Robert Evans and Miles Gray examine John Harvey Kellogg, a Seventh-day Adventist eugenicist whose upbringing under Ellen White's leadership shaped his radical medical views. Influenced by Sylvester Graham's moral diet theories linking masturbation to illness, Kellogg transformed the Battle Creek Sanitarium into a resort enforcing extreme treatments like continuous baths and high-pressure enemas. Despite earning an MD from Bellevue Hospital in 1875 and treating celebrities like Thomas Edison, Kellogg maintained that sexual urges were grave evils requiring harsh physical intervention, setting the stage for his controversial legacy as a "cum doctor." [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:02:11
This is an iHeart podcast.
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When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
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He's going to get what he deserves.
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In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice in sellings, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots five, city hall building.
How could this ever happen in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with the man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
The Cereal Killer Mystery00:03:03
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
What?
I don't know.
Sexually abusing my children through breakfast cereals.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm Robert Evans.
This is Behind the Bastards, and we're talking this is an episode that's got to go in some bad places.
Some dark places.
Miles, how are you doing today?
Our guest is Miles Gray.
I'm so sorry, Miles.
I'm great.
I love it.
I'm so sorry.
Miles.
I love it here.
How do you feel about cereal?
The like grain breakfast thing?
Yeah.
The concept of the thing that you can like pour into a bowl, add milk.
Yeah.
Right, right.
Love, you know, love it.
Loved it as a child.
On board.
Don't on board.
Don't have time for it now as an adult, really.
Really?
Don't have time for cereal.
You know what it is?
I have Like I go through streaks, so I'll open a box of cereal and then the shit is like stale because I didn't eat it like within however long I'm supposed to eat cereal.
I never want more than about a bowl.
Yeah.
I mean, I'll do like what happens is I'm high at the grocery store and I'm like, oh, I'm going to eat rice krispy tree cereal.
Yeah.
And I'll eat like a half a mixing bowl worth.
And then I'll be so just disgusted because I use half and half as the milk that I put the cereal in the back of my pantry.
Stoner ash.
And then I'm like, nah, and it's, and it calls to me.
Yeah.
I mean, I was the same way back when I smoked pot.
Those were my cereal days because I would show up at like one of those 24-hour grocery stores at 1.30 in the morning and I would buy the largest thing of marshmallow cereal.
And I would sit with a giant bowl and a bong watching Star Trek the Next Generation and eating.
And it ruled.
I had some great memories of those days.
How do you feel about granola?
My first thought is just a slang, you know, pejorative for hippies, you know, granola.
But the food, I like it.
Are we talking like a bar or are we talking?
No, I mean, any granola-based product.
You can do a lot with granola.
I think we can all agree.
Versatile.
Versatile.
Love a granola bar.
Love a Nature Valley.
Fanny yoga?
Yeah.
Yeah.
But yoga.
I mean, I really, the thing, I'm sorry that I'm so awkward.
I mean, not only am I high, but like knowing you, I just don't like the path you're walking me down.
Yeah.
Because it's just, it's always just so fucked up.
And you start, that's all I'm like, cereal.
I'm like, what the fuck you're talking about, Robert Cereal?
Like, cereal killers?
Not serial killers, worse than a cereal killer, though.
The fun thing about today's episode, Miles, is that the bastard we're talking about has either helped to invent or popularize a variety of products that I'm going to guess about 100% of the people listening to this show have enjoyed.
So everyone listening to this has benefited in some way from something this man either invented or popularized.
Hidden Numbers in the Bible00:15:06
Now, the guy we're talking about was also a hugely prominent eugenicist and a prolific advocate of female genital mutilation.
So yeah, we are.
Right.
This is going to be like the elevator episode all over.
Yeah.
We are talking about John Harvey Kellogg.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Have you done this already?
Oh, no, no.
Wow.
I'm honored.
I feel like, I mean, because I know vaguely, like, it's all very fucking.
People, most people have heard little bits of this stuff.
He's like, yo, here's some sex shit.
He made cornflakes to stop kids from fucking.
Yeah.
Like, that's like one of the things that, you know, I hear everyone from the cracked orbit here.
I've heard that sort of line many times from Dakota.
It's much deeper and much worse than that.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So before we started on his life, we need to give a little bit of background about where this guy came from because there's a lot of different strains of thought in the American mind that kind of led to the birth of John Harvey Kellogg as the person that he became.
Do you know much about Seventh-day Adventism?
Yeah, I know a little bit about SDA.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, but not much.
Like, I just know about like, you know, they give out food.
They give out food.
They believe that Saturday, not Sunday, is the Lord's Day.
That's the seventh day part.
And they, you know, they believe the apocalypse is imminent, and they kind of have for a long time.
Yeah, okay, right, right, right.
That's yes.
Which today is like half of the religious right.
But back in when they came about was kind of a new idea.
Some of them also believe that going to doctors is evil.
That's not like a mainstream belief necessarily, but it's like a trend through Seventh-day Adventist thought.
And we're going to talk about why for a little bit.
So the Seventh-day Adventists are a Millerite sect.
And the Millerites were a religious movement that started in 1816 when a Vermont farmer named William Miller converted from being kind of like a skeptical deist, like a lot like Ben Franklin, right?
Like that sort of guy.
He got pilled hard on the Baptist faith.
And because he was this kind of rational skeptic guy, once he became a believer, he had to believe that the Bible was fundamentally rational and internally consistent.
Now it's not.
So you can see how this would be a problem for him or how this would lead to problems.
So he set to work trying to prove the inherent rationality of the Bible.
And this very quickly led him to a bad place.
After about two years of this, he'd gone full conspiracy corkboard Pepe Sylvia on the whole issue and convinced himself that the Bible was filled with numerical clues hidden in different books that revealed the exact date and time of the apocalypse.
He's the first guy to do this, like biblical numerology.
He's like that.
There's a hidden date.
Yeah.
Wait, is he like one of the first, who's like one of the first sort of conspiratorial numerologists?
Like, I don't know if he's one of the first breaking new ground to be like, there's code in here.
Yeah, there's hidden numbers in the Bible that predict the end times.
Right.
He's like, I think pretty much the first guy who does that.
Good for him.
Yeah, no, I know, right?
Good.
Solid.
That's kind of in a weird way.
If I was at CPAC, I think I would drop that if that was like a relationship person.
You know, I was the first guy to start counting the number of letters and words and verses of the Bible.
Actually, no, mother, that's actually my great-grandfather, dude.
Yeah.
Check Wikipedia, dude.
Don't tell me about secret Bible codes.
My family invented secret Bible codes.
Oh my God.
Hey, Bill, this guy's trying to tell me about biblical fucking numerology.
Me, Joe Miller.
I imagine the Millers moved from Vermont to New York at some point.
They're just like, yeah, then they're in the elevators union.
Yeah.
So unlike everyone at CPAC, Miller was not a grifter.
He did believe in all of this.
He wasn't like trying to get rich.
And he waited a lot.
Once he became convinced he'd figured out the date of the end of the world, he waited years to share his discovery with people because he didn't want to like create a panic.
He decided the world was going to end in 1843.
And as the year approached, he started to grow convinced that and like heard voices and stuff.
God wanted him to warn people, right?
So he keeps quiet for a while, but he decides like, God wants me to tell people the end is coming so they can have their souls saved.
So in 1831, he starts preaching and giving public speeches, laying out his work, which was convincing to a lot of people because back then, if you knew what numbers were, you seemed like a genius to at least half of the population.
So a lot of people get pulled in on this.
Miller taught his growing circle of followers that everyone who wasn't saved when the end date came would be incinerated along with the entire planet.
He started preaching in Dresden, New York, and he soon hired an effective publicist and was giving speeches up and down the East Coast.
By 1840 or so, he had a newspaper called The Signs of the Times, which he used to spread his beliefs and mass to audiences who'd never have been able to hear him speak.
