William Bailey, a con artist born in 1884 to a single mother, exploited early 20th-century radiation hype after forging his Harvard diploma. Following a 1915 fraud conviction, he founded the Associated Radium Chemists Incorporated, selling dangerous products like radium suppositories and uranium-infused water despite Pierre Curie's death warnings. While the FDA only prosecuted manufacturers with insufficient radioactive material, Bailey sought high-dose exposure for cures ranging from syphilis to impotence. Ultimately, his schemes highlighted how irrational exuberance over "magical" radiation led to fatal cancers, mirroring modern technological hype cycles. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Welcome Back to the Pod00:05:34
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I'm Lori Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
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You related to the Phantom at that point.
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Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where my headphones were not plugged in when I started talking, and now they are.
We have a keen, eagle-like grip on the professional competence required to do our jobs, Sophie and I.
And our dialogue is.
It's so much funnier when the headphones that are not plugged in aren't like small iPod headphones, but like the big black ones, that is so much funnier.
I had a lot of opportunities to get this right.
Sophia Alexandra.
Welcome back to the pod, Sophia.
How have you been?
How's it going?
How's the world?
Bad.
The world is terrible.
Thank you for noticing.
Yeah.
Thanks for having me on the pod.
I am good.
It's been a minute.
It's so nice to see y'all's faces.
I've missed you.
Yeah, I've missed you too.
And, you know, obviously, Sophia, as you're aware, as I think most people are aware, as a podcast host, I maintain medical power of attorney over each of our guests.
Now, this is pretty standard in the industry.
My understanding is it's a holdover from English common law established in the 1600s by the very first podcasters.
So the other day you called me up and you said, Robert, should I dose myself with moderate quantities of radiation to gain unclear, unspecified health benefits?
And I sure did.
And I was like, let me look into that, Sophia.
Let me look into that.
So I did a quick Google.
Is it bad to irradiate yourself for health?
And it turns out, yes, that's what we're talking about this week.
It's the radium grifter.
I thought you wrote that entire bit of a bunch of people.
I scripted that whole bit.
I scripted the whole bit, Sophie.
I scripted that entire thing is so you of you.
That's so funny.
It makes me think of like you doing stand-up and literally writing out all of the parts where you're like, am I right, you guys?
Yeah, your little like plug throws to the audience.
Sure.
No, I mean, what this is, is I have a little, this is a free productivity hack for you writers out there.
If you have a whole thing you have to write, like say 8,000 words about radium grifters and you're being a procrastinator, maybe just spend a paragraph or two writing out some bullshit jokes to your friends, you know?
And then just keep it in the script.
Why not?
Nobody has to read these but me.
So, you know, it doesn't have to be tight.
Well, that was cool, but I'm just excited that Sophia is here.
I'm excited that Sophia is here.
And she has a new Patreon.
Let's start there.
Oh, yeah, Let's begin with the plugs.
That's the right way to do this.
Oh, shit.
Yeah.
Come to patreon.com slash SophiaAlexandra.
There's writing on there.
There's videos.
There is just random shit I'm into, like Galer and relationship anarchy and making clay pots and John Lee Hooker.
I don't know.
I'm a weird bitch.
Come through.
Well, check that out.
And, you know, check out Sophia Alexandra's many other podcasts that she's done with us too.
Some of our very best.
And this is about to be this one, Sophia, going to be a classic because we're getting back to our roots here.
You know, we've been covering some dark shit a lot on this show.
And, you know, we've really gone hard for drifters.
This comes as a surprise to me.
This is a woman that has guessed it on more dead baby episodes than anyone.
No dead babies.
It's crazy that this is going to be a dark one.
A lot of dead people, but not dead babies.
Thank you for respecting me.
But it's a fun, mostly up until the second episode, mostly funny ways that people are horribly injuring themselves because it's good old-timey medical nonsense, right?
The Birth of Radiation Burns00:14:48
It's people just poisoning their bodies with uranium because they think it'll help them deal with a cough.
It's super funny if you can kind of dissociate yourself from the human cost.
See boil me podcast, Daddy.
I am ready.
Yeah, yeah, it's going to be a good time.
So the history of people using radiation as like a pop medical treatment, the way they use colloidal silver today, starts in 1895 when a German physicist named Wilhelm Rottingen discovered x-rays for the first time.
He published an article on a new kind of rays 50 days later, which is what we're all looking for in life, right?
I'm usually referring to Ray Bands there, but I'm talking about guys named Ray usually when I'm talking about.
Guys named Ray.
I've had good relations with guys named Ray, you know.
I only fuck men named Ray.
It's terrible.
That's like that diet where you only eat red things.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's just as effective.
Yeah, I'm either celibate or I get hit a lot.
That's what it is.
That is the duality of Ray.
Yeah.
Hey, everyone.
My notes on this were a little messy.
I just wanted to add that while it was Rotjan who discovered X-rays, the guy who actually kind of discovered radioactivity as a phenomenon was Henri Becquerel.
He worked with the Curies.
He shared a Nobel Prize in 1903 with Pierre and Marie Curie.
It was, I believe, Marie Curie who named radioactivity, but Henri was the guy who kind of first started discussing the phenomenon after the discovery of X-rays.
So in 1898, a famous scientist-power couple, Marie and Pierre Curie, found radium in a sample of uraniumite.
These are kind of, we're going over like sort of the birth of understanding radiation as a thing.
Radium was soon found to have properties that were like similar to x-rays, right?
You could like expose photo negatives and stuff with it.
And a new field of study in this kind of wondrous and magical property that certain materials had started to open up.
And obviously, x-rays, I mean, even today, like reading about studying radiation, it's like wild.
It's like space alien shit, right?
So obviously people in the late 1800s starting to realize how radiation works is it's not just like fascinating to scientists, but it also, you know, honestly, a good comparison note is in popular culture, radiation was treated in this period very similar to how people are treating AI now, where like some people are, you know, just trying to be reasonable about it and say like, well, it may have this application or that.
And other people are saying, this is the silver bullet to every problem in society.
You know, now it's like, we can just add AI to every problem and it'll fix it.
And that then is like, you just got to irradiate everything.
AI and world hunger.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's the attitude.
They're like, yeah, we can end world hunger.
You just irradiate all your craps.
It'll be great.
Yeah.
That is, that is like how this, where this is going to go.
A Japanese scientific journal published Rotengin's work in 1896.
A Japanese physicist constructed one of the first X-ray machines the same year to beam crystals with X-rays for purposes that are not clear to me.
The first X-rays.
What do you mean crystals?
Like the rocks.
Like quartz or something.
Yeah.
He was shooting them.
I think he was like, crystals are cool.
X-rays are cool.
Let's see if we can see what happens.
It's a real PB and J situation.
They had X-ray machines in Japan for like a surprisingly long time before anybody started using them for like medical purposes.
They were just like shooting random shit with them to see what it would do.
That's which is fair.
Yeah.
Kind of awesome in what I would do.
So yeah, yeah, basically.
Also, though, that's why I'm not a doctor.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's why I'm not.
