John of God, a Brazilian spiritual healer and mass rapist, built a $10 million cult in Abadiana through fraudulent "spiritual surgeries" using rusty knives and invisible meditation. Despite Oprah Winfrey's endorsement and Dr. Mehmet Oz's validation, which amplified claims of miraculous cures while ignoring deaths like singer Leah Melman's, the operation functioned as an organized crime syndicate exploiting followers with blessed water and crystals. This analysis exposes how media figures prioritized profit over scrutiny, facilitating sexual abuse under the guise of healing and cementing John's legacy as a dangerous grifter who monetized faith through systemic fraud. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Lizzie McGuire and I'm like wild bats.
It was like a first closet moment for me where I was like, you're like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them.
No, no, no.
I was like, she's beautiful, but I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are.
I'm not like.
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Robert Evans, Behind the Bastards podcast.
This is introduction.
Not very good.
I liked it.
Thank you, Sophie.
Thank you for lying about it being a good introduction.
But you know, it is good.
Certainly better than my introduction.
Is our guest for today, Mr. Andrew T. Fuck yeah.
What's up?
I'm alive.
Can't kill me yet.
Nope.
Nope.
Can't.
So you have made it through the Rona so far, Andrew.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I have to say your hair looks as badly in need of a cut as mine does.
Yeah.
I can't decide.
Are you?
I'm like debating whether to just shoot the moon and grow it to like donatable lengths.
Yeah, fuck yeah.
Shaved my head.
I don't know.
It's it's unpleasant.
It's it's at the very unpleasant point of the uh growth.
Like it like yeah, I hate it at the back of my neck.
It's fucking disgusting.
It's terrible.
But we could do what if we did like a locks of love thing, but instead of for people who need hair, it's for like weird horny people on the internet.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We raise money for some charity.
I don't know what kind of charity.
Like bombs not food, maybe.
That sounds like a charity.
I mean, it could be like sort of an OnlyFan situation.
Yeah.
Imagine the recording of cutting it will be will be useful to somebody.
Yeah, that'll be ASMR for some very weird person.
Yeah.
And yeah.
So, Andrew, Andrew, Andrew, as a general rule, when you and I get together, we talk about a horrific story of colonial genocide, which is what our friendship has been based on up until this point.
Even before the podcast, that's the fucked up part.
Yeah, I would just call you randomly in the middle of the night and be like, have you heard about what they did to Haiti?
And I'd be like, nope.
Let's hear it.
Today, though, today we have a story that's horrible, really, really horrible.
But it's actually a little bit of a reverso because it's like in part the story of this weird belief system from Europe being adopted honestly by people in a colonized nation and then used to justify horrific misbehavior on behalf of cult leaders.
So that's kind of cool.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Cool.
New shit.
Yeah.
I guess you could call it a type of, I don't know.
I don't even know what to call this.
It's a real motherfucker of a story, though.
This is the tale of John of God.
Have you ever heard of John of God?
I've heard of neither John nor God.
So no John of God.
Now, people might be confused.
There's an actual like Jesus-y guy, like a Catholic person called John of God.
I think he's a saint or some shit.
This is not that guy.
This is a modern spiritual medical grifter, repeatedly endorsed by Oprah Winfrey, who turned out to be a mass rapist and possibly a baby farmer.
So that is what we're getting into today.
You're welcome, Andrew, for booking me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Thanks for having me.
Jesus Christ.
Yeah.
Yep.
It's going to be an interesting tale today.
But before we get into John of God's story, we have to go back in history to the mid-1800s and to a man with what I would have to say is one of the most unreasonably cool names I've ever come across in my research.
Are you ready for this name?
You're not wrong with this name.
Nobody's ready for this fucking name.
Hippolite Leon Denizard Reveal.
That is a fucking name.
Hippolite Leon Denizard Reveal.
That is a fucking name.
Revale is like so what a I like going like subtle on the on the final landing.
It's just like yeah, we could do it normal.
We can do it.
I like that fully 50% of his four names sound like Pokemon.
I've got a Hippolyte.
I've got a Denizard.
It fucking fools.
So Hippolyte Leon Denizard Reveal was a French educator and he wrote under the markedly less cool pin name Alan Kardec, which I don't understand.
If you're Hippolyte Leon Denizard Reveal, you lean into that shit.
This guy did not know what was clickable.
Very frustrating.
That's wild.
Yeah, that's giving up, speaking as a guy who's named after fucking the godfather guy.
Like, that's that, you don't give up the gift of a name that cool.
Very frustrating.
So anyway, under the boring name Alan Kardec, he wrote a series of books about spirits.
And Kardec's core contention was that all living animals were inhabited by immortal spirits that bounced around from body to body over the ceaseless eons.
Kardec also believed that spirits could become disembodied through a variety of causes and that these free spirits could impact the world in positive and negative ways.
Ancient Spiritist Traditions00:04:54
Kardec's theories became the religion of spiritism, which is still practiced around the world today.
And it is particularly popular for reasons I don't really understand in Brazil.
It has something like 3 million adherents there.
Damn.
Yeah.
That is...
I guess it's sort of like a French version of sort of like an animist type religion, right?
Yeah.
I think you're very keen to recognize that because I suspect it has a lot to do with that.
Usually, spiritism winds up being kind of like a spiritist Christian hybrid.
And it does, you're right.
It kind of does, because a lot of these places had sort of animist traditions prior to Europeans coming in and fucking shit up.
And so Spiritism felt like this kind of genuine synthesis of these old traditions with, you know, the new Christianity.
I think you're probably onto something there.
I guess that's kind of the shit that happened with like Catholicism in South America where it basically became saints became a pantheon.
Yeah.
Or the polytheism.
It's like, yeah, it's fine.
Just a slight demotion and everyone's the same.
Yeah, it's whatever.
So we don't hear a lot about spiritism today in the United States.
And probably the reason why is that a sizable number of what were originally the religion's chief pillars have just become normal facets of like fringe spirituality.
Like a lot of stuff that was originally part of this spiritualism religion that Kardec cooked up just kind of became things that like people who like crystals all believe.
Yeah.
And even Christianity, kind of like mainstream evangelical Christianity in the United States has even absorbed a number of spiritist beliefs, or at least different Christian cults around the world have done that.
And in a number of places, including Brazil, this has led to spiritual healers becoming a very big deal.
Spiritual healers are individuals who claim to be able to carry out magical healing sessions because their bodies act as conduits for dead medical doctors, saints, and sometimes just God himself.
Now, in the United States, this is often seen in Pentecostal communities, who I talk about a lot because people need to know more about them.
Have you ever seen like spiritual surgery sessions?
Oh, shit.
I feel like I can imagine it, but I can't think of one.
But yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
It's kind of like laying on of hands type shit.
Laying on of hands, but then they'll like pull their hands away.
They'll be like, oh, there's a tumor inside you.
The devil's put a tumor around you.
And they'll pull their hands away and they'll have like a bunch of bloody pieces of meat in their hands.
And it's almost, it's always like chicken or something.
Like they get guts from like an animal and they do sleight of hand, like magician shit to make it look like they're kind of like that guy in Temple of Doom pulling out, you know, diseased organs.
Yeah, like that's that's a big thing in the United States.
And it's cool.
It's a big thing in the parts of the United States that I'm going to guess most people don't know anything about.
Like most Americans would be like, this isn't a big thing in the United States, but you're wrong.
I mean, it is like nice how the state of the art of like 16th century magic has kind of remained the same.
Yeah, if you can palm a chicken heart, you can get away with a lot.
Yeah, the most important thing to realize about just the world is that people have never been dumber than they are now, and they have never been smarter than they are now.
Human intelligence, regardless of the actual amount of knowledge that exists, is a flat plane.
Yeah.
So yeah, spiritual surgery is a thing that happens here in the United States and it's a thing that happens all over the world.
The various kinds of spiritual healing traditions have existed since time immemorial.
There's like a whole tradition of it over in India that has nothing to do with Christianity.
It's like shit like this has been happening for thousands of years, right?
But over in Brazil, a combination of spiritism and Christianity has created a thoroughly unique tradition of what is generally called psychic surgery.
Now, unlike most similar traditions around the world, in Brazil, this psychic surgery often includes real cutting with surgeons using actual knives on the eyes and bodies of their patients.
So that's a cool wrinkle.
That's fucking crazy.
Oh, God.
I mean, I guess it's like on some level, it's got to be a little bit similar to like, you know, an alchemy thing where it's like, you know, sometimes the problem is just a little bloodletting is needed or like pressures building up and like that will work occasionally.
Yeah, and it's kind of like, you know, people who for like whatever reason, because of like a depressive disorder, cut themselves.
Like they feel, they like they tend to feel relief for one reason or another.