His actual number of followers was probably in the low tens of thousands, but Miller's ideas were influential and widely discussed in the popular culture of the day.
The mainstream press wrote about his theories regularly.
As 1843 drew nigh, people started to ask, hey, when exactly in 1843 should we expect all life on earth to end in a fireball?
Now, Miller's answer was precise, but not super accurate.
He said that it would occur in the Jewish year 1843, which was apparently between March 21st, 1843 and March 21st, 1844.
I don't know enough about Judaism to tell you if that is the actual Jewish year of 1833.
So that's what he said.
Yeah, it's way far ahead.
It seems wrong to me, but that's what he was telling people at least.
Yeah, because I think right now it's in the Hebrew year is 5781.
Yeah, see, I think he was, I don't think he knew much about Judaism.
Damn, he got away with that shit.
But no one did.
No one in America did back then.
Yo, I love that.
You know, because that would be, I think, what, 5603.
Yeah.
He's like, no, no, no.
It's the Jewish nation.
We're like, what the fuck?
It's just March to March.
Yeah, like, ease up, bro.
That's fucking wild.
Oh, you know, Jewish people.
They love March.
Big month.
Yeah.
Okay, fine.
That's like when you know the first time that when you switch up calendars on someone for like the arrival date, that everyone should be like, this is shit.
Okay, maybe this.
Yeah.
So spoilers here, Miles, in case you haven't gotten to the end of your 1843 history book, but the world did not end that year.
Or did it end in March?
Or did it?
Not that I'm aware of.
Signs point to know.
So yeah, the fact that all life didn't end in fire was a bummer for Miller and his followers.
But being a humble man, he was the kind of person who was willing to admit that he had screwed up on his counting and missed the exact date of the apocalypse.
Even so, he insisted the end was still very much nigh.
He just like flipped a digit or two.
So he kept on preaching and his followers mostly stayed dedicated to the message.
One of them, a fellow named Samuel Snow, did his own calculations and suggested an alternate date for the end of all things, October 22nd, 1844, which he said was the Jewish Day of Atonement.
And again, I don't know if it was, but that's what he said.
Many Adventists clung to this in order to have hope that they'd been right all along.
When October 22nd passed without everyone and everything dying, they were heartbroken.
It was a tough time for them.
Now, the Millerites were definitely kind of a cult, but it has to be said, William Miller himself seems to have been a guy, like a decent person who truly believed what he was preaching.
Because when two end times dates passed without the times ending, he was consumed by shame and he spent the rest of his life hiding from the world.
That's good.
Oh, man, that's dope.
Yeah, that's funny.
Again, that's dope.
That's great.
That's what you're supposed to do.
That's what scumbags of honor used to do.
The jig was up and you fucked off.
Yeah.
You thought the world was ending.
You were wrong.
You spent the rest of your life hiding in your basement.
No, fuck that.
Good on you.
Right.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And to his followers, which had sort of one of the things people called them was Adventists.
To the Adventists, this failed apocalypse prediction became known as the Great Disappointment.
So they're real bummed out about this.
Wow.
But while William Miller had the good graces to hide his face from the world when he was proven wrong, the movement he'd spawned did not die out as a result of the Great Disappointment.
In fact, it seemed to have only grown stronger in the face of unequivocal proof that its founder was wrong about everything.
Adventists kept having meetings and kept trying to figure out when the world was going to end.
In 1848, Ellen White and her husband, some guy, attended a conference of Adventists in rural New York.
This was a year before William Miller's death and about five years after he'd gone into hiding.
So things were not going great for the Adventists.
And the main topic of debate for the conference that year was whether or not Miller's prophecies had even been real.
Like, obviously the date had been wrong, but like, was he completely full of shit or did he just like mess up some numbers a couple of times?
So yeah, one chunk of the Adventists argued that Miller had been right and that Christ had come back on October 22nd, 1844, but that he'd done so in spiritual form and he hadn't destroyed the world.
So he was right about the date, but Jesus did it invisibly, so nobody noticed.
Oh, fuck yes.
That's some good shit.
Yo, that's some like kidding.
That's some 2021 logic.
Like, that's the logic that dictates all life in America today.
Exactly.
That fucking cutting edge.
Amazing.
And people took that shit.
That's when it's a wrap.
That's some Joe Biden and Trump switched faces and Trump is still the president.
Exactly.
Oh, my God.
Unbelievable.
It's so good.
Invisibly.
Yep.
That makes sense.
Like, if I had been at that meeting, I would have just stood up and started clapping.
Like, you did it.
You invented America.
You motherfucker.
You beautiful bastard.
Oh, I was there.
I'm getting this shit tatted.
You saw it.
I was there when it all got down.
Fucking logic failed forever.
This is the breaking of the world.
Yeah.
So good.
So another thing.
Fuck off.
Oh, my God.
Oh, my God.
And then it's continued by people who are unwilling to admit they're wrong.
So now it becomes a religion because this group ego is unrelenting.
It's so good.
But now everyone's like, but how do they live so long?
I want that.
Eventually, this will terminate in somebody firing nuclear warheads into the sky because invisible aliens are molesting our children or something.
And that will be the end of all life on earth.
And it's going to be very funny in the last like four and a half seconds.
So there was another sect at the meeting led by a guy named Hiram Edson.
And they taught that the date Miller had calculated was the date of a heavenly event, not a terrestrial event, and that Christ had destroyed sin within what they called the heavenly sanctuary, which I think is basically heaven in 1843 in order to prepare his way to his return to earth.
This became known as the sanctuary doctrine.
And it basically argued that Christ had gotten caught up in cleaning up heaven and it had delayed him from landing on earth and destroying all life in hellfire.
So both of the explanations are invisible things happened.
We were right, but it was invisible.
They actually go against even what the beliefs are of like what they believe Christ to be, God to be omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent.
It seems that way.
So if you are omniscient, you all-knowing, all-powerful, and fucking everywhere and nowhere and all of that shit at once.
Yeah, you're like, hey, motherfucker, hold up, man.
I got to clean some shit up.
Excuse me, fucking a little bit, man.
There's some fucking problems.
If you only fucking knew, I'm serious.
If you only fucking knew, I won't even tell y'all, but I'll be there in a second.
I'd be like, dude, I think Christ has a drug problem or something.
Like, what the fuck is going on?
He's always fucking, what is he fucking doing up there?
Is he like it?
Is he just doing a bunch of K every night and waking up six hours late for things?
Does he walk around with a spray bottle and a flashlight trying to find light fraction?
Is he always shooting Viosine up his nose?
I think we've both known about four Jesuses each.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm familiar with Christ.
I'm familiar with the Christ type.
Oh, God.
So this meeting goes on.
And as I said, Ellen White is there, this lady Ellen White, who, as a little bit of a heads up, in her early childhood had a traumatic brain injury.
This will become relevant later.
So Ellen White is listening to these two different sects debate at this conference, and she has a vision.
And I will remind you, she also has a traumatic brain injury.
And she has this vision, which she becomes convinced is a prophecy from God, tells her that the sanctuary doctrine is correct.
So basically, Hiram goes up on stage and proposes this theory.
And then she shouts out, God just told me you're right, and I'm a prophet.
Now, from this point forward, Ellen and her husband are like become major fixtures within the Adventist movement.
And she starts predicting dates for the coming earthly apocalypse.
And these dates are all wrong.
But by this point, Millerites were used to their prophets being wrong, and it didn't hurt her credibility in any way.
By 1850, she made the very wise decision to urge her fellow Adventists to stop predicting the exact date of the end of the world, which is a good call.
So that's where we are now.
I'm leaving some stuff out, but that's the gist of the Ellen White story.
Yeah, that's good.
I mean, somewhat responsible, getting people real hot and ready, and then just being like, you know what?
Let's not do that.