But, you know, these people barely were, right?
It was the 1890s.
Most early radiation researchers did learn quite quickly that this stuff was, they didn't, I wrote that they learned it was not something to play with.
They played with it constantly, but they learned that it was a dangerous thing to play with, right?
Marie Curie herself suffered pretty significant radiation burns a number of times touching this stuff.
She's also like she and her husband both die horribly as a result.
I was just going to say, I was like, dude, she fucking died from it.
I think that burns are secondary, Robert.
She dies decades later, but like you can suffer a burn in your life and keep going, but like I think it's the painful death for me.
Yeah.
What I'm saying is that like, well, before the painful death, they knew that like, oh shit, this is like bad for us, right?
Like we're hurting ourselves by being near this shit.
Yeah.
Like Pierre Curie made a statement in 1901 that like, I would not want to be alone with a pound of pure radium because I think it will burn.
I don't know this.
No one's ever had this much, but I think it will burn all of the skin off of my body if I'm close to that much of it.
And somewhere in Hollywood, an actress was like, ooh, the skin off my body.
Yeah.
So, you know, by the turn of the century, again, like five years into, you know, serious research on this stuff, like several researchers had already died due to radiation exposure.
So again, within the scientific community, as much exuberance as there is about, you know, radium and uranium, people are very much aware this shit is like deadly.
We don't fully get why it's deadly, but we know that it is super dangerous to be around in quantity, right?
So after witness, now, one of the side effects of this is that like people aren't, people are seeing how dangerous this stuff is.
They're seeing the kind of horrible burns it can cause.
One of my favorite stories, like one of the scientists working on this keeps some like radium in his pocket and it like burns a hole through his leg.
But when this what when did he notice that it started burning and you just kept it in there?
I think maybe I'm wrong about this, but my reading of it, I think it's the sort of, you know how like at that Bordeau yacht club party, they had those UV lights that just looked like normal UV lights, but were for disinfecting slaughterhouses.
And so it gave everyone horrible sunburns on their eyes.
Oh my God, I didn't know that.
Oh, yeah, fucking great story.
Yeah, they use.
So there's, you know, people put UV lights and like dance, you know, like rave parties and stuff all the time.
But there's also UV lights that are meant to like disinfect slaughterhouses.
And somebody got the wrong UV light in this party and it gave people like sunburns on their eyes, but they didn't notice it until like the next day, right?
It wasn't immediate.
They weren't immediately aware that anything was awry.
They just kind of woke up burning.
I think it's like that.
Woke up burning is the first country song that I have put out on my Patreon.
Yeah, and it's about your experiments with radium.
It's about a UTI, actually.
Yeah.
So Pierre Curie, like he sees his friends and his wife getting horribly burned by radium.
And he's like, well, this stuff is dangerous.
But also, if it can burn skin this way, maybe we could burn away cancer.
Right.
And that is the start of chemotherapy is like some of these scientists realizing like, well, the way that this burns people, you might actually be able to effectively like kill tumors and stuff with it.
Someone that has had chemo, I'm like, totally did not make that connection.
Yeah.
In terms of, yeah, wow.
That's fast.
I mean, that's, that's what you're doing basically with chemo is, yeah, you're like, you're, you're effectively using radiation as a laser to murder a tumor.
Well, that's my basic understanding.
No, because chemo is chemicals.
Well, yeah, I mean, it's not like you're talking about the other treatment.
You're talking about actual radiation, which I also have had.
Which I think it's like skin cancer they're dealing with first, right?
Is my guess, right?
Yeah, because that's probably the simplest.
It's on the surface until they figure out how to like actually, you know, radiate like tumors inside you, which I'm sure took, you know, at least another week.
Yeah.
A while.
But like, so they start figuring out like, okay, this stuff is dangerous.
It can hurt people pretty badly.
But if you use it the right way, you can actually like kill cancer with it, right?
Which is, you have to think about where medical science is in early 1901, the early 1900s.
That is, this kind of reinforces the attitude that these radioactive materials are fucking magic because cancer is just fucking death, right?
It's the hand of God.
There's nothing to, there's very, very little treatment available for a lot of this stuff.
And suddenly.
Can I ask a dumb question?
Yeah.
When did people start realizing what the fuck cancer was?
Oh, I mean, I mean, for, for, for thousands of years, we have understood, you know, they may, they, we didn't maybe, we didn't have the kind of understanding we have about it now, but we knew that certain people would develop tumors and stuff and that that was inimical to life, right?
Um, and I think, you know, like physical removal of like skin cancer and stuff, like that has gone back a while, although it was obviously like of middling efficacy.
Savage-ish.
This is, this is kind of the beginning of us starting.
And obviously we still don't have a great handle on cancer, but this is like, you have to, you have to keep in mind the possibility of any sort of effective cancer treatments beyond the crudest and most violent is like that hits the medical community like a bomb, right?
Like it's, it's, it's a miracle almost.
Like that is how they're thinking about it, right?
Some of that is irrational exuberance.
They think it's going to work better than it does because it takes a long time for this to get more effective.
But like there is this, that's going to play into the way people think about radiation and it as a miracle cure is that like, yeah, it's the first thing that's given people really effective hope against cancer.
That's a big deal, obviously.
I'm going to quote from an article in the Journal of Medical History by Micah Nikao.
Quote, the first to use x-rays for skin diseases was physician Leopold Freund of Vienna, who treated a patient's pigmented.
No relation?
No, no, no.
F-R-E-U-N-D, not Freud, Freund.
Oh, okay.
Which I think means friend.
I don't know.
I don't know German.
Niels Ryberg-Finson's light therapy for tuberculosis of the skin by that time also achieved a reputation.
Radiation therapy spread quickly and x-ray technologies were introduced to many hospitals for the diagnosis and treatment of diseases such as broken bones, eczema, and skin cancer.
Radioactivity from radium seemed similar to x-rays, giving scientists and medical doctors high hopes for the medical use of radium.
Before understanding the actual chemical and physical conditions in terms of modern science, doctors in different parts of the world, including Germany and the United States, used radium in the treatment of diseases such as keloids, tuberculosis, syphilitic ulcers, hyperthyroidism, tumors, and cancers.
Some of these treatments work.
Some of this stuff, like tumors, you can effectively treat with radiation.
I think syphilitic ulcers are not helped by radiation, but they're just kind of trying it on everything.
You know, they're giving it a shot.
I mean, it's hard.
Syphilis, like, honestly, syphilis goes hard.
Syphilis goes, I've always said that about syphilis, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's why I respect it.
That's why it's like genital worse or just syphilis is out here making you crazy long term.
That shit goes hard.
Making you crazy and possibly contributing to the birth of horror as a genre, you know?
So respect.
Respect the syphilis.
Exactly.
I'm sorry, that's merch.
Respect the syphilis.
Yeah.
So one thing that's interesting to me is right from the very start, even among people who knew better, there's obviously all this enthusiasm for radiation for reasonable reasons.
But for basically everybody, including these very hard-nosed scientists like the Curies, there's this irrational obsession with it that forms too.
