in all the limbs, but above all, the numb, disagreeable sensation, which seems to have its seed in the peristeum over every bone in the body.
All these made their appearance.
This paroxysm lasted two or three hours each time and recurred if I repeated this dose, not otherwise.
I discontinued it and was in good health.
So he has like a really bad reaction to this shit, kind of like a fever.
That's his interpretation of it.
It's like, oh, this taking this fever treatment feels like a fever to me.
Yeah.
So Hahnman was struck by a revelation as a result of this.
If this bark cured fevers, but also gave him a fever when he took it while he was healthy, maybe that meant sicknesses were cured by substances that acted similarly to the illness they were treating.
I can see the logic.
You can see the logic in that.
You can see, like, it's not, he's not a dumb person at this stage in medical development for being like, oh, maybe this is what's going on.
Well, that's the steps you would take, I guess, just to figure stuff out.
I can see how a smart person would be like, oh, shit, I think I figured something out.
And I think I'm saying that because that's what I would do.
And there actually is some, not in his particular conclusion of it, but like vaccines essentially work that way.
He's wrong for the right reasons, I guess you could say.
There are some things in medicine that work like what Hahnman realizes here.
His main problem is that he generalizes way too much.
That's humans.
Yeah, that's humans.
Exactly.
That's yes.
But again, you see, I have trouble.
This guy's an imperfect person, and we'll get to some of his character flaws a little later, too.
But he's not a bastard.
No, he's not a bastard.
He's not a bastard.
He's doing his best in an era where nobody knows anything about medicine.
But he, yeah, and he's one of the few people raising his eyebrow to everything, being like, I don't know.
I think y'all are wrong.
And he's right.
But he's wrong, too.
I don't know the answer.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But that idea.
But he does eventually get to the point where he feels like he knows the answer.
So, yeah, Hahnman, based on this single experiment, worked up a bold new theory of medical science, which he summarized with the now infamous line, like cures like.
Okay.
That's one of the core facts of homeopathy.
To get your thing going, you do need something catchy.
It's like in order to beat Donald Trump, a doddering ill old man, we need another doddering ill old man whose eye fills with blood at random intervals.
I don't think we need that one.
Nope.
That's what's going to happen, Billy Wayne.
Fucking hope you're so wrong.
We've all decided.
Glad you gave me that knife.
I think that that is no.
I hope not, but if you travel at all, you're like, damn, it's like cures.
Like, it's like when we, when, when, when uh, Mitt Romney and a violent Christian extremist ran for president, the only person to beat them was Barack Obama, who was essentially, or not Mitt Romney, Jesus, I fucked this up entirely.
Yep.
What are you doing?
I don't know.
It's like how Barack Obama and John McCain are the same person.
Yeah, see, it doesn't make any sense.
This didn't work at all.
Vote for a woman.
Okay, continue.
A woman?
That's not like curing like, Sophie.
That's love curing like.
That's not homeopathy.
That's cool.
Kind of is homeopathy.
It is very homeopathy, I think.
So Hanman's basic idea was that medicines treated illness by causing similar symptoms in the patient.
And thus, when you had dose someone with something that made them sick and they were already sick, the two sicknesses would cancel each other out.
Now, you may recognize this as the same medical reasoning in that one episode where Mr. Burns goes to the doctor and they realize that he has all of the diseases.
Oh, yeah.
Your illnesses are a perfect balance.
That's literally Hanman's revelation as a result of making himself sick on chinchona bark.
Oh.
Yeah.
You just kill it.
It's like his thing is like, you fought fire with fire.
It's kind of like that the problem came to him and you're on fire.
He was like, just give him some more fire.
Give him a little bit more fire.
That's going to give him.
I mean, that is kind of how you deal with wildfires, but not in the same way.
But not a human.
But not a human fire.
I do understand you do firefire.
I understand how that works.
It's kind of like the vaccine versus, yeah.
Yeah.
No, it is a vaccine for fires.
Yes.
A little bit of fire will cure this fire.
Well, we control it before it does it itself.
Yeah.
That's the problem with overgeneralizing.
Yeah, it is.
Yeah, because I did try to stop a kitchen fire once by just lighting other parts of the kitchen on fire, and that did not work.
That doesn't work anyway.
That doesn't work.
Or putting water on a grease fire.
Do you know that?
Nope, but if you put grease on a water fire.
That if you've caught water on fire, then you are the city of Cleveland.
Yes.
Yes, you are.
You guys caught your river on fire.
We did.
Every time I make fun of Cleveland for their river being on fire, that like five times that it caught on fire, they point out how clean it is today.
And I'm like, I'm sorry.
Yeah, because all the stuff burned up.
Because the poison burned out the river.
Yes.
He cleaned it.
Oh, I'm never going to let Cleveland live that one down.
They don't care.
They don't care.
They don't.
They've been drunk the whole time.
I love Cleveland.
It's fun.
You can mess anything up.
They don't notice.
She got mad.
Sophie is a Cleveland stan.
No?
I was just thinking about the only thing that they got mad about is when LeBron left.
Well, I'd be mad about that, too.
That's the only thing they have.
Yeah.
Well, he left.
He's ours now.
Well, he's no one's.
That's beautiful.
LeBron James belongs to the world.
He is a precious gem.
Possibly one of the people least fit for this podcast.
Yeah, he's so nice.
Meanwhile.
Every move he makes is great.
Yeah, he's a class act.
Unlike Shaq.