Let's just chill out for a second.
I can be wrong about this.
I can't be wrong about other things.
Yeah, I'd like the...
Oh, you know what?
God just...
Yeah.
Yeah, okay, God just stopped.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What?
How?
You didn't see it.
This should just fucking happen.
Just happened.
How fucking dare you even like?
What were you about to say?
Because I'm telling you, that's what fucking God just said, okay?
Fucking asshole.
So in what was a great move from a branding standpoint, Ellen basically argued that all Adventists needed to know was that the end was coming soon, and their job was to bring as many people as possible to Christ before that time.
Proselytization became an increasingly huge deal from this point forward.
One of the hotspots for Millerite recruitment was Michigan.
Weird Religious Shit00:07:00
And that's where in 1852, an Adventist.
Michigan is the West at this point.
It's where people are moving.
It's like the big, exciting new place.
And it's also kind of like, you know, people, the reason white colonizers came to the North America in the first place was like they believed all sorts of weird religious shit that like wasn't quite cool over in Europe.
So they came here to do their weird religious shit.
And then when people had weird religious ideas in the new United States, they kind of moved to Michigan to do it because it was off the beaten path.
This like makes a lot of my relatives make a lot more sense.
That is the birth of Michigan is people being like, you know, we're a little bit too weird for the eastern seaboard.
Let's move inland a little bit.
Yeah, you know what?
Maybe we should go over here for a little bit.
I don't think it's going to work over here.
I think all the snow and big lakes will make it real easy for us to believe weird things about Jesus.
So who's just a little bit busy right now?
He'll be back in one moment.
Even Christ gets busy.
In 1852, an Adventist named Merritt Cornell converted a fella named John Preston Kellogg, who is the subject of today's episode.
The Kellogg family had moved to Michigan in the early 1840s, and their early years were pretty standard for white colonizers in the era.
John's first wife, Mary, had died of typhoid or consumption or some weird old time.
She died horribly.
John himself went through a series of religious conversions because there's all these weird little different niche faiths in Michigan.
And in 1852, though, he settles on Seventh-day Adventism.
Things being what they were back then, his family converted with him because they didn't really have any other choice.
And on February 26th, 1852, his family came to include a little baby named John Harvey Kellogg.
Now, John Harvey's earliest memories would have heavily involved the Adventist faith.
In 1855, his father pledged $300, which was a lot of money in those days, to help start up the first Adventist printing press in Michigan.
Because again, putting out magazines and pamphlets is a big part of the Adventist faith.
That's how they recruit people.
So he worked directly with James White, who's the husband of Ellen White, who was at that point basically the spiritual head of the faith.
The press was established in Battle Creek, Michigan, a small city with a reputation for being accepting of weird religious movements.
Making this pledge to fund the printing press inspired John Preston Kellogg to move his family across the state to Battle Creek.
Little Johnny Kellogg was about four years old when this happened, and he was one of 16 children.
Family finances were stretched in their very crowded household.
His father operated a broom factory, but any spare money he had went to the church.
His dad had a strict work ethic, and he demanded the same from his kids.
John Harvey Kellogg later recalled his upbringing as sad and solemn, which is some very Michigan, I'll say that.
You know, sad and yeah, well, it kind of sounds like a bummer thing to be raised around as a kid.
Like, is there any fun if like you're all just being like, fuck, when is this?
No, the apocalypse is coming and you have no money because your dad spends it paying for the religion to be able to make books.
Because he's the shitty Banksy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Shit Banksy.
So.
And he was also pretty sick, John Harvey Kellogg was for most of his childhood.
He had a bad diet.
His family ate really unhealthily and he suffered from rickets for years.
He grew up small and thin.
He would top out at just 5'4.
So he's not a healthy little kid.
Okay.
And I'm going to quote now from a book titled John Harvey Kellogg and the Religion of Biologic Living by Brian Wilson, Dr. Brian Wilson.
Quote, he would compensate for his physical shortcomings by energy, assertiveness, and a burning ambition to do something with his life.
Although he knew this would not be easy for a boy on the frontier.
According to Kellogg's later recollections, his parents prevented him from learning to read because, given the imminence of the end of the world, acquiring such skills would be a waste of time.
The apocalypse is coming.
What do you need books for?
Oh, no, that's so fucked up.
Like, really, you know what I mean?
Like, to have such a fucking cynical worldview where it's like, the world's ending.
So honestly, like, I can just neglect everything.
And that's just it.
But then you have like a kid who's, you know, maybe needs some nutrients and like food, some reading.
It does get better because when he's 12, a local pastor who may have been James White decided that, quote, if the Lord was going to come soon and end the world, he would be more pleased if he found children in school.
Which at least is a healthier set of logic than the world's ending.
You don't need to learn how to read.
So Kellogg, like, as soon as he's allowed to go to school, he basically spends an entire winter stuck in the neighborhood schoolhouse.
He's an autodidact.
He's very good at learning and he catches up very quickly.
He just reads constantly.
He's clearly a very smart boy.
Quote, yeah, so he compensated for his physical difficulties with kind of a relentless sense of self-confidence as well.
He was loud and assertive from a young age.
One minister who knew him at the time described him as a bright, sturdy, active, wide-awake boy.
In 1863, when he was 12 years old, his mother asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up.
Brian Wilson writes, quote, he promptly yelled, anything but a doctor.
Apparently, shortly before his mother's question, John Harvey and some other boys had pressed their faces against a neighbor's window to witness the bloody spectacle of a local sawbones practicing his art on one of their playmates lying on a kitchen table.
In the wake of this episode, Kellogg remembered, I abhorred the idea of the medical profession, did not like bad medicine and the bloody surgery.
That just a few years later, the young boy would find himself a famous doctor and a surgeon at that must have given the elderly Kellogg a chuckle.
For in addition to his childhood disgust at the sight of blood, he had been, at the age of 11, nothing more than an undersized boy working in his father's Battle Creek broom factory, distinguished only by his exceptional manual dexterity, sorting broom corn, and the fact that his family belonged to a struggling apocalyptic sect.
Significantly, Dr. Kellogg followed this memory with that of another.
Shortly after his mother asked him about his future in life, the boy had come upon her praying for his future.
I went in and knelt down beside her, and she placed her hand on my head as we knelt there, and she dedicated me to the Lord for human service.
So that's kind of the pivotal moment in this kid's life.
She asks him what he wants to be.
He says, I don't want to be a doctor.
And then a couple of days later, he doesn't want to be a doctor because he sees what doctors are doing in the 1860s.
Right.
Pretty ugly.
And then a few days later, he catches his mom praying and she like puts her hand on him and dedicates him to serving the human race and God.
Robert, you know who else will serve the human race and God?
Definitely not Raytheon.
Absolutely not Raytheon.
But Raytheon's only motto is: we do not serve God.
It's time for some ads.
It is time for an ad or two.
A Doctor's Moral Dilemma00:04:24
Maybe three.
Maybe four.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, you just bent the rules all the time.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
They said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Shari, stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Masturbation as a Sin00:17:17
We're back.
So, yeah, from that moment forward, his mom dedicates him to human service, and Kellogg would later recall that basically from that point forward, he never had any desire but to serve the Lord and the human race.
He got his first chance about, you know, several months later when James White noticed how intelligent this kid was and asked him to come be unpaid labor at the Adventist publishing house in town.
John Harvey became an apprentice and he spent the next four years being drawn closer and closer into the inner circle of the prophetess Ellen White.
He was promoted rapidly and it kind of seems like they decided this kid's so smart, he's got to do something for the faith.
We're going to like groom him for leadership within our weird little apocalyptic cult.
He was promoted rapidly and by the time he was 16, he'd been made an editor of the Adventist newspaper.
John Harvey loved religion and he particularly loved what most people would call the boring niche details of theological debate.
