Behind the Bastards - The People Who Turned Burning Your Face Off Into A Healthcare Fad
Aired: 2020-04-28
Duration: 01:27:58


=== Trust Your Girlfriends (03:09) ===

[00:00:00]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[00:00:02]  Guaranteed human.
[00:00:04]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[00:00:13]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:00:15]  He is not going to get away with this.
[00:00:17]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:00:19]  We always say that: trust your girlfriends.
[00:00:24]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:00:25]  Trust me, babe.
[00:00:26]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:00:31]  I got you, I got you.
[00:00:36]  What's up, everyone?
[00:00:37]  I'm Ago Mode.
[00:00:38]  My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
[00:00:42]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:00:45]  He goes, just give it a shot.
[00:00:46]  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.
[00:00:53]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:00:56]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:01:03]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:01:05]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:01:06]  There's a lot of life.
[00:01:07]  Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:15]  In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
[00:01:22]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[00:01:26]  I doctored the test once.
[00:01:27]  It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
[00:01:32]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[00:01:34]  Greg Gillespie and Michael Manchini.
[00:01:37]  My mind was blown.
[00:01:38]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[00:01:40]  This is Love Trapped.
[00:01:41]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[00:01:43]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[00:01:47]  Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:55]  10-10 shots five, city hall building.
[00:01:58]  How could this have happened in City Hall?
[00:01:59]  Somebody tell me that.
[00:02:01]  A shocking public murder.
[00:02:03]  This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
[00:02:09]  I screamed, get down, get down.
[00:02:11]  Those are shots.
[00:02:13]  A tragedy that's now forgotten.
[00:02:15]  And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
[00:02:19]  Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:02:30]  What's edging my Roberts?
[00:02:33]  I am on the, I am on the edge of life and death right now, recording my podcast with just one pip left on the power level of my Zoom.
[00:02:43]  So this is going to be an exciting day for everyone.
[00:02:47]  Robert Evans here, host of Behind the Bastards, really frustrating my producer, Sophie, with my devil may care recklessness.
[00:02:56]  And here to ride on the edge of hell and life itself with me, my motorcycle co-pilot, Billy Wayne Davis.
[00:03:06]  Hey guys, coming from the side tour, right here.

=== The Heat of Black Salve (12:24) ===

[00:03:09]  Billy, I got the goggles on.
[00:03:11]  Look at the barny side.
[00:03:13]  You shudu.
[00:03:15]  How are you feeling as we recklessly ride the line and gamble with everything and nothing at all?
[00:03:24]  He's frozen and he looks angry and this is frozen.
[00:03:30]  Oh, there you are.
[00:03:31]  It froze right when Robert asked you a question and you were like, and your face was like this.
[00:03:35]  You were like, I had a good answer.
[00:03:38]  I said, I was like, you said edging my Roberts.
[00:03:41]  I was like, you don't understand what edging is in pornography, right?
[00:03:45]  I do.
[00:03:46]  It was a double entendre.
[00:03:48]  Okay, good.
[00:03:48]  Because I was like, that's.
[00:03:50]  No, because you know how everybody's like, you know, trapped inside and being ludicrously horny on the internet?
[00:03:58]  Yes.
[00:03:59]  Yeah, I figured I might as well play into that.
[00:04:01]  But you know what's not ludicrously horny for the internet, Billy?
[00:04:07]  I don't.
[00:04:09]  When people burn off huge chunks of their face and other body parts with nonsense medicine from the internet.
[00:04:15]  I'm sorry, what the fuck are we talking about today?
[00:04:19]  Jeez.
[00:04:19]  Oh, yeah.
[00:04:22]  This is not good.
[00:04:23]  This is a little bit of a continuation of the episode you and I did, the two-parter on Harry Hoxie, the father of the fake cancer industry.
[00:04:32]  So we had a good time on that one, right, Billy?
[00:04:35]  You enjoyed yourself?
[00:04:37]  I do oddly enjoy myself on these things.
[00:04:41]  Yeah, well, that episode was actually a little bit of an accident.
[00:04:45]  See, I found out about Harry in the first place because I was doing research for an episode on this really, you know how I love these little online communities that like start as Facebook groups and wind up killing a bunch of people?
[00:04:56]  Like that's one of my favorite things in the world.
[00:04:59]  So I was looking into one of those little groups, Black Sav Enthusiasts and like S-A-L-V-E, which is like a medicated ointment, basically.
[00:05:09]  Yeah, have you heard of Black Sav, Billy?
[00:05:12]  I've seen it, like, you know, like on, you know, just on the back of it's obvious this is bullshit, that kind of stuff.
[00:05:22]  Yeah.
[00:05:22]  Yeah, it hops around like that.
[00:05:24]  So I started looking into that and I found out about Harry Hoxie and I just wound up writing 10,000 words about Harry Hoxie when I was a little bit drunk.
[00:05:32]  And then we did that episode.
[00:05:34]  But now we're going to do the episode I originally intended, Billy.
[00:05:38]  And we're going to talk about the Black Sav community.
[00:05:42]  So.
[00:05:43]  There's a community.
[00:05:45]  Yeah, there's a whole community about burning off large chunks of your skin with bullshit poison.
[00:05:52]  It's pretty cool, Billy.
[00:05:55]  It would be neat if I could go, but people talk about if they could go back in time to the start of the internet and warn people.
[00:06:02]  And they usually focus on warning them about Trump.
[00:06:04]  It'd be fun to go back and be like, thousands of people are going to convince themselves spontaneously that it's a great idea to kill themselves with acid.
[00:06:15]  And they will think everyone else is dumb for not doing it.
[00:06:18]  And that is what the internet will create more than anything else.
[00:06:23]  And people will be like, yeah, like tell that to, you know, somebody in like 1993 on Usenet who's posting about Star Trek and really optimistic about the future of networked information.
[00:06:37]  Yeah, I always think of my seventh grade teacher, Mr. Lin, who taught us about the internet and did the, you know, it was like the, I think about him like probably once a month when I see something on the internet where I just think of him being like, you guys, this is going to change the way we share information.
[00:06:55]  It's going to make the world.
[00:06:57]  I remember so specifically how excited he was.
[00:07:01]  And then it took him 45 minutes to get online.
[00:07:05]  And then my friend David pushed one button and he was off in a second.
[00:07:09]  And I remember how mad our teacher got and was like, huh, it's going to change communication, huh?
[00:07:16]  So, Billy, now that we've talked about the internet and the past, let's talk about black salve.
[00:07:25]  Buh, black salve.
[00:07:27]  So, to describe it in brief, black salve is an alternative topical therapy that was initially used back in the day to treat skin cancer.
[00:07:34]  And most formulations contain two main ingredients.
[00:07:38]  One of them is blood root, sanguinaria canadensis, like Canada, and the other is zinc chloride.
[00:07:44]  And it all basically works by just burning layers of your skin to death at a time.
[00:07:48]  Then this dead layer of skin falls off, leaving a horrific open wound, kind of like a diabetic ulcer in terms of like the way it looks.
[00:07:57]  And yeah, that's what this community is based around, is doing that to like your face and stuff to cure cancer.
[00:08:03]  That's, I mean, they've taken a step up from like, hey, you can burn a wart off to just burn your face off.
[00:08:13]  Yeah, and it is based on that logic of like, oh, there are these chemicals that burn off layers of your skin.
[00:08:19]  And if you have a wart that's just on a couple layers of skin, they can get rid of that wart.
[00:08:23]  And they've taken that to like...
[00:08:25]  If you have cancer on the outside of your body, you can burn it off with this stuff.
[00:08:30]  But then because the internet does what it does and inherently groups online radicalize each other, everyone went from like, it's like, yeah, you can burn this skin cancer off to like, if you take these pills up your ass, it'll cure your internal cancers and stuff.
[00:08:45]  So we all made that beautiful jump.
[00:08:48]  It's great.
[00:08:49]  It's really good.
[00:08:51]  It's that young drinker who was like, if one beer makes me feel this good, two beers will make me feel black.
[00:08:58]  Yeah.
[00:09:01]  It's great.
[00:09:01]  Same kind of, yeah.
[00:09:03]  Exactly.
[00:09:04]  Yeah, that's the alternative medicine ecosystem in a nutshell.
[00:09:09]  It's the logic of 17-year-old drinkers, but writ by adults who are worried that they're going to die of cancer.
[00:09:19]  So I did a site colon Facebook.com search for black salve just to see what kind of groups were out there.
[00:09:29]  And one of the first pages I brought up was Naturally Healthy Black Salve, which is a Queensland, Australia-based group with 334 followers.
[00:09:38]  Now, their explanation of Black Salve notes, the reason we call it Black Salve is because the Bloodroot herb used is red in color to begin with, but in a short time after the Salve is made, it turns black.
[00:09:48]  The reason it is also called black drawing paste is that the blood root draws out toxins.
[00:09:54]  Now, the reality of the situation, as I'm sure you're guessing, Billy, is that blood root does not draw out toxins.
[00:10:00]  It just rips off layers of your skin.
[00:10:03]  Yeah, it's a little bit, you remember that bleach drinking cult, how like kids would start pooping out their intestinal lining and they'd convince themselves it was worms?
[00:10:14]  It's kind of like that, but with like rotting layers of your dead skin.
[00:10:19]  That's kind of the logic.
[00:10:21]  And I bet it smells good, too.
[00:10:22]  It smells awesome.
[00:10:24]  Yeah.
[00:10:24]  Anytime I've been around burning hair or skin, it's just like, that aroma.
[00:10:30]  That's good.
[00:10:31]  Yeah, I don't know because it's like burning.
[00:10:33]  It's an acid burning.
[00:10:34]  So I haven't stuck my nose in somebody's armhole due to black salve.
[00:10:39]  But yeah, I'm going to bet not great.
[00:10:41]  I'm going to bet none of it's very pleasant.
[00:10:44]  And it certainly doesn't look pleasant because people post pictures of it.
[00:10:47]  Now, yeah, the reality of the situation, because like most of these will be claimed if you like look on these sites, they're always claimed it's like a Native American remedy from this tribe or that tribe.
[00:10:57]  And they'll include, they'll really list the blood root out top because blood root sounds like something that ought to be a medicine.
[00:11:04]  The reality is that the vast majority of these salves, when they're analyzed, turn out to be majority zinc chloride, which is a synthetic corrosive chemical, and an emphasis on the word synthetic.
[00:11:14]  Native American tribes were not synthesizing a lot of zinc chloride a thousand years ago.
[00:11:20]  Are you sure?
[00:11:22]  Yeah, I'm reasonably.
[00:11:24]  I mean, you know, not to say they didn't have like pretty complicated understanding of chemistry because they were able to make DMT.
[00:11:31]  Yeah, I understand.
[00:11:32]  Yeah.
[00:11:35]  Yeah.
[00:11:36]  And the synthetic part, the fact that they're using synthetic zinc chloride is interesting to me because every site you'll find selling this stuff inevitably emphasizes how natural it is.
[00:11:47]  That first Facebook page from Queensland I found notes, it is important to dispel a myth about black salve.
[00:11:52]  There is some opposing literature around suggesting that some black salves are corrosive.
[00:11:56]  That is, they work by corrosion, like burning into the skin to burn the cancer out.
[00:12:01]  Maybe some black salves in the past were corrosive, but the more recent black salves used, including Cancema, which is the product that is being sold here, are definitely not corrosives.
[00:12:12]  The black salves we have seen used, which we now use, do not repeat, not ever act by causing corrosion of the tissue.
[00:12:18]  God.
[00:12:19]  So it's not burning you.
[00:12:21]  It's just pulling out toxins.
[00:12:23]  So they're just...
[00:12:24]  That's not fire.
[00:12:28]  Yeah.
[00:12:30]  That's freedom heat.
[00:12:32]  That's freedom heat.
[00:12:34]  Jesus Christ.
[00:12:36]  Freedom heat.
[00:12:37]  Yeah, and it's like this community of sellers has been urging this group of people who are largely self-radicalizing and gradually convinced them that like burning off your skin is just drawing out the toxins.
[00:12:52]  And anyone who says you're not drawing out the toxins is a liar on the other side of the medical industrial complex.
[00:13:00]  It's pretty cool.
[00:13:01]  So I think that's kind of amazing that because of the way online communities work and with a little bit of pushing from the companies selling this stuff, hundreds and hundreds, thousands really of people around the world have convinced themselves that a product that's literally just a type of acid that eats away at their skin and like burns layers of it to death is not corrosive, that it's drawing out toxins.
[00:13:30]  It's one thing to convince somebody, like you, you know those old products where like you would you would rub this thing on your foot that they said was like pulling out toxins and it was really just like scrubbing the bottom of your foot, but then all this black stuff gets in the water and it looks like you're...
[00:13:42]  Well, like the acid part, like you're talking about.
[00:13:46]  I get this very painful acne sometimes from stress on the back of my head.
[00:13:53]  And it's very painful.
[00:13:54]  And they don't really know how to get rid of it.
[00:13:57]  It's just like when I get stressed out, but they put these, they give me shots to make it less painful and clear it up.
[00:14:04]  And it's, I asked, I was like, why does that hurt?
[00:14:06]  Why so bad?
[00:14:08]  She's like, oh, it's just like acid we're putting in there that kills everything.
[00:14:11]  So I can see these people being like, well, this is something they use, dermatologists use to help desist and things like that.
[00:14:19]  But they're still not going to the fucking doctor.
[00:14:23]  No, and it's a different, a fundamentally different type of chemical and stuff, even if like they both may be corrosive.
[00:14:30]  Like, I don't know.
[00:14:31]  It's fundamentally a different thing.
[00:14:33]  But it's amazing to me that like these communities, with the help of some of the companies selling these products, have convinced themselves that a product that's visibly burning their skin off isn't doing that.
[00:14:46]  That it's pulling out toxins.
[00:14:47]  Like it's one thing.
[00:14:48]  You remember that they have those products where it's supposed to pull the toxins out of your feet or whatever.
[00:14:52]  And it's really just like cleaning the bottom of your feet, but it looks like you've got a bunch of toxins coming out of you.
[00:14:57]  Like that's one thing.
[00:15:00]  And it's not, like, I get why people fall for that.
[00:15:03]  It's amazing that you can have them burning holes in their body and not think that they're doing that.
[00:15:08]  Like, that's incredible.
[00:15:11]  It is incredible.
[00:15:12]  And I've fallen for the feet that...
[00:15:15]  Oh, yeah.
[00:15:16]  Yeah.
[00:15:16]  Yeah.
[00:15:17]  We all fell for something.
[00:15:20]  Yeah.
[00:15:20]  Now, so in the interest of like dispelling all the myths about this stuff, I decided to dig into the whole history of Black Sav and how our good friends at Facebook helped to spread it over the land in a manner that kind of like resembles a cancer.