Unlike Shaq.
Noah, he's like Shaq.
Oh, he's like Shaq.
Yeah, I like Shaq.
I like Shaq, too.
Shaq's great.
Shaq is great.
I mean, Shaq's great, but I mean, he's definitely not as nice of a person as LeBron James.
Shaq vs Gretzky00:04:50
You don't know that.
I feel like now we're just splitting very large, tall hairs.
Do you want to continue with your private family?
Yes, we should probably continue the podcast.
Just like a thought, you do host.
I do host a podcast.
So, the logic of Hanman's idea that like cures like was reinforced a few years later when Dr. Edward Jinner invented the first smallpox vaccine.
This worked by essentially introducing a small sample of the disease into a patient to immunize them.
Now, today we know that what Jinner did with his vaccine is very different than what Hahnman proposed.
But at the time, given the information available, you could be forgiven for taking Jenner's breakthrough as more evidence that Hanman was on the right track.
And it made Hanman insufferable to be around.
He definitely was.
That happens after this point.
Ah, he's like, been telling y'all, I figured it out.
Who told you?
Clearly, this is the same thing.
Damn it.
Electrified by his study, Samuel Hahnman began a series of experiments to develop what he believed would be a whole new and much more valid school of medicine.
Since the underlying theory behind it all was that light cures like, he called his new system homeopathy.
On his first book on the subject, he wrote, To obtain a quick and lasting cure, choose for every attack or illness a substance that which can produce a similar malady to the one it is to cure.
Modern-day homeopaths still cite this experiment as one of the greatest developments in the history of mankind.
One modern textbook claims, chinchona bark was to Hanman what the falling apple was to Newton and the swinging lamp to Galileo.
Hanman launched next into a series of bold experiments, both on himself and on his children, his wife, and his students.
In his first book, Fragmenta di Viribus, he asserted that he had experienced 122 different symptoms from ingesting chinchona bark, which suggested it must have a wide-ranging medical application.
Likewise, Samuel had listed 174 known symptoms with the consumption of green peppers.
So I deal with health problems by eating peppers.
God.
174 of them.
Although, you know, this is obviously not real medicine, but it also seems pretty harmless, like eating green peppers isn't going to cure anything, but it's not going to make you worse.
No.
Unfortunately, the very logic of like cures like led Hahnman inevitably towards experiments with literal poisons.
Martin Gumper, one of his biographers, wrote, Day after day, he tested medicines on himself and others.
He collected histories of cases of poisoning.
His purpose was to establish a physiological doctrine of medical remedies, free from all suppositions, based solely on experiments.
Hahnman sent his children into the fields to collect hinbane, sumac, and deadly nightshade.
They grew up like young priests of the Asclepion of Kosts.
They felt the leaves, blossoms, and tubers with small but expert hands.
Everyone was obliged to join in the work, for there was no other way to succeed in his titanic plan of rescuing the wealth of natural remedies from the quagmire of textbooks and displaying it in the bright light of experience.
The family huddled together, and every free moment of every one of them, from the oldest to the youngest, was made of for the testing of medicines and the gathering of the most precise information on their observed effects.
So he sends his kids out into the field to grab poison and take it.
So that's good.
I mean, that's how you raise his kids.
They are his kids.
He owns them.
That's his.
He's a doctor.
He's a doctor.
It was an exciting time for Hanman and his family.
Unfortunately.
Which ones are going to die?
It was not an exciting time for many of his patients.
And I'm going to quote now from the ACSH's write-up on homeopathy.
Having amassed voluminous pseudo-knowledge by pairing many specific vile substances and particular diseases whose symptoms most resembled the effects he attributed to those substances, Hahnman set up shop as the original homeopath.
He would begin his consultations by putting wearisomely numerous questions to the patient.
The replies would contribute to his building a picture of the patient's condition, a picture based exclusively on these replies, the patient's appearance, and Hanman's supposedly God-given intuition.
For example, if the patient had a gray pallor, was sweating profusely, and said that he or she suffered from abdominal cramps, Hanman would in effect look up gray pallor, sweating, and abdominal cramps in his tome, use cross-references to narrow down possible remedies, and thus decide that strychnine, a toxic alkaloid, was the ideal cure for the patient's condition.
It'll make it stop.
It'll make it.
It will stop a lot.
Yes, it'll make it stop.
Strychnine causes sweating and horrific cramps itself, so it seemed like a logical treatment for a patient exhibiting those same symptoms.
Unfortunately, giving literal poison to sick people is likelier to kill them than cure them.
That was...
Okay, good.
That's what I thought, but I wasn't sure you were going to say that.
Yeah, that's where this is heading.
He kills a lot of people before he's safe.
Because of the poisons.
Because of the poisons.
Turns out that's bad.
Is his defense the you have to let me fail?
If I have succeeded in curing one patient, it's only because I failed on 999.
It's a numbers game.
You kill 100% of the patients you don't treat.
That is.
That's what Wayne Gretzky said.
Reverend Dr. Wayne Gretzky.
Wayne Gretzky on Homeopathy00:04:55
Yeah.
That's his famous.
Ah!
My headphones fell off.
That can only mean it's time for an ad plug, Billy Wayne.
Okay.
Plug it.
Before we do the ad plug, you want to touch tips here?
I always want to touch tips.
With our blades.
Beep.
Products.
Felt good.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Engo Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up-and-coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, 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 luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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 did this ever happen in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that!