Marie Curie wrote about it.
She would often write about it as my beautiful radium and would discuss kind of with this sort of awe her feeling at the glow that pure radium have.
Quote, oh, it's a jerk-off situation.
Yeah.
Oh, it's hot to her.
She's hot.
She's hot for radium, right?
Those gleamings seemed suspended in the darkness and stirred us with ever new emotion and enchantment, right?
There's something magical about it.
One U.S. surgeon general described radium as reminding him of a mythological superbeing, while an English physician described it as the unknown god.
And again, we're not doing nuclear shit, right?
This is wild.
This is like how fanboys talk about Elon Musk.
That's crazy.
It is.
It is, I think, honestly, the best touch point for how people were talking about radium at the turn of the century and radiation at the turn of the century is like AI and shit.
It's just this, the discussions of it are often completely divorced from what it can actually do because it just seems magic, you know?
But no one's out here like writing sonnets, being like my beautiful AI.
They're having the AI write those sonnets and they're dog shit.
Yeah.
You're not wrong.
So newspapers reporting on early medical studies into radium as a cancer treatment published breathless reports with titles like radium is restoring health to thousands.
This is the last time we're going to talk about radium that way.
In 1904, John McLeod, a physician at Charing Cross Hospital in London, developed radium applicators to treat internal cancers and showed evidence that they shrank tumors.
This is like, I think, the birth of kind of modern chemotherapy, right?
First, we're using it to just kind of like shoot rays at sort of external cancers and the like.
McLeod figures out the, and I'm assuming this is horrifically crude, but like, here is how you deal with, like, you basically use radium to kill internal tumors in the earliest manner of like what we are doing today, more or less, right?
Um, this was treated as a go-ahead by some in the medical community and many, many grifters in the quack medicine industry to start dumping radium into every conceivable product, right?
We know now, like, yeah, you have to be very careful about how you introduce this stuff to the body to treat internal tumors because it's dangerous and it can potentially be worse than the disease, or at least just as bad as the disease, if you're not careful about it.
Yeah, but people are just like, oh, SIE is a thing.
Now everything has SIE in it.
Was this argan oil?
Argan oils now and everything.
And they do treat it exactly like people fucking treat a CIE berries, right?
Where they're like, well, if it's good in your body to kill cancer, it must just be good to like microdose, right?
Like mushrooms, right?
We just need to be taking radiation all the time, right?
Why wouldn't the middle will go a long way?
Yeah.
If a lot of it can help you when you're sick, a little bit of it must keep you well, right?
That is literally what a lot.
And like, that is, that is an insane thing to think.
Although you have to give them some credit.
They just didn't know as much back then, right?
Like, I'm not clowning.
Like, all of us are stupid too.
Natural Radon and Blood Cells00:14:26
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
They were as dumb as we are, just about different things.
Like, we just don't know yet what we've been extremely stupid about.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
No, I mean, I still think we're going to find out that like a lot of the stuff in our sodas is the worst thing ever.
They're going to talk about some of that, but also maybe not.
It'll probably just be, you know, all of the, all of the fucking gasoline fumes in the air.
But like literally, they were like, hey, LaCroix is made of like fucked up stuff.
And everyone was like, cheers, and popped into their fucking six pack.
Like, no one cares.
No one cares.
I mean, I'm drinking fucking, it says it's brewed with real tea and lemon, but it's one of those nonsense bubbly waters.
Who knows what kind of poison is in this fucking thing?
No one trusts anything.
And no one trusts anything.
Slowly dying.
That's it.
It is.
I do love it whenever like my friends that I spent 10 years doing drugs with get like on a health kick and are like, no, I'm not going to drink that diet soda because it's got this.
And it's like, man, I know what we snorted together.
Right.
Like you're like, that cocaine smelled like a fucking gas station.
Okay.
I've seen you smoke whatever you found between the cushions of a couch.
Now we care about aspartame or whatever.
Eric, I watched you pick up a half-smoked cigarette from outside a bar and light it because you were that drunk.
Like, don't, don't talk to me about fucking aspartain.
Yeah.
And you lit the filter, dog.
Yeah, you started on the filter.
So people are getting real excited about radiation and the seemingly magical properties of radium were reinforced by a series of discoveries around the turn of the century.
And this I wouldn't have guessed into the healing properties of hot springs.
Now, if you like spend a lot of time reading Victorian novels, right?
There's basically always a character who gets sick and has to take to the spa town to like take in the vapors, right?
Take in the waters and shit, right?
Like that goes, that's a challenge.
Yeah, you go convalesce always.
Yeah.
And I think probably for as long as there's been civilization, people have known, wow, I felt better once I got in that hot spring.
It's probably good for me.
And it is actually for pretty basic reasons, right?
For what soaking in hot water can be really healthy for your joints and your muscles.
It can really.
You know, it's better than just a hot spring, Robert.
Is a hot tub with, yeah.
Well, no, what if we combine two of our favorite things?
Yeah.
Well, actually, this is weird.
What they find is that those things have always been combined, right?
So they're, they're trying to.
So radium and hot springs have always been combined.
They've always been together.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That is a property.
I'm going to explain this.
It actually makes a lot of sense.
I just had never thought about this before.
So, um, you know, there's this folk belief that has some backing in it that like hot springs are good for your body, right?
Um, and they didn't really know why.
Um, and and so they start at the same time as they're discovering, you know, that radiation is a thing, how it works, they're start being scientists who are trying to figure out like what is it about hot springs that have healing properties.
And I'm gonna, I wanna read from a write-up on radium patent medications in the Journal of the American Medical Association here.
This is talking about researchers studying hot springs.
They noted throughout history, hot springs like those at Brombach in Germany, Ishia in Italy, and Sal de Bain in France had been touted as panaceas for a variety of ailments, including rheumatism, cretinism, impotence, and melancholy.
These salutary effects were achieved only when the waters were drunk or their vapors deeply inhaled.
Bottled water from these springs rapidly lost its potency.
The great German chemist Justus von Liebig attempted to analyze the waters from Gastein springs, eventually ascribing their power to a dissolved gas with mysterious electrical effects.
effects.
In 1903, the discovery was made that the apparent pharmacological agent in these waters was radon, radium emanation, an alpha particle emitting gas with a half-life of less than four days that was produced by decaying radium.
Alpha particle emitting isotopes taken internally in minute quantities were hailed as powerful natural elixirs capable of delivering direct energy transfusions to depleted organs.
So I have a basement, right?
This is not the case everywhere that there are basements.
I really didn't think your transition from that quote was going to be so I have a basement.
It's relevant because in the Northwest, at least, and I've only ever had a basement here in Texas, we don't have basements because the ground's weird.
But I had to get, I was told, like, basically, hey, your basement has not had radon mitigation.
So it will fill up with a radioactive gas and you will get horrible lung cancer if you spend a lot of time in your basement, unless you install what's called a radon mitigation system, which basically is a pump that pumps the air regularly up out so it can rise into the sky.
But it's just that like because of decaying radium in the earth, the dirt is filled with radon, right?