German Surgery Team in Head00:08:44
And it's like because it releases endorphins and stuff.
So like you do that in the context of a powerful religious experience and it can feel really good to people.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So anyway, yeah, the Brazilian to first pioneer this technique was Jose Pedro Di Feritas or Zay Arigo.
According to his autobiography, an obviously problematic source, he started working at a mine until age 14 in 1950 at age 29.
Or he started working at a mine at age 14.
And in 1950, when he was 29, he began to suffer a series of blinding headaches followed by hallucinatory trances.
This all culminated in his body being taken over by the spirit of a bald German man in a white apron with a massive team of spectral doctors and nurses at his beck and call.
So he's got like a whole German surgery team in his head.
Jesus Christ.
Now, this magical dead German was Dr. Adolf Fritz, a field medic in the German army who died in the trenches in 1918, which is cool.
It's bizarre that like this Brazilian mine worker would choose like, it's got to be a German field medic.
But that's what he picks.
And I guess we all consider Germans trustworthy.
I can't think of anything in history that would make me not trust German doctors.
So yeah, that scans.
So together, Dr. Fritz and Zay Arrigo had a wildly successful 20-year career performing surgery to adoring audiences of as many as 800 followers at one time.
Zay Arrigo would go into trances and become so taken with the spirit of Dr. Fritz that he would grab random kitchen knives and use them to cut out tumors and the like from his patients.
He became known as the surgeon of the rusty knife.
And this was not like nobody was like talking shit at him by calling it this.
That's like, that's some shit.
That's like a prison nickname, the surgeon.
Yeah, that is like a prison nickname.
Yeah.
Like if you're, if you get like locked up and they're like, oh man, that's the knife.
That's the rusty knife surgeon.
Like that's the dude you don't want to fuck with.
That's like the Butcher Bill motherfucker, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's incredible.
That's, that was a compliment.
Yes, that was a compliment.
Yeah, because like that's, that's part of the evidence to these people that he's like so clearly holy and sacred is that it doesn't even matter that he's using a rusty knife because and again you'll see this throughout the whole episode and all these guys we talk about like part of the thing everybody focuses on is that like none of his patients feel any pain none of them get infections even though you know he's just cutting them with a dirty knife Like, that's how holy this is.
Yeah.
So that's cool.
And yeah.
You know what?
It's cool.
Yeah.
You know, blood of Jesus, that works.
It's fine.
Antiseptic, largely.
Yeah, the blood of Jesus is profoundly antiseptic.
Yeah.
So he prescribed various medications, generally a mix of herbal remedies and complete nonsense.
His patients could redeem their prescriptions at a local pharmacy run by his brother.
The height of Zay Arrigo's career came when he removed a tumor from a popular senator.
He was arrested in 1956 and convicted of practicing medicine without a license, but he was pardoned by the president of Brazil.
In 1962, he was arrested and jailed again for the same thing.
But the police allowed him to continue healing from his cell.
He died wealthy and beloved in 1971 due to an auto accident that his spirits failed to warn him about.
So this guy would be like an amazing character in like a Batman video game, I feel like.
He feels like real final boss energy.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
But he's, we're just getting started with Zay Arigo.
So Zay Arrigo dies, and in 1990, this guy, Rubens Faria, who's a 44-year-old engineer and software salesman, kind of looks back in history 19 years and is like, this guy made a fuckload of money.
What if I start claiming to channel the spirit of the same dead German guy?
Next up, Rubens Faria is like, Dr. Fritz is in my head.
And he starts like, pretty soon, he's attracting crowds of a thousand people every day to this giant hangar style building he buys in Rio de Janeiro.
His patients were renowned to feel no pain even when he cut into them, and they reportedly never got infections from all of his eyeball scraping and body gouging.
Christopher Reeves is reported to have visited Mr. Faria for healing.
It didn't work.
Boom.
Too soon, but boom.
Yeah, I mean, I'm not making a joke.
It clearly didn't do the trick.
Yeah, seriously.
Damn.
I mean, that's a bummer.
He seemed like a nice guy, but yeah, this was not the treatment.
So in 1995, Mr. Faria married Rita Costa at age 34.
He dumped her a few years later for a 19-year-old friend of his daughter's.
Mrs. Costa reported her former husband to the police for non-payment of taxes.
The police confronted him during a surgery in Rio and arrested his bodyguard for possession of an illegal weapon.
That bodyguard then testified that he'd been secretly helping his boss dispose of the corpses of a number of patients who died as a result of Mr. Faria's hacking on their bodies.
So it turned out like a bunch of people were dying and getting infected, and his bodyguard was just throwing them in a hole.
I guess I was going to say, like, what does it take to have the confidence to just cut people with a fucking rusty knife?
And I guess it is, you just have to, you have to break a few eggs to make a magic omelet.
You know, I've always said there's no, nothing builds confidence like having a large, heavily armed man willing to dispose of corpses for you.
That really, that's all any of us really needs.
I guess that's you for most people that I know.
I mean, yeah, I'll do a little bit of corpse disposal.
You know, it's like a, yeah.
So a raid on Rubens Faria's compound revealed more than a thousand boxes of conventional prescription medications suggesting that this spiritual healer was actually practicing traditional medicine, but just without a license.
He was arrested in jail, but while his district police chief agreed that Farias needed to be locked up, he still professed a strong belief in the myth of Dr. Fritz, telling the Guardian, in my opinion, I think that Dr. Fritz does exist, but that Rubens Faria is doing things that he shouldn't.
So I think he's really channeling this German guy, but that doesn't mean he's not committing crimes too.
Oh my God.
Threatened the needle.
Thanks, Doc.
My favorite is that reminds me a little bit of I've known various people that have gotten out of Scientology, and the worst of them sometimes say shit that is basically akin to like, well, I don't agree with all the homophobia and all the occult stuff, but obviously Xenu is real and controls our lives through us here.
You know, shit like that, where I'm like, you know, it's just about the practice of it, not like the underlying logic.
Yeah, it's amazing.
Hey, I mean, you know, I worship L. Ron Hubbard, not for his spiritual teachings or any of the things he wrote about space aliens, but for his ability to get boats full of young people to search for gold that his past life buried.
Exactly.
That's what I celebrate about LRH.
Yeah.
So, yeah, this all is the background I think that's necessary to understand John of God.
So, on November 17th, 2010, Oprah magazine writer Susan Casey published an article about her visit to Brazil, where she'd met with the country's new hottest psychic surgeon.
Oh boy, João Tiexeira DeFaria, better known as John of God.
This sparked a visit by Oprah herself and an avalanche of uncritical positive stories about how cool this new John of God guy was.
For the first time, a Brazilian psychic surgeon attracted mass interest outside of Brazil.
But foreigners had been trickling into the country for years before that.
And one of them, an American named Heather Cumming, wrote a book about John of God, the man who became her guru.
It is a thoroughly uncritical work of puffery from a woman who clearly worships her subject.
But it's also our best real source or best source on the early life of John of God.
So I'm going to start by reading from that.
And I'm going to give the caveat that this information, this is all information that a mass rapist cult leader wanted to convey about his early life.
So, you know, a little bit of salt here and there.
Cult Leader's Early Life00:07:56
So João Tiexeira de Faria was born on June 24th, 1942, in the poor village of, oh boy, Cachoira di Fumacha in the state of Goyas in central Brazil.
His mother, Donna Luca, was a popular member of the community and a dedicated housewife.
John of God would later speak highly of his mother, and I have no reason to suspect she wasn't a nice person, other than perhaps the fact that her boy grew up to a mass raping cult leader.
The biography of John of God continues, quote, In the 1940s and 50s, there were no paved roads or infrastructure in this part of Brazil.
The roads connecting the towns were dirt, studded with cattle grids, and wound their way through farms and villages.
When construction of paved roads began in the late 1950s, João's mother ran a small hotel and cooked for the road workers to augment the family's meager income.
Joao often says that his mother became famous for her delicious cooking.
His father was less successful.
He was a tailor and owned a laundry business, but money was not great, and young João and his four brothers and one sister lived in constant economic anxiety.
Young John had to work from an early age, starting as a cloth cutter in his father's shop at age six.
He only attended two years of primary school before economic necessity forced him to end his formal education and take up a series of increasingly brutal jobs.
Now, that's what his biography says.
That's not the only version of that we have.
A 2005 ABC News profile on him notes that based on interviews with people from his hometown, quote, he is said to have been so rebellious that he was thrown out of school after the second grade and could not keep a job.
So that's a different version of his background.
Sure, sure.
Yeah.
But probably...
Either way, shit.
Shit was, yeah, he had to do some shit.
He got up to some shit and did some shit.
Yeah, and he...
At the age of seven.