His love of this brought him into direct contact with Ellen White, who took a liking to him.
Her husband eventually confided in the boy that his wife had received a vision from God that John Harvey Kellogg was to play a crucial role in the Lord's work.
So you can kind of see how this grooming process is going.
Yeah, Jesus.
That's a lot of pressure.
A lot of pressure.
They're really putting a lot on this kid's shoulders.
And from age 17 to 20, John Harvey Kellogg continued his work on the Adventist Review and Herald.
He also started teaching grammar school before he'd actually finished high school himself, which is, I guess, the thing you could do back in those days.
He was...
You've been a TA and you're like teaching college kids shit.
Yeah, while you're still in high school.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm about to wrap that degree up, but here's the deal, kids.
Let's learn our letters here.
He was, by all accounts, a good teacher, and for several years, it was clear to everyone that John Harvey's future was going to lie in education.
He even told everyone he'd received a waking vision from God that this was to be his calling.
But when Johnny was 20, Ellen White had herself yet another vision.
This one was that John Harvey Kellogg was going to become a physician.
So he wants to be a teacher.
He really likes teaching.
This is the whole thing he's patterning his life for for years.
And then the prophetess with a brain injury sees God tell her, this kid's going to be a doctor, the thing he least wants to be in the entire world.
So this brings me to another long digression, Miles, because physician meant a different thing to Ellen White than it does to you or me.
And then it did to most people in the United States when she said it, right?
What the fuck?
Yeah.
How?
When you say doctor, you imagine like a guy who treats illnesses with a variety of medicines, right?
There's no fucking way that you have any other definition that isn't a Dr. Dre or Dr. Pepper joke of what a fucking doctor is.
Her definition of doctor was a guy who gives people different kinds of baths.
Yeah, to explain why, Miles, we have to talk about An intellectual movement in America in the mid-1800s called sectarian medicine.
So medicine in the early 1800s was mostly nonsense and poison, right?
We talk about this a lot on the show.
But it's important to note that a lot of regular people recognized that doctors were bad at their jobs.
Like the fact that they were 1830s medical treatments were basically just bleeding people and feeding them mercury.
Right.
And this was bad.
And a lot of people at the time were like, kind of seems like the doctors don't do anything but kill people.
Yeah.
It kind of seems like you die.
And then like something was wrong with your like a cough and they sawed your foot off.
Yeah.
It doesn't seem like they're good at this.
Yeah.
So it's, it's like, and a big, like purgatives are a big part of medicine.
Like the idea that like you're sick, you must be filled with poison.
We'll give you things that make you vomit and shit constantly.
Oh, he died of vomiting and shitting.
Well, the thing is, man, it's supposed to do the opposite thing.
I guess we'll dial it back next time.
All right.
So you got the same thing?
All right.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Do a little less this time.
Or a little more.
Maybe we didn't give him enough.
Yeah.
Now, such treatments were called heroic medicine because the doctors who saw what they were doing, which was poisoning people, as engaging in a violent battle with disease.
So like, yeah, we're giving people these poisons, mercury and strychnine and the like, but these poisons are necessary because you have a disease and the poison has to fight the disease, right?
Which you can see is both wrong, but not on the wrong track of thought because it is like cancer.
Chemotherapy is bad for you.
You don't like, you wouldn't want to get chemo.
Right.
But it's a poison that kills the worst poison, you know?
Right, exactly.
So there is medicine that works.
Like you can see the doctors at the time, they weren't entirely on the wrong thinking track.
They were just like, but you don't give people mercury because they have a cough.
No.
I wonder what the fuck were they seeing where they're like, oh yeah, that shit works, dude.
Oh my god.
Hit him with some more myrrh.
And they had stuff that did work too.
But yeah, I mean, it's hard to find.
Like, you got to look at a data set at some point and be like, man, my bad average is.
I don't think there were not a lot of data sets at the time.
Yeah.
No, but I mean, in this, in their own, like, even just thinking back, like, they'll look back and they're like, I've lost a lot of people.
And I can actually kind of remember only a couple of times I helped save someone seriously.
I think the level of drunk that every doctor was, it played a role in this.
Yeah, because you're like a weird fucking butcher slash like star of a Wes Craven film.
Like, yeah, so you're hammering in on opium all the time.
Yeah, and you're letting the neighborhood kids watch you cut their friend's leg off through a window.
It's all a weird scene.
Yeah, it's not great.
So, um, yeah, this is heroic medicine, the sawing people's legs and poisoning them thing.
It's heroic.
Where do you fucking know?
I'm a fucking hero.
Okay, Jesus Christ, doc.
And a lot of people thought this was bullshit.
And throughout the mid-1800s, a new school of medical thought arose that rejected this and focused instead on the healing power of nature.
And this came to be known as sectarian medicine.
So orthodox physicians would use heroic medicine to battle illness.
Sectarian doctors would use natural remedies to bring the body back into balance.
And this may not sound too bad, right?
Because there are like, I don't know, witch hazel does some shit.
Like Tylenol comes from a plant that you can, you can make a tea that'll do the same thing as Tylenol.
There's all sorts of natural remedies, Comprey and Yarrow and Plantain, that really do have beneficial effects, which is why like Native American medicine worked a lot better than many kinds of Western medicine.
Than cutting your friend's leg off.
Yeah, cutting your friend's leg off.
Yeah.
But that's not what they were talking about when they talked about natural remedies.
It was what they thought was natural, which was not like, yeah.
So The natural physicians, the sectarian doctors, believed that keeping people healthy was about restoring natural balance.
And some of this was in fact good medicine.
A lot of it meant like, well, people need to get enough sunlight.
People need to get enough exercise.
People need to get enough vitamins.
That's not bad.
You know, right track so far.
Okay.
But sectarian doctors also believed a lot of nonsense themselves because people didn't know anything back then.
They boiled nearly all health problems down to an imbalance with one of six things.
Air, diet, evacuations, sleep cycles, exercise, and peace of mind.
So one of the most popular physicians of the sectarian school was a fellow named Sylvester Graham, father of the Graham Cracker.
Although you would not have wanted to eat the Graham crackers that he made for reasons that we will get into.
Oh my God.
I know.
This is going to be such a good episode, Miles.
Oh, it gets so bad.
So remember when I said sectarian doctors focused on natural medicine and bringing the body back into balance?
Well, one thing a lot of them believed was that the body got taken out of balance when you masturbated because obviously you're ejaculating, right?
You're losing a fluid which must be taking your body out of balance and making you sick, right?
I think that's where the logic line started.
Keep it in.
Keep it in.
You got to keep it in.
No fap.
Yeah, no fap.
This is actually a very no-fap episode.
It is the same logic that Proud Boys.
Oh, like that, like you will be levitating at a certain point.
Not that.
Or that you'll go crazy and kill yourself if you come.
No, but if you don't, though, like, aren't you then allowing yourself to be a bad person?
They hadn't thought of that part.
Well, actually, some of them did believe that the reason people in the Bible lived to be 800 years old is that they were in perfect balance and never came.
So yes, actually, Miles, that's exactly right.
Virgin logic, incel logic.
I'm actually going to live forever.
I mean, John Harvey Kellogg, spoilers, is an incel.
So I'm going to quote from a write-up in the Journal of Technology and Culture about the evolution of sectarian physicians' beliefs about masturbation.
Quote, the source of these beliefs can be traced back to an 18th century Swiss physician, S.A.D. Tissot.
Tissot taught that one of the basic causes of illness and death was the wasting away of body energy.
The most dangerous of such wastes, and yet the one that could be controlled, was that brought on by masturbation.
Those who masturbated would soon have a cloudiness of ideas, suffer a decay of their bodily power, experience acute pains in their head, be afflicted with pimples on their face, and eventually lose the power of generation.
Females were likely to be subject to hysterical fits, violent cramps, ulceration of the matrix.