Jeffrey Hood did 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, you 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 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, 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.
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.
Sophie, you're making a strange face.
What's up?
I feel left out.
I don't have a weapon.
Touch Tips and Knives00:15:19
Here, here.
You got that mind.
You have this.
Why, thank you, Billy.
You're welcome.
I'll pull out my knife.
I get the machete here.
Thanks, Robert.
Nice.
Okay.
All right, cool.
All right.
Let's touch tips and recommit ourselves to the study of bastardry before we get back to this topic.
Oh, that's good.
That's going to be great content for the audio podcast we need.
Metal on metal.
Yeah, everybody loves the sound of metal on metal almost as much as they love the sound of Cody's time machine.
Oh, that was so crazy.
That was horrible.
That was disgusting.
Now, do, I used to believe that's a metaphor for something disgusting.
It's a literal of something disgusting.
Cody Johnston made the most horrifying, what he thought was a sound effect for a time machine.
It sounded like cockroaches performing oral sex.
Yeah.
Yeah, it wasn't great.
It was like, no.
Terrible.
Okay.
Speaking of terrible, Samuel Hondman's practice of giving poison to sick people worked out terribly and killed a huge number of them.
Quote, for stomach pains, he regularly prescribed quarter ounce doses of mercury.
He instructed one poor soul.
There's so much mercury, right?
God, that's like 20 thermometers worth of mercury.
And that's going to hurt you.
That is not going to help.
Not coming back.
He instructed one poor soul to take half an ounce of sulfuric acid in the morning and another half ounce later that day.
I do not think they made it to the second.
And if you get to the end of the day, take a little more.
Take a little more if you make it.
You can just imagine that person making it through and then just being like, all right, you got to take another.
I don't.
I don't want to do it again.
That second dose just falls right out.
It does through the hole burned by the first.
He made it through.
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
A purported healing system that Hondman asserted God had revealed to him was having devilish effects on his patients who were dropping like flies.
I just picture him with a big pad of paper and just going, nope, not that one.
Acid's not the solution.
Not it.
Nope.
And I'm guessing it was like for heartburn or something.
It's like, oh, your heart's burning, huh?
I think I know what'll deal with this.
You want to burn your heart back into alignment?
Take it a little bit.
Drink some fucking acid.
Drink it.
Oh, boy.
Yeah.
So, you know.
Why is it bubbling?
That's the carbonation.
Some doctors might have, you know, realized from all of these dead people that this theory of like curing like maybe was not as universally applicable as Hondman thought.
But Samuel Hondman did not make that decision.
Instead, he decided that his theory just needed a little bit of alteration.
You don't want to scrap a whole medical theory just because you burn a couple of people to death with acid.
Yeah, he just looked up and his healing pile was a lot smaller than the dead body pie.
Yeah.
And that does mean you need to rejigger some things.
Yeah.
He's like, math's wrong.
The math's not right.
We're getting out here.
Yeah.
Now, to adjust his theory, Hondman turned back to his Masonic and occult roots.
He added a new stage to the treatment.
Instead of just dosing his patients with fatal poisons and watching them die horribly, he began diluting said poisons to a ridiculous extent.
He'd start by adding 99 drops of alcohol to one drop of the actual substance, and then he would shake the mixture to potentialize it and activate its magical powers.
Potentialize it.
Potentialize it.
They still do that.
You got to shake this shit.
Obviously, if you don't shake it, it doesn't work.
It's like one of those five-hour energies.
Yeah.
You got to shake it.
Got to shake it.
He would then dilute it further, adding 99 drops of water to one drop of this 1 C mixture, and that would create a 2C mixture, and so on down the line until essentially nothing was left of the original substance.
Of course, this was a placebo.
It's just a placebo.
But to Hahnman, he saw this instantly have a massive positive effect on his patients because it's way better to give someone water than strychnine.
Yes, yes.
Yes.
I didn't go to, I mean, I allegedly, I don't know for a fact, but that's how I didn't go to medical school.
Yeah, I'm not a doctor.
But Googling Hill suggested that to me.
Yeah, I think if you drink water, it'll make you feel better.
Aren't you both Reverend Doctors?
We haven't made that trick.
We haven't gone to Haiti to bleach people.
This is the bleach part that...
Yeah.
I understand.
But I want that sweet, sweet title.
You take, just, what if we make our own program?
How do we become accredited to give people fake medical degrees?
This is America.
You can do that.
We're just like, oh, I don't think it's probably as hard as we think it is.
Yeah.
We've got to find someone who owns a small college and give us an honorary doctorate.
You know who's...
Let's talk to, oh, what's his Liberty.
They're in trouble right now.
Liberty University.
We just did an episode on Fall Wells.
I bet we could get that.
They need some help right now.
They need some help right now.
Let's get in bed with the Falwells.
Yeah.
What could go wrong?
No.
Well, we get in the pool with the Fall Wells.
Oh, yeah.
Have you seen that stuff?
About the trainer and stuff?
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Cool boy.
Yeah.
What is his name?
Juan.
Gian Carlos.
John.
It's so.
I'm proudest of him.
He did well.
He did.
He did very well.
Every move he made, I was like.
Good boy.
This is a good story.
Solid man.
Now, so obviously Hanman starts diluting his literal poison, and he notices massive improvements in his surviving patients.
I'm not dehydrated anymore.
Yeah.
It's great.
Nor are my insights liquefying.
It's great.