Yeah, and he had basically no school, and he never learns to read or write.
That's the important thing here.
Yeah, Not a reader, this guy.
So, um, his biographers, though, claim that he worked many jobs as a well digger, as a bricklayer, and you know, generally they say that he spent his late childhood and early adolescence in hard manual labor.
Uh, he learned how he never learned to read or write, but he did learn how to play pool, and this provided him with something of an escape from the dreary existence poverty had forced upon him.
John's biographer claims that he was a brilliant natural clairvoyant who earned pocket money by actively prophesizing events at the pool hall.
Yeah, this is very funny because she notes that, quote, after being given money, he would return to the pool hall.
He is an excellent pool player to this day.
And I can't prove what I'm going to say next in any way, but my suspicion is that there is a germ of truth to this, but that he's not clairvoyant.
John just discovered he had a knack for pool hustling and various forms of cheating that required quick hands and charm.
This is a guy who would go up to spend his life doing sleight of hand stuff to giant crowds.
The fact that he's a pool hustler as a kid makes total sense.
So I think that's what's actually going on here: he's like, Yeah, he learns how to hustle at a pool hall.
Well, it's also like you can the range of predictable items of things that could happen in a pool hall is like finite and like less than 30, I would say.
I feel like you could just shoot shoot a lot of shots of the dark, and that shit's going to come true eventually, pretty quickly.
Yeah, yeah.
So, yeah, he spends a lot of time as a kid in a pool hall.
He learns sleight of hand, he learns how to grift.
Um, and yeah, the yeah.
So, so far, the biographical information that we've got from his uh his biography by his follower Heather Cummings has been broadly reasonable.
Um, this changes with this next paragraph.
Quote, he also remembers walking into the fields with the villagers and pointing to roots and plants that would heal their ailments.
The first recorded occasion of Joao's paranormal abilities took place when he was nine years old while he was visiting family in the town of Nova Ponte with his mother.
It was a beautiful, cloudless day, but Joao had a premonition that a huge storm was coming.
He began pointing out houses, including the houses of his brother, and saying that they would be blown down or lose their roofs.
He urged his mother to leave before the storm.
Although she was not convinced, she humored her son and they sought refuge in a friend's home nearby.
Exactly as he had predicted, the thunderstorm appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, and badly damaged or destroyed about 40 houses in a small town.
And depending on where you find this story, he always claims a different number of houses were destroyed.
So I don't know.
Yeah.
So he predicts a storm.
This is his first case of clairvoyance.
But despite being clairvoyant and able to read storms in the sky, he found himself still forced to labor in order to get by.
At age 16, he moved to his city, Campo Grande, and to try and make a living.
He was only successful in fits and starts, and before long, he found himself unemployed and living under a bridge at the edge of town.
One day, he headed to the water to bathe, and John claims as he approached the water, a beautiful woman called to him and invited him closer.
They talked for hours.
The next day, he returned to the water to speak with her again, but he found a brilliant shaft of light in her place.
He heard her calling his name, and so he approached.
She told him to visit the Spiritist Center in Campo Grande, which he did.
So that's his version of events.
The spirit meets him and they talk for hours, and then she sends him to the Spiritist Center in town.
So, like, yeah, he arrives, and the director of the center like knows his name already and says they've been waiting for him.
And then John immediately like collapses.
He like passes out.
And when he returns to consciousness, there's this huge group of people standing around him.
And they tell him that he has incorporated, which is the term they use for when you're taken over by a spirit, the entity King Solomon.
And he cured 50 people while possessed by King Solomon.
Which I remember King Solomon as the guy who cuts up babies, but I don't know.
And as far as like the luck of the draw goes, hey, that's a good get.
Good get.
Oh, yeah.
King Solomon.
KS.
That's a big one.
Yeah.
Hey, could have happened to anyone.
Could have happened to anyone.
Amazing.
Could have happened to anyone.
I mean, I would love to, I don't know, not King Solomon.
Which king would I want to Henry VIII?
Henry VIII.
That's a good, that's a bad, I mean, that's a bad king, but that's a fun king to incorporate.
To be.
Or King Leopold.
I could ride a tricycle.
Take some difference.
Yeah.
I guess the old dude, the old, old dude from the Bible, he probably got up to some shit.
Nebuchadnezzar.
Methuselah.
Oh, Nebuchadnezzar.
You mean like the Babylonian emperor?
Yeah, that's a good one.
Right?
Those guys, those guys got up to some shit.
Yeah.
Oh, man.
And it's so much more impressive to take on Nebuchadnezzar.
That guy's got a way better name than Solomon.
A little lame.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, yeah, obviously, this is all lies.
The only truth here is probably that John's age 16 is about when John started fooling around with spiritism.
Unfortunately, I'm unaware of any serious journalism that exists to actually document what went down with John's early years in the religion.
But he claims that the director of the center had to take him aside and explain to him that he'd been chosen by an entity of light known as King Solomon.
This director told him to leave and come back at 2 p.m. the next day to keep healing people.
Since John was homeless, this guy invited him to stay the night at his house.
John claims that this man's humble home and food were unthinkable luxuries for him, given the poverty he'd lived with his entire life.
He was given his own room with an electric fan.
So that's a big deal.
Nice electric fan.
It is like so weird to think about like the band of grifters welcoming in a new.
I mean, this is in the retelling, welcoming in a new grifter.
Like, what the fuck was actually happening?
Tiffany Budginista Financial Talk00:04:11
Yeah, and it's one of those things.
Yeah, it's convenient that, you know, out in the, at this period of time, out in the middle of nowhere, Brazil, you know, lifespans aren't enormous.
So you're really, if you make it old enough, you could just lie about what happened to you when you were a kid.
Right.
Yeah.
Right, right, right.
That makes sense.
Yeah, the earlier most people die, the easier it is to be a grifter.
Yes.
I mean, when everyone I go to went to high school with is dead, I'm going to have some stories I start telling.
I'll tell you that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No corroboration.
Oh, I was healing the shit out of people in 11th grade.
Makes sense.
You want to take an ad, buddy?
Yep.
You know who else was healing a lot of people when I was in the 11th grade?
On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budginista Aliche to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never, ever taught.
Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
That's great.
It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iTart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Will Farrell's Big Money Players and iHeart Podcast presents soccer moms.
So I'm Leanne.
This is my best friend Janet.
Hey.
We have been joined at the hip since high school.
Absolutely.
Now, a redacted amount of years later, we're still joined at the hip.
Just a little bit bigger hips, wider.
This is a podcast we're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey with all the snacks and drinks.
Sidebar.
Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer?
Oh, they had a BOGO.
Well, then you got it.
You want a white clothes up here?
Just say.
What are y'all doing?
Microphones?
Are you making a rap album?
I wouldn't believe you.
I would buy it.
Cuts through the defense like a hot knife through sponge cake.
That sounds delicious.
Oh, you're lucky.
I'm not a drug addict.
You're lucky.
I'm not an alcoholic.
You're lucky.
I'm not a killer.
I love this team, and I'm really trying to be a figure in their lives that they can rely on.
Oh.
Listen to soccer moms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, Ernest, what's up?
Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
On each episode of the podcast, Earn Your Leisure, we break down the conversations you need to understand money, investing, and entrepreneurship.
From stocks and real estate to credit, business, and generational wealth, we translate complex financial topics into real conversations everyone can understand.
Because the truth is, most people were never taught how money really works.
But once you understand the system, you can start to build within it.
That means ownership, smarter investing, and creating opportunities not just for yourself, but for the next generation.
If you want to learn how to build wealth, understand the markets, and think like an owner, Earn Your Leisure is the podcast for you.
Listen to Earn Your Leisure on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
I'm Iris Palmer, and my new podcast is called Against All Odds.
And that's exactly what the show is about: doing whatever it takes to beat the odds.
Get ready to hear from some of your favorite entrepreneurs and entertainers as they share stories about defying expectations, overcoming barriers, and breaking generational patterns.
I'm talking to people like award-winning actress, producer, and director, Fiva Longoria.
I think I had like $200 in my savings account, and my mom goes, What are you going to do?
Military Dictatorship and Snitching00:15:47
And I was like, I'll figure it out.
We had a one-bedroom apartment for like $400 a month, and we all could not afford.
Like, I was like, How am I going to make $100 a month?
I'm opening up like I've never before.
For those of you who think you know me from what you've seen on social media, get ready to see a whole new side of me.
Listen to Against All Odds with Iris Palmer as part of the Michael Tura Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Okay, so now let's talk about products.
Nope, we did that.
Now we're back.
Okay, so John of God, he meets this Spiritist church, and they tell him that King Solomon's taken over his brain.
And he's like, that's good and normal.