I don't know what the matrix meant in this situation.
I'm guessing that's like the uterus.
Oh my.
Yeah.
That's what a fucking term.
Oh my God.
The matrix.
Yeah.
It's also the opposite of correct just in terms of what masturbation can do for cramps.
But yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
So Tissot's ideas reached America at the end of the 18th century through the works of a guy named Benjamin Rush, who was the dominant medical voice in the United States during the revolutionary period and was a signer of the Declaration of Independence.
Rush taught that all disease could be reduced to one basic causal model, bodily energy.
Either the dimutation in or increase of such energy led to disease.
Dimutation of energy led to direct debility, while increase led to indirect debility.
Once the nervous system was weakened, it was susceptible to illness and disease.
So the whole idea is balance.
You lose balance one way or the other, you're going to get sick.
Rush concluded, based on observation, that sex was a major cause of nervous excitement and was thus extremely dangerous.
So basically like, people seem to get excited when they're fucking.
That can't be good.
Uh-uh.
No, none of that.
None of that.
You can't have that.
The matrix is at stake.
The Matrix could go out of whack.
I just actually looked it up.
It is, it's just a medical term, but he's just using the first part and just referring to it as the matrix.
The matrix.
But it is the uterus.
Yes.
I was hoping, I was a part of the uterus.
I was hoping that it was something to, ah, damn it.
I mean, the movie The Matrix does kind of take place in like a robot uterus filled with people.
Okay.
That are also batteries.
That are also batteries, like babies in a uterus.
Yes.
So I understand biology, Miles.
Two doctors just talking to each other right now.
Very normal.
Very normal.
So Rush concerns you.
Can you see the Matrix?
So Rush concluded, again, that sex was a cause of nervous excitement and thus careless sex would result in seminal weakness, painful urination, tuberculosis, vertigo, anxiety, and death.
From his theorizing burst a galaxy of American cum doctors, all with their own theories on why masturbation was bad and how to stop it.
Edward Bliss Foote, which is an amazing name, believed that masturbation disrupted the natural animal magnetism between the sexes.
Sylvester Graham believed that overstimulation of the nervous system was the cause of all disease.
And since Graham believed this was the case, the ultimate preventative medication was to live a life that was as boring as possible.
This meant no masturbation, because that excites you.
It meant the absolute minimum amount of sex necessary to procreate.
And it also meant eating and drinking only the very blandest things.
Graham banned grease, salt, condiments, spices, tea, coffee, tobacco, and alcohol for his followers.
He cautioned that only cold water was healthy to drink.
He created the Graham Cracker, which was initially sugarless and flavorless, to be a food that would stimulate the body as little as possible and help you poop in order to cut down on sexual urges.
Hey, yeah, my kid was jerking off.
Can I get some of those shit crackers that'll help you?
Can we show those crackers that taste terrible and make them poop?
Also, wait, the blandness of life is our secret?
Is the spice of life?
Because if you're out of balance, if you're happy, you're out of balance.
If you're excited, you're out of balance.
If you experience a moment of joy, you're out of balance, and that will make you die.
Right.
So it's like purgatory, you know, let's just be in physical purgatory.
Life should be an endless gray expanse of non-experience.
Andrew, and like the logic of like, and also eat these crackers, man.
Yeah, eat these crackers.
They'll make you shit and they taste bad.
Honestly, what?
You won't fuck if you eat these.
I won't fuck if I have diarrhea.
Yeah.
What do you mean?
No, They're full of fiber.
Yeah, I mean, I know, but I'm just, I haven't been regular because I haven't been masturbating enough.
One of the things he's right about is like the diet at this point involved a lot of like pork and grease and like people's bowels were often in bad shape.
And he went like, yeah, having enough fiber is good for your health.
Also, never fuck.
Yeah, that's like, I was with you the other, I don't know, never fuck and no salt or flavor.
Yeah.
Even Catholic priests don't do that.
I mean, they also fuck children.
Even if I fuck, there's something.
There's some kind of something.
Yeah, something.
But not for the followers of Sylvester Graham.
Now, doctors like Graham were not just physicians in like the scientific sense, although they saw themselves that way.
They were also moralists.
These guys were religious crusaders who believed their medical advice was morally upright as well.
And that that was a big part of like, that's why we don't need to do research to prove this stuff.
It's morally correct, so it's medically correct, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's right.
That must have sucked when like microscopes and shit was just like dunking on all this shit.
Yeah.
Yeah, it really was a bummer for these guys.
Right.
Like, I mean, there's still a lot of them.
It's why eventually the South African COVID variant will become a problem.
Oh, boy.
That's another episode.
That's another episode.
So, yeah, Graham was a Presbyterian minister and a temperance crusader as well as a medical guru.
Brian Wilson explains, quote, many people during the time believed that God visited people with disease as punishment for moral sins.
Sectarian health reformers, on the other hand, believe that whereas moral sins led to spiritual diseases, it was physiological sins that led to diseases of the body.
And just as spiritual disease could be avoided by following the Ten Commandments, so too, physiological sins could be avoided by heeding the laws of life.
Moreover, both kind of sins ultimately had implications for one's personal salvation.
For, according to Dr. Larkin B. Coles, it is as truly a sin against heaven to violate a law of life as to break one of the Ten Commandments.
So, if you masturbate, if you eat salt, you are sinning against God as much as if you murdered because you're violating the natural order of your body, right?
It's a moral, it's a physiological sin.
They invented a whole new type of sinning.
Yeah, it's called, oh my God, it's called being satisfied.
Yeah, it's called enjoying even a second of your miserable dirt farming life.
Yes.
Yeah, that's it.
That's the secret, man.
That's the secret.
We should all just be miserable.
Yeah.
It rules.
I love Western culture.
Yeah.
And it's such a, for all these guys like jacking off over the ancient Romans, the Romans would have listened to this.
Are you fucking what is wrong with you people?
The only reason to live is to eat salt and fuck.
Are you fucking serious?
You're drunk all the time.
Yo, get this guy out of my fucking.
I'm going to kill this guy.
What the fuck did he just say to me?
You're a doctor?
You're a doctor?
No, Richard.
Go pedal your shit.
My last doctor prescribed me a bunch of fucking.
Yeah, this is the Roman Empire.
My doctor just prescribed me cum, I'll have you know.
And I'm living large and in charge, sir.
Worms and Eye Infections00:07:46
Grahamism swept the country a little bit, like in the years kind of immediately before John Harvey Kellogg was born.
And it was still an extremely influential strain of medical thought when he grew into a young man.
It was very popular among religious hardliners like the Adventists.
It was quickly followed by another great advance in medical science, hydropathy.
This was a proposed medical science based on the research of an Austrian, which should have keyed everyone into the fact that it was a bad idea.
Anyway, this Austrian, whose name was Preisnitz, believed that fresh water cured all ailments.
You could take it internally via hydration or through a wide variety of baths.
Some of these were traditional baths or showers, but others were weird as hell, wet blanket wraps and multi-hour long cold and hot soaps.
Hydropathy got huge in the late 1840s and was still a big deal in the 1850s when James and Ellen White moved their asses to Battle Creek, Michigan.
And this is the point where all of the Seventh-day Adventist stuff we've talked about came to intersect with all the weird sectarian medicine stuff we've talked about.
At first, the whites were very anti-medicine.
Brian Wilson writes, quote, since an accident had left her an invalid for much of her childhood, that's the brain injury, Ellen White had been intensely concerned about her own health.
And so throughout her early ministry, she had been plagued by health problems.
Sometimes these were so serious that her friends despaired of her life.
On at least one of these occasions, her friends rallied around her to pray for her recovery, which, when it occurred, was interpreted as nothing short of one of the miracles promised for the last days.
Accordingly, healing exclusively through prayer and avoiding doctors and medicine came to be seen as an act of faith.