Now, to Hondman, this proved he was on the right track.
He added the aphorism, less is more to like cures like.
And together, these two facts laid the cornerstone of homeopathic medicine.
Yep.
Hondman's diaries of his less is more period included much alchemic and astrologic symbol.
Oh, I'm sorry, I'm quoting here from that write-up.
They all understand marketing.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
To like a degree that most people...
I wonder with Hondman, though.
I wonder if he's just...
This is just kind of how science works when you know less.
Gotcha.
You just think everyone's dying from everyone's treatments because they're all bad.
Like we laugh about him giving someone a quarter ounce of mercury because that's debt terrible.
But also like normal doctors who weren't homeopaths were also giving people shitloads of mercury.
And we know that you don't do that now because of them.
Because of them.
Yeah, there is that point.
Yeah.
So I think it's very possible that Hondman is just, he's making some, clearly some logical failures and being like, oh, now when I diluted it, they got better.
That means diluting it makes the medicine stronger.
Or it's like, no, no, that's not quite it.
No, the stuff is killing them.
And you're giving them less stuff.
You just stopped poisoning them.
He's like, nah.
Or less is more.
Yeah.
Yeah, or the saying.
Yeah, so he started, you know, spending his nights shaking and mixing and cooking up all sorts of magical cures for people.
And over time, Hanman grew to dilute his medicines more and more.
In 1799, while he was based in a small town called Koenigsluter, an outbreak of scarlet fever hit the community.
Hahnman thought the symptoms of the disease, headaches and wide-open eyelids with a dull, staring look, were similar to the effects he'd observed on his friends and family when he dosed them with atropine to see what would happen.
Following the theory of light curing like, he dosed patients with atropine.
Thankfully, it was an extremely diluted 1,432,000th solution.
So it was basically water.
I'm going to quote from the University of Washington here.
The reason for diluting the drug was Hondman's awareness that drugs were often responsible for aggregating existing diseases or introducing new ones with contemporary dosages.
Still believing he was observing drug effects, he gradually gave his pure drugs and greater dilutions.
Hondman rationalized this action by speculating that in illness, the body was enormously more sensitive to drugs than in health.
He's making a lot of logical leaps here.
It's interesting.
And here's the question.
Is he also dosing himself?
Yes.
So he's just getting madder and madder.
Yeah, I do suspect that's having an impact.
Yeah.
Because he gave himself a lot of poisons.
Yeah, I'm sure that someone affect the mind.
You don't hear much about his kids.
Not even, well.
Well, all that mercury.
Yeah.
Now, he continued his tactic of diluting his medication until things reached their current point of homeopathic absurdity.
A modern homeopathic treatment for the common cold would be a 6C solution of onion.
Why onion?
Because when you cut an onion, your nose gets all stuffed up like it does when you have a cold.
Oh, man.
Yeah.
Now, if you're wondering how much actual onion is in a 6C dilution, well, I'm going to quote from the ACSH's write-up again.
A 6C onion concentration would result if one filled Wimbley Stadium to the roof with water and added one drop of an onion mother tincture.
A 12C onion concentration in a homeopathic pill is equivalent to that which would result if one added a single drop of onion mother tincture to a body of water the size of the Atlantic Ocean.
So he's just giving them water.
He's just giving them water.
Or La Croix alcohol.
It kind of depends on how you're doing this.
It's like an onion version of LaCroix.
Yeah, it's like more concentrated or more diluted LaCroix.
LaCroix is a lot stronger than homeopathic medicine.
Is someone in the next room cutting onions?
No, that's the medicine.
That's the medicine.
But we did make it by having someone in the next room cut onions.
And we took the smell of it and sprinkled it on the water.
You're actually getting into what is the problem, one of the modern problems with homeopathic medicine, but that's going to wait until part two.
They don't always dilute it so much.
Now, the ironic thing about all this is that Hondman's nonsense medicine actually saved a huge number of lives during this period of time.
This is not because his cures worked, but it is because real doctors in this period were prescribing people poison.
Most sicknesses suffered by most people get better on their own after enough time if you just don't give people deadly poisons.
So Hondman's patients would start taking his nonsense water.
They would heal of their body's own accord, and they would avoid going to a regular doctor who would have probably tried to drill a hole in their brain to let the ghosts out.
In this way, completely by accident, Samuel Hondman did succeed in advancing the frontiers of medical science in a major way.
I'm going to quote from the 1963 book, The March of Medicine.
However, we may judge Hondman's theory, one thing must be admitted.
It led to a decisive change in medical thought.
Clear-headed doctors realized that a minimum dose of an ineffectual substance, such as homeopaths used, was tantamount to giving no treatment.
If the sick recovered all the same and this could not be disputed, it must be a matter of self-healing.
Homeopathic treatment, in other words, no treatment was often far better.
So basically, doctors start realizing, like, okay, this guy's given people nothing.
We know that.
We know that, like, his, because we knew math.
Like, you know, Avogadro's number and shit at this point.
We know this is just water and his patients are doing better than ours.
Maybe we suck.
Yeah.
Maybe we're bad at this and we need to really fundamentally change how we do medicine.
And Hondman was a big part of that realization.
That's really nice.
Yeah.
And it's also like, you think there's a period where like, maybe if we send our patients to the ghost we let out of their brain, that would help.
Yeah, that's what we're doing.
They send a lot of patients to the ghosts that they let out of their brain, too.
That just seems like probably a step they went through.