And yeah, so he winds up staying the night with like the leader of the center.
And he tries to explain to him that he's not a practicing medium and he doesn't know anything about medicine and he doesn't understand how he was healing all these people.
He was actually terrified because he didn't know like how to, he was expected to come back the next day and he didn't know how to do what was expected of him.
But as soon as he gathered at the Spirit Ascent the next day, King Solomon took him over again and he kept healing more sick people.
John claims this went on for months while the more experienced spiritist practitioners educated him on the nature of the entities that increasingly took over his body.
He became known as Medium John and his new teachers.
It is kind of funny.
Medium John.
It's like the sequel to Big John that's not as good or rhythmic.
Medium John.
Just medium John.
Every morning at the mine, you could see him arrive.
He stood 5'8 and weighed 135.
Kind of medium at the shoulders and medium at the hips.
And everyone knew it was okay to give some lip to medium, John.
It's so, it is like so juvenile to find confusing medium with medium, but that's funny.
I know, it's funny to me.
It's very funny.
It's funny.
So his new teachers told him he needed to devote his whole life to healing other people.
And this, his biographers claim, started a five or six year period of traveling throughout Brazil, healing the sick and the suffering.
He became known as Joao Curador, or John the Healer.
Through his biographers and in interviews, John always makes sure that people know that he is a healer, but he also at the same time always firmly rejects being called a healer.
So he makes sure that people knows that like he, everyone started calling me John the Healer, but I'm not a healer.
The entities that channel through my body are the ones doing the healing.
I'm just a conduit.
It's very important to him that you believe both things.
Yeah.
So this has a nice side benefit of allowing him to argue that he isn't practicing medicine without a license, which is handy when you're practicing medicine without a license.
I don't know if you've ever practiced medicine without a license, but you got to be careful with it.
So he's shifting the blame to literal King Solomon, essentially.
Yeah, exactly.
If somebody dies while he's performing psychic surgery, it's the dead king's fault.
That's a hell of a loophole.
That's a genius.
I mean, I am going to start blaming all of my many crimes on King Solomon.
I'm not even going to lie to you about that.
That seems like a very good idea.
Well, especially the baby chopping thing, because that's, he's got previous MO on that.
Yeah, I mean, yes, officer, I was going 135 miles an hour in a 55, but if I didn't, this fucking king ghost in my head was going to chop up some babies.
Like, do you want me to go a little fast or you want some chopped up babies?
That's all I got to ask you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's up to you.
Up to you.
Up to you, cop.
Seems reasonable to me.
You want me to heal you?
Let me pull out some chicken gizzards and pretend to rip them from your chest.
So his biographers next note that he did, that while he did his extraordinary work of healing, Medium John was persecuted by members of the medical and religious establishments.
He claims that they were threatened by his presence and that he lost count of the number of times he was arrested for practicing medicine without a license.
John traveled constantly, never more than a few steps ahead of the law.
He finally got a break in 1962 when Brazil was thrown into turmoil by a violent coup.
His biography says the country suffered a revolution and a military government came into power.
The reality is that Brazil's democratically elected socialist president, João Gouler, was overthrown by a military coup backed by the U.S. government.
A conservative military dictatorship would rule Brazil for the next 20-ish years.
John's biography glosses all over all of that because the advent of a military dictatorship worked out really well for him.
Medium John traveled to the capital, Brasilia, and offered his services as a tailor to the military.
Quote from his biography.
Because he was so young, he was not commissioned to create uniforms, but was given an opportunity to sew a consignment of work pants.
His expertise impressed his new employers, and he was soon promoted to full-time tailor and assigned to make uniforms for the army.
Medium Joao continued his healing work quietly on the side, but word of his gift soon spread throughout the barracks.
One day, he incorporated an entity who operated on the wounded leg of a doctor, which healed immediately.
The doctor was enthralled with Medium Joao's gift, and from that day on, he became the spiritual healer for the military and civil authorities.
He was promoted to Master Taylor and became their protégé for nearly nine years.
Consequently, he was protected from persecution during that time and traveled extensively throughout Brazil with the army.
There's a lot that's interesting there.
The most fascinating thing to me is that, so the army comes to believe that this is a magical healer, and as a result, they promote him to Master Taylor, which is, this is an interesting choice.
I mean, it's just like keep him in the ranks, I guess.
Yeah, keep him in the ranks, keep a paycheck going to the guy while you dictatorship Brazil.
I'm not going to backseat dictatorship.
You know what?
There's a lot of bureaucracy.
You can't just insert like witch doctor, surgeon general.
Yeah.
You get, that's like a year eight of the dictatorship thing at best.
You know, you get a, oh my God, I want to be witch doctor, surgeon general so bad.
That's you just, that sounds even better than Reverend Doctor, to be honest.
You just have to, yeah, you have to work within the available structures until such time as you don't.
Yeah.
Yeah, I got really fucked up fighting those partisans the other night.
I got a bullet in my arm.
I got to go to the master tailor to deal with this.
Yeah.
So John claims that the experience of working as a protege healer slash tailor with the dictatorship instilled in him a deep desire to become a successful businessman.
His fawning biographers explain that he, quote, needed money-making expertise to support his spiritual purpose.
This is so he doesn't sound greedy.
Wonderfully, they claim John just happened to have a great head for business and his financial success has allowed him to fund his healing mission, all without charging patients a dime.
This is absolutely a lie, but incredulous white Americans bought it for years.
So basically, he like he claims that he became a great businessman and that's how he's able to fund his free healing hospital.
The reality is like literally the opposite.
He makes a bunch of money healing people and he used it to buy like ranches full of cattle and stuff.
But whatever.
Yeah.
Now, from this point on, the story of Medium John has a decent amount of documentation.
So we're going to depart from his terrible, terrible biography.
But before we do, I want to turn to his biographers for an explanation of exactly who these entities that take over John are.
They describe the entities as transcendent spirits who are who are, quote, able to use Medium Joao's body to produce cures by performing visible and invisible spiritual surgeries.
Quote, Medium Joao can incorporate approximately 37 entities, but only one entity can be incorporated at a time.
This specific entity may change, however, depending on the needs of an individual patient.
In addition to the entity incorporated at any given time, there is a highly evolved group of thousands of spirits who actually work on a person while the incorporated entity oversees healing.
This group is referred to as his phalange.
One spirit might specialize in diabetes or heart problems, another in emotional afflictions.
These entities serve humanity in the hopes of alleviating pain and suffering on the earthly plane.
This service is part of their evolutionary process.
So he's a whole hospital of ghosts.
Jesus Christ.
Having like support staff in this fake spiritual system.
It's like, I mean, I guess it makes it sound more plausible on some level.
Like, oh, how could you possibly do this?
No, we need, you know, the help of thousands to cure your fucking whatever.
Yeah, no, I got nurses.
Yeah.
Is it ever like, oh, I'm sorry.
No, the Gaiku could help you.
He's out on vacation.
We just have like the dude who helps me cut people's eyes.
Do you need an eye cut?
Yeah.
Oh, that's the other side of it is if you were like, if I were designing my own version of some Kakamami bullshit, I feel like it would be, it would involve as little true body horror as possible.
No, no, people love that shit.
Yeah, I guess.
People love getting fucking cut into and blood and shit.
Like, if you really want to, if you want to like, if you want to get some cult shit going on, you got to get gross with it, man.
Yeah, it's part of it.
It's part of it, but oh, physicality.
Yeah.
That's why, you know, not everyone's made to be a cult leader, Andrew.
I don't think I got what it takes anymore.
I believe you could be a cult leader, but it takes some sacrifice.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I don't have the willingness to put in the reps to really get good.
Yeah, yeah.
There's a lot in common.
Being a cult leader has a lot in common with having great abs, right?
They both take, you either have to be born with the right genes or you have to put in a lot of time on the bench.
Yeah.
And it's not happening for me.
Yeah, well, that's, that's, yeah.
They're making choices.
Yeah.
That's not happening yet.
I'll see.
We'll see.
We'll see what life takes me.
It would be cool to be able to incorporate the spirit that could just give you incredible abs.
One of them has to know how to do abs.
But okay.
So John claims that after a few years of making money and getting in good with the brutal dictatorship, his entities told him it was crucial he expand his work and heal more people.
He wound up being guided to the town of Abadiana in Goyas.
He first arrived there in 1978 and began his practice by sitting in a chair outside in the middle of the main road and greeting travelers who showed signs of illnesses.
Through him, the entities would heal these people, and over time, the numbers increased from dozens to hundreds to thousands per day.
John's incredible healings eventually earned him the loyalty of a mysterious benefactor who purchased him a plot of land and paid to build a healing center, Casa de Dom Ignacio de Loyola.