That gets in things.
So if you have a basement, it will fill with radon.
And these hot springs, because they're being fed from like underwater, you know, rivers or pumps or whatever, fill like also have radon in them.
Now, the radon is not causing the health benefits, right?
That's just because it's nice to be in hot water.
It's good.
It's relaxing.
It's good for your muscles and joints.
But they're starting to realize there are health benefits to radiation.
And they realize that a lot of hot springs have natural radon gas.
And they're like, the radon is what makes springs good for you.
So clearly, if we just dose people with radon, it will make them healthier, right?
It's the danger of correlation being, you know, causation.
It's not.
Yeah.
That's exactly what's going on.
The radon's also there, but that's not.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's what like they decide is like, oh, it must be the radon that makes the hot springs good for you.
Everyone should start taking as much radon as they fucking could.
So this is, this is going to take off very quickly in the early 1900s.
And initially, it is not like radiation, putting radiation in food and medicine is not regulated, especially in the United States.
Now, we had at this point, 1906, we passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, right?
We've done episodes on this.
It was part, a large part of it was in reaction to like the fact that milk kept killing entire cities worth of babies when it would be full of worms or whatever.
Radon, though, radium was not regulated under the Pure Food and Drug Act because it's a natural element, which is still, this is still a problem with like supplements today where they're like, you can make a lot of bullshit claims and like sell people.
Alex Jones says all these sells all these nonsense supplements.
And it's like, well, it's a natural element.
It's not a drug.
So you can basically do whatever as long as you avoid a couple of easy pitfalls.
This is how radium gets introduced to the American diet is they're like, well, the FDA says it's natural.
So you can put as much of it as you want in your milk.
That's so wild.
I didn't know about that natural repo or whatever the fuck.
Yeah.
It's like, well, there's a lot of poison found naturally too.
Like, are we just like chill with arsenic being like just slowly that does come into the story, Sophia, because we were for a while.
Yeah, shut the fuck up.
So all of these fraud treatments start spilling out into pages of newspaper and magazine ads with bold claims like, remarkable new radium cream liniment drives out pain from achieving joints and muscles instantly, right?
They're like, it's the radium in the hot spring.
So let's get rid of those healthy, like hot waters and just put pure radium on people's bones.
I'm sorry, petition to make that voice your permanent voice.
Oh, you're going to be hearing a lot of that voice today, Sophia.
Don't worry.
I am delighted.
Yeah.
So the reveal that so many healing springs gave off radon, again, it doesn't mean that that's why like the good things.
Like I, I don't, we don't spend time in our basements as places of healing just because they're full of radon.
But dumb time, dumbass old timey people, you know, they're not as smart as you and I is, right?
You know, we, we've, we's smarter than this.
We would never do any, we would never, for example, take a cattle deworming medication because we believe it's going to cure all of our sicknesses.
Yeah.
And because a very tiny man that used to host a show where they ate worms told us to do it.
Like, and definitely abs 100%.
If, if, if it was like, if, if podcasts had existed in 1906 and so had Joe Rogan, he would have been, he would have been telling people to microdose radium.
He would have been like, you're a dumbass if you're not microdosing straight radiation.
You got to take some rads every day.
He would have been glowing.
Yeah.
He would have been nothing but elk meat and fucking radium.
So the name of the new therapy that a lot of health grifters start pushing based on these ideas is called mild radium therapy, as opposed to like what we're actually doing when we're treating cancer, which is a much heavier dose, right, of this kind of stuff.
So mild radium therapy is basically we're microdosing this shit, you know?
Some suggested radium compounds stimulated organs directly.
Others believed the radiation acted as superpowered bleach, killing microscopic toxins that caused cancerous tumors.
There were theories that radium stimulated your adrenal glands or perhaps the thyroid.
What seemed clear beyond doubt was that the healing properties of radium came from alpha particles emitted by a radium nucleus.
Now, obviously, Sophia, Sophie, all three of us are trained nuclear physicists.
We don't talk about it much on the show.
You know, privately, all we talk about is like thorium plants and shit.
We're very knowledgeable about this, but because our audience are a bunch of dumb dumbs, I'm going to read a quote from the AMA's journal explaining how this shit works rather than try to do it myself.
Alpha particles are large, relatively slow-moving chunks of nuclear matter consisting of two protons and two neutrons.
They possess tremendous energy and produce a dense cloud of ionization events when traversing matter.
Because they dissipate their energy so rapidly, they can only penetrate 40 to 100 UM, limiting the range over which they can exert their effects to a distance of about 10 cell diameters.
Such a lack of penetration prevented their use in cancer therapy.
And the early radioactive sources produced for Curie therapy all contained filters designed to stop alpha particle transmission.
Though high doses of alpha radiation produced an intense blistering response on the skin, alpha particles were considered just too difficult to harness in the service of cancer treatment and were largely ignored by oncologists.
So like the basically what this is saying is like the method of action that like is being used in this mild therapy is the stuff that once they oncologists started fucking around with radiation, they realized this stuff is too hard to control.
So we're not going to use it for most things.
And then it becomes the province of medical grifters who are like, we're going to use this for fucking everything.
Now, I mean, I heard that, but really all I heard was not enough penetration.
Not enough penetration.
That's right.
That's right.
This is this is mild radiation therapy is basically, yeah, getting deep dicked by straight up radiation.
Like that is what's going on here.
Now, to be fair to our old-timey idiots, by early kind of the outbreak of World War I, that period, there are some studies that seem to show real medical benefits to light radiation therapy.
Now, these are all very flawed studies, but they led to this belief that people could back up with what seemed like good evidence that radium might treat rheumatism, gout, syphilis, anemia, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, and a wide variety.
Yeah, ED.
Well, yes, sorry, Sophia.
By far, the most common kind of radiation medication I've come across are variations of dick pills.
So, yeah, we'll be talking a lot about that.
That's what the original jerk-off machines were for.
Yeah, yeah, it's just like people think it's like there's that whole like whole thing that you thought they think, like gynecologists used to like jerk their patients off, which is like not a thing.
It was a thing invented for a movie that just spread.
But originally, the jerk-off machines were definitely like, oh, we're going to solve all these men's problems if like these jerk-off machines jerk them off.
Like, obviously, we'll get all the bad to come out through their jizz.
Yeah, that's doctoring 101.
Yeah, get them, get them a prostate poker that's like made out of pure uranium.
You know, that's actually very, that's actually more or less where this ends up.
Um, one of the things they did know, um, that was shown pretty early on in radiation research is that when you exposed like a portion of someone's body to radioactive waves, um, their leukocytes, their white blood cells, would kind of cluster around where that beam was hitting.
Um, I'm guessing this is just your immune system trying to defend itself from something, but like they, they, this kind of this led the assumption that if you irradiate part of the body, it will bring the white blood cells there.
And the white blood cells, those are basically the worker bees of your immune system.
So, that's part of what the logic here is: is we, it, it clearly stimulates our immune system, which must mean if you're sick, you kind of like x-ray the part of you that is suffering and it'll bring the white blood cells and they'll take care of the problem.