Yeah, it wasn't an even march of progress.
This one dude's like, hold on.
That dude was the doctor, and we let that ghost out of his brain.
Let's see what the doctor ghost knows.
And he didn't give them poison, so the ghost doctor was a better doctor than the actual doctors.
Yeah, the ghost doctor would absolutely be a better doctor.
I would rather go to a ghost doctor in this period than a Hondman or a regular doctor.
The more and more I come to these, the more and more I realize, like, oh, it makes sense we've destroyed this planet.
Yeah, we're not a smart species.
Yeah, it's crazy it took us this long.
Yeah, no, we've really made a lot of progress for as dumb as we are.
It's kind of inspiring when you think about it that way.
We're doing all right, you guys.
While real doctors took the apparent success of Hondman's methods as a reason to revise their tactics, Samuel himself continued to plow forward and develop his treatments into a wide-ranging belief system.
Homeopathy was immediately popular with patients for obvious reasons.
From a report in the National Institutes of Health, quote, the differences between orthodox medicine and homeopathy could hardly be more vivid.
From its beginning, homeopathy always began with a long consultation, lasting at least an hour, in which all aspects of the patient's illness and life were discussed.
Homeopaths like to stress that they practice holistic medicine and the appropriate treatment chosen.
In contrast, during the first half of the 19th century, when homeopathy was becoming established, Orthodox medicine was immersed in the belief that advances in understanding disease could only come from a detailed correlation of symptoms and signs of the sick patient on the ward and the findings at autopsy, clinicopathological correlation.
So these orthodox tactics did lead to eventually a greater understanding of health and illness.
But it also meant in the immediate term that doctors were basically often, we're just going to wait till you die and cut you open.
And then we'll see.
And then we'll be better in the future, which patients aren't big fans of.
No.
No.
That's not why you go.
They like a doctor who treats you as a person and not as just like waiting to cut into your corpse.
It'd be like you took your car into the mechanic and he's like, ah, I could, but I'm not going to.
Yeah.
But when it quits running, bring it to me.
When your brakes fail on the highway, I'll cut your car open afterwards.
And I'll take a look at that.
Yeah, I'll tell you why the brakes didn't work.
I'll tell you exactly why they didn't work.
Yeah.
So Hondman showed no interest in detailed pathology, none in conventional diagnosis and treatment.
He was only interested in the principles of homeopathic medicine, which he used to name the illness.
Classic homeopathy was therefore seen by its supporters as an attractively safe symptom, simple, easy to understand, and centered on the patient as a whole and not on pathological lesions.
By 1801, Hondman had moved on yet again, back to a town near Leipzig.
His notebooks revealed the kind of problems most of his patients came to him with.
Insomnia, headaches, dizziness, constipation, lack of appetite, backaches, menopause, menstruation.
In other words, all things that tended to resolve themselves.
Yeah, life.
Yeah, life.
But Samuel Hondman watched his patients improve after giving them water, and he grew convinced that he had solved the problem of sickness for all time.
His fellow doctors were less than convinced, and they were particularly frustrated with the fact that high society, the aristocracy and the very wealthy, increasingly embraced homeopathy over orthodox medicine.
By 1805, he was widely recognized as a physician of note.
In 1810, he published The Organon of Rational Healing, which would be published in five editions during his lifetime.
Leipzig University, his alma mater, hired him to give lectures.
From 1812 to 1821, he taught six-month courses on the principles of homeopathy.
Curious young minds from all over Europe flocked to Hondmann's classroom to learn from the master.
By this point, he'd grown utterly convinced of his own brilliance, to the point where he told one group of students, he who does not walk on exactly the same line with me, who diverges, if it be but the breath of a straw to the right or the left, is an apostate and a traitor.
And with him, I have nothing to do.
Oh, good.
The Rise of Hahnemann00:05:02
Yeah.
Good.
He doesn't get more better in his old age.
No.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is kind of where he gets to be a little bit more problematic.
Well, everyone's telling him how great he is.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And, you know, in fairness to him, compared to the poison doctors, he's solid.
Good.
Not giving people poison is a good move as a doctor.
I wish I'd been a doctor, then it would have been so much easier.
Yeah.
Machetison could have really taken on.
I think so.
He just knows that that era.
Just cut off a digit.
Just cut off a finger.
That is.
Oh, he's trying to give you acid.
I'm just going to cut your finger off.
Just give me.
Which finger do you hate?
Yeah.
We all have one we love.
Everybody's got an evil finger.
Which finger do you hate?
That's the core of machetising.
God.
All right.
It's time for ads, Sophie.
Sophie's saying it's time for ads.
If you like cutting your finger off, try these products.
Services.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, 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 luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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.
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 docks.
A shocking public murder.
I 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 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 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.
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.
Double-Blind Experiments00:13:49
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 of AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
We're back.
You tried though, Billy.
Thank you.
In 1821, at age 66, Samuel Hondman was granted unlimited privileges by a nearby duchess, allowing him to live in luxury while he took a partial retirement to further develop his theories.
66 in the 1800s.
He lives a long fucking life.
That is, I mean, it's old now.
Yeah.
He lives forever, essentially.
Yeah.
He continued to be the center of the homeopathic field, directing the establishment of a homeopathic journal and watching as new homeopathic schools were established by his former students.
While homeopathy spread over the continent, Samuel Hondman continued to work until in 1828, he presented his greatest discovery since his first breakthrough.