In fact, in 1849, Ellen White published a broadside targeted at Adventists entitled, To Those Who Are Receiving the Seal of the Living God.
It warned that, if any among us are sick, let us not dishonor God by applying to earthly physicians, but apply to the God of Israel.
So great.
That's just like that, huh?
What's the God of Israel's batting average?
Yeah.
How's Israel doing in the 1840s?
How's that one doing against Foot Chopper?
I think Foot Chopper's got the edge.
I think Foot Chopper's got the edge.
Over the God, really?
Okay.
Well, that's a big thing.
For a time, Adventists believed that Ellen White could bring the Lord's healing upon people just by praying for them.
This period came to an end in the mid-1850s when one of her followers in Camden, New York died after refusing medical treatment in favor of prayer.
Ellen White called the reports that her preaching had helped kill this woman groundless.
But from that point forward, she started telling her followers that faith healing should be balanced with actual medical care.
So she back the fuck pedals once she gets someone killed, which again, these grifters are so much more moral people than our modern ones.
I don't even know.
Maybe not fair to call her a grifter.
I do think she believed, but like clearly felt bad that she got someone killed.
Yeah, she at least was like, oh, shit.
I got it.
Ooh, boy.
Okay, you know, man, that was kind of a big swing, huh?
That was an L for me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Yep.
Chalk that one on there.
Yeah, you can write it down.
I'll take it.
So she was also, so she, she starts embracing medicine, but she's not embracing, you know, heroic medicine.
She starts embracing these weird people like Graham and stuff like hydropathy.
And because she's into Graham, she gets huge on healthy living.
And this is like kind of ties into the fact that Adventists accepted that the apocalypse was not as imminent as they'd initially believed.
So they had to take care of their bodies as part of their being right with God.
And there's a bunch of theological arguments about this.
But basically, like one of the things that happens is that Adventist belief kind of lashes on all of this Grahamist stuff about you got to be a vegetarian.
You can't eat salt.
You can't eat anything good.
So they all start to adopt those beliefs as well.
So this is.
But they kind of figured it out, though.
Isn't the Blue Zone diet actually known for like longer life expectancy?
So is the Mediterranean.
Right, right, right.
Or not to say that he was, you know, omniscient in knowing that, but like, yeah, not to, or to just, look, I'm all spice and salt, baby.
Yeah, one of the most healthy things they figure out because like pork is a horrible meat for your health.
Terrible for you.
Like, you should not be eating pork at all.
We all love the way it tastes, but we shouldn't be eating it.
It's bad for me.
No, yeah, yeah.
And it was the main meat that was people's diet in this part of North America at the time.
They're just eating a shit because it's easy to make a lot of it, right?
Beef's not great for you either.
Like Mediterraneans eat a lot of meat, but it's not primarily beef and pork and stuff, you know?
Lamb.
Yeah, lamb and seafood.
Exactly.
Got to get it.
Get it, get it.
The healthiest diets aren't necessarily vegetarian, but they're definitely not eating nothing but bacon.
It's not buffalo wow wings either.
Exactly.
So yeah, like the American diet at this point is really bad.
And it's true that like they start to notice, like part of why they get so into these medical beliefs is like they adopt these grahamist health beliefs and they all feel better because they're eating healthy.
Like it is better for you.
For sure.
He might be onto something, but then he's like saying it's not really the diet.
He's like, no, it's the cum that you've kept inside.
Well, yeah, we'll get to that.
So this is, I keep going back to all of these different strains of thought because this is how John Harvey Kellogg grows up.
This is what he grows up believing.
And he didn't, you know, because in his early childhood, they haven't quite adopted these Grammist beliefs yet.
Sickness is a constant factor in his childhood.
His father, and it's also not trusting doctors is a big factor.
So his father has like lifelong chronic near-fatal diarrhea because of an eye infection that a local doctor treated by making a fly bite him, which caused his tongue to swell up and permanently injured him.
So, like, win.
Hold up.
You know, say that whole sequence of words out loud.
That's so crazy.
He had chronic, debilitating diarrhea that he got from an eye infection.
Well, because the doctor prescribed an insect bite for an eye infection.
A flea bite for your eye infection.
Doc.
Doc, I gotta tell you, man, this is...
I believe.
I trusted you.
My eye is fucking worse.
And my diarrhea is off the fucking meat hook right now.
I can't.
You know medicine.
What the fuck?
Where did you get that bug?
There's a lot of unanswered questions here.
So obviously, also his dad's first wife dies of tuberculosis.
In 1847, his first daughter died of a lung infection, which the doctor blamed on worms.
And then his dad like sits with the doctor to cut up his dead daughter just to prove like, no, there ain't no worms in that dead girl.
Like it's dad.
No.
It's full mug.
Oh my God.
No, no worms.
No worms.
The doctor was wrong.
Yes.
It was tuberculosis.
He was giving her like poison because he thought her lungs were filled with worms.
And then he poisoned her to death.
I'm going to take a wild guess.
Worms were there.
They had a real bug.
Bug-focused doctor.
Where is Bug yet?
Yeah.
You know who won't murder your child with strychnine because he thinks their lungs are full of worms?
Who?
Raytheon.
They'll murder your child with an honest-to-god knife missile.
10-10 shots fired in the City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
Building a Health School00:15:57
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall.
How did this ever happen in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did it.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's docks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Shari stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop.
Even if you did a lot of redistribution, you know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
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Yeah, we're back.
So John Harvey Kellogg, by the time he comes into the world, his dad was not trusting of mainstream physicians, which would make sense.
He buys the church's lines on medicine.
And when the church gets really into hydropathy, so does John Harvey Kellogg's family.
Now, John Preston, his dad, subscribed to the Water Cure Journal.
And John Harvey grew up with hydropathy as kind of the go-to treatment for everyone in his family, which makes sense because it is healthier for you than, for example, bug bites.
Honestly, where the fuck?
What school of medicine is that?
It's all bugs.
Who's the godfather of bug doctory?
And where the fuck?
Who's the bug supplier?
I don't know.
We're missing some pieces of that story.
Like, that's...
There's a whole, there's a whole consultation scene that I must see be acted out.
Dr. Bug, you may not, you may not be the best physician.
Sounds like you got a scorpion in your brain.
What?
Scorpion talking?
Get the bones up.
Okay, I'm getting the fuck out of here.
So here's how John Harvey recalled his medical.
Imagine if you actually had something wrong with your asshole.
We got to put a milk beat up there.
I'm going to put all the bugs I can in your ass.
Oh, yeah, I've seen this.
Not enough bugs.
Not enough bugs in your hands.
Not enough arachnids in there.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
You swear he solved your thing.
Yes, my sister had a baby after she saw him.
She was scared not to.
Also, you know, I think maybe they were just having an affair.
Yeah.
He might have been.
They made it seem like a miracle because her husband went to go see him when he had trouble urinating and the doctor suggested a bug bite on his ball sack.
So here's how John Harvey Kellogg described the hydropathy treatments he received when he was sick as a kid.
Quote, I remember very well how violently I shivered when at the age of 10, I was wrapped in a cold, wet sheet pack to bring out the eruption and an attack of measles.
I shall never forget the crude shower bath with which its house barrel tank arranged over a pan with perforated bottom through which cold water from a deep well poured in frigid streams on my body until the tank was empty because the door to the little chamber in which I was confined stuck so fast I could not escape and no one came to my relief until the tank was empty.
So they waterboarded this little kid as like medicine.
That was their treatment.
It was like, we're going to lock you in a tank and pour freezing water on you for hours.
What the fuck?
How does that even get hydro?
Okay.
Thanks, hydropathy.
Thanks, hydropathy.
So he's being like al-Qaeda tortured, like CIA style tortured, but it's like, oh, you got measles.
Hi, I'm Gina Haspel, director of hydropathy.
You know what?
I will say this.