=== Dr. Fell's Dangerous Paste (09:35) ===

[00:15:34]  Now, the use of this stuff in kind of Western culture starts in about 1842 when an American physician moved to New York City and enrolled in the University Medical College.
[00:15:44]  He graduated with an MD in 1844, which is a two-year period of time, because back in those days, anyone capable of staying conscious for 48 hours at a stretch could become a doctor.
[00:15:55]  He began practicing in New York City and went on to become one of the founders of the New York Academy of Medicine in 1847, which is again five years after he decided to become a doctor.
[00:16:06]  So things were easier back then for doctors, is the point I'm making.
[00:16:11]  They haven't changed that much.
[00:16:15]  Yeah, I think you can go from five years in five years from, I think, doctors sounds like a good job to founding the New York Academy of Medicine.
[00:16:24]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:16:25]  Yeah, nowadays.
[00:16:26]  Yeah, life expectancy was different.
[00:16:29]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:16:30]  So he was appointed temporary librarian, a position he held until his resignation for reasons not immediately clear the next year.
[00:16:37]  Now, his resignation was not accepted instantly.
[00:16:40]  Instead, it was forwarded to the Academy's Committee of Medical Ethics.
[00:16:44]  And their investigation showed that in 1847, Dr. Fell had started practicing with what the historical literature generally refers to as an unregulated cancer remedy.
[00:16:54]  And his membership in the organization was finally terminated in 1856 when Dr. Fell fled to England to open a new clinic.
[00:17:02]  So he joins this group or he helps to found this group and then starts kind of using his position there to try to start selling an unregulated cancer cure.
[00:17:12]  And he winds up getting kicked out for it.
[00:17:13]  And he flees to England, which in those days, I'm guessing was more like what Tijuana is today for fake doctors like this.
[00:17:24]  So he winds up in England and he decides to apply for a patent for a new promising cancer treatment he developed.
[00:17:30]  The governors of Middlesex Hospital in London wisely decided to conduct a scientific trial to see if Dr. Fell's cancer treatment actually did anything.
[00:17:37]  And it was at this point that Fell began claiming his treatment was based in a Native American remedy that he discovered in use by tribes around Lake Superior.
[00:17:47]  So Minnesotan natives, he starts like, he moves to London, starts doing this.
[00:17:56]  His college is like, we should see if this works.
[00:17:59]  And in order to kind of defray suspicion, he tells them that it's Native American magic, basically.
[00:18:04]  But he was like, hey, you guys, you know about like the shoes, the moccasins?
[00:18:08]  He's like, same people.
[00:18:10]  Yes.
[00:18:15]  So, yeah, he does this.
[00:18:18]  And yeah, and his new ointment, this cancer treatment that he'd been trying to sell since the start of his career was essentially just a root astract of blood root, which the natives called pocoon.
[00:18:29]  And he mixed this traditional remedy with huge amounts of zinc chloride, which is what is used in it today, which was a well-known and frequently used escarotic agent, which means it burns things off.
[00:18:39]  So back before, you know, surgery was very good, doctors would use escarotic agents to burn off tumors.
[00:18:47]  And that's all Dr. Fell's using.
[00:18:49]  He's taking a medicine people have used for years, and he's sprinkling in a little bit of something he can claim is Native American medicine and basically selling the same product people have always used, but with a fun twist that makes it seem like magic to wealthy white people at the day.
[00:19:08]  Gotcha.
[00:19:09]  So he's very ahead of his time.
[00:19:12]  I was going to say, it sounds like he knew his demographic before most people did.
[00:19:19]  Yeah, it almost sounds like he helped bring the demographic into being just by boldly lying.
[00:19:27]  He's a cool dude.
[00:19:29]  Yeah, well, it sounds like he understands that humans just want to be told what they want to hear.
[00:19:37]  Yeah.
[00:19:38]  I think all these fake medical grifters understand that.
[00:19:42]  And what people who are sick want to hear is, you're going to be better.
[00:19:47]  Yeah.
[00:19:47]  And if you can make them believe that, it doesn't really matter what the treatment is.
[00:19:52]  All you're ever convincing them is that I can make you better.
[00:19:55]  And then, you know, whatever way you do that as an individual grifter doesn't really matter very much.
[00:20:02]  No, because it's all placebo.
[00:20:04]  Yeah.
[00:20:06]  Yeah.
[00:20:06]  And it's all based around, you know, just the charisma of whatever dude is making the nonsense that is your particular species of nonsense.
[00:20:18]  And I'm going to go ahead on the limb and say nine and a half times out of ten, it's always a dude.
[00:20:25]  It almost always nowadays that's changed because of Instagram.
[00:20:31]  I don't know if it's the only reason, but it has definitely changed because there's a lot of lady grifters.
[00:20:36]  So we have officially defeated the patriarchy in the realm of fake medical cures.
[00:20:43]  So that's good, Billy.
[00:20:45]  Hey, baby steps.
[00:20:46]  Baby steps.
[00:20:47]  So, yeah, so Dr. Fell wraps up his very old burn-off cancer treatment in Bloodroot because it sounds mystical.
[00:20:58]  And, you know, initial studies did suggest that Bloodroot might be useful for certain things like removing warts.
[00:21:03]  But Dr. Fell insisted that it was a cancer treatment.
[00:21:06]  And he decided to go beyond just insisting that it could treat cancer and really made a point of trying to inform everybody that this was an external and internal treatment for cancer.
[00:21:16]  So doctors are like, oh, yeah, I mean, this can burn off.
[00:21:18]  This might burn off certain cancers.
[00:21:20]  And he's like, yeah, but if you take it, it'll cure your gut cancer too.
[00:21:23]  You got to put it as much of it inside of your body as possible.
[00:21:27]  What could go wrong?
[00:21:28]  What could go wrong?
[00:21:31]  Yeah.
[00:21:31]  So Dr. Fell insisted that his browned paste was an ideal treatment for large tumors and that it resulted in comparatively little and in many cases, no pain.
[00:21:41]  He claimed that only 30% of his patients suffered a recurrence of their cancer, as opposed to 80 to 90% of patients treated with a knife alone.
[00:21:48]  All of these claims were lies.
[00:21:50]  Clinical trials showed that many of Dr. Fell's patients suffered a rapid acceleration in tumor growth.
[00:21:56]  The trials also showed that, contrary to his claims, Fell's paste caused nightmarish, unendurable pain in his patients.
[00:22:03]  And I'm going to quote from a write-up I found on Victorian Web.
[00:22:06]  Quote, Fell's regimen had drawn criticism for its purported inability to control discomfort.
[00:22:11]  The middlesex physicians observed that the worst pain was experienced during the treatment of epithelial cancers, especially on the face, where the paste came into contact with ulcerated surfaces.
[00:22:19]  Some patients simply could not bear it, so for them, the treatment ceased.
[00:22:23]  The chloride was no doubt acutely painful, but its severity lasted only minutes and could be reduced with cold compresses.
[00:22:29]  Where large lesions had to be destroyed, chloroform was used, and the preoperative surface was first frozen by the application of mixed ice and salt.
[00:22:37]  So these are pretty horrific surgery they're doing to people.
[00:22:41]  Like they're burning holes in their faces, and then when they have to apply more burning stuff to the holes in their faces, they're knocking them out with chloroform and freezing like the dead skin that they have to bake, like knock off so that they can knock it off when the person's like not screaming and awake.
[00:22:56]  So it's bad.
[00:22:58]  Do you think like the guy, the first guy they're treating is watching it and then his roommate's like, hey, when it's my turn, let's do the chlorophyll first on me.
[00:23:09]  Let's do that first.
[00:23:12]  Yeah, I definitely, I see why the chloroform came into it.
[00:23:16]  I can I can support that.
[00:23:20]  Jesus.
[00:23:21]  Yeah.
[00:23:22]  So years of testing eventually came to a profoundly mixed conclusion about Fell's paste.
[00:23:28]  There was some evidence that it might have been a little bit better than certain older pastes had been at burning away cancers, but even this was unclear.
[00:23:36]  And Fell wasn't willing to just be like, hey, I made a slightly better burning paste.
[00:23:40]  He insisted for years that it would treat internal cancers, and there was just no evidence of this.
[00:23:46]  And Dr. Fell went on to make a lot of money failing to treat people in London with his paste.
[00:23:51]  But the mainstream medical community did eventually declare it humbug after extensive clinical trials.
[00:23:56]  So, you know, it picked up in popularity, primarily among the alternative medical set after that.
[00:24:03]  And Harry Hoxie, our old friend, is the guy who first picked up the torch of burning off cancer with zinc chloride and blood root in the 20s and 30s.
[00:24:11]  He was joined by a doctor named Frederick Moose in the 1930s, who formulated his own version of Fell's paste that showed remarkable success in treating basal cell carcinoma.
[00:24:20]  Or at least it looked like it might have remarkable success at that.
[00:24:23]  Other researchers who looked into the matter were able to immediately show that his paste actually had no credit on the treatment.
[00:24:30]  And the real credit went to the fact that he was using a new surgical technique alongside his paste.
[00:24:34]  Despite it being proven that his paste had no curative effect, Moe's patented it as a standalone topical therapy that required no cutting in order to make a bunch of money.
[00:24:44]  So these are all good people.
[00:24:46]  Really good people.
[00:24:48]  Yeah, they seem like good people that understand that by the time you figure out I'm full of shit, I'll be gone and die.
[00:24:55]  Yeah, or you'll be dead, which is the real benefit of medical grifting, is just the fact that people tend to die from what you do to them.
[00:25:04]  Yeah.
[00:25:05]  But you know who never dies, Billy?