The father of homeopathy had finally found the root of all chronic illnesses.
No.
The itch.
Scabies.
Really?
Yeah.
He decided it was scabies.
That's not, I can tell you from experience, that's not the root of all.
It's not the root of all illnesses.
I've stayed in some shady hotels and stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, Hondman termed it psora and claimed that scabies basically acted as the soil from which all diseases sprung.
Modern homeopaths are very much divided on whether or not this last great theory of Hondman's was a misstep or the key to a proper homeopathic treatment.
Actual doctors recognize that scaby is actually caused by tiny microsopic mites and has nothing to do with, say, multiple sclerosis or after chronic illness.
But I'm sure during that time, it was a huge problem.
Scabies is everywhere.
Everywhere.
Everybody's got scabies who comes in with something else wrong.
Yes.
Must be the scabies causing it.
It's like people that do hardcore drugs always also smoke pot.
Yeah.
That's the same thing.
That's exactly that logic.
Yes.
Yeah.
Gotcha.
Now, in 1835, Hohnman married a 35-year-old French socialite.
She'd originally been one of his patients.
35-year-old?
35.
I mean, even them.
Season is like a damage.
Even them.
Old horny dudes existed.
Yeah, old horny dudes.
And he is apparently great at it.
Yeah, she'd originally been one of his patients, which I'm sure presented no ethical dilemma.
None.
His family, particularly his surviving children, were horrified when the now very elderly scientist left for France with his young new wife.
Oddly enough, that year, 1835, was also the year homeopathy faced its first effective rebuttal using what we would recognize today as actual science.
Oh, I bet he didn't like that.
I don't even know what he thought about it because it's not like there weren't like online journals and stuff.
This happened far away from him.
I don't know.
He was busy.
He was busy fucking his new wife.
He was like, oh, you guys got a problem with it?
I don't care.
I'll make sure you ain't got no scabies.
She's French.
Homeopathy had taken off among the great and good in the kingdom of Bavaria.
In Nuremberg, two homeopathic doctors did a brisk business treating the nobility with nonsense water.
This irritated a fellow named Friedrich Wilhelm von Hoven, the city's chief public health official and the head of the hospitals.
He wrote a critique of homeopathy under a pseudonym.
According to the NIH, quote, Von Hoeven accused homeopathy of lacking any scientific foundation.
He suggested that homeopathic drugs were not real medicines at all and alleged homeopathic cures were either due to dietetic regimes and the healing powers of nature or showed the power of belief.
He called for an objective comparative assessment by impartial experts.
If, as he expected, homeopathic treatment proved ineffective, the government would need to take drastic measures to protect the lives of deceived patients.
A little bit of both in between.
Yeah.
It seems like everyone is very reactionary.
Yeah.
I mean, nothing's changed.
That's what humans are.
But they have a hard time going in between.
Yeah.
It's interesting.
It is interesting.
It's a common problem with people.
Johan Jacob Reuter, Nuremberg's homeopathic doctor, defended his discipline by claiming that even children, lunatics, and animals had been cured by homeopathic solutions.
He challenged von Hoeven to try some homeopathic comparisons, like human groups.
Children, lunatics, and animals.
And animals, the three kinds of people.
He challenged von Hoven to try some homeopathic medicine, a 30 C dilution of salt, and see if he didn't feel something.
This test or challenge sparked dozens of physicians and pharmacists in Nuremberg to take him up on his offer.
He said, Now I want something sweet.
Yeah, now I kind of want some chocolates.
So suddenly all these physicians start doing tests on themselves with diluted salt water.
And eventually they hit upon the idea of conducting a single large-scale test instead of all doing individual tests.
Quote, following a widely publicized invitation to anyone who was interested, more than 120 citizens met in a local tavern.
The minimum numbers needed to proceed had been fixed at 50.
The design of the proposed trial was explained in detail.
In front of everyone, 100 vials were numbered, thoroughly shuffled, and then split up into random into two lots of 50.
One lot was filled with distilled snow water, the other with ordinary salt, and a homeopathic C30 dilution of distilled snow water, prepared just as Reuter had demanded.
A grain of salt was dissolved in 100 drops of distilled snow water, and the resulting solution was diluted 29 times at a ratio of 1 to 100.
So this is like a double-blind experiment.
You get your control, you get your test group, and a list was made of which subjects had received which substances.
The subjects themselves were kept in the dark about what they'd received.
So this is believed to be the first double-blind study conducted in the history of medicine.
Wow.
This is what it's done to try and see if homeopathy worked.
Like Hahnman advanced the frontiers of medical science more than almost any other single person completely by accident.
Yes.
Yeah.
Completely by accident.
It's kind of cool.
By contrarian by accident.
By being like, I think, I don't think this is right.
Yeah, I think I'm the only one who knows anything.
And well, that's what I was going to say, too.
It's like a lot of, it seems like a lot, even to this day, arrogance takes us way farther and helps us in some degree, but we hurt ourselves pretty Hard till we get there.
There's a lot of, there's actually a lot of interesting writings on the evolution of overconfidence and like why overconfidence occurs in species and stuff, and like how if you're um, if you've got two species, two different animals come competing over a resource and one of them believes irrationally that it will win any fight and so it always tries to grab the thing.
Like sometimes it'll get in fights and sometimes it will lose those fights, but more often than not, the less confident thing will just be, like I don't want to, I don't want to fuck with you.
Like the dog that goes for the treat first gets the treat.