That's one of the reasons people think this works.
That's not what's happening.
Please do not irradiate your like elbow if you've got 10s elbow, right?
But that's what people think is going on.
Treatments like this take off like gangbusters among certain segments of the medical community.
One physician reported that from 1913 to 1921, he dispensed over 7,000 injections of radium.
The over-the-counter trade in radium, and he's again just shooting straight radiation into people's body when they're like sick or whatever.
Yeah, that's so wild.
Yeah, the over-the-counter trade in radium-based pharmaceutical remedies was even more widespread.
One of the most popular early devices was inspired by the supposed benefits of radon hot springs.
The Revigator by R.W. Thomas.
This was basically a big crock pot type device that you poured your water in.
It has a spigot, and this is like how you drink your water every day, right?
You pour it into it's like a filter bottle, right?
But you know what the bottle is made out of?
Tell me: pure uranium.
It is a cistern of uranium that you pour your water in, and you're supposed to drink six or seven glasses of uranium water every day.
Pouring Uranium Into Water00:03:30
Hey, I'm sorry, that's flawless.
Yeah, it would have been a lot easier to make like a backyard nuclear weapon back in the day.
But you know who will teach you how to make an atomic bomb?
Our sponsors, yeah, next goods and services providers.
We are sponsored entirely by Doc Brown from the first Back to the Future movie.
And there's nothing he loves more than giving people access to nuclear weapons.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
Woo My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.
Just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired in the city hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
This is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey, who 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 chambers ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon, and I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, 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.
Radium in Cigarettes and Soil00:05:53
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.
And we're back.
So, I want to read a quote from the book Quackery by Lydia Kang and Nate Peterson.
Next, talking about this uranium water dispensing system.
And if you had any leftover water at the end of the day, advertisements encouraged consumers to water their plants.
One of the problems with the revigator, besides slowly poisoning people with about five times the radium concentration recommended for drinking water, was its lack of portability.
Several similar but smaller devices sprang onto the market, including the Thomas cone, the Zimmer aminator, and the radium aminator, all of which operated on a similar principle, that you simply plop them into water you were about to drink.
These devices, collectively dubbed emanators, were typically manufactured from carnitite ore, a primary ore of uranium.
The uranium would gradually decompose, producing radium and radon gas in turn, which then infuse the water to make it radioactive.
So you just dump in some uranium in your water to take like a sip, you know?
That's what you need, right?
You know, just a little bit of uranium.
It's good for you.
Yeah.
It's called a Chernobyl chai.
Please don't disrespect it.
Thank you.
Oh, man.
Yeah, that it does sound.
And one of the things that's weird, I haven't found a good explanation of this, but a lot of people report they feel better.
They feel invigorated.
They feel energized when they start consuming this stuff.
And a lot of that is certainly has to be the placebo effect.
I do wonder if maybe like there's a physical just because of it's doing shit, like maybe there's some sort of weird high that comes from taking radiation in this way.
I don't know how you would like study or prove that objectively, but a lot of people do seem to report like, yeah, I felt like I had more energy.
Now, all these people die horribly of cancer like five years later, but it does seem to make people very energetically.
They pass with real pep.
I haven't found like a solid explanation for this, but I, there are enough reports that a lot of people seem to experience, and maybe it is all placebo, but it seems like it's more consistent than you'd see for that.
I don't know.
But it does seem like people experience some like beneficial, like they feel good on this stuff for a while.
So maybe there is some sort of weird high you get when you're poisoning your body with radiation.
I don't know.
But that is, that is at least how people report feeling when they're on this stuff, right?
Now, if you're making health products in the early 1900s and you really want to provide people with the maximum benefit, of course, people barely drank water back then, right?
It was all highballs, you know?
So if you want, it's like, it was like stupid.
People would make fun of you if you drink water.
You're like, you fucking dumbass square little bitch.
Yeah.
And they're talking to a baby who's trying to literally drink milk out of its mother's teeth.
Yeah.
They're just like, you are dumbass.
Where's your fucking Manhattan?
I do say that to babies often.
But so if you want people to get enough radiation in the early 1900s, water is not your best bet.
Cigarettes are.
And so the good people at the A. Batshari Tobacco Company in Baden, Germany started producing the world's first radium-laced cigarettes for when you really want to give your lung cancer some chest hair, right?
Like that lung cancer is not doing enough on its own.
You gotta, you gotta really fucking pump those numbers up.
That's some rookie lung cancer you got.
Now, that is insane.
That is like one of the craziest things I've ever heard.
But the craziest thing is that like, while these radium cigarettes had a lot more radium than normal cigarettes, cigarettes already have radium in them.
Cigarettes actually have like more radium than you would guess in them.
Like all of our cigarettes are to some extent radioactive.
I did not know this.
I actually found this out.
I had no idea.
Yeah.
I'm going to quote for an explanation.
I'm going to quote from an article on the EPA's website.
Naturally occurring radium found in the soil and from fertilizers can be taken up by the roots of the tobacco plant.
Radium radioactively decays to release radon gas, which then rises from the soil around the plants.
Radon later decays into the radioactive elements lead 210 and polonium-210.
As the plant grows, the radon from fertilizer, along with naturally occurring radon decay products in surrounding soil and rocks, cling to the sticky hairs on the bottom of the tobacco leaves called trichomes.
Rain does not wash them away.
Polonium-210 is an alpha emitter and carries the most risks.
Cigarettes made from this tobacco still contain these radioactive elements.
The radioactive particles settle in smokers' lungs, where they continue to build up as long as the person smokes.
Over time, the radiation can damage the lungs and can contribute to lung cancer.
And like one of the things, like radon-heavy fertilizer is often used by the tobacco industry.
I think they, from what I've read, it makes for like bigger yields.
And it is like research has found that if you are smoking tobacco with lots of radon in it, you are at a higher risk of lung cancer than normal, obviously the non-smokers, but the normal smokers, right?
It's like if you have two different, it's the same thing if you're like getting exposed to radon because you're in like a basement that hasn't been mitigated.
If you're a non-smoker, you are less likely to get cancer from that than a smoker who was also exposed to radon.
Like the two, the risks compound upon each other, right?
I had no idea of that, but I guess cigarettes are all radioactive.
So that's cool.
I literally used to like run a student organization in college that like a lot of the, what we did was anti-Philip Morris action.
And I knew all this other shit about them, did not know this.
Harvard Lies and Fake Jobs00:10:44
Yeah, neither did I. Wild.
Yeah.
So that's cool.
All of this brings me to the story of our actual bastard for the episode, William John Aloysius Bailey.
That is, we have, we do have a specialist.
I refuse to have a name.
I refuse to hate a name, a man that has Aloquitius in his fucking nonsense name, right?
Like, how fucking dare you?
So Will Bailey, born May 25th, 1884 in Boston.
We have woefully little about his childhood or his early life.
He seems to have come from a working class background, probably poor would be a better way to describe it.
One writer in Scientific American described him as growing up in a tough neighborhood.
And he has a rough background.