=== Patents and Lies (03:37) ===

[00:25:09]  No.
[00:25:10]  The products and services that support this podcast all are eternal.
[00:25:14]  The saddest one you've ever done.
[00:25:16]  Writ into the firmament of the stars, Billy.
[00:25:20]  You cannot kill these products and services.
[00:25:24]  And maybe, just maybe, if you buy them, you too will become immortal.
[00:25:28]  That's the FDA-backed guarantee we make on Behind the Bastards.
[00:25:33]  Where do I sign up?
[00:25:35]  Right here, Billy.
[00:25:37]  Perfect.
[00:25:41]  What's up, everyone?
[00:25:42]  I'm Ego Modem.
[00:25:43]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
[00:25:54]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:25:57]  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.
[00:26:02]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:26:05]  I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place that come look for up-and-coming talent.
[00:26:09]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[00:26:14]  Yeah.
[00:26:14]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:26:17]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:26:19]  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.
[00:26:27]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:26:30]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:26:37]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:26:39]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:26:40]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:26:41]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:26:51]  10-10 shots fired.
[00:26:53]  City hall building.
[00:26:54]  A silver.40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
[00:26:59]  From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
[00:27:02]  This is Rorschach.
[00:27:04]  Murder at City Hall.
[00:27:05]  How could this have happened in City Hall?
[00:27:06]  Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey Hood did.
[00:27:09]  July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
[00:27:16]  Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
[00:27:19]  And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
[00:27:27]  Everybody in the chamber adopts a shocking public murder.
[00:27:31]  I scream, get down, get down.
[00:27:33]  Those are shots.
[00:27:34]  Those are shots.
[00:27:35]  Get down.
[00:27:35]  A charismatic politician.
[00:27:37]  You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
[00:27:39]  I still have a weapon.
[00:27:41]  And I could shoot you.
[00:27:44]  And an outsider with a secret.
[00:27:46]  He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
[00:27:49]  That may or may not have been political.
[00:27:51]  That may have been about sex.
[00:27:53]  Listening to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:28:06]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:28:10]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:28:13]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:28:16]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:28:20]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:28:23]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
[00:28:27]  Oh my god, this is the same man.
[00:28:29]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:28:34]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:28:36]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:28:38]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:28:40]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:28:43]  They said, oh, hell no.
[00:28:44]  I vowed I will be his last target.