Most often you know, or yeah you, that whoever throws the first punch.
And with human beings it means sometimes we build arsenals of nuclear weapons capable of annihilating all life on earth and hand them to doddering old men, uh.
And it also means sometimes we look up at the moon and go yeah, I bet we could fling a guy into that.
Let's just go up there, let's figure this out.
Yeah, we can do it.
I mean, if my car goes this fast, let's just a bigger gas tank.
Yeah, that's that.
That happened in Huntsville, Alabama.
That's where they, that's where they build those rockets.
Yeah, so keep making fun of the south.
Yeah, we fucking landed on the goddamn moon.
That's where all the NASA is, because nobody else is that fucking crazy.
No well, that's a lot of it too.
Yeah, because there are a lot of rednecks going like boy, I know how to do this, I get us up there.
That's really like the core history of that's why like, all the great test pilots come from like Oh, or something like flat, boring places where it's like oh yeah, i've been rolling around in a car trying to get myself killed for years.
Might as well do it for science.
Yeah, and I can fly.
All right, all right yeah, i'll be the first one.
Yeah, i'll do that.
Yeah, i'll get on board this.
That's, you're any Chuck Yeager he's still very very, very confident in old age where you're like well god, how cocky was he when he was little, how could you not be being Chuck Yeager, though I think you accomplished a couple things?
And then you're just like oh, I can do anything I want.
And you're like, who's that chucker?
Oh yeah, go ahead, you want a cigarette?
Just let him.
Yeah, you can smoke in the maternity ward.
So obviously uh, the double blind.
This first double blind study showed that uh, it didn't.
The homeopathic medicine didn't do anything.
So the first blind study worked.
Yeah, it worked.
Uh, so yeah, in 1835 a bunch of dudes at a bar succeeded in proving homeopathy was nonsense.
But as i've said a number of times on this, show proof has never convinced anyone of anything.
Nope yeah, homeopathy is the oldest European example of what we now call cam, or complementary and alternative medicine.
That's a nice term used by professionals today to avoid hurting the feelings of people who truly believe crystals are going to heal their arthritis.
The whole reason a field of fundamentally unscientific ideas is treated this way traces back to Samuel Hondman before his rise to prominence.
Medicine outside the mainstream, without data behind it, was just called quackery.
Going to quote next from an article in the Royal Society OF Medicine, most of these pre-1850 quacks tended to specialize.
Some were bone setters, others claimed to cure venereal disease without the use of mercury.
A doctor Taylor of Beverly in Glouchester uh arranged to attend regularly at three public houses to which patients only had to send in their urine and he would tell at once whether they were curable or not.
There were self-styled oculists who specialized in the treatment of cataract And curiosities of cancer without operation.
One of the latter, calling himself the high German Dr. Simon, invited you to visit his house and see for yourself a cancer of the armpit of five pieces of 12 and 12 ounces weight, which he claimed to have removed.
Most of these regulars were uneducated or even illiterate, and only a minority were full-time healers.
They usually had regular jobs, such as blacksmith, farrier, grocer, butcher, cheesemonger, cobbler, cutter, or mechanic.
They often claimed patronage of the great and good.
Dr. Scott's bilious and liver pills were used by the Dukes of Devonshire, Northumberland, and Wellington, Anglesey, and Hastings, and the Earls of Pembroke, Essex, and Oxford.
While Dr. Lampert at 36 High Street, Borough, London, claimed to visit the well-to-do in the West Indies, the Isles of Skilley, London, Nottingham, Derby, Norwich, Lincoln, Boston, Gloucester, Wolfer, Hampton, Litchfield, a bunch of fucking British names.
And for good measure, almost every other town in the kingdom.
These irregulars had one thing in common: they had little, if any, interest in understanding of Orthodox medicine in their time.
I ain't got time for fancy book learning.
I'm doing magic.
And it's not always bad, like the doctors who are like, oh, we can cure your VD without using mercury.
Like, they couldn't cure people's STDs, but they weren't making it worse with mercury.
Yeah, you know that you know what sucks worse than V D?
Mercury.
If you drink mercury, yeah.
And we're like, oh, God, put mercury down your peehole.
Don't do that.
Just yeah.
So things changed in the early 19th century, largely as a result of Samuel's work.
Homeopathy gave quacks an ideology and a school of medicine to stand alongside.
While old-fashioned quacks would rarely visit the same town twice because they were fundamentally frauds, homeopaths would continue to practice in the same area for years, even decades.
People at the time recognized this change.
Quote, an Orthodox practitioner remarked, the old-fashioned quack with his farago of receipts who seldom visited the same neighborhood but at very long intervals in order to avoid recognition, this class of practitioner is fast coming to a close.
It was being replaced by literate and educated empirics who read books.
This remark signaled the emergence of a new form of unorthodox medicine, which formed the basis of what is today called complementary alternative medicine.
So this is where we get goop from.
You know, it used to be if you were like a fringe medical person, you wouldn't stick around in town.
You'd sell your snake oil and get out.
Because of Hahnemann, these people established themselves as like, no, no, no, we're going to like set up offices and try to do, like, we see ourselves as legitimate practitioners.
And that is all really humans need is like a different subconsciously.
We're like, it's like the marijuana doctors.
Yeah.
It's like the marijuana doctors.
Samuel Hahnemann and his wife lived out their last years as popular socialites in France.
The only hiccup in his golden ears came when his wife was charged for practicing medicine without a license.
