Sylvia Browne, a self-proclaimed psychic detective, is exposed through her 1992 securities fraud conviction for selling fake gold mine shares and obtaining $1.25 million in fraudulent loans. Despite claims of aiding the FBI in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, records show no official collaboration, with her "predictions" often coincidental or incorrect, such as misidentifying Amanda Berry's abductor. Her alleged 87-90% accuracy rate collapses to roughly 0% upon skeptical analysis, revealing a career built on financial deception rather than genuine paranormal ability. Ultimately, the episode dismantles her mythos by contrasting her extravagant lifestyle with documented criminal history and failed prophecies. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Cal Penn's Early Career Clips00:14:07
Cool zone media.
Oh my gosh, look at the time.
It's behind the bastards.
45.
It's actually 2.11 p.m., otherwise known as 8 a.m. in the morning for me, because I let my sleep schedule get disastrously disordered and it is slowly destroying me and my life.
But you know who it's not destroying is our wonderful guest for these episodes, Cal Penn.
Cal, how are you doing?
I'm doing well.
I was going to make a joke about just perpetually being awake, but I had no good punchline.
I'm good.
I am awake.
More of a morning person, but very excited to be here.
I was just telling you before we came on what a fan I am.
And so especially remember.
Can we talk about Sylvia's voice?
Sorry, I'm just jumping the gun a little bit.
And we'll be hearing more of it.
Don't you worry.
Okay.
All right.
Yeah.
But no, I'm excited to be here.
So thank you for thank you for having me.
Yeah, let's put a pick because I do want to hear what you have to say about her voice, but let's give the listeners like a minute or two of it, which they're going to get in a minute.
And then we can really, we'll have something to sink our collective teeth into.
We'll dive in.
Yeah.
This is an iHeart podcast.
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You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Shariach stay with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Mode.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
So in case you're coming into part two of this episode like a maniac, we're talking about Sylvia Brown, who is not named Sylvia Brown yet because she hasn't married the guy that she takes the last name from.
But we're going to call her Sylvia Brown anyway, for the sake of making this simpler.
She is a psychic who has found out that if you are sick or die in a war, that's because you chose to do that in a past life.
She's gotten out of her first marriage to an abusive cop.
She's moved to California.
She has started a psychic foundation where she is working to create her own new religion.
So by 1975, things are really starting to come together for Sylvia.
She's getting more and more famous.
She's getting paid to speak at events by local organizations in Southern California.
And usually what this means is like an elks club or something will like hire as like entertainment and they'll channel her, right?
Or she'll channel Francine, right?
So she'll bring in and they'll get to ask Francine questions about aliens or the other side or whatnot, right?
Like it's a gimmick, you know?
Yeah, it could be fun, right?
Yeah.
If this isn't evil, this is just a hoot.
It's the stuff that comes later that gets to be evil.
This is also the period where she claims she starts working as a pro bono consultant for cops and quote several medical and psychiatric professionals that she knew.
Now, this is one thing that's interesting to me about this book.
It tells you what a different era Sylvia came from, where she has to reiterate several times: I never tell anyone to come to me first.
I'm always only brought in if they've already consulted a medical professional or already talked to the police, and that didn't work.
I'm just there to help if they've already tried traditional methods.
Never go to a psychic before you go to a doctor, which is like a responsible thing to say.
And she would absolutely not be saying if she were like doing this griff today, right?
Like today, you can just do away with doctors altogether.
It's just interesting to me how, even back in her day, you had to be like, obviously, go to a doctor first.
It's kind of a even the psychics trust doctors less than they used to.
My question about this is: why not go to you first?
Like the cost, both in the actual what you're paying the doctor and the time you got to take off work.
And if she's so great and you can solve something in 20 seconds, why would we not go to you first?
I, you know, logically, you're right.
It does make no sense.
If she's a legitimate psychic, she shouldn't be saying that, right?
I think it's just that that was too much, like it was too crazy to tell people to do that in the 80s.
People would have been like, you're telling people not to go to the doctor?
That's fucked up, right?
Oh, I think the disinfo ecosystem has just advanced so much now.
But you're right.
Like, if she's a real psychic, you would want to go to her before a doctor because doctors fuck up all the time and God doesn't, right?
Like the spirit will know where your tumor is.
Yeah.
So, yeah, she's she's consulting and whatnot with all sorts of agencies, so she claims.
And she also starts to show up on television, right?
This is when the beginning of her TV career starts.
And she gets asked to come to San Francisco, where she will, for the next like decade, like almost 20 years, will be a semi-regular guest on the local TV show, People Are Talking.
This is like a San Francisco, like local access show or something like that.
And finding episodes of local TV shows from the 70s is very hard.
There's a ton of lost media from that era, which is actually really unfortunate.
Like there's, it's a, there are efforts to archive a lot of that stuff that I'm very supportive of because it's a serious problem that so much of very important American like culture has been lost from that era.
So I can't show you her appearances on People Are Talking from the 70s.
I just haven't found any.
But I did find a 1991 episode of People Are Talking with Sylvia Brown.
And I think it's fair to assume that this is similar to the stuff she would have been doing in the 70s and the 80s.