=== Omega Labs' Global Reach (13:24) ===

[00:28:47]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:28:51]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:28:53]  Trust me, babe.
[00:28:54]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:29:04]  I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:29:10]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:29:16]  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.
[00:29:23]  From power to parenthood.
[00:29:25]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:29:28]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:29:31]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:29:33]  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.
[00:29:37]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:29:44]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:29:46]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:29:53]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[00:29:55]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:29:58]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:30:09]  And we're back.
[00:30:11]  So, yeah, in 1975, a Portuguese doctor named Almida Goncalves visited Frederick Moe's clinic and observed his technique.
[00:30:19]  He was able to find it and show that when the paste was used alongside a skilled surgeon with a scalpel, there might be some minor benefit to it.
[00:30:26]  However, his research showed that when people applied the salve on their own, they basically always fucked it up, failing to put it on properly and leading to residual metastasized cancer in most cases.
[00:30:37]  Now, Black Sav languished as a treatment for years after this, primarily because repeated research has shown that it was actually a really bad way to treat cancer and at the very most, modestly useful when a skilled surgeon like used it in combination with advanced surgical techniques.
[00:30:53]  But then, Billy, then along came the man who would save Black Sav from the dustbin of history.
[00:31:00]  A myth, a legend named Greg Catton.
[00:31:05]  He took one look at Black Sav and he saw an opportunity.
[00:31:09]  Oh, good.
[00:31:10]  Great.
[00:31:10]  You're going to like this guy.
[00:31:12]  You're going to really like meeting this guy.
[00:31:13]  So Gregory James Catton had founded a company called Consumer Express back in 1984.
[00:31:18]  It was a garden variety MLM manufacturing low-quality nutritional supplements and then selling them at an outrageous markup to customers who would then sell them to friends and family.
[00:31:29]  After a couple of years, he changed the name of his company to Nutrition Express.
[00:31:33]  And shortly thereafter, his business was bought by a fellow you might have heard of named Kevin Trudeau.
[00:31:39]  Oh my God.
[00:31:41]  Yeah.
[00:31:42]  Yeah.
[00:31:42]  So in 1993, Greg Canton was angry over the buyout.
[00:31:47]  Apparently, he felt that Trudeau, a notorious fraudster and scammer, had scammed him in buying his company.
[00:31:53]  And he wrote a book called MLM Fraud, which alleged that he'd been tricked by Trudeau while tricking customers with his shitty MLM, which is very funny and good.
[00:32:02]  That is, that's the story you want to hear right there.
[00:32:06]  Yeah.
[00:32:06]  Yeah, there's nothing I love more than a scammer getting scammed by a scammer in the process of committing a scam.
[00:32:13]  Trying to get better scams.
[00:32:15]  Yeah, it's great.
[00:32:16]  So in the mid-1990s, Greg had to find a new grift.
[00:32:20]  And he found that grift in black salve, and particularly a formulation of black salve known as Cancema.
[00:32:26]  And the Cancema folks were the ones who were insisting up at the top of the episode that their burning paste did not burn anything, which is cool.
[00:32:35]  So, yeah, so Cancema.
[00:32:40]  Absolutely.
[00:32:43]  So is it, okay?
[00:32:45]  My whole thing usually in these things is like I'm trying to get behind like their mental motivation.
[00:32:50]  Like when they say, are they just rebutting people be like, that shit burns people.
[00:32:55]  And they're like, no, no, not this one.
[00:32:57]  It doesn't burn.
[00:32:58]  Because it's going to burn them.
[00:33:00]  Is that why they say that?
[00:33:01]  Is it just like a rebuttal or they've just decided, like, I'm just not going to say, just don't say it burns.
[00:33:07]  Yeah, I think it's like, you know, I don't think most of these companies have very sophisticated PR operations, right?
[00:33:14]  Like it's a couple of people shipping out the poison and they also take shots at it on the internet.
[00:33:20]  And I think it's just one of those things where it's like, okay, everybody's saying that our death paste burns their skin off.
[00:33:28]  But it's not burning their skin off.
[00:33:29]  We'll tell them it's sucking out the toxins.
[00:33:32]  And like, I don't know.
[00:33:33]  I think they just, they've kind of realized that's the one thing they have to convince people.
[00:33:38]  If you convince the people taking it that it's going to, if they, if the people taking it are terrified that their body is filled with toxins and think that this will pull the toxins out, that's all you really need to sell them on because they already don't believe doctors, you know?
[00:33:52]  Yeah.
[00:33:53]  Well, it sounds like a lot of these people are just improvisers with an actual product.
[00:33:57]  Yeah.
[00:33:58]  Yeah.
[00:33:58]  I think a lot of these people, if they had gotten into UCB, might have, might have scratched that itch in their heads.
[00:34:05]  Oh my God.
[00:34:07]  No.
[00:34:08]  Easy is a scam.
[00:34:10]  It sure is.
[00:34:11]  It sure is, but it's a scam that doesn't make people burn their faces off.
[00:34:15]  That I know of.
[00:34:17]  That we know of.
[00:34:17]  That I know of.
[00:34:19]  I mean, we'll see.
[00:34:20]  Now that the internet age has taken over improv in the wake of the quarantine, I don't know, maybe.
[00:34:29]  We'll see some faces burned off.
[00:34:31]  I think, as a general rule, the community of people who are comfortable getting up to people and saying nonsense to them, which includes both like scam artists and stand-up comedians and improvisers and actors, they're all kind of the same pool of people.
[00:34:45]  And the best of them get careers entertaining people and the worst of them sell poison.
[00:34:52]  Yeah, you're exactly right.
[00:34:54]  And then in the middle, they go to Washington.
[00:34:56]  And in the middle, they go, yeah, when they're not good enough to do either, they get into politics.
[00:35:01]  That's exactly who that's who we're talking about.
[00:35:05]  So in the mid-1990s, yeah, Greg starts selling Cancema.
[00:35:09]  And he basically takes, in making this formulation, he takes this traditional blood root and zinc chloride extract that Dr. Fells had initially created, and he just throws in a bunch of random herbs so he can really lay in on the whole this is Native American medicine aspect of it.
[00:35:24]  And Cancema sells really well, and Greg makes like a million dollars in the space of a couple of years.
[00:35:29]  But the FDA grows wise to his operation, particularly the part of it where Greg starts claiming Cancema has a 100% success rate in dealing with skin cancers, regardless of the type or size of cancer.
[00:35:41]  He also claims that his Wonder Paste could intelligently discriminate between cancerous tissues and healthy ones.
[00:35:47]  So it only, Greg is like, this only burns away cancerous tissue.
[00:35:52]  So if you put it on your skin and your skin burns, that's cancer.
[00:35:58]  God.
[00:35:59]  Jesus.
[00:36:02]  It's terrible.
[00:36:04]  He fucking rules.
[00:36:05]  Oh, my God.
[00:36:06]  He does kind of.
[00:36:06]  He just kept saying stuff.
[00:36:08]  Like, you would say stuff and then read.
[00:36:11]  And they're like, you guys, okay?
[00:36:12]  You're with me on that?
[00:36:13]  It's a great solution because, like, what's the problem?
[00:36:16]  This thing burns off your skin anywhere it touches you.
[00:36:19]  Just make people believe that it only burns cancer.
[00:36:22]  Like, it's like the variant of the emperor is wearing no clothing of that story, but with face burning paste.
[00:36:30]  Yep.
[00:36:31]  Oh, is it burning?
[00:36:32]  Oh, man.
[00:36:32]  You're lucky.
[00:36:34]  You're lucky.
[00:36:35]  That whole nose was cancer.
[00:36:37]  There's a lot of pictures of people who lose their entire noses to this stuff.
[00:36:40]  So that's why I said that.
[00:36:43]  Oh, man.
[00:36:43]  Horrible pictures.
[00:36:44]  Be glad that this is an audio medium because the pictures are fucking awful.
[00:36:50]  You think noses are ugly till you see somebody without one.
[00:36:53]  And then you're like, you know what?
[00:36:57]  Oddly enough, a lot of these pictures, you know, you spend a lot of time in very poor parts of the globe and refugee camps, and you see people with like horrible ailments that are like easily treated with access to like modern nutrition and even like minimal health care.
[00:37:11]  So like we just don't see them often in the United States.
[00:37:16]  And a lot of them are like on the face and really terrible and clearly like very, very uncomfortable for the people.
[00:37:23]  And there, it's just like this horrible consequence of their unspeakable poverty and suffering.
[00:37:28]  And here, when people wind up with like giant holes on their face, it's generally because they've decided to like they've got to self-treat their cancer, which is sometimes also caused by a lack of resources.
[00:37:41]  But the fact that this takes off like a fucking rocket in Australia where they have national health care is evidence that like sometimes people just like to do it.
[00:37:50]  It's really, there's so many people that are like, yeah, I know a little bit better than most people.
[00:37:56]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:37:57]  I'm smarter enough than everyone else that I can take, I'm the right one to deal with my cancer.
[00:38:03]  I didn't get to upper management at McDonald's for being a dumb dumb.
[00:38:11]  Give me some of that black saff.
[00:38:12]  Put it on my balls.
[00:38:13]  Yeah, right on them testicles.
[00:38:15]  That might be, I want to know if there's cancer there, and since it only burns cancer.
[00:38:21]  I'm glad I did.
[00:38:22]  It hurts like, hell, there's a lot of cancer down there.
[00:38:24]  Yeah.
[00:38:26]  So, yeah, Catton was initially hard for the FDA to track.
[00:38:29]  He sold Cancema through a company called the Lumen Food Corporation, but actually shipped Cancema through another company, Alpha Omega Labs, which was registered in, of all places, the Bahamas.
[00:38:40]  By 2003.
[00:38:42]  Yay!
[00:38:45]  By 2003, the FDA had untangled this all and tracked Catton down to a residence in an industrial site in Lake Charles, Louisiana, which is where you want to headquarter your fake burn people skin off operation.
[00:38:59]  A little messy girl I didn't know.
[00:39:02]  Yeah.
[00:39:03]  So the FDA raided his location and they found a huge amount of Cancema as well as a giant cache of misbranded and unapproved drugs.
[00:39:11]  Among that cache were 16 55 gallon drums of a liquid corrosive material eventually identified as sulfuric acid.
[00:39:20]  What?
[00:39:22]  What?
[00:39:22]  I mean, Billy, that's not a whole lot of sulfuric acid.
[00:39:26]  Like, there's, you know, let's see here.
[00:39:29]  16 times 55.
[00:39:32]  That's just 880 gallons of sulfuric acid, Billy.
[00:39:35]  Well, and it's not highly corrosive.
[00:39:38]  No!
[00:39:39]  And in fact, Catton had labeled the acid non-corrosive, which meant that his employees didn't use proper safety precautions when they were some Michael Scott shit, right?
[00:39:52]  It's awesome.
[00:39:53]  Yeah, it's Michael Scott selling face burning cream.
[00:39:57]  And one guess as to what he was doing with the sulfuric acid.
[00:40:01]  I think this guy was watering down his blood root with just straight up acid.
[00:40:09]  He's cool.
[00:40:10]  I love him.
[00:40:11]  Now, in addition to the drugs and the acid, and I mean that in the way that is the least fun way that that sentence can be read.
[00:40:20]  Yeah, neither the drugs nor the acid are fun.
[00:40:23]  The FDA also turned up a small pile of weapons, three semi-automatic rifles, one bolt action rifle, two shotguns, a pistol, several sets of body armor, which had been concealed inside a hidden compartment.
[00:40:34]  Now, since Catton was already a convicted felon due to prior schemes that had gotten him convicted of felonies, he was arrested on possession of firearms because that was the most illegal part of the face burning operation.
[00:40:47]  You know, that went on the back burner.
[00:40:50]  Well, that's the thing.
[00:40:51]  I mean, you can even, they're like, listen, he's, yeah, the face burning thing is like, that's people keep doing that, but the guns, we got.
[00:41:04]  It's just, it's so American.
[00:41:06]  It's the most American anything can possibly be.
[00:41:11]  Yeah.
[00:41:12]  So he goes to prison for about five years or so, and he does his time.
[00:41:16]  He gets out and he moves immediately to Ecuador.
[00:41:19]  Well, I will bet he is allowed to own guns again.
[00:41:22]  Yeah, or at least he owns guns again.
[00:41:26]  So he continued to operate Alpha Omega Labs from Ecuador, and it is in business to this day, selling black salve all over the world with Nari ACARE for the FDA.
[00:41:35]  Today you can buy 22 grams of black salve for $24.95 from Alpha Omega Labs' own website.
[00:41:41]  Their company tagline is the triumph of medical science over politics and greed.
[00:41:48]  And while I might quibble a little bit with that, it is probably accurate to say that the black salve makers have triumphed over the FDA at least.
[00:41:55]  Yes, they have.
[00:41:56]  I'm curious who in prison told him about Ecuador.
[00:42:01]  Yeah, I'm going to guess a lot of people.
[00:42:05]  Yeah, because that's like, it's so clear.
[00:42:07]  Like, he went in there and he's like, here's what I say.