This spiritual hospital, as his followers would come to describe it, eventually received more than 10,000 visitors per month.
Since Abadiana has only about 19,000 residents, the huge streams of sick and dying people represented a big infusion into the local economy.
So like half the population of the city is coming in every week just to see this guy.
Oh.
Yeah.
That's, I mean, I guess you need like desperation tourism sometimes, but Jesus Christ, that's that is actually Jesus Christ's business model also.
So you know what?
Maybe it's just a good one.
Yeah, if Jesus Christ had benefited from like roadside billboards, I don't think they ever would have gotten to kill him.
He would have made too much money.
Tragic.
Yeah, render to Caesar about 38% and you're fine.
Honestly, yeah.
So this was often glossed over by the positive coverage of John of God, but the extent to which he became an industry for the people who lived around him can't be exaggerated.
I'm in a quote now from an O magazine profile by Susan Casey, just a terrible article from 2010 that nonetheless revealed some important details about the economic impact of this guru on the small town of Abadiana.
Quote, several businesses had displays of white clothing.
The CASA requests that only white be worn.
This makes it easier, apparently, for a person's aura to be seen.
There were a number of vividly painted small hotels lined up side by side, lilac purple, canari yellow, lime green.
One of them, a coral-colored one-story building, opened up to the street, and inside I could see a John of God video playing on a large screen.
An audience of about 20 people sat in straight-back chairs and watched him cut into a man's chest with what looked like a rusty paring knife.
The man's eyes were closed, and he was peaceful and still as rivulets of blood ran down his white shirt.
Yeah, that's awesome.
That sounds like the kind of charming small Brazilian town I want to vacation in.
Just have a couple of fucking mojitos and watch some guy commit surgery on people.
Hell yeah.
Yeah.
This is like some midsummer shit.
This is like insanity.
Yeah, imagine like you're just backpacking through Brazil and wind up here on accident.
And it's like, oh, I have erred.
I did not want to be here.
Holy shit.
So John established a cattle ranch nearby, and by the early 2000s, he was known to spend most of his week there running his various businesses.
He was able to do this because increasingly throughout the 90s and early 2000s, a string of foreigners, generally American women, moved in and dedicated themselves to helping his mission.
This includes the Americans who wrote his biography.
John of God's practice involved a series of mass meetings where sick folks would basically fill up rooms and wait to be seen by the medium.
He'd consult with his entities and then diagnose their problem.
I'm going to quote now from a write-up in the Montreal Gazette.
Quote: Once the diagnosis has been made, the healing procedure begins.
It may be visible or invisible spiritual surgery.
If the patient chooses invisible, they are directed to a room to meditate while the spirits do their work.
Visible surgery can involve sticking a surgical clamp up the patient's nose.
It looks very impressive, but it is nothing but an old carny trick, usually performed with a long nail and a hammer.
Any anatomical text will reveal that there is a roughly four-inch-long passage up the nasal cavity that is quite ready to accommodate a foreign object without any harm.
John maintains that, yeah, that's a good trick.
Yeah, he's doing the nails up the nose thing, he's calling it brain surgery.
Classic, yeah, classic.
John maintains that the success of his treatment hinges on the patient abstaining from drinking alcohol, eating pork, and having sex for 40 days after the treatment.
This can provide for a convenient out in case no miracle occurs.
Patients can be healed even if they are unable to travel to Brazil.
All that is needed is a surrogate willing to undergo the spiritual surgery.
So that's awesome.
That's a good grift.
Oh, God.
Yeah.
Oh, well, I mean, I guess it's like if you're going to be a main grifter, at least bring up your little grifty town around you.
Yeah.
Yeah, I guess.
Yeah.
I mean, that's obviously the safest thing, right?
Because then they'll have a vested financial interest in protecting you.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I guess that is what a cult is.
Yeah, that's basically.
I mean, yeah, more.
I mean, this is a little more complicated than just a cult because there's a cult, but then there's also the town who, like, probably a lot of the townsfolk knew that this was bullshit, but they also know there's a fuckload of money in this shit.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Make everyone invested in you.
And yeah, one way or the other, it's got leverage.
It's essentially the same way that like the pot industry works in large amounts of the United States.
Or, yeah, like any drug, illegal drug business works, where it's like, well, this is where the money is here.
So nobody's going to start shit.
Yeah.
Don't snitch.
This is the fucking godfather.
Don't snitch.
Healing Terminal Illnesses00:03:30
This is good for all of us.
Yeah.
That's kind of what's going on here.
Um, except for instead of good, honest marijuana, it's a guy cutting people's faces and shoving things up their noses.
And he actually hates marijuana.
Uh, he was famous for saying that, like, if you smoked pot, you had to like detox for a whole year before he could heal you.
The entities don't like weed.
Yeah.
That's can't be true, but fair enough, entities.
Yeah, if there are if there are ghostly entities flying around, there's no way those ghostly entities don't like some fucking dank.
Like, come on.
Yeah.
They love, they love weed.
So that last write-up I read you from the Montreal Gazette was obviously written by a credible journalist who was as critical of who was very critical of John of God.
But I want to read another example, another person writing about what his healing sessions look like who actually believed in him and was a member of his cult.
So here's his biographer, Heather Cummings, recalling one of his healing sessions.
Quote: The entity, Dr. Jose Valdovino, called for his, and that's the guy he's channeling, is this Dr. Jose Valdovino, called for his instruments again.
I opened the special drawer and carefully removed the tray and took the instrument tray to him.
He chose a paring knife, a regular kitchen serrated edged knife.
He passed his hand over the man's eye and told him to relax.
He opened the eye wide and pressed down hard and scraped.
See, here it is, he said, as he wiped the knife on the man's shirt.
I could see a minute dark sliver.
I know beyond a doubt after seeing so many of these operations that the sliver was not a topical foreign object being removed, but rather something from deep inside that only the entities can see.
The entity looks into the eye as a representation of the whole body system, not limited to the physical eye.
I understand this is a symbolic removal on the physical level, but originating from many levels and involving many different organs.
The son is healed.
You can take him to the infirmary, he said, as he wrote the post-op prescription.
So that's cool.
Shit.
That's an awesome gig, man.
That is...
I mean, I don't, I, like, I don't wear contacts because I can't touch my eye, I think.
Oh, I'll heal you, man.
Yeah.
Come over to my house.
I'll whip out a big old rusty machete and I'll carve the ghosts out of your eye, man.
It's fine.
This is where I'm taking machetes in next.
Damn.
God, that's an easy grist.
Just start slashing people's fucking faces.
It's fine.
Holy shit.
Oh, man.
And then, yeah.
Can you imagine the first time you try this shit?
Like, this will work.
There's a lot of blind people who are like before he learned how to scrape people's eyes without blinding them.
Like, he.
There's like a whole village full of his first draft healings.
Yeah.
Jesus Christ.
I guess some of those people are dead, huh?
Yeah, I mean, you know, the good thing is, if you're actually like, if you're doing this kind of grift, I think you definitely want to start out only trying to heal people with serious terminal illnesses like cancer, because then once you fuck up, they're not around very long, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, that's really key.
Yeah, a lot of good advice on how to start a medical grift in this episode.
So take notes.
When society collapses, some of you are going to do very well remembering this stuff.
So yeah, like as that story noted, John of God would write prescriptions to his patients, and all of these prescriptions were for a specific herbal pill mixture sold in John of God's own pharmacy.
Dr Oz Gives Legitimacy00:09:49
The pills were mostly passion flour, and by some accounts, they've netted John more than $10 million a year.
He also gets a cut of the sales of the white clothes, the hotel fees, the sales of blessed water, and the sales of healing crystals, which he prescribes to his followers.
So you can see why no one in Abidyana had any interest in questioning whether or not John of God was legit.
He did face occasional challenges from members of the Brazilian government, particularly folks in the medical establishment who were leery of his psychic surgery.
But this sort of woo is extremely popular in Brazil, particularly among rural voters.
And John of God was both rich and connected.
So it is not surprising that very little was ever done.
What's more surprising is the degree to which foreign journalists bought into his shtick.
In 2005, ABC News sent a small team to Abadyanya to meet John of God.
They put together a documentary basically posing the question of whether or not he was a healer or a bullshit artist.
And they kind of landed on healer.
Like ABC News did a pretty shitty job of journalism here.
And I'm going to quote from this write-up in the Montreal Gazette.
Quote, In an attempt to provide a critical view of John's antics, the producers invited two experts, cardiac surgeon Mehmet Oz and James Randy, the world's leading investigator of paranormal phenomena.
Oz was probably chosen because he was a proponent of various alternative therapies, such as therapeutic touch and refluxology, and would be likely to be somewhat sympathetic to faith healing and perhaps add an air of legitimacy.