His dad, who is a cook, dies when he's very young.
He has, he is, he dies when he he dies when Will is young, but he dies after having fathered nine children, right?
So holy shit, he was getting it in.
He couldn't have been that old, right?
So he must have just been putting one out per year from the time he was like 16, you know?
Damn.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Putting in work, putting in work.
But this means that like his, so Will's mom is always single.
She doesn't remarry.
So she is on a single mother's salary, 15 bucks a week, raising nine kids.
Oh, that's not.
No.
And I looked it up.
That's about, in modern terms, that's the equivalent of raising nine children on $2,000 a month before taxes.
Like, I don't know how you do that.
I have literally no idea how you do that.
That's like, that's a fucking nightmare.
Like, that is, yeah, just horrifying to comprehend.
And like you said, before taxes.
Before taxes.
We don't know.
I haven't found much really about his mom or about his background, but like just from what we know, she kind of sounds amazing.
Like she was, she somehow managed to pay for William to go to a private school.
Like it becomes clear that he's a really gifted kid.
She manages to pay.
She sends him to the Boston Public Latin School, which is like the, I think the oldest public school, like private school, but public is in anyone can go if they pay in the country, right?
So a very prestigious institution.
It is the kind of private school you send your precocious young boys to if you want them.
Basically, like what it's, it's big reputation.
It's still for precocious young boys.
Yeah.
If you're, if you've got a gifted kid and you want him to go to an Ivy League school, but you don't have family money or like legacy admissions, you send them here.
And it like, it, it specializes in getting these kids ready for the Ivies.
He does really well.
He graduates high school 12th in his class.
And he and his mom basically have a goal of getting him admitted to Harvard.
He does not do great on the entrance exam, particularly his science stuff is bad, but he gets accepted anyway.
And he enters Harvard as a freshman in 1903.
Again, we don't know a lot about what was going through this dude's head as a kid.
From what we know about his background, the poverty and struggle that his mom has to go through, I think we can infer he grew up used to being very poor and fucking hating it, right?
This guy's goal, I want to go to Harvard.
I want to like, I want to make something of myself.
I don't want to be poor.
I'm not going to do, and like whatever I have to do to make money is going to be okay, right?
That's the, that's the conclusion this guy comes to.
And obviously, while he's in college, while he's sort of like starting to his formal education, it's the same period that all of these discoveries about radiation are happening.
They're figuring out how, you know, about radomon in hot springs.
The Curies are doing a lot of their work.
So this is all kind of a boom period both for public fascination and what seems to be this miraculous new scientific discovery.
And also the early 1900s is the boom period of what's called patent medication, which is basically random pills and elixirs that could be claimed to do anything because the FDA didn't really do a lot back then.
That's what I'm saying, y'all.
Snake oil.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's, he's, he's coming of age in the snake oil era.
And while, you know, he's a smart kid, his grades are good at Harvard.
He's always struggling to afford to stay there.
Right.
And after about three semesters of increasing financial difficulties, William Bailey has a realization, which is, why do I want to finish college when the really valuable thing is just having the degree?
I've been to Harvard enough that I can talk convincingly about it, right?
I can just drop out and lie.
You know, it's 1903.
Nobody's got the internet.
Nobody's going to be able to check up on me.
Right.
I just fake a diploma.
Yeah.
You get all the benefits of college.
Fuck you, Harvard.
Yeah.
You can say you did whatever.
No one, how are they?
What are they calling Harvard?
Yeah.
Yeah.
The Harvard cop's going to come after me.
Fuck it.
I'll just lie.
Exactly.
So he moves to New York City.
He gets a job at an import-export business, editing their catalog.
And he spends his free time scheming.
His earliest plot, now that he's in this import-export, he's dealing with like international trade and stuff.
He decides he thinks he can convince the federal government to appoint him to be the unofficial U.S. trade ambassador to the emperor of China.
Again, he's like 20.
That's kind of ambitious, you know?
I don't know how big one.
And he decides to try to do this.
He spends hours, all of his free time, basically, writing and sending letters to God knows, like huge numbers of U.S. government officials, right?
And he's just like laying out, here's how I would modernize trade with China.
You know, here's what I'll do if you guys make me this, which like, again, he doesn't know these people.
He has never visited China.
He knows nothing about it.
This does not go anywhere, right?
People do not buy into making him the ambassador.
So he gives this scheme up and he starts traveling.
He starts living on the road, basically just like going to different countries, lying about his background and, you know, getting whatever job it seems is going to get him the most money.
This kind of ends in 1914 when he is in Russia working with the Tsar's government, like consulting on oil drilling operations.
He has absolutely no experience here.
He does not know what he's doing, but he's good at lying to the czar.
So, you know, that's a useful story.
That will get you far.
That will get you very far for about three more years at this point.
And then you will most likely get murdered.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then the Bolsheviks will kill you.
Yeah.
But he's smarter than the Tsar because when the war breaks out, you know, being a fairly observant person, you get the feeling this guy understands people pretty well.
He decides quickly, Russia's not going to be safe much longer.
Heads right on back to the United States.
He gets a job working in a machine shop and he would claim in his letters to...
At any point in history, if you make that proclamation, you will be right.
Yeah.
Russia might not be safe anymore.
Always a good call.
Truly.
So he decides, I'm going to, you know, he gets back home and he starts sending letters, you know, to his former classmates from Harvard, all of whom are, you know, in their upper class careers and shit.
And he just starts lying, telling them that he's invented patents for like motor vehicles, moving pictures, armor plates.
He starts claiming to have invented a magneto generator.
Don't fully know what that is.
He's just kind of like lying about stuff to try to get.
He's going to say Elizabeth Holmes 1.0.
Yeah.
Yes.
Yes.
He very much is that kind of guy.
Now, what he's really doing is launching his career as a con artist.
He founds a company called the Carnegie Engineering Corporation.
He has enough knowledge about industry terms, about like, because he's worked in sort of machine shops that he can kind of fill out a convincing fake business prospectus.
And he uses the name Carnegie because the Carnegie family are like the most famous industrial dynasty in the country at the time.
So he just like sticks their name on his business because he figures like, yeah, yeah, smart.
He's, he knows what he's doing.
And then he starts advertising, putting up ads and papers being like, for just, you know, I'm selling a $600 mail order automobile and you can do it on credit.
So you send me a $50 deposit.
I'll ship you the automobile and you'll pay it back later.
Right.
Wow.
Which seems like a great deal, right?
You know, you get a car for 50 bucks.
That's not bad.
Sign me up.
Sign me up.
Of course, there was no factory and no mail order car.
How dare you?
Yeah, he's just lying.
But thousands of rubes send him their hard-earned money and he makes he makes a good amount of money off of this.
Some of us are not ruubes.
We just thought that that sounded like a really great deal and like that that car sounded awesome.
So whatever.
I can't afford.
He did kind of do a Tesla where he's like, yeah, pay me a little bit of money up front of it.
There's totally a car coming.
You'll get your cyber truck soon.
So according to the Journal of the American Medical Association, quote, the supposed factory turned out to be an abandoned sawmill with one box of tools and three stenographers.