=== Social Media Radicalization (10:32) ===

[00:42:11]  It burns people, but they love it.
[00:42:14]  And Ecuador, Ecuador, you should go there.
[00:42:18]  Yeah, that is the place for you, friend.
[00:42:22]  It's like that moment in Blow where it's like, tell me, what do you know about cocaine?
[00:42:29]  Tell me, what do you know about Ecuador?
[00:42:32]  You're like, go on.
[00:42:34]  Go on.
[00:42:35]  So, yeah, so he gets out of jail.
[00:42:38]  He starts selling this stuff from Ecuador.
[00:42:40]  And, you know, the first couple of years, it's pretty minimal, but it gradually starts to rocket up and rock it up in the mid-aughts after, like, especially 2012 or so.
[00:42:50]  And the culprit as to why Black Sav started to grow in popularity again in the last few years is, of course, Facebook.
[00:42:59]  Over the last decade, Black Sav has leapt out of relative obscurity and into a prominent position within the alt medical ecosystem.
[00:43:06]  Numerous Facebook groups with names like Black Sav Healing Support Group provide opportunities for thousands of sick people to urge each other to burn their problems away with poison.
[00:43:15]  I'm going to quote now from a BuzzFeed article on the matter.
[00:43:18]  A Facebook spokesperson told BuzzFeed that these groups don't violate its community guidelines.
[00:43:23]  This summer, it launched an initiative to address exaggerated or sensational health claims and will downrank that content in the newsfeed, similar to how it handles clickbait.
[00:43:31]  But it's not clear how it defines what a sensational health claim is, setting user privacy.
[00:43:35]  Facebook would not say whether or not it had downranked the black salve groups in the newsfeed.
[00:43:40]  Other platforms have taken a different approach.
[00:43:42]  When BuzzFeed News asked YouTube about several videos where people discussed using Black Sav, YouTube said the videos were in violation and removed them.
[00:43:49]  Amazon, which does not sell the SAV itself, removed a book about Black Sav when BuzzFeed News asked about it.
[00:43:54]  So this is a case where even normally really irresponsible people, you can find so many fucking books on Amazon right now about the coronavirus.
[00:44:03]  But even they were like, oh, we shouldn't let people, we shouldn't enable this, right?
[00:44:08]  This crosses a line.
[00:44:09]  But fucking Facebook, they're on board with it.
[00:44:14]  Of course they are.
[00:44:16]  Or like our community guidelines strictly say if you get enough clicks, you can do whatever you want.
[00:44:22]  Exactly.
[00:44:23]  And one of the amazing things about the coronavirus outbreak, like they just, Facebook just cut a live video stream from the president of Brazil, Jayer Bolsinaro, because he was just lying, particularly about the same thing our president was lying about, that fucking quinine derivative medication that he says is a cure.
[00:44:42]  And they just cut his feed.
[00:44:44]  And I'm starting to wonder, like, one of a couple of things finally happened.
[00:44:48]  One of them is just that this was finally serious enough that it spooked them into acting like a respectable member of the community.
[00:44:54]  The other is that the large majority of Facebook employees, and I've known a number of them, are decent, perfectly decent, reasonable people who have a lot of issues with certain things.
[00:45:07]  And maybe the sheer fucked upness of the situation meant that that group was finally able to push for some changes and we'll see more of them.
[00:45:18]  I'm interested in whether or not they change any of their other ways and get more responsible from here on out or if they're just panicked about coronavirus because they're worried that a lot of them are going to die.
[00:45:28]  I don't know.
[00:45:29]  We'll see.
[00:45:31]  Well, usually that shit comes from the top down.
[00:45:34]  And I don't see Marky Mark changing his ways.
[00:45:40]  Yeah, I mean, it often does, but also, like, it's such a big company.
[00:45:44]  Like, I highly doubt Mark Zuckerberg never got asked about fucking Black Sav.
[00:45:49]  That decision was made below him.
[00:45:50]  That's because it's not, we're not talking about enough of a, like, I think that when you talk about like right-wing disinformation, Mark's been in a number of those calls where they've decided, no, we leave these people who keep lying on.
[00:46:01]  But I don't think Black Sav is something he winds up getting consulted about.
[00:46:06]  You know, it's a problem, but it's not.
[00:46:08]  There's billions of Facebook users, right?
[00:46:11]  Well, I just mean the cutting of the president's feed.
[00:46:16]  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:46:17]  That had to have been the final call was someone at the top for sure.
[00:46:22]  Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
[00:46:23]  And I'm saying, like, just letting all most of this shit go is probably still going to happen because he's just a, I think at this point, a megalomaniac.
[00:46:34]  Yeah, I mean, we're all going to learn a lot over the next year.
[00:46:38]  We're all.
[00:46:40]  I should, let me rephrase that.
[00:46:42]  Those of us that survive are all going to learn a lot.
[00:46:48]  So, in their investigation into Black Sav on Facebook, BuzzFeed found seven different Facebook groups for Black Sav discussion visible in search results.
[00:46:57]  The largest of these groups had 21,000 members, which is too many members for a burn-your-own face-off fan group.
[00:47:04]  Now, most of these are invite-only groups, but the sort of people who use magical goo to burn away their cancer are not super great at vetting new members.
[00:47:12]  So, Facebook was able to get into a number of these groups.
[00:47:15]  And once they were inside, they were able to collect horrifying stories of black Sav applications gone wrong.
[00:47:20]  Quote, a woman recently posted photos to a private group of a spot on her cheek that she had applied black salve seven times, asking if she should keep applying after it oozed pus several times.
[00:47:30]  The next post was from a man and featured photos of a large wound on his ribs and the scab that had fallen off.
[00:47:35]  In the comments, someone wrote, impressive.
[00:47:40]  Impressive.
[00:47:42]  You're really burning a hole in your side there.
[00:47:44]  Good job.
[00:47:45]  You're doing good hovel burning.
[00:47:47]  That's good.
[00:47:49]  Yeah, I mean, it is a little bit like I've known some people who are into like sort of extreme like self-torture kind of stuff for erotic purposes and watch some like, yeah, I mean, you are fucking, you are, that's a lot of holes in your back that you're hanging yourself.
[00:48:05]  Good.
[00:48:06]  Good.
[00:48:07]  I had a friend who did stand up hanging from two hooks for 15 minutes.
[00:48:12]  Yeah, and one of the differences that those communities actually are incredibly health and security conscious and are doing something that is fundamentally has some dangers in the safest way possible, as opposed to ripping holes in their side with poison to try to cure themselves.
[00:48:31]  Yeah.
[00:48:32]  So in 2017, a woman posted on that 21,000 member Facebook group that she had put black salve on her breast to kill a tumor.
[00:48:41]  When she bent over, she says she heard a popping noise and blood and pus poured out.
[00:48:45]  She went to the emergency room where she was put on IV antibiotics.
[00:48:49]  Three months later, she wrote an update to say that she was now being treated for her cancer by a traditional oncologist.
[00:48:56]  So these are the kind of tales we find.
[00:48:58]  It popped, Billy.
[00:49:01]  Fuck.
[00:49:02]  Good stuff.
[00:49:03]  Awesome stuff.
[00:49:05]  Like, so she went there before and then.
[00:49:09]  Yeah, she found out she had cancer, decided I can take care of this cancer, and then did not take care of this cancer and decided I should consult a real doctor again.
[00:49:20]  I mean, she's lucky.
[00:49:22]  Yes.
[00:49:23]  Well, we don't know if she lived in the long run, but yeah.
[00:49:26]  I mean, she's lucky that that didn't kill her.
[00:49:29]  That's what I'm saying.
[00:49:30]  Yes.
[00:49:30]  Yes, absolutely.
[00:49:32]  To make matters worse, recent investigations have shown that black salve can actually make non-deadly cancers into life-threatening cancers.
[00:49:39]  There is evident, like, basal cell carcinoma, for example, does not normally metastasize, but it does metastasize with some regularity if you put a mutagenic compound on it.
[00:49:50]  And black salve is a mutagenic compound, which can cause it to go rogue, in the words of one oncologist, and spread to other parts of the body.
[00:49:59]  So this thing that like normally isn't going to be a life-threatening cancer, black salve actually makes into a life-threatening cancer.
[00:50:05]  So that's cool.
[00:50:07]  I mean, I mean, it's just that thing of like, you can hear somebody sailing it, and they're like, well, I don't know, man.
[00:50:14]  I don't know if that stuff will work on me.
[00:50:17]  And then the salesman's like, it can't make it worse.
[00:50:20]  And then the doctor's like, it made it worse.
[00:50:23]  Actually, it can make it worse.
[00:50:25]  Yeah, you are going to die now.
[00:50:27]  Yeah.
[00:50:28]  And it's awesome, Billy.
[00:50:30]  I mean, what's good about this is that, you know, basal cell carcinoma was in the old days kind of the most common thing that black salve was applied to.
[00:50:39]  But now, thankfully, because so many great grifters have put effort into convincing people that it cures internal cancers, a lot of people use it for internal cancers.
[00:50:50]  So that's good.
[00:50:52]  Yeah.
[00:50:52]  Right?
[00:50:53]  Yeah.
[00:50:53]  People aren't.
[00:50:54]  Yeah.
[00:50:56]  You gotta burn your insides.
[00:50:57]  That's always good for them.
[00:51:00]  It doesn't need water.
[00:51:01]  No.
[00:51:03]  In a Facebook group named Blood Root Discussion Group, BuzzFeed found a woman who, in 2015 and 16, posted frequently about taking black salve in pill form and topically to treat her ovarian cancer.
[00:51:15]  Her last post was in 2016, asking if it was normal to pass lumps vaginally.
[00:51:20]  Sometime later, another member of the group posted to inform the others that she had died.
[00:51:25]  So that's good and cool.
[00:51:29]  Don't you shouldn't pass lumps that way.
[00:51:32]  No.
[00:51:33]  Also.
[00:51:34]  In 2017, a woman named April started documenting her self-breast cancer treatments with Black Sav on YouTube.
[00:51:41]  She claims to have done some chemo, but declined surgery or radiation, preferring instead to treat herself with black salve.
[00:51:47]  She posted 14 videos over the course of nearly two years, uploading her last video in early 2019.
[00:51:53]  Four months after that video was uploaded, her son commented on it to tell her viewers that his mother had died.
[00:51:59]  Now, those videos had not been removed as of the publication of the BuzzFeed article.
[00:52:04]  They have since been taken down by YouTube, but YouTube was perfectly happy to leave this whole trail of videos up.
[00:52:11]  Wow.
[00:52:12]  So that's good.
[00:52:14]  Also taken down from YouTube in the wake of that article was a popular video titled, I removed four breast cancer tumors using black salve.
[00:52:21]  So you can see the pattern here pretty well.
[00:52:23]  When big media companies expose this stuff, it gets taken down.
[00:52:27]  But YouTube and Facebook know they're pretty safe on waiting to take action until people get angry, since their only obligation is to their shareholders and not the health of their users or the health of the broader society, which is a good way for things to work.
[00:52:40]  Yeah.
[00:52:42]  Yeah.

=== Corporate Responsibility (05:06) ===

[00:52:44]  Now, Billy, you know who does have a great responsibility to broader society and its users.
[00:52:52]  McDonald's.
[00:52:54]  Yes, McDonald's and all of the other products and services that support this podcast.
[00:53:00]  A lot of responsibility, Billy.
[00:53:07]  What's up, everyone?
[00:53:08]  I'm Ego Modem.
[00:53:09]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
[00:53:20]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:53:23]  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.
[00:53:28]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:53:31]  I'm working my way up through it.
[00:53:32]  I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
[00:53:35]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[00:53:40]  Yeah.
[00:53:40]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:53:43]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:53:44]  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.
[00:53:53]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:53:55]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:54:02]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:54:04]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:54:06]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:54:07]  Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:54:17]  10-10 shots fired.
[00:54:19]  City hall building.
[00:54:20]  A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
[00:54:24]  From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach.
[00:54:29]  Murder at City Hall.
[00:54:30]  How could this have happened in City Hall?
[00:54:32]  Somebody tell me that.
[00:54:33]  Jeffrey, what did it?
[00:54:35]  July 2003.
[00:54:36]  Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
[00:54:41]  Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
[00:54:44]  And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
[00:54:53]  Everybody in the chamber ducks.
[00:54:55]  A shocking public murder.
[00:54:57]  I scream, get down, get down.
[00:54:59]  Those are shots.
[00:55:00]  Those are shots.
[00:55:00]  Get down.
[00:55:01]  A charismatic politician.
[00:55:02]  You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
[00:55:05]  I still have a weapon.
[00:55:07]  And I could shoot you.
[00:55:10]  And an outsider with a secret.
[00:55:12]  He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
[00:55:15]  That may or may not have been political.
[00:55:17]  That may have been about sex.
[00:55:19]  Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:55:32]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:55:36]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:55:39]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:55:42]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:55:45]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:55:49]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
[00:55:53]  Oh my god, this is the same man.
[00:55:55]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:56:00]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:56:02]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:56:03]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:56:06]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:56:08]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:56:10]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:56:12]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:56:17]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:56:19]  Trust me, babe.
[00:56:20]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:56:30]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:56:35]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:56:42]  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.
[00:56:49]  From power to parenthood.
[00:56:51]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:56:54]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:56:56]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:56:59]  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.
[00:57:03]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:57:10]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:57:12]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:57:18]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[00:57:20]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:57:23]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:57:34]  We're back.
[00:57:35]  So the expansion of Black Sav through the well-worn tunnels of the global fake news ecosystem has opened up a market that's now a lot larger than it was in simpler times when Greg Catton was hoarding rifles and sulfuric acid in Louisiana.
[00:57:48]  I do miss those days.