Randy was invited as the token skeptic.
Oz appeared repeatedly in the hour-long show, basically echoing the refrain that science doesn't have all the answers and all other forms of healing need consideration.
Science, of course, doesn't claim to have all the answers, but it does look for evidence before jumping on a bandwagon.
Randy, who could have provided evidence for methods of trickery and for psychological manipulation, was given a total of 19 seconds on the show after being interviewed for hours.
Why?
Because the possibility that cancer can be healed by penetrating the nose with surgical forceps by a healer chosen by God makes for better television than declaring him to be a self-delusional simpleton or a calculating fraud artist.
So.
I mean, this has to also be like something like the underlying Faith in Christianity, like, you know, it's like, oh, you gotta, you know, can't question religion, can't question religion takes you all the way to, well, this could be real.
This clearly fake shit could be real.
It's gotta be real.
What else can it be?
It's, it's, it's wild, man.
Um, and Dr. Oz is a big part of justifying this guy.
Like, you can't overstate how much Dr. Oz played a role in giving this guy legitimacy because his job for his whole career, pretty much, has been to be a real doctor who will get up and say that nonsense makes sense, that nonsense medical treatments are good for you.
I mean, I think it's like critical to point out that like physicians are not fucking scientists.
Like, you can be a doctor.
Ben Carson believes in fucking, you know, doesn't believe in evolution.
Like doctors are just like high-stakes technicians.
Yeah.
And engineers are regularly, engineers and doctors actually are not irregularly like part of like terrorist moods, like Al-Qaeda had a bunch of engineers and doctors at it.
Yeah.
Because like they, you know, if you've got that kind of intelligence, like Ben Carson is a great brain surgeon and is also able to convince himself that the world is 6,000 years old.
Like the kind of brains that these people have don't, you know, there's a lot of very smart doctors, obviously, too, but you can be a doctor and very dumb.
Yeah, yeah.
And you can be a doctor.
But I don't think Dr. Oz is dumb.
I actually don't think that's, I think Dr. Oz is a very intelligent grifter who's made millions of dollars causing untold harm to the world and to our shared understanding of science.
God, I hope that Dr. Oz ad comes on during this episode.
He's a piece of shit and a monster.
I think an ad for Dr. Oz comes on right now.
I think it's just like worth pointing out that the TEM in STEM, none of those things are indicative of actual knowledge necessarily.
No, and this is part of why like this is people talk about like conservatives in particular like talk a lot of shit about the liberal arts and like philosophy and all this stuff.
And it's like, no, no, no.
The reason why engineers and doctors should have some grounding in all that education is to stop Dr. Oz's from coming about.
It's to give people like a broader understanding than just like if you get really good at one incredibly narrow technical thing, you can convince yourself to believe all sorts of stupid bullshit because you're a very smart person who doesn't have a wide-ranging education.
And it's very easy for those sorts of people to convince themselves of the dumbest things in the world.
Yeah.
And who have like, who are highly rewarded for it.
So like, yeah, you watch like any Silicon Valley person make a pronunciation on anything outside of business.
And it's like, oh, you are, you are less educated than the average person.
You are bad at reasoning.
Yeah.
And when a bunch of these people who are really good at one incredibly narrow task wind up responsible for a wide range of things, you have stuff like a viral epidemic get wildly out of hand and kill tens of thousands of people.
But yeah hypothetically hypothetically yeah, and dr Oz is, of course, a part of that and was like urging people to take bullshit medical treatments during the coronavirus epidemic.
Because he's he's he's, he's history's greatest monster.
Um, you know he was also cited repeatedly in that 2010 UH OH magazine article because, of course, Oprah um gave me, Met Oz life and nursed him at her metaphorical breast of publicity um, and i'm gonna quote from that next.
So this is the write-up in O Magazine that really put John Of God on the map.
Quote, five years ago, Oz had participated in a primetime live segment focusing on John Of God.
He examined hours of film footage from the entity's healings.
He'd looked at scans and biopsy reports and there were results.
He couldn't explain the shrinkage of an aggressive tumor.
For instance, this guy has a glioblastoma, which is a very deadly brain tumor.
Oz recalled it was grade four.
They biopsied it and proved it.
As an added credential, the biopsy was done at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, a prominent hospital.
I took those films down to my radiologist, along with a new set of films the patient had taken after his visit to John Of God, which showed the tumor had calcified and essentially died.
Now I don't know dr Oz's radiologist, but I do know that dr Oz himself is a famous charlatan and a liar.
I can't speak to the specific case, but it's worth noting that no other doctors got to look at this information um.
I can however, speak about other cancers that John Of God claimed falsely to have cured.
In 2005, South African singer Leah Melman refused breast cancer surgery to be treated by John Of God.
She claimed to have been cured by him and showed up on Oprah Winfrey show to tell everyone the good news about how Brazil's miracle healer had had cured her untreatable cancer which actually was treatable that she just chose not to get treated.
She died of her untreated cancer two years after her Oprah appearance in 2012.
Oprah did not post a retraction based on any of this.
Of course, some of this is probably due to the fact that there were many, many other grateful patients, all too eager to come forward and share their own stories of miraculous healing.
That 2010 article by Susan Casey included the stories of several charismatic foreigners who claimed to have been cured by John and now worked for him or made money taking groups to be healed by him.
Um, i'm gonna read one example.
This is a quote from that OH Magazine article, which you can only find it on the way back machine, because once this guy got accused by of rape by literally hundreds of people um, Oprah pulled the article, but uh, I found it on the way back machine.
And if you want to be really angry at an unspeakably shitty journalist and and Susan Casey is one of the very worst who's ever ever done the job uh, read that article because it will make you want to punch holes in your wall.
So i'm going to read a quote from it now.
So get your whole punch in hands ready over a good chile in Red.
Edwin, an ordained minister, motivational speaker and author of the Four Spiritual Laws Of Prosperity, recounted the story of her brain aneurysm deemed inoperable by five neurosurgeons.
Get your affairs in order, she remembers being told, and try not to sneeze.
That's how fragile I was.
She said so.
I did it.
I went out and got my living will, my durable power of attorney, but then I realized i'm not ready to go just yet.
She laughed at the memory.
That's all it is.
Now, after her dire diagnosis, at the urging of her prayer group all of whom say they received the same vision of John Of God curing her Edwin, Edwin traveled to the Casa.
I was nervous and I was skeptical, she said.
But what did I have to lose?
Almost immediately, the entity performed invisible surgery on her, a 40-minute process that involved sitting in a group meditation with her right hand over her heart.
Nobody touched her, but Edwin remembers, I could feel things moving around in my head.
It didn't hurt, but it was different.
Afterwards, she collapsed in exhaustion for 24 hours.
Days later, she was told by her guide the stitches would be removed.
That night, I could feel ping, ping, ping, like stitches being pulled out.
Eventually, a CT scan revealed the truth.
Her aneurysm was gone.
I'm so grateful, she said, nodding toward the heavens.
Since then, she's been back to the Casa once at Christmas, and now she was headed there for a third time, bringing a group of 20 people who also sought healing.
So this is the level of journalistic rigor that we're getting in this article.
The magazine, everybody.
The mention of the wine is particularly choice.
Oh, it's got to be revolting.
Yeah, Oprah Magazine was definitely like, yeah, it was entirely geared at getting wine moms to believe spiritual nonsense and not get their cancer treated.
Jesus Christ.
Wine Moms and Ad Breaks00:02:44
Robert, you want to take an ad break real quick?
Yeah, you know what else doesn't care if wine moms get cancer treatment?
The products and services that support this podcast, they don't give a good goddamn.
Great.
And that's the behind the bastards guarantee.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Bajanista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never, ever taught.
Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
That's great.
It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Hey, Ernest, what's up?
Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
On each episode of the podcast, Earn Your Leisure, we break down the conversations you need to understand money, investing, and entrepreneurship.
From stocks and real estate to credit, business, and generational wealth, we translate complex financial topics into real conversations everyone can understand.
Because the truth is, most people were never taught how money really works.
But once you understand a system, you can start to build within it.
That means ownership, smarter investing, and creating opportunities not just for yourself, but for the next generation.
If you want to learn how to build wealth, understand the markets, and think like an owner, Earn Your Leisure is the podcast for you.
Listen to Earn Your Leisure on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Will Farrell's Big Money Players and iHeart Podcast presents soccer moms.
So I'm Leanne.
This is my best friend Janet.
Hey.
And we have been joined at the hip since high school.
Absolutely.
Now a redacted amount of years later, we're still joined at the hip.
Just a little bit bigger hips, wider.
This is the podcast.
We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey with all the snacks and drinks.
Sidebar.
Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer?
Well, they had a BOGO.
Well, then you got it.