This gets found out when like he gets arrested.
The FTC comes after him, basically, right?
He gets arrested on December 14th of 1915.
He's convicted of fraud and he spends 30 days in jail.
Like most conmen in similar positions, getting caught and being given a slap on the wrist merely convinced him to be more careful next time.
So he opts to go for a real product.
Now, not a product that works, right?
But an actual physical item his customers will receive so that it's harder for them to like complain to the FTC.
He's like, what I've learned is I need to be a better con artist.
Thank you.
Yeah, they really challenge.
Incarceration doesn't really fix anything.
No, I think for a guy like this, and I feel the same thing about Elizabeth Holmes, because I don't think we're getting any safer by keeping her in a prison for 11 years.
You tattoo on their face con artist, right?
That should mitigate the danger, right?
They can stay free.
Just everyone has to know that's a con artist whenever they walk past, you know?
I mean, at the very least, maybe attach it to like every credit check, every whatever you could possibly run on the person, you know, because otherwise, like what?
They're just learning how to be better criminals in jail.
It's like, I'm not really, I don't think they need the help.
Yeah.
Hey, there we have like, you know, instead of using the FBI for, you know, entrapping random people at mosques, we have a federal agent follow every con artist and every conversation they have, they walk up afterwards and say, she's full of shit.
Like just absolutely full of shit.
Like whatever she said to you, fucking lie.
Do not give this person any money.
That would be actually the sickest job.
Strychnine Boner Drugs for Kids00:03:52
I think that might work actually.
Yeah.
Like you just come up with individual, like interesting ways to tell the person the same news.
Yeah.
But that fucking person that you're on detail with or whatever for is like their con artist.
But you just like, one time it'll be a singing telegram.
One time it'll be balloons.
Like, you'll get a flash mob going.
You'll do the robot.
Like, I don't know.
You could just really go crazy.
You could.
And I think, you know how there's always, I'm sure you have a few of these people in your life.
I do.
Like certain people are just like inherently trustworthy and like everyone likes them.
Like you send out like NFL scouts to the colleges and be like, oh, Chris, everybody likes Chris.
Everybody trusts Chris.
Chris, you want a gig?
America needs you.
Yeah.
Chris is just saluting on his way to.
But Will Bailey has just learned how to be a better, better con artist.
So the next product that he picks is a patent medication called Lazzigo, like L-A-S-I-Go.
Lazzie Go for superb manhood is the full name of the product.
And as you may have guessed, it's a boner drug, right?
And obviously, when you think boners, what chemical do you think?
Radium.
Oh, no, strychnine.
Strychnine.
He's not in the radium yet.
These are just strychnine boners.
My bad.
It's like, I don't even know dicks.
Like, what am I even talking about?
That's why, basically, dicknine, right?
You know, that's what we call it.
It's because it's so fucking good for the boners.
Now, giving people strychnine pills for erections seems dangerous and insane, but it was also pretty common in patent medications of the day.
And I want to quote from an article I found hosted by the Buckley Valley Museum.
And this is, one such medicine from the Buckley Valley Museum's collection is a bottle of Fellows Compound Syrup of Hyphophosphites, invented by James Fellows, a St. John, New Brunswick drug merchant in the late 1800s.
This remedy was widely sold to doctors to dispense the patients, as well as directly over-the-counter in pharmacies.
Fellows' compound was considered an excellent recuperative tonic that could be used as a treatment for anemia, neurasthenia, bronchitis, influenza, pulmonary tuberculosis, and wasting diseases of childhood.
Like, oh, yeah, your kid's not putting on weight.
Strychnine will help with that.
A little bit of strychnine, you know?
I'm sorry, wasting diseases of childhood.
I'm going to get that as like a bumper sticker on my car.
Don't honk at me.
I'm suffering from wasting diseases of childhood.
Now, if you're not a chemist, strychnine is what we put in rat poison, right?
It is very toxic.
You should not ingest it, specifically, not in quantities.
Despite its potential toxicity, Fellows' compound was manufactured and sold throughout the early 1900s.
And what I found in that article, like, cause again, they have like a bottle of this at this museum.
They're like, our Fellows' compound bottle still contains its original liquid, making it a somewhat hazardous artifact to keep in our collection.
Staff deal with this hazard by wearing nylon gloves whenever they handle the bottle.
So it's still dangerous enough that you got to wear PPE to hold this.
They were just selling it to kids who were coughing.
Yeah.
That's cool.
So alas for William, the law caught on to his strychnine boner pill scheme and he was fined $200 plus costs for, yeah, selling drinking rat poison.
That's just not enough.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Not enough.
No, not.
And it doesn't stop him.
All it does is it makes him think like, all right, clearly there's good money to be made in selling people dick pills.
And, you know, I am also, he's also getting increasingly interested in like, people are really obsessed with the endocrine system in this period.
We were just starting to understand what it is.
So he's like, I bet all problems are caused by issues of the endocrine system.
I wonder, I want to sell ways people can boost their endocrine function, you know?
Now, he's also aware that a lot of radium-based patent medications are being released.
Hood's Endocrine System Hype00:02:26
And he's like, that seems like the fucking business to be in.
Speaking of the business to be in, whatever business is sponsoring our podcast is the business to be in.
Love it.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
Next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place to come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired.
City hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged you to be a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
Europe's Radiation Quackery Products00:11:47
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield.
And in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
So at the turn of the decade, 1920, radiation therapy was still at this point, it's a bigger market in Europe than it is in the U.S. because Europe is where a lot of radiation research starts.
And over in Europe, you can get radioactive candies that are like advertising.
It'll make your teeth glow, which is great shit.
Oh my God.
Fun.
Great.
I'm just picturing those Instagram ads, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Where they're always just like selling that teeth whitening shit.
Yeah.
I mean, that is exactly like how they're kind of marketing it, right?
They're selling, you know, liniments, potions, gadgets, a lot of different wild shit.
But the tipping point for U.S.-based radium medication therapy is a tour of the states that Marie Curie takes in 1921.
Now, obviously, Curie's a real scientist.
I don't think she's a bad person.
She's not trying to ignite like a scam medicine radiation industry.
Your opening was, she's a real person.
I don't think she's a bad person.
She's a real scientist.
Sorry, real scientist.
So she starts writing.
She basically does this big tour of the U.S. where she's like writing on a train and like giving speeches all over the place at these stops about like all of the potential that these different radioactive compounds and elements have in medicine and a whole bunch of other things, right?
This is the birth of like nuclear science, basically.
So she's, she's talking a lot about that kind of shit.
She's very charismatic.
She's well spoken and she gets people excited.
Again, the hype is a lot like the hype for AI or whatever.
The problem with this, and this isn't really her fault, but because she's such a good hype woman, a lot of dummies get convinced that radiation should belong in everything.
And grifters like Will Bailey realize that like, if I slap, just like how like there's like Pepsi now that says made with AI on the fucking bottle, grifters realize like, oh shit, if we just stick with rate, this has radiation in it, people will buy even more of this.