=== Enemas and Fake Cures (05:11) ===

[00:57:50]  In April of 2017, the FDA sent out warning letters to a number of black salve makers.
[00:57:55]  They arrested an Amish seller in Kentucky and sentenced him to six years in prison.
[00:58:00]  But companies like Alpha Omega, based in countries that don't extradite to the U.S., keep a steady supply flowing into the country.
[00:58:06]  And Facebook groups provide a place for users to discuss where they can still buy the SAV or make it for themselves.
[00:58:12]  So this is all just great.
[00:58:15]  And as awareness of Black Sav has spread, so too have its non-prescribed prescribed uses.
[00:58:20]  Black Sav advocates now use it to self-treat acne and moles, and they've even formulated diluted versions to use as vaginal douches and enemas.
[00:58:28]  Because if there's anything that makes a good vaginal douche, it's something that burns off layers of your skin.
[00:58:34]  Oh!
[00:58:39]  I'm so happy.
[00:58:40]  What if we made douching a worse idea?
[00:58:43]  Yeah, it's awesome.
[00:58:45]  Oh, God.
[00:58:48]  Yeah.
[00:58:48]  I'm in pain just from hearing.
[00:58:50]  No, it's okay.
[00:58:51]  I support using this as an enema.
[00:58:53]  You should all enema your stuff with as often as possible.
[00:58:57]  That's just good basic medical stuff.
[00:58:58]  You don't have to poop anymore.
[00:59:00]  Yeah.
[00:59:01]  It just falls right out.
[00:59:02]  It's great.
[00:59:02]  It just, pieces of it just drop out and then you're good to go.
[00:59:06]  Whenever every day it's great.
[00:59:09]  You know, one of the best ways traditionally to lose weight, Billy, is to have large sections of your colon and small intestine removed surgically.
[00:59:18]  Yeah, they're heavy.
[00:59:20]  Yeah.
[00:59:20]  They're heavy, exactly.
[00:59:22]  Get rid of those love handles.
[00:59:26]  So, yeah, people are now selling this as douches and enemas.
[00:59:30]  And one example of how this is marketed comes from the it's awesome, Sophie.
[00:59:34]  Let's not be judgmental about a healthy and good thing.
[00:59:38]  I'm somewhere in between, you guys.
[00:59:40]  That's good.
[00:59:40]  The middle is always where the truth lies.
[00:59:42]  Yeah.
[00:59:43]  Horrible.
[00:59:45]  One example of how this is marketed is the website for Two Feathers Healing Formula, a popular black salve variant.
[00:59:51]  Here's how they sell it on their website: Two Feathers Healing Formula is a unique American Indian herbal compound that has reached through time over several hundred years to meet the needs of an ailing civilization today.
[01:00:04]  It is like a time capsule sent to us from a distant past when knowledge was more of the spirit than of the intellect.
[01:00:10]  There's a great sincerity and respect for this healing formula at every stage of its preparation.
[01:00:16]  That is impressive.
[01:00:21]  Oh, man.
[01:00:22]  Eloquent.
[01:00:23]  Bullshit.
[01:00:23]  Yeah.
[01:00:24]  It's awesome.
[01:00:25]  Like the writer in me is like, I'm not mad at that.
[01:00:28]  That's just beautiful.
[01:00:29]  That's that's the smart way.
[01:00:31]  Yeah, they go on to note: those of us who handle this compound, including myself, feel blessed to be part of an age-old rite that is indeed very special.
[01:00:39]  Still produced in the original Native American manner, synergistically blended with spiritual intent.
[01:00:46]  Wow.
[01:00:47]  Native Americans big on synergy.
[01:00:50]  This is a big also.
[01:00:52]  Also, I like that they were healing people by the spirit, not the intellect.
[01:00:56]  It's like, no, they were noticing what worked and what didn't work.
[01:01:01]  That's the intellect.
[01:01:02]  They were noticing that, boy, in this age when we don't have any other options, sometimes you can burn off an external cancer.
[01:01:09]  And then white people were like, what if we mix that thing they were using with 90% other stuff that just burns even more?
[01:01:17]  And we just lie to people and say it's the same thing.
[01:01:20]  And it's still going on today.
[01:01:22]  And that rules, Billy.
[01:01:23]  Yeah, we play a drum in the background while we're doing it.
[01:01:27]  Yeah, love it.
[01:01:28]  Call it feather or something?
[01:01:30]  Name it.
[01:01:30]  Yeah, two feathers.
[01:01:32]  Yeah, so two feathers, they have all this like two paragraphs talking about how special and age-old and wise this formula is.
[01:01:39]  And immediately below all those lines on the website are the bolded words, enema or douche.
[01:01:47]  Woo!
[01:01:53]  It's awesome, Billy.
[01:01:55]  It is awesome.
[01:01:57]  I'm not even.
[01:01:58]  Okay, here's the thing.
[01:01:59]  I'm not mad at this one.
[01:02:02]  Because the information is there.
[01:02:07]  The information's almost always there, though, and it never seems to matter.
[01:02:13]  I know.
[01:02:14]  Yeah.
[01:02:15]  My dad and I talk about this too.
[01:02:16]  He's like, people are, he's like, it's ego.
[01:02:19]  He's like, we have all the answers to all our questions in our phones, in our pocket, and people are still walking around like they know everything.
[01:02:25]  And I was like, that's, I was like, you should listen to this podcast, I do.
[01:02:33]  Good stuff.
[01:02:34]  So, the article on Two Feathers that talks about how this stuff is handed out or talks about how to use this stuff as a douche or an enema closes that section by noting, quote, if the wound has opened and a pus-like substance is being released, then the compound is left on the skin till all the pus-like substance has been released and the compound falls off the skin of its own accord.