You want a white class up here?
Just take off.
What are y'all doing?
Microphones?
Are you making that rap album?
Friendly Nice Five Senses00:11:11
Why would that?
Why would you believe it?
I would buy it.
It cuts through the defense like a hot knife through sponge cake.
That sounds delicious.
Oh, you're lucky.
I'm not a drug addict.
You're lucky.
I'm not an alcoholic.
You're lucky.
I'm not a killer.
I love this team, and I'm really trying to be a figure in their lives that they can rely on.
Oh.
Listen to soccer moms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Iris Palmer, and my new podcast is called Against All Odds.
And that's exactly what the show is about.
Doing whatever it takes to beat the odds.
Get ready to hear from some of your favorite entrepreneurs and entertainers as they share stories about defying expectations, overcoming barriers, and breaking generational patterns.
I'm talking to people like award-winning actress, producer, and director, Fiva Longoria.
I think I had like $200 in my savings account, and my mom goes, what are you going to do?
And I was like, I'll figure it out.
We had a one-bedroom apartment for like $400 a month, and we all could not afford.
Like, I was like, how am I going to make $100 a month?
I'm opening up like I've never before.
For those of you who think you know me from what you've seen on social media, get ready to see a whole new side of me.
Listen to Against All Odds with Iris Palmer as part of the Michael Tura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
We're back.
Oh my gosh.
What a great.
I don't know.
Whatever this is.
What a great story.
John of God is a monster and a rapist, and we will only hear more about the horrible things that he's done.
But I can't have the same kind of hatred for him that I can for these fucking O magazine grifters and Dr. Oz.
And I don't know why.
I think it's because on like a on like a global level, the amount of harm that these people do is so much higher.
And it's also so much like this is going to sound weird, but like the horrible physical crimes that John of God committed, like he just went out there and committed with his own body.
And there's a level of like commitment to evil that's necessary.
Whereas Dr. Oz and Oprah just like sit in front of a camera and say bullshit that harms so many more people while at the same time, they're perfectly friendly and nice people.
And so like nobody hates them and they never go to prison.
And like I'm not going to say they're worse than a rapist, but yeah, in a way, they do more damage on a broad scale, right?
Like, yeah, it's not good.
Well, it's, it's like sort of like, it's like, it's like whatever the PR version of money laundering is.
They clean, they clean it.
They're the cleaners.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
That's exactly right.
They're like money launderers for like dangerous bullshit that gets people killed and molested and stuff.
And they, they, they are responsible in this case for sending thousands of potential victims to this guy who, again, turns out to rape hundreds of people.
And like they're being sent there by Oprah, but all she gets is traffic for it and more money.
And everybody loves Oprah.
And if she ran for president, she would absolutely win.
And it's fine.
And it's just fine because she's a friendly, nice person.
I'm sure if I got to hang out with Oprah, I would enjoy her company.
And I would forget momentarily the horrors that her brand has brought into the world.
And that's very frustrating to think about.
Although, to be fair, actually, if she were to graduate to the level of American president, she would once again be in company where probably relatively speaking, her hands are relatively clean.
And like, I hate to say it, but I suspect she would not be the worst president of my lifetime.
Oh my gosh.
She might be the best.
Yeah.
It's entirely possible.
Yeah.
Both things are true.
can be the friendly face of a lot of horror and still be the best president yeah i would still vote for her over the current guy or even joe biden to be honest so yeah here we go like it's fucking wild this is so dumb we shouldn't have presidents um or billionaires like oprah but whatever Anyway, that O magazine article has been scrubbed from the internet because of all the rapes and stuff.
But yeah, I almost recommend finding it and reading it just to get a crash course in how to write a really irresponsible article about a cult leader.
Susan Casey should be in some sort of journalist prison.
But instead, she went from being Oprah's editor-in-chief to working as the creative director for Outside Magazine, the editor of Sports Illustrated Women, and the author of a ridiculous sounding book on dolphins.
And I am sure that I have ruined any chance of publishing an outside magazine now, which bums me out because I would much rather do that than write about Nazis, but I don't like Susan Casey, and I think she's very irresponsible.
Yeah.
She's the journalistic equivalent of like taking your nine-year-old out shooting for the first time and just getting blackout drunk first.
I mean, is it like, cause it's like, so generally there's this like a vested interest in promoting like spirituality and Christianity on some level.
And like, cause it's like when you, when you encounter these people, are you not at any point like, hey, this seems fucked up.
It's so wild to me that you don't, that they don't have that instinct.
You know, the key is that all of the people surrounding John of God, because you don't spend much time with him.
You spend a lot of time around these like, and they're mostly like white American ladies who like love his shit.
And they're all the same kind of, they're all Gwyneth Paltrow kind of people.
And they're all like, like, well-healed and friendly and charming.
And they know how to speak to a specific segment of the population.
And those people find them trustworthy.
Yeah.
So Susan felt the need to visit John of God, the author of that O magazine article, so she could write a terrible article.
But the ailment that sent her there was the fact that her father had tragically died very young, and the resultant grief had nearly broken her.
She went to Brazil for healing, and she basically claims that John of God put her into a trance during one of his mass healing sessions, and she was able to visualize her father in paradise.
Knowing that he was happy and off living his eternal life allowed her to move on.
And that's all fine.
Like, seriously, grief is the worst thing ever, and there are way worse ways of coping with it than paying a guru to help you to hallucinate heaven or whatever.
Do what you got to do to get by.
I'm not going to blame her for that.
What I will blame her for is the utterly uncritical way that she wrote about John of God's bullshit, like his claims of being able to perform surgery without even touching people.
So here's another quote.
When you consider the countless unseen things that have undeniable power, sound waves, microwaves, radio waves, emotions like anger or envy, wind, and of course the awesome universal power of love, it seems silly to rely on the naked eye for proof of anything.
Yet that is what we do.
Numbers on charts and graphs, x-rays, those we believe in, but belief without documentation, something we perceive with one of our five senses is considered without with one of our five senses is considered blind faith.
Sweet, but we don't really trust it.
So she's saying that like it's it's silly to believe in radio waves, but not the power of ghosts to heal people's cancer.
The hand waving of naked eye into evidence is fucking revolting.
She is hand waving so hard it could power a fucking windmill farm.
Like Jesus.
So she actually makes the argument in that article that it's unreasonable for us to reject the reality of John of God's powers just because there's no proof behind them.
This is reinforced by something she writes about her arrival in the hotel at Abadiana.
Quote, as I hoisted my luggage up to the second floor, a small sign of the wall caught my attention.
Don't believe everything you think, it advised.
Which is like, that's kind of gaslighting, right?
Like, it's like gaslighting via decoration.
That's a yeah, that is exactly what abusers say.
That's fucking insane.
Yeah.
Holy shit.
In this same uncredulous way, she writes about the entities that John of God channels.
Quote, if you spend time at Abadiana, you will hear the phrase the entities over and over again, sometimes plural and sometimes singular, and you will come to use it yourself as if it were a completely ordinary thing to say.
What it actually means, however, is so extraordinary that it defies our sense of what is logical or even possible in this world.
The healing entities who work through John of God are the spirits of deceased doctors, surgeons, masters, and saints.
Heather's website explains matter-of-factly.
They use Medium Joao's body, channeling their power through him.
Sometimes the spirits show up anonymously, but there are several who make regular appearances.
They include Dr. Augusto D'Almieda, a surgeon and army man with a serious and efficient manner.
Dr. Oswaldo Cruz, whose specialties were infectious diseases and bacteriology, Saint Francis Xavier, co-founder of the Jesuit order, along with Casa's patron, Saint Ignatius of Loyola, a priest and nobleman from the 16th century.
Despite the presence of saints, Medium Joao, born a Catholic, makes it clear that the Casa is not a church, but rather a spiritual hospital.
My mission has nothing to do with religion, he says.
So.
Oh.
Have these guys ever been like sued by the estates of these?
This feels a little bit like Mormons like baptizing people in like post-mortem.
Most of the poor people who come to John of God are too poor to sue if their serious diseases don't get cured.
And most of the rich people aren't actually coming there for serious diseases.
They're coming there for things like Susan has, where they're sad, you know?
Yeah.
That's a lot of these patients.
Sorry, I meant the estates of these spirits.
Man, yeah, that would be fun to try to sue someone for that.
I don't know that there's any legal precedent.
I think it's really funny that you're like talking about like, okay, well, we've got this infectious disease doctor, but actually he's calling it a second opinion from the 16th century nobleman.
Yeah, exactly.
It's like, hey, my grandpa, you know, admittedly, my Nazi grandpa probably wouldn't have supported this.
I guess it's not the best court case, but, you know.
Oh, boy.