Et Guantanamo, no fucking measles.
Not one case.
Not one case.
You're welcome.
You tell me.
You tell me.
Jim from the office was right.
We should be thankful for the CIA.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And that's some good news from John Krasinski.
So right around the same time in John Harvey's early adolescence, his family expanded their medical interests into Grahamism.
Now, before becoming Gramists, his family diet had included huge quantities of pork, but afterwards, the whole Kellogg family were strict vegetarians.
An Adventist minister who was a friend of the family introduced them to an early prototype of graham crackers.
By the time John Harvey Kellogg was a young adult helping to run Ellen White's newspaper, the whole Adventist church had plunged headlong into sectarian medicine.
See, Ellen White had a vision in the early 1860s.
She'd already been advising her followers to avoid alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, and fatty foods, but now she'd received a prophecy from God, and he told her that everyone needed to be a vegetarian, get lots of exercise and rest, drink tons of water, and engage in medical baths.
It's likely she was actually influenced in this by the behaviors adopted by her close friends, the Kellogg's and other people in Battle Creek.
It's kind of hard to tell like exactly where this, this, like which way this flowed.
It was probably both ways.
And there may have been...
She's been winning around some of them.
Yeah, and there may have been something of a grifter pin spun to this because hydropathy becomes very popular and Ellen White adopts it as part of the faith, claims God has told her that this is like the true medicine.
And then she opens a medical school that the church runs to teach doctors hydropathy.
And they call this the Western Health Reform.
Take up the School of the Americas.
Kind of.
So it officially opened its still unfinished doors on September 5th, 1866.
Since this was her biggest new project, she told her new brightest follower, John Harvey Kellogg, that he needed to go there.
See, she'd had a vision that he was meant to be a physician, not a teacher.
John Harvey, like I said that a little earlier too.
John Harvey hated the sight of blood and he had no desire to go to medical school, but he was gradually kind of forced into doing this because it was God's command, right?
This kid who wants to be a teacher winds up learning to be a bath doctor, and he doesn't really want to do this.
Now, he hated the medical school that his church created because he was actually a smart person, and he was intelligent enough to know that all of the stuff they were teaching was fucking nonsense.
He graduated with no effort since all of his classes involved zero medical science.
The headmaster of the medical school believed that organic chemistry was a lie by the devil.
So, like, there was not a lot of hard science going off in there.
Oh, just graduating with flying colors.
Your whole test is just water with a question mark, and you write yes.
You nod.
Congratulations, doctor.
You take a sip of water and go, and that was my dissertation.
You know, it would be good if I was locked in a room filled with this for hours where no one could hear my screams.
That seems like it would treat, I don't know, cancer.
I love that.
This kid's going somewhere.
He's going to save the planet.
This kid's going to fix everything.
You're a prodigy.
Didn't even go through an applesauce phase.
He's straight to water.
You see what he's you can learn from him, guys.
Everyone can look around.
Look at this guy.
Yeah.
Jimmy, all that oil you've been pouring up people's assholes.
That was the wrong water.
Yep.
Bug guy.
I don't even got to tell you.
Where are you putting those scorpions?
Stop that.
Yeah.
None of us have pissed right for a week now.
So he realizes that this medical school his church creates is complete bullshit.
But his time at Ellen White's nonsense school of long baths ignited a very real interest in medical science.
Dr. Brian Wilson writes, John Harvey's time at the college did whet his appetite for further medical training, this time at Orthodox medical institutions, an idea he proposed to James White upon his return to Battle Creek.
Elder White was reluctant to endorse this project, his attitude being that training at some doctor mill was all an Adventist physician really needed.
But Kellogg prevailed, and with White's financial backing, he attended first the College of Medicine and Surgery at the University of Michigan and then Bellevue Hospital in New York City, which at the time was the finest teaching hospital in the United States.
Here, Kellogg not only learned the latest in regular medicine, including new drug therapies, but under the tutelage of Austin Flint and E.G. Janeway, was also introduced to advances in physiotherapy and surgery.
Intensely proud of his achievement, Kellogg graduated with a regular MD from Bellevue in 1875.
Later, in the 1880s, Kellogg, now completely over his disgust of blood, would take up the practice of surgery in earnest, training first in New York and then in 1883 in Vienna with Adolph Billroth, who Kellogg characterized as the greatest surgeon of the 19th century.
And everyone seems to agree, he was John Harvey Kellogg, was an incredibly gifted surgeon.
Like he is, he is a nonsense doctor too, but he's also a deeply gifted regular surgeon who is respected within his field for his talents.
He's a very, he's kind of like Ben Carson.
I was going to say, this sounds familiar.
There's a lot of Ben Carson energy going on with this.
He's actually good at fucking surgery.
Please don't listen to anything else.
Yeah, he's anything else.
So he becomes an actual doctor and returns to Battle Creek from getting his MD in 1875 and immediately joins the staff at his religion's nonsense medical school again.
And it became immediately apparent that no one else who worked there knew anything about medicine.
As the only member of his staff, of the staff of this, again, medical college, who was not a gibbering maniac, Kellogg was almost immediately promoted to superintendent of the institute, which was probably the best call you could have made.
Like, you've got the real doctor and the guy who believes Satan invented chemistry.
I guess we picked the real doctor.
And then that doctor is like, well, I guess the student has become the teacher.
Yeah, thanks, Professor.
Thanks, Professor.
Chemistry.
Why don't you go talk to Buggy?
Yeah.
So, yeah, he was like 26 years old when he becomes the superintendent of the Institute.
And he agreed to take the job both because the Prophet told him it was God needed him to do, but also because he would have control over the Institute.
He would be able to reform it.
So Kellogg was, again, not super psyched about this college.
He described it as an empirical institution, a sort of mixture of water cure, homeopathy, and eclecticism with no scientific direction.
And so when he took control, he vowed to turn it into an internationally recognized medical institution devoted to a wide range of treatments based on hard science.
His first act of director was to change the institute's name to the Battle Creek Sanitarium.
He actually invented the word sanitarium.
The editor of his old newspaper complained about this, pointing out that no one would know what he meant by using it because he just created the word.
But Kellogg argued that sanitarium was a better name than sanatorium.
See, a sanatorium was a place where sick people came to be cured.
That's not what Dr. Kellogg wanted to make.
He wanted to create a place where people learned how to stay well.
Kellogg's vision was a mixture of like a quack hospital and quack medical school, but also a real hospital and something akin to a health spa.
Like he wanted to turn this into a place where people would come to learn how to be healthy as well as come when they were sick.
And he was, he was, again, there's a lot of good ideas this guy has, one of which is that you don't, the ideal is not to treat people for illnesses, it's to keep them healthy, right?
Which is fair, like a reasonable thing for a doctor.
Preventative medicine, it's just essentially like, yeah.
And he kind of, he turns the sanitarium into like a preventative medicine spa where like particularly rich people can come and like get all these different treatments designed to keep them healthy.
One of his first executive acts was to start placing full-page ads in professional journals, including the AMA's journal, advertising the sanitarium as a place where people could take vacations, not just to treat their ailments, but to get healthier.
Brian Wilson writes, quote, along with all the luxuries of a grand hotel, the San was touted as offering a carefully monitored vegetarian diet, a variety of physical therapies, including rational hydrothy, swedish movements, calisthenics, breathing exercises, and eventually electric light and heat therapies.
Now, there's a lot of questions that that paragraph raises.
Cleansing the Bowels00:12:09
I bet you're wondering first off what rational hydropathy might include.
I'm going to let a write-up from history.com explain that.
In a 1907 ad in Good Housekeeping magazine, the Battle Creek Sanitarium boasted of offering 46 kinds of baths.
Some, like foot baths and sponge baths, were relatively conventional, but there were also options like the continuous bath, which was much like a regular tub bath, except that it could last, Kellogg wrote, for many hours, days, weeks, or months, as the case may require.