=== Mocking Cancer Patients (15:25) ===

[01:03:01]  When the releasing process is complete, nano-silver or colloidal silver can be sprayed over the open wound.
[01:03:08]  Do not cover an opening with compound that is releasing pus or toxins.
[01:03:12]  So that's good.
[01:03:15]  You see what they're doing there is like what's happening is that you're burning your skin off and pus and all sorts of horrible things are building up around it to try to protect this open, burning wound and your body.
[01:03:29]  And they're being like, no, no, no, it's a releasing.
[01:03:31]  It's a releasing of toxins.
[01:03:33]  It's not your body desperately trying to protect you from your own stupid, like foolishness.
[01:03:40]  The only good thing about this is that I guess spreading nano silver over a massive open wound isn't the absolute worst thing you can do, but this is all just a bad idea.
[01:03:52]  A horrible idea.
[01:03:55]  So Two Feathers goes on to advise.
[01:03:57]  Yeah.
[01:03:59]  It's just crazy.
[01:04:03]  Yeah, it's.
[01:04:05]  I think the first question they must ask any of these people are like, did you quit school or did you stop paying attention in science class around fifth or sixth grade?
[01:04:15]  And if they're like, yes, they're like, come in, come on in.
[01:04:19]  Because there seems to be like a basic misunderstanding of basic science in a lot of things.
[01:04:24]  Yeah.
[01:04:26]  I think it's not a misunderstanding.
[01:04:28]  I think it's that a lot of people have like a deeply inbred hatred of, if not all science, then medical science because of the things they read and the communities they're raised in.
[01:04:38]  And when there is no, when you don't trust science, you only trust individuals who have convinced you they're healers.
[01:04:47]  Like those individuals can get you to buy into an awful lot of terrible things.
[01:04:53]  I think that really is where it all, it all like all almost all of our modern problems that we're like all terrified with right now from the reason people aren't taking the coronavirus thing seriously to fucking incipient fascism.
[01:05:06]  Like they all come from this root of the fact that there's no shared acceptance of reality anymore among a large chunk of the population.
[01:05:14]  And that's also kind of where this comes from.
[01:05:17]  It's just like the this is this stuff takes root in a community of people who have stopped believing in a baseline level of the reality the rest of us believe in.
[01:05:26]  Yeah, and on top of that, schools stopped teaching critical thinking.
[01:05:33]  And maybe shouldn't have stopped that.
[01:05:36]  And we're now we're in a society that requires constant critical thinking to see what the truth is.
[01:05:45]  And people aren't trained to do that.
[01:05:49]  Yep.
[01:05:50]  So Two Feathers goes on to advise its users that their black salve may be used with a toothbrush for healthy teeth and gums.
[01:05:57]  I can't.
[01:05:59]  It's like two guys being like, let's see how far we can get people to do this.
[01:06:04]  What things can we convince them to burn?
[01:06:07]  Before the FDA came after Two Feathers in 2005, they even hosted testimonials on their website where people would tout the efficacy of black salve at treating basal carcinoma, which you may recall is the cancer that only metastasizes if you put something like black salve on it.
[01:06:23]  Or not only, but is unlikely to unless.
[01:06:26]  So you can currently find Two Feathers Healing Formula all over Facebook.
[01:06:30]  So the FDA coming after them, once again, did not stop them from doing their thing.
[01:06:34]  It just cut down on how they could advertise it.
[01:06:37]  One page with the misspelled name Two Feathers Healing Formals Formules has more than 600 followers.
[01:06:46]  Another page I found held an interview with Robert Roy, who apparently runs the company.
[01:06:50]  Roy claims to have treated more than 65,000 people with his salve to date.
[01:06:56]  The Two Feathers website also has links to a book, Ha! I Laugh in the Face of Cancer by Susan Liberty Hall.
[01:07:06]  I love the fucking names, man.
[01:07:08]  Susan Liberty Hall.
[01:07:09]  I don't.
[01:07:11]  The Buddhist in me is like, you better stop mocking cancer.
[01:07:16]  Yes, Susan Liberty Hall will teach you how to liberate your nose from your face.
[01:07:22]  And by the way, Susan Liberty Hall's book, Ha, I Laugh in the Face of Cancer, is still available on Amazon.com as of the publication of this episode.
[01:07:29]  God.
[01:07:30]  Of course, yeah, and Jeff Ross's grossed cancer away is coming up.
[01:07:35]  I mean, that's just good sense.
[01:07:36]  You can burn cancer.
[01:07:38]  I can cure anybody's metastasized cancer with enough fire.
[01:07:42]  There are additional consequences to the fire, but the cancer will be dealt with.
[01:07:47]  You know?
[01:07:48]  Yes.
[01:07:48]  Some side effects.
[01:07:50]  Yeah.
[01:07:50]  Now, did he die of first-degree burns?
[01:07:53]  Yes.
[01:07:53]  Did he die of cancer?
[01:07:55]  No.
[01:07:55]  Nope.
[01:07:56]  And you know what?
[01:07:56]  That cancer?
[01:07:57]  Not growing no more.
[01:07:58]  Didn't need to use any chemo.
[01:08:01]  So, if you have any cancer.
[01:08:05]  All my product is available on your way out.
[01:08:07]  Thank you.
[01:08:09]  Yeah, you can send me right now $2,500 for a copy of my new book, Treat Your Cancer with a Bonfire.
[01:08:16]  There's one step.
[01:08:18]  Jump in that bonfire, right?
[01:08:20]  Well, you got to make the bonfire.
[01:08:22]  But yeah, okay, two steps.
[01:08:23]  Sorry.
[01:08:24]  You're right, Billy.
[01:08:25]  And it's pretty handy, too, because if you have books with scary knowledge, you can also get rid of them in the same fire.
[01:08:32]  If the FDA actually does something about our treat people's cancer with bonfires plan.
[01:08:37]  So as dumb as all of this black salve nonsense seems, we do live in a country where cancer forces roughly 42% of people who get it to exhaust their entire life savings paying to treat it.
[01:08:50]  And with the stakes that high and trust in the medical establishment and any kind of establishment so low, it's no wonder that people prefer burning themselves to death to going broke using real medicine.
[01:09:00]  And I guess this isn't so surprising in the hell world that we Americans have decided to live in for some reason.
[01:09:05]  But outside of the U.S., in the lands where medicine is socialized, black salve is still really fucking popular.
[01:09:12]  It is particularly well loved in Australia, despite being very much illegal there.
[01:09:16]  And this brings me to the unfortunate story of Helen Lawson.
[01:09:21]  And this is not you and I's first story of a woman dying horribly in Australia due to a quack doctor.
[01:09:27]  And it will not be the last, Billy.
[01:09:29]  Are you ready for this fun tale?
[01:09:31]  Sure.
[01:09:33]  Good.
[01:09:33]  Good man.
[01:09:34]  All right.
[01:09:35]  So Helen Lawson was not on paper the sort of person you'd expect to fall for a grift like this.
[01:09:40]  She was an ER nurse and a competition cyclist.
[01:09:43]  But in January of 2017, she found a lump on her pelvis.
[01:09:48]  Unfortunately, Helen chose to ignore it and hope for the best.
[01:09:51]  By October of that year, it had spread to her ovaries.
[01:09:53]  So now she had ovarian cancer.
[01:09:56]  She was booked for surgery to remove it, but at the very last minute, she canceled her appointment.
[01:10:00]  The reason she canceled this appointment to get an actual doctor to remove her cancer was that a natural medicine practitioner named Dennis Wayne Jensen had gotten his hooks in her.
[01:10:11]  Helen had gone to him after getting diagnosed, and he'd convinced her that the surgery would do nothing to help her.
[01:10:17]  Fortunately, Jensen had already cured his own brain cancer and the cancers of hundreds of other patients.
[01:10:23]  And he was able to assure Helen that he knew what she needed.
[01:10:26]  Black Sav.
[01:10:29]  It's weird that you can't trust somebody with the middle name Wayne, too.
[01:10:33]  No, it is.
[01:10:34]  It is.
[01:10:35]  That never happens.
[01:10:38]  I will say one of the key things to note if you're trying to avoid grifters is anyone who says a variation of the phrase, cured my own brain and then blank.
[01:10:48]  Probably something you ought to back away from.
[01:10:51]  I cured my own brain.
[01:10:53]  Go on.
[01:10:54]  Okie dokie then.
[01:10:57]  So, yeah, yeah.
[01:11:00]  Now, Helen's romantic partner of 21 years, Belinda Davis, claims that she was kind of really, really skeptical of Jensen from the beginning.
[01:11:10]  And she later recalled this to the age.
[01:11:12]  Quote, she said Jensen said the surgery is not going to work, and I'm just a number to them.
[01:11:17]  And the black salve will draw out the cancer, and the black salve will do what the surgeons can't.
[01:11:21]  I had a huge fight with her.
[01:11:22]  I was just saying, this is insane.
[01:11:23]  Give yourself a chance.
[01:11:24]  For God's sake, just give yourself a chance.
[01:11:28]  And yeah, the argument that this fake doctor was making, which was that real doctors wouldn't treat her well and that the black salve would draw out the cancer anyway, that worked.
[01:11:41]  And for weeks, Belinda would drive her partner to Jensen's home outside of Melbourne and watch as he put his hands on the gigantic sore left on her belly by the black salve, which ate away at her flesh every single day.
[01:11:53]  Quote, he put his hands on her stomach and he would breathe out like he was trying to blow away the cancer, telling us that the cancer was gone and there was only a tiny bit still there, Belinda says.
[01:12:02]  And here she was, so swollen and distended and just unbelievably ill.
[01:12:07]  So Jensen eventually had his patient apply black salve all over her stomach, rotting the skin away and covering her belly and the top part of her groin in what looked like third-degree burns.
[01:12:18]  It is impossible to say for sure if surgery would have saved Helen's life, but we can say to a point of certainty that black salve did not.
[01:12:26]  And because of Jensen's treatment, Helen spent the last months of her life rotting away in unspeakable agony.
[01:12:32]  And in the true tradition of bullshit medical scam artists the world over, Jensen refused to even pretend to have learned a lesson from this tragedy from the age.
[01:12:41]  Quote, Jensen, however, insists that black salve works and is not an improved mainstream treatment because pharmaceutical companies can't make any money off of it.
[01:12:50]  They don't want black salve on the market because it cures cancer, he said in an interview with Fairfax Media on Monday.
[01:12:57]  The self-proclaimed healer said he recently cured a man of terminal cancer in his neck and had also healed a woman's ovaries.
[01:13:03]  I actually put my hand on her tummy over the ovaries and I was able to heal the ovary so she could have a baby, he said.
[01:13:09]  He also said that he did not charge for his services or ask for money, a claim disputed by Belinda, who said he made it clear he expected a donation once Helen recovered.
[01:13:18]  So I'm angry at a lot here.
[01:13:21]  I'm angry at this guy Jensen for torturing a sick woman to death.
[01:13:25]  I'm angry at those newspapers for just like running those quotes of his.
[01:13:29]  Like I'm sure they thought that he would sound silly enough that people would get that he was, but they don't.
[01:13:35]  And you shouldn't.
[01:13:36]  You shouldn't just let him talk like that without...
[01:13:39]  You shouldn't.
[01:13:40]  No.
[01:13:41]  You shouldn't.
[01:13:43]  It's so it's wild to me.
[01:13:47]  And I think it just kind of shows like what where our brains go when we're fighting for our lives.
[01:13:56]  That a registered nurse and a competitive cyclist, like those people are very aware of their bodies.
[01:14:05]  And to be like, nah, no, I mean, it's also that putting away.
[01:14:12]  Sounds like she was like, I think I know what this is and I'm just going to ignore it.
[01:14:17]  Yeah.
[01:14:17]  It does sound like she was like in denial about what she had and was like, if I don't treat this normal, it's not really happening.
[01:14:27]  Yeah, and I'm sure there's some aspect of that.
[01:14:30]  And like, yeah, it's just a sad story and a really infuriating story.
[01:14:37]  And it's a story where the bad guy in it only gets the kind of minimal consequences that I think we've come to expect from these guys.
[01:14:46]  In the wake of Helen's death, Jensen was temporarily forbidden from seeing any patients.
[01:14:51]  In August of 2018, this was expanded to an indefinite prohibition against providing any medical advice or treatment.
[01:14:58]  I'm sure he's being more careful now, but I am 100% sure he is still giving medical advice for money to some groups of people.
[01:15:05]  Without an out of it, yeah, yeah, that's just what these people do.
[01:15:08]  Yeah, you, unless you lock this kind of person away, like, I'm sorry, there's a tiny chunk of people who actually do need to be restricted from being around other people.
[01:15:18]  Yeah, and I don't think drug dealers and robbers, and I don't think most people who go to prison are, but this kind of person, and it's the same kind of person Paul Manafort is.
[01:15:27]  He's just not as smart or successful.
[01:15:29]  Um, where they will poison the people around them one way or another, no matter what happens.
[01:15:35]  If they are allowed to circulate in society, they will incapable of doing anything but poisoning the people around them.
[01:15:42]  Well, it's like a pure sociopath, not necessarily a psychopath, but like a sociopath.
[01:15:50]  You're right, they need to be removed from society because they just keep you know, it's never their fault because there's a lot of sociopaths who are perfectly capable of existing in society and not hurting people.
[01:16:06]  Um, it's something you know, there's something about this need, it's like we talk about with with old treehead, um, our essential oils doctor.
[01:16:16]  This need to be seen as a doctor without actually learning anything about it.
[01:16:21]  This like desire to practice medicine that seems to be the most important thing to them, even above making money, is they want to make medicine.
[01:16:31]  I don't know how to describe what this is, it just hit me.
[01:16:34]  Like, I've especially in Hollywood, you deal with people that have like inherited a ton of money, so now they want to be in this business or whatever, and they'll come in and be like, I'm a producer, or I'm this, and you're like, No, you're just a guy with a lot of money.
[01:16:53]  And they're like, Their whole thing is like, if you point out that they don't know what they're doing, that's that'll ruin that makes them madder than not knowing what they're doing.
[01:17:06]  Because you pointed out that this person, like, their whole show is like, I just, I need everyone to tell me I'm this thing.
[01:17:16]  And if you tell me I'm not this thing, fuck you.
[01:17:20]  I don't care about the results going around me, that the truth is I'm not this thing.
[01:17:24]  I just need to feel and have this illusion that I'm a doctor or whatever.
[01:17:31]  And I will never stop, no matter any facts or results.
[01:17:35]  I'll just keep going.
[01:17:37]  Yeah, that is my whole thing.
[01:17:39]  And it's awesome.
[01:17:42]  So, there's no upside to this story, Billy.
[01:17:45]  But to make it a little bit more palatable, I do have a picture of Jensen, and it might be the only one of him, I guess, because it's the picture that every single news article uses of him.
[01:17:54]  Sophie, can you send it?
[01:17:56]  And it's not the kind of picture you normally see used as the picture for somebody in an article, which is why I think it might just be one of the only ones they have.
[01:18:05]  It looks like the photo he took when he was like, he had to take a photo for Skype and he just used his phone to click a shot of himself.
[01:18:14]  Let me know when you get it.
[01:18:16]  Oh, wow.
[01:18:17]  Just think that's pretty great, right?
[01:18:22]  Like, it looks like he took a picture of himself in the middle of like looking for Sasquatch.