But this does not seem to have led to a significant penalty.
He died a millionaire in 1843 at the age of 89.
So, good life for him.
God.
Yes.
Yeah, that's a long-ass way to live.
Because he drank all that water, staying hydrated.
He was very hydrated.
Extremely hydrated.
Yes.
The most hydrated man in this 1800s.
Now, Hahnman went to his grave believing that his decision to dose himself with china bark was a moment for human science on par with Newton being hit by an apple.
And in some ways, that is true.
His violent reaction to quinine has forever altered the progress of medical science.
Over the years, several medical professionals have tried unsuccessfully to recreate his findings.
One doctor who did so, representing the Board of Health, wrote, Chinchona, even in the preparation advocated by Hahnman, did not cause fever in either healthy people or animals.
So this is a little weird, right?
No one has ever been able to recreate the effects of Hondman's first groundbreaking experiment.
But during my research, I did come across one fascinating theory that might just explain this mystery and key us in on how homeopathy was really started.
I found an article by Dr. William E. Thomas, a Melbourne-based physician and medical historian.
He notes that quinine, the active ingredient in Chinchona, is only toxic in higher doses than Hahnman took.
However, there are some people who are allergic to quinine and the symptoms are startlingly similar to what Hahnman himself reported.
It can be concluded then that Hahnman might have suffered from an allergy to quinine, which means that the fundamental foundation of homeopathy, like the idea that like cures like, is based on the fact that Dr. Hahnman had a rare allergic reaction to quinine when he took this bark.
Which is just the most human element of this whole thing.
Quinine Toxicity Debunked00:06:26
Yeah, it's very understandable.
Yeah.
Wow.
Now, Billy Wayne.
I'm excited of who he's led in to Pandora's box.
That is what part two is going to be.
I'm excited about who comes in here.
Because Samuel Hahnman, an imperfect person, you can criticize them some ways.
Not really a bastard.
No.
Not really a bastard.
Just a dude who made some logical leaps that were not justified by the actual evidence, but that are understandable in the context of the time.
And then really just kind of took some confirmation bias after that.
A lot of confirmation bias.
Young French wife, you know.
That's distracting.
Yep.
Then it would be very distracting.
In part two, we are going to talk about some of the actual bastards, the horrible harvest in corpses that is Samuel Hanman's modern-day legacy.
So a lot of dead babies in part two.
Of course there is.
Yeah.
Now, Billy Wayne, I feel like the right way to break up this game of tennis we're going to play.
Yeah.
I think we should go to five total points.
And I think we should do the first two points at the end of this episode.
And then we'll have the last three, assuming there's any pieces of this VHS tape left.
Yeah, I think.
All right.
Yes.
Thank you, Sophie.
Sophie knows that when you grab a machete, you do it by the blade.
That is.
I'm going to put myself in.
Just don't hurt Anderson, please.
All right, Sophie, are you ready to ref?
Yeah.
Okay.
I thought it was.
Anderson.
I'm going to serve first.
Okay.
Here, let me put this.
Now, I don't know how to play tennis.
I don't think I can play.
I don't think this is how to play tennis.
No, let's see.
All right.
I do know one thing, which is that I'm supposed to say zero serving zero, right?
That's how it starts?
You can.
All right.
No, it's, isn't it love?
No, love is 15.
No, love is zero, isn't it?
No.
15.
It's love.
I don't.
Fuck.
I'm going to throw the copy of Basic Instinct while I'm going to try to hit it at you.
Okay.
Oh, you hit it at it.
I hit it backwards.
That didn't work out.
All right.
There's no way.
Just get out of the way of it.
I think.
What does that count as?
I think that was a point.
Hit the back.
All right.
All right.
It's 1-1.
Yours is cut.
I'm not.
I think it is.
All right.
All right.
Yeah, we'll try this.
15-all.
Oh, yeah.
Look at that.
That was a good one.
That one's, it's holding up pretty well.
You got to give it credit.
All right, Billy.
All right.
It's 2-2.
We're tied.
We're tied.
And the VHS of Basic Instinct is holding up surprisingly well.
Pretty.
Pretty well.
Let's take it out of its case.
See how we're.
Oh, nope.
It's been cut so much that it is.
Oh, is it in there?
It's now in there.
Yeah, I think we actually wedged it into the paper.
That's awesome.
Nice job, guys.
Nice job.
Paul Verrowdon, great director.
Hell yeah.
Billy, you want to plug your pluggables?
Yes.
BWDTour.com slash tour is all my live dates.
I'm coming to Atlanta, Seattle, Portland, Eugene, Cincinnati, Huntington, West Virginia, Birmingham, Alabama.
See Billy Wayne live.
Come see us.
A variety of bladed instruments, I'm sure.
And continue listening to this podcast and also find it on the internet at behindthebastards.com or at BastardsPod on Twitter and Instagram.
There's also another podcast that exists.
Buy t-shirts on TeePublic.
What's that podcast called, Rob?
Oh, it's called The Worst Year Ever, and it's about politics.
Wow, that sounds so dumb, Dum, Anyway, tune in on Thursday to see who wins the game of what is definitely not tennis.
It's not tennis.
Not at all.
No.
No Andersons were harmed in the making of this podcast.
Yet.
I'm just saying I can't guarantee.
I can.
How do we light this thing on fire?
No, we're not lighting it on first.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
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Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
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This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
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An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
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Check out my newest 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.
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What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Mode.
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.
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