That's rational hydropathy.
That's the rational.
You had to stay in a bath for months.
Yeah, yeah.
And you could get up to use the restroom and you could get up to do things, but they would keep bathing you while you were standing and moving.
Like, that's what they meant by continuous bath.
So you get up to take a dump and then they're just pouring buckets of water on you?
Or you'd always be bathing.
Oh, my God.
Kellogg advocated continuous baths as a treatment for skin diseases, chronic diarrhea, and a host of mental maladies, including delirium, hysteria, and mania.
I kind of think a weeks-long bath might not help you.
Yeah, put you in a weird place.
That would put you in a weird place.
Kellogg was fascinated by the evolving therapies of the day.
He would regularly read about some new health fad and fall in love with it.
Dr. Kellogg would generally frame this as paying attention to the latest medical developments, but many of the fads he embraced had little scientific basis.
For example, he became a disciple of Horace Fleischer, a health guru who traced many health problems to poor chewing discipline.
Fletcher believed people needed to chew each bite at least 40 times, sometimes you'll hear 34, before swallowing.
As a result, Dr. Kellogg would lead dinners in the sanitarium with renditions of the chewing song, the chorus of which was, chew, chew, chew, that is the thing to do.
Oh, fuck you, you.
Sounds like a hoot.
Kellogg was a believer in what he called auto-intoxication, which resulted from the putrefaction of undigested meat in the bowels.
He believed that auto-intoxication was behind virtually every illness of the bowels.
To fix this, the bowels had to be cleansed.
His sanitarium offered patients a truly dizzying variety of enemas.
He believed, quote, more people need washing out than any other remedy.
This was, again, not an uncommon health treatment at the time, but as usual, Kellogg took things further than anyone else.
Traditional enemas involved a pint or two of liquid being, you know, put in your butt, right?
John Harvey's enemas were administered by a special machine of his own design that could pump 15 quarts of water per minute through his patients' bowels.
What the fuck?
More's better, baby.
Wait, nearly four fucking gallons a minute?
What?
That's absolutely outrageous.
Yeah.
Gonna fucking pressure wash your just whole shit like that?
Yeah, he's basically taking pressure washer from like a car wash and shooting up.
Of his own design.
He just designed a weird nozzle to put in your asshole.
Otherwise, it's the pressure washer that the city uses when there's fucking graffiti.
I have never heard that this was a sex thing, and this is a man who, by his own claim, never came.
But you know, this was a sex thing.
Yeah, you got that thing.
Yeah, you're like, that was absolutely.
I think it could hit harder.
Yeah.
You know, the problem with normal enemas is that it's not gallons of water per minute up your asshole.
It's not looking like a busted fire hydrant on a summer day in New York.
Jesus.
The sanitarium grew famous, both due to Kellogg's skill at drawing media attention and due to his actual gifts as a physician.
He was actually a good doctor in a lot of ways, including surgery.
He was Sojourner Truth's Doctor, and he would go on to treat Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Amelia Earhart.
Before long, the sanitarium was the hip place for the rich and famous to go and receive medical care.
Here's how one ad from the early 1900s described it.
This ad has like a picture of the sanitarium, a bunch of trees.
There's like a golf club and a tennis racket on it.
Get away and rest, the largest and most elaborately equipped health resort in the world.
A mecca for vacationists, a cool and delightful summer resting place, outdoor life encouraged, swimming, golf, tennis, volleyball, motoring, and tramping.
Wait, tramping.
Systematized diet of simple and delicious foods, expert bath facilities, and the most efficient medical service if desired.
Accommodations for 2,000 guests.
Plan your vacation early.
So yeah, it's like a spa.
It's like a med spa.
It is a med spa.
They're not describing the butthole destroyer.
They don't put that in the ads.
We will ruin your asshole.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Lay waste to that thing.
There will not even be a hole when we're.
You don't want I'm on.
I could say a lot of dis lot of metaphors that aren't explicit, but you get the picture, you know, when sock.
So let's make sure that you know what we're doing over there.
Don't get too wild on that thing.
Now, so far, John Harvey sounds, you know, kind of out there, but not evil, right?
No evil yet.
Like, it's definitely not the best health decision to pump gallons of water in and out of your air.
But it's not, he's not, you're not a monster if you think that's, and especially it's the 1880s, 1890s.
It's better than a lot of what doctors are doing, you know?
Yeah.
You're not probably going to die from that like you would from the strychnine treatments.
Or the bugs.
Not a monster, based on what we've heard so far.
But as I said, Kellogg was the kind of guy who was always interested in new treatments and expanding the scope of his practices.
From the beginning, both the sanitarium and John Harvey Kellogg had been influenced by Graham's teachings.
This led him to advocate a vegetarian diet and sobriety, which we've already talked about and is fine, even if it's not a lot of people's choices.
But it also convinced Kellogg that masturbation was among the greatest human evils.
And I'm going to quote now from a wonderful write-up in Jezebel.
Masturbation could begin, in the most tragic of cases, at a young age.
Kellogg reported that he had seen children as young as two years of age place their hands upon their own genitalia.
In these cases, the child, already deficient in morals, was most likely suffering from the sins her parents committed before she was even born.
Having excessive sexual relations during pregnancy or being the offspring of a masturbator could warp the values of a fetus and utero.
Kellogg did not believe any natural inclination would draw a child's hand to their private parts.
These manipulations came from dark and foul sources such as constipation, hemorrhoids, bladder infections, anal fissures, and uncleanliness of the organs.
Other foul temptations were to be found in choice of bedding, said Dr. Kellogg.
Soft beds and pillows must be carefully avoided.
The floor with a single folded blanket beneath a sleeper would be preferable.
A hair mattress or a bed of corn husks covered in two or three blankets or a quilted cotton mattress makes a very healthy and comfortable bed.
Of course, simply switching out pillows can't stop people from wanting to masturbate.
Nothing short of physical torture and mutilation is going to stop an adolescent from experimenting with their own genitals.
And as we'll discuss in part two, physical torture and mutilation is exactly where Dr. John Harvey Kellogg decided to go.
So next episode is going to be a rough one, Miles and everyone listening.
Real bad.
Just some of the worst stuff we'll ever talk about on this show.
Real, real dark shit.
Real black pill hours here, my friends.
Oh, well, you know, that's...
I feel like I'm always here for these ones.
But, you know, I'm built different.
I'm built differently.
We had you on for the Trump University one.
You've had your fun episodes.
Yeah, we've had the fun ones, and then we've also had absolutely fucked ones.
But hey, you know what?
That's what this show is.
You know what I mean?
If you want fucking good times, go listen to fucking, you know, whatever that is.
Yeah, that shit.
That's the show where we won't spend an hour on Thursday talking about female genital me.
Anyway, yeah.
We'll just talk about shit jokes a lot, probably.
Yeah, that's great.
That's what people enjoyed about this episode, I'm sure.
Yeah.
No one's going to be happy with the next episode.
I promise you, no one will be happy with the next episode.
So don't complain.
So don't complain.
It's going to be bad.
There's your warning, okay?
Eat your fucked up vegetables and a ton of emotional and sexual abuse.
It's going to be bad.
So listen in on Thursday.
All right, Miles, you got any pluggables?
Just to have, you know, self-care, your mental health for now.
And I'll see you on part two.
Yeah, eat some graham crackers and pound it.
Yeah.
Wait, wait.
Anything.
Okay.
Eat some graham crackers and masturbate.
Yeah.
Unless that's your thing, unless it helps you come.
Please, if you have any insight into the bug field, I'm honestly really interested in this.
So please, my pluggable is please approach me with bug doctor information.
Bug doctor in bug.
Like what the fuck was, yeah.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, They take matters into their own hands.
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In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots five, City Hall building.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Williams.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with the man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world of AI.
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