=== Understanding the Addiction (03:29) ===

[01:18:27]  He's this like bearded guy, clearly in the woods, taking a blurry picture of half of his face with a cell phone.
[01:18:34]  Yeah, it's like he just got his phone and he's trying to figure out what it does.
[01:18:38]  It looks like it was taken on a razor phone.
[01:18:41]  Yeah, and that is the photo of record for this man when he is covered in the news, which I do think is a good call.
[01:18:48]  I think he's very, I think he's way smarter than he's letting on.
[01:18:53]  So, Black Sav is still available all over the internet.
[01:18:56]  You can't buy it on Amazon, but you can buy it from Alpha Omega and from Two Rivers.
[01:19:01]  Amazon does, however, sell books that teach you how to use it and make it.
[01:19:04]  And of course, there are numerous Facebook groups, closed and open, where rubes advise each other on the best ways to permanently scar themselves and metastasize their carcinomas.
[01:19:13]  And as for Dennis Wayne Jensen, he's still forbidden from pretending to be a doctor.
[01:19:17]  But don't you worry, by late 2018, he'd moved on to getting in trouble from impersonating a doctor to impersonating a lawyer.
[01:19:25]  So he's still rolling right along.
[01:19:30]  That is.
[01:19:30]  I have a feeling we'll be hearing from him more in the future.
[01:19:33]  Without a doubt.
[01:19:35]  Yeah.
[01:19:36]  He sounds like somebody's probably going to represent Carol Baskins or something in her drugs.
[01:19:42]  Yeah, I think he's still looking for his real big grift that justifies the whole episode.
[01:19:47]  But I have faith in him.
[01:19:50]  Yeah, these guys, they're not quitters.
[01:19:53]  That is another thing.
[01:19:55]  Yeah, and he does a little bit more, and he will be this podcast number two person with Wayne as a middle name.
[01:20:02]  Ah, see.
[01:20:06]  I mean, I've lived that my whole life.
[01:20:07]  Like, you're nerd block of serial killer.
[01:20:10]  Yeah.
[01:20:11]  It's the three names thing.
[01:20:13]  Yeah.
[01:20:13]  That's me.
[01:20:16]  So, Billy.
[01:20:19]  Yeah.
[01:20:19]  Billy, how are you feeling today?
[01:20:22]  I mean, this one was some of them are funnier, but this one was, I don't know why.
[01:20:26]  I think it's because you can kind of understand why all these people keep doing this.
[01:20:33]  Yes.
[01:20:34]  Well, you mean the people who keep burning themselves?
[01:20:37]  Yes.
[01:20:38]  Not the people that sell it.
[01:20:39]  No, I don't.
[01:20:40]  I can't.
[01:20:41]  I can't get behind.
[01:20:42]  I mean, I understand money, but this is more than money because some of them aren't making that much money at it.
[01:20:49]  Yeah.
[01:20:50]  But I understand that.
[01:20:51]  Like in the beginning, I was like, how are these dummies?
[01:20:55]  How could you ever get fooled like this?
[01:20:57]  But then you just think, you're just like, you don't want it to be true what's happening to you.
[01:21:04]  And then the reality of like, well, I'm going to try all this before spending all my family's money.
[01:21:11]  Yeah.
[01:21:12]  Like, cancer treatment generally sucks and is unpleasant, and it's also expensive.
[01:21:18]  And if you can give yourself a treatment that feels like maybe it's working because it also sucks and is unpleasant, but it's cheaper.
[01:21:26]  Yeah.
[01:21:26]  I, yeah.
[01:21:28]  You know, I get why people make that call, even though it's objectively the wrong call and bad and like dumb, not in like the flippant sense of like being insulting, but just like, no, this is a horrible idea and a bad thing to do to yourself.
[01:21:43]  But we all, it's like an extension of, I'm sure everybody, and this happens more as you get older, has like weird little things they notice about their body that you're like, probably ought to talk to a doctor about that, huh?

=== Cheap Painful Treatments (05:25) ===

[01:21:56]  Yeah.
[01:21:57]  Like, there's a, there's a germ of that in all of us.
[01:22:02]  But, yeah.
[01:22:05]  Boy, howdy.
[01:22:06]  Well, it's because it's you're you've gotten they're taking advantage of people with the death sentence, which is the hardest part for me.
[01:22:18]  Yeah.
[01:22:18]  But like the essential oils and all that stuff, like, it's just some of it's people being vain.
[01:22:24]  You know what I mean?
[01:22:25]  So they're taking advantage of that part of human.
[01:22:27]  But this is like people who are like, you're going to die if you don't do something.
[01:22:33]  And this one.
[01:22:33]  Yeah.
[01:22:34]  Like that's for whatever reason for me, that's like, it's super fucked up.
[01:22:40]  Yep.
[01:22:41]  Like, I would, I'll much rather you go, you're selling one bullet to these people.
[01:22:45]  You know what I mean?
[01:22:48]  Yeah.
[01:22:48]  It's, it's.
[01:22:52]  Speaking of selling a single bullet, Billy, do you have any things you'd like to plug?
[01:22:58]  I do.
[01:22:59]  I've been working on a cannabis podcast called Grown Local that is about the people and communities and not like, you know, like the business part of it.
[01:23:10]  It's like the people that have been growing it and the community it makes up.
[01:23:15]  And these different, the first, the first place we go to is Eugene, Oregon.
[01:23:19]  And it's coming out April 20th, 420, which is pretty significant for weed because it's Hitler's birthday.
[01:23:27]  Oh, but it is.
[01:23:31]  And Hitler was a famous medical marijuana advocate.
[01:23:34]  He loved it.
[01:23:35]  He loved it.
[01:23:35]  He loved hyped up on meth, then just come right down, you know.
[01:23:39]  Yep.
[01:23:39]  Kind of think about fans.
[01:23:40]  Doing process.
[01:23:42]  That's why he didn't make any mistakes.
[01:23:44]  And that's yeah, famously.
[01:23:48]  That's all.
[01:23:49]  I've always loved that 420 thing.
[01:23:51]  When people are like, you're going to celebrate 420 and then other people are like, Hitler's birthday.
[01:23:55]  And you're like, that is, that's pretty funny.
[01:23:58]  That is the day.
[01:23:59]  Yeah.
[01:24:01]  Well, what?
[01:24:03]  You know what isn't Hitler's birthday?
[01:24:06]  Is my presence on Twitter.
[01:24:08]  You can find me there at iWriteOK.
[01:24:10]  You can find this podcast and its sources at behindthebastards.com.
[01:24:14]  You can find us on TeePublic, where you can buy shirts that are absolutely impregnated with both nano silver and acid that only burns your cancer.
[01:24:23]  So if you put on one of our shirts and it burns your skin away, all of that skin was cancer and you need to send us an extra $3,500.
[01:24:32]  Yep.
[01:24:33]  You can also find our sources by scrolling down under the episode description on all your apps.
[01:24:40]  Yeah, you sure can.
[01:24:42]  There's tons of ways to find our sources.
[01:24:44]  And there's tons of ways for you to stay sane while enduring the pandemic.
[01:24:49]  But the only real way is by listening to the podcasts that I produce, which are all medically guaranteed to keep you mentally, I don't know, this bit.
[01:25:02]  Robert is actually saying that you're going to listen to this podcast.
[01:25:04]  Listen to Worst Year Ever.
[01:25:06]  Listen to The Women's War.
[01:25:08]  And listen to Billy's new cannabis podcast when it comes out.
[01:25:11]  That's what he was saying.
[01:25:12]  That's really what you meant, right, Robert?
[01:25:15]  Podcast will save us all and nothing else will.
[01:25:19]  Now the episode is over.
[01:25:20]  Bye.
[01:25:21]  All right.
[01:25:31]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[01:25:39]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[01:25:42]  He is not going to get away with this.
[01:25:44]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[01:25:46]  We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
[01:25:50]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[01:25:52]  Trust me, babe.
[01:25:53]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:26:02]  What's up, everyone?
[01:26:03]  I'm Ego Modern.
[01:26:04]  My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
[01:26:08]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[01:26:11]  He goes, just give it a shot.
[01:26:13]  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.
[01:26:20]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[01:26:22]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[01:26:29]  Yeah, it would not be.
[01:26:31]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[01:26:32]  There's a lot of life.
[01:26:34]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:26:41]  In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
[01:26:48]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[01:26:52]  I doctored the test once.
[01:26:54]  It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
[01:26:59]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[01:27:01]  Greg Gillespie and Michael Manchini.
[01:27:03]  My mind was blown.
[01:27:04]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[01:27:06]  This is Love Trapped.
[01:27:07]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[01:27:09]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[01:27:14]  Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

=== The City Hall Mystery (00:37) ===

[01:27:21]  10-10 shots fired in the City Hall building.
[01:27:24]  How did this ever happen in City Hall?
[01:27:26]  Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey Woods.
[01:27:27]  A shocking public murder.
[01:27:29]  This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
[01:27:35]  They screamed, get down, get down.
[01:27:37]  Those are shots.
[01:27:39]  A tragedy that's now forgotten.
[01:27:42]  And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
[01:27:46]  Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:27:55]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[01:27:57]  Guaranteed human.