Susan goes on to write, quote, at the CASA, skeptics are as welcome as believers.
I had already noticed that skeptics didn't tend to stay that way.
Many harumphing empirical scientists had become impassioned John of God advocates after visiting and witnessing him in action.
She doesn't go on to quote any of these scientists or give any evidence of this.
She just like says it because this is again a perfect piece of journalism.
At one point, Susan attends a healing and says that John of God called for doctors in the audience to come forward.
In her recitation of events, these learned men were all bowled over by John's inexplicable healing abilities.
As far as I can tell, Susan took no action to determine if any of these men were actual doctors.
A real journalist, Michael Usher, did report critically on John of God in 2014 for 60 minutes, and I want to compare how she and Michael both wrote about the medium's eye scraping surgery.
Journalist Reports on Session00:06:04
Quote, from my vantage point, only 10 feet, and this is Susan, from my vantage point, only 10 feet away.
The change in his body and demeanor was easily visible.
Now his eyes were more intense and they flashed noticeably darker.
His gait became stiffer, his movements more deliberate.
He turned to the three women standing against the wall, took the one closest to him by the hand and gently sat her in a wheelchair.
Her eyes fluttered wide as she meditated.
Reaching to the tray, he selected a short knife with a wooden handle, a cheap-looking type that you might use to pair an apple, and he held it up to the room, making sure that everyone saw its sharp blade.
He tipped her head backward, running his hand across her face, and he opened her left eye, holding the eyelid wide.
Then he began to scrape the knife across her eyeball back and forth with visible pressure.
Unbelievably, the woman sat absolutely still without flinching or recoiling.
I had a hard time watching this, believing as I do that the words knife and eyeball should never appear in the same sentence.
After what seemed like an eternity, devoid of trauma, he put down the knife.
The orderly took the wheelchair and steered it into the infirmary.
As she had the entire time, the woman appeared to be napping.
How on earth could a knife cross your eyeball and not hurt?
Later, I would interview another recipient of this treatment, Connie Price62 from Jackson, Michigan.
There was no pain whatsoever, she said of the five-minute scraping.
I could feel the energy coming through him.
I remember the heat pouring through that man's body.
Price found the treatment beneficial.
I can see a lot better now.
So you'll notice the only evidence of efficacy of healing is they didn't look to be in pain when this guy was rubbing a knife on their eye.
And they said, one of them said afterwards, I can see better now.
There's no, again, that's not evidence.
That's an anecdote.
And that's not an anecdote based on like actually testing her eyesight.
Is that?
And also, it's like, aren't there isn't the whole thing?
That's like, there aren't, are there nerves on your eyeball?
Because that's how they do like basic, right?
Yep.
It's actually really easy to write.
It's the same thing with like shot.
It's actually very easy to rub a knife and even cut a little bit on an eyeball without somebody being in horrible pain.
Right.
And, you know, even when you actually are cutting into people's chests, like it's easy for people to not feel pain.
Like, again, people who like there, there are people who like do cutting and stuff or who will like, like, I have friends who like will suspend themselves from fucking things in the roof of a building with like hooks in their back.
And like it feels good to them.
Like there's like a release of endorphins.
Like there's pain too, but like they're not like screaming in agony the whole time, even though you would think they would be.
Like, there's, yeah, exactly.
Like the fact that these people don't report pain or anything isn't weird and is part of like a long documented history of people experiencing temporary relief from faith healing and stuff like that.
There's nothing mysterious about it.
For decades, Pentecostal revivalist preachers have done things like pray over people with injured legs and then have them discard their crutches and dance around.
And the explanation for how this works is the same as the explanation for why if you throw your back out, you might find yourself forgetting the pain during a moment of extreme danger or extreme excitement.
Like it's just sometimes our brains override our experience of pain.
It happens.
It's a thing that people do.
It's like those stories of women lifting cars off their babies.
So yeah, that's how Susan Casey uncritically reports on a healing session.
Here's how a real journalist, Michael Usher, reports on a pretty much identical healing session.
John of God is not a surgeon.
He is not a trained doctor.
Yet he is presented with a tray of medical instruments, scalpels, and all sorts of scissors.
He takes a scalpel and scrapes eyes.
He sticks knives and scalpels of some sort down the back of people's throats.
And he claims he is getting to tumors.
He claims he is getting to the root of people's illnesses.
He claims he is getting to what makes people ill or sick.
None of it is done with an anesthetic, and you don't even know if what he's using is sterile.
Yeah.
That feels about right.
A large part of why John of God's magic seems to work is the fact that he performs it all in public, among and in front of a large and enthusiastic crowd of true believers, many of whom also happen to be desperately ill.
John tells them that they can all help fuel his work and heal themselves by sitting in the current and basically meditating for hours while he does his thing.
As Susan Casey writes, on any given day, maybe 400 people form the current, spelunking so deeply into their interior realms that they might well be asleep or anesthetized.
While doing so, they refrain from opening their eyes or crossing their arms or legs.
These things they are told cut off the flow of energy as surely as would kinking a hose.
So this is at least said they were told in that one.
Yeah.
If I'm throwing a lot of shade on Susan Casey for her bad article here, it's because her choice to platform John of God with no critical thinking or even an attempted examination brought his line of bullshit to the eyes and ears of millions of vulnerable people.
Oprah Winfrey had her on her show in 2010.
And one of the millions of women who watched that episode was a Dutch choreographer named Zahira Leinke Maus.
She suffered from sexual trauma and Winfrey's episode, Do You Believe in Miracles, convinced her that Medium John could heal her.
She waited in line twice to receive his healing after traveling to Brazil.
On her first visit, he prescribed her some of his herb pills.
When those didn't do the trick, she went back and he offered her a spiritual cleansing in a rare private session.
From the Washington Post, quote, she waited until everyone in line had their turns until finally she was alone, and John of God invited her into his office and then into his bathroom.
That's where Moe says he raped her, all while leading her to believe it was part of her healing.
Now, Moe was one of hundreds and perhaps thousands of rape victims of John of God.
And I want to end on this note to get to the point of like what's really happened here, which is that an American industry based on uncritically looking at spiritual healers funneled victims into this guy's hands and allowed him to achieve a level of influence and basically like built a spider web for this fucking spider of a man.
So we're going to continue the story of John of God in part two.
But right now, we're going to continue the story of Andrew T of God's pluggables.
Oh shit.
Part Two Continues Story00:03:33
You know, just go to the Yo Is This Racist podcast.
I met Andrew T. His last name is spelled T I everywhere.
Yeah, that's it.
That is it.
Well, I'm Robert Evans.
You can find me on the internet at findthebastards.com.
You can find me on Twitter at iWriteOK.
And if you want, I will just sort of rub a machete all over your eyes.
It's going to cost you, I don't know, let's say I don't take any money, but we do ask for $3,000 donations to our medical center.
So give me $3,000 and I'll fucking rub a machete on whatever part of your body you want.
That's the guarantee.
That is a guarantee.
Absolute guarantee.
I also have a podcast called The Women's War.
It's upbeat.
It tells you about how to make things that don't suck out of your society when it sucks.
So maybe listen to that too.
And I don't know, go in Christ and cut up people's eyes.
Yep.
That's the podcast.
Yeah, it is.
Dope.
Part one of the podcast.
Okay.
You know the famous author Roald Dahl.
He thought up Willy Wonka and the BFG.
But did you know he was a spy?
Neither did I. You can hear all about his wildlife story in the podcast, The Secret World of Roald Dahl.
All episodes are out now.
Was this before he wrote his stories?
It must have been.
What?
Okay, I don't think that's true.
I'm telling you, I was a spy.
Binge all 10 episodes of The Secret World of Roald Dahl.
Now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Readers, Katie's finalists, publicists.
We have an incredible new episode this week for you guys.
We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode.
They put on Lizzie McGuire at 2 a.m. video on demand.
This guy's playing.
2 a.m.
2 a.m.
Whatever time it is.
Lizzie Maguire and I'm like... Wild back.
It was like a first closet moment for me where I was like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them.
No, no, no.
I was like, she's beautiful.
I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are.
I'm not like.
Listen to Lasco Triestas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
This Financial Literacy Month, we are talking about the one investment most people ignore: building a business around the life you actually want.
It was just us making happen whatever he said was going to happen, and then it happened.
On those amigos, entrepreneurs like Amira Kazam and Joe Hoff get real about money, taking risks, and why your dream might be the smartest move.
At the end of my life, what am I really going to care about?
And the conclusion I came to is what I did to make the world a better place in whatever way.
Listen to those amigos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversation about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
On a recent episode, I sit down with actor cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
The entire season two is now available to bench, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
I'm an alcoholic, and without this probe, I'm a guy.
Listen to Ceno's show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.