They'll pay a fucking premium.
Now, it's possible William Bailey met Curie at some point.
We don't actually know that, but he was clearly inspired by her work.
And his own dabbling with radiation therapy escalates right after her 1921 tour.
Bailey produces and circulates a translation of Curie's groundbreaking 1910 two-volume book, Treatise on Radioactivity, which is what she got her second Nobel Prize for.
And he establishes a company, Associated Radium Chemists Incorporated, which starts firing out various radioactive medications.
There was Dax, a cough suppressant.
Claps, an influenza treatment that profited off of the still present terror of the recent 1918 pandemic.
And then, of course, Arium, which is marketed as a weight loss cure.
This one might have worked because if you do irradiate yourself enough, you will get skinny.
I mean, yeah, like the more flesh falls away from your fucking bones, yeah, the skinnier you'll be.
You drop those pounds, girl.
Literally once for yeah.
So at this point, there's not a lot to differentiate Bailey from all of the other grifters selling radium medications, right?
Every quack doctor and professional poisoner is racing to market new irradiated supplements.
I hate it when I'm trying to scam and then everyone is trying to scam the same way.
I want to be the only scammer.
Yeah, tragic.
Now, this is a time of astonishing creativity in the field of causing new and curable cancers.
Perhaps the most reckless example of this was the radium eclipse sprayer.
This is a pesticide gun that operates on the brilliant principle of killing insects by irradiating absolutely everything in your home and garden.
One ad bragged that it quickly kills all flies, mosquitoes, roaches, and has no equal as a cleaner of furniture, porcelain, tile.
It is harmless to humans and easy to use.
I don't know about that.
Certainly not harmless to humans, but yeah, it's basically just a radiation sprayer.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Home products, a Denver-based company, has the cunning plan to combine animal gland supplements, which at the time are being marketed by the likes of Bastard Plot alumni John Brinkley, the goat ball doctor.
So basically, this is like the liver king shit where it's like, organ meat is a superfood.
They're mixing organ meat and radium to produce one of the most perfect hot dogs.
Two great tastes that go great together.
They call their product Vita Radium.
And Home Products claimed it would help weak, discouraged men bubble over with joyous fatality.
So again, it's a dick pill, right?
You know?
Now, I know what you want.
It's not a pill, Sophia, because I know what you're wondering.
How would you take a radiation and organ meat speedball, right?
Because that's what this is.
I'm going to quote from the book Quackery here.
I was not ready to learn this.
The men who had the unfortunate experience of taking Vita radium certainly bubbled over with something because those radium supplements were suppositories, radium suppositories.
Patients were literally putting radium up their own asses.
The women, however, had it worse in an effort to combat the eternal feminine problem of sexual indifference.
Home products produced women's special suppositories.
When inserted vaginally, these radium suppositories were claimed to cure all manner of sexual afflictions and once more reinvigorate their sexual appetites.
Your wife doesn't want to fuck, shove some radium up or hoo-ha.
I, it's like already bad enough just being a woman during that time, but now I also have to have a fucking nuclear pussy.
Oh, yeah, you got to nuke your vagina for sure.
You know, like my uterine lining already sheds.
Now, like, the rest of my internal organs will just shed right out of my pussy.
That's that's cool for me.
One of my ovaries popped right out and just started walking around.
The pills must be working.
What's this?
A fallopian tube in my hand?
I'm killed.
The primary issue with these different products, outside of the fact that they're incredibly dangerous, was that they're not cheap, right?
Radium is, it's not common, right?
It's rare and expensive.
And, you know, so is like, yeah, uranium ore.
Like only the very wealthy can afford, for example, that full uranium cistern for their family kitchen.
So most people who were selling recreational purveyors of recreational radiation products were either marketing them just to rich people, they were like premium products, or if they were affordable, it's because the company lied about the product being radioactive, which in this case is a real good thing, you know?
Right?
That's the one time you're like you correct and did something good.
Yeah, but that's not how people see it at the time.
And I'm going to quote from the Journal of the American Medical Association again.
Pharmacopias from the 1920s listed dozens of patent medications that supposedly contain small amounts of radioactive materials.
Paradoxically, most of the governmental regulatory intervention in the growing field of radiopharmaceutical nostrums was limited to prosecuting patent medicine manufacturers whose supposedly radioactive preparations were found to give off only background levels of radiation.
So the FDA goes the FDA goes after people, but just because they're not putting enough poison in the meds, this isn't nearly deadly enough.
You're not going to give them any kind of crazy cancer with this.
How do you expect this woman's puffet to embod the FDA has one goal and it's making sure people continue to get new kinds of vaginal cancers.
So unless she tarns in on herself and becomes a literal TARDIS, I don't think we've succeeded.
So Bailey and some of his peers in the patent medicine industry are disturbed.
Bailey particularly is a real, he does seem to be a true believer in radiation, but he radiates himself quite a bit.
So he is frustrated by like how many of these products are cons, right?
And so he starts working on a solution to this problem, an affordable economic way of exposing yourself to the equivalent of several dozen x-rays each morning.
This is where he would find his fortune and rack up his highest body count.
But we're going to talk about that in part two, Sophia.
Oh, shit.
Hanging.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So you got anything to plug before we roll out of part one?
Yeah.
Thank you for asking.
I have a new Patreon.
It's the Sophie Alexandra Project.
So go to patreon.com/slash Sophia Alexandra.
And there, I will be posting writing and videos and other really dope stuff.
So go there.
Well, go there or be square, you know?
Thanks.
And obviously, Sophie and I, you can subscribe to the show ad-free at CoolerZone Media.
Also, if you go to coolzonehealthproducts.com, we're releasing a new supplement line.
You know, everything you need to stay healthy, to stay energized.
Honestly, folks, it's just a 50-50 mix of uranium dust and cocaine.
So, you know, you'll have energy.
You're going to get fascinating new cancers.
Cancers, we're working on some cancers that people have never seen before.
Doctors are very excited about our uranium cocaine.
It reminds me of that part in Wet Hot American Summer where they're like going into town and she's like, hey, get me some lube for my pussy.
Yeah, we've got uranium lube.
It's just pure urine.
It's just pure uranium.
You know what?
You can either use it as lube for sex or you can run a nuclear reactor off of it.
It works for both.
No longer will you have to go two different places for that.
Get you a girl who can do both.
Listeners often are saying listeners often ask me, like, what would happen if I didn't interrupt Robert during one of those things?
And honeys, now you know.
Yeah.
That's not good.
Uranium, we get it straight from the source.
I go to Chernobyl, I dig up some Chernobyl dirt, I mix it with some fucking industrial horse lube, bada bing bada boom, we're good to go.
Hey, I summered near Chernobyl when I was a kid, so I just have it inside my body.
Yeah.
Robert, throw in an eel.
Give that promo code.
Yeah, we'll eel up a horse.
We'll do it all, baby.
We'll do it all.
Anyway, see you all Thursday.
Don't listen to Robert.
Bye.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
CoolZone Media Production Wrap00:01:49
For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that: trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.