So we're still in the 70s.
I'm going to play this clip from the 90s because I want you guys to get an understanding of like what her TV appearances are like in the early stage of her career, right?
I hope that makes some sense.
And this was this, this is 20 years into her doing this show.
She's, she's, well, she starts in like the late 70s.
She's been doing it for like a decade, a little over a decade.
She'll be on the show off and on, I think, for like 20 years, right?
This is about a decade into her run, something like that.
And before you ask, since this is from 1991, yes, if you can't see, all of the women in this clip are wearing thick shoulder pads, and everyone's hair looks terrible.
Just terrible, terrible hair.
It's the age of big earrings as well.
I love the whale eyeball earrings.
It's beautiful.
Yeah, Sylvia looks incredible.
She's got, as Cal said, earrings that look like whale eyebrows.
So the episode starts with a very low-stakes story, right?
Some guy wanted to buy Sylvia's talking about a thing that had happened previously, where some guy paid her to consult because he was going to buy an apartment with his wife and he wasn't sure about it.
So he asked Sylvie if it was a good idea.
And she said, no, don't buy the apartment.
It's a horrible idea.
And then sometime later, that guy's wife calls in and leaves a voice message thanking Sylvia for telling them not to buy the apartment because of what had happened in it.
And here's that voicemail.
And by the way, I do think the person leaving the voicemail is intoxicated, but you can make your own opinions up on that.
People that know me, I really don't beat around the bush that much.
I probably was a little bit nicer than that, truthfully, but I said it's a bad idea.
It's negative.
There's something wrong with it.
I feel all kinds of negative energy around it.
And I came on very strong about it.
Now, he then called our producer, Kathy Termel, and left a message on her answering machine.
And this is the message he left after he talked to Sylvia.
It's Terry.
It's, I guess, 8:30 your time.
I just wanted to tell you that the apartment that Eric Clapton's kid fell out of the window, I don't know if you heard he was killed, was the apartment that Billy, you know, and I have been looking at forever that he just lost today that someone else bought.
So Billy calls and says, maybe your psychic's right after all, because your psychic said there are major problems with that apartment.
So for what it's worth, he's a big believer, again, in your psychic.
Can you believe that?
Anyway, I thought you'd want to know.
Isn't that something?
Wow.
First off, I do think that lady's drunk.
But second, that's a true story.
Eric Clapton's son did die falling out of a window in a New York City apartment building.
That's what she's claiming is that like the apartment they were going to buy was in the building that Eric Clapton's son fell out of, which like, I mean, first off, that's a tragedy, obviously.
Like it's horrible, but also doesn't mean that anything was wrong with his apartment.
He wasn't buying Eric Clapton's apartment.
And the child didn't die because the apartment was bad.
The window was left open while it was being cleaned and the kid hadn't realized and he like ran towards what he thought was a closed plate glass window to like put his face against it or something and he fell over the side.
Like it's a really sad story.
But again, it's nothing wrong with the apartment.
Like they wouldn't have died falling out of the apartment window.
Right.
It's like, again, whatever.
It's just, there's this, and I have no idea at this point how much of this is even manufactured.
Like if that was like a completely fake story because Eric Clapton's son dying was so in the news.
It's kind of unclear to me.
The producers, would they fact check calls that came in?
We don't know.
No, no.
And I don't know that they would, but also this is like a show.
Like it's about entertainment.
They're not purport.
So I don't actually know what's going on here.
That said, as we established last episode, Sylvia has a history of deciding homes are cursed and not wanting to be in them.
So I can believe this just happened to be the same apartment Eric Clapton lived in, right?
Yeah.
So the next question here, they go to break and when they come back, the hosts note that they're having weird electrical issues with the broadcast, which always seems to happen when Sylvia comes by.
And she's like, oh, every time I'm on TV, there's electrical issues somewhere.
You know, it's the spirits.
The ghosts messed with the equipment.
The recording and the video looks pretty clear to me from recording from 1991, but who knows?
They take questions from the audience.
So she's being asked now.
This is a series of questions about celebrity marriages and celebrities trying to have kids and whether or not their relationships work out.
And she gets a couple right.
She's first asked if Maury Povich and Connie Chung are going to have a child together.
And she says no, which we will call partially correct.
The couple had fertility issues and were not able to conceive together, but they did adopt a child not long after this broadcast.
So partially, we'll give her like a half score on that one, right?
After that, they ask about Bruce Willis and Demi Moore's second child.
Now, she does correctly predict that their second child will be a daughter, which is like a 50-50 guess, but okay, we'll give her that one, right?
She's right about this.
The next one she's asked about is Roseanne Barr and Tom Arnold.
And they were at the time attempting to have a child through artificial insemination.
And she goes on a real rant here.
Her whole mood changes because she thinks God hates artificial insemination.
I can't think of anything worse.
She is so angry at the fact that they are getting having artificial insemination.
And there's also some weird like fat shaving parts of it too, because when they talk about, do you think they'll have a kid?
Like the audience starts to laugh as they show pictures of Tom Arnold and Roseanne Barr.
And I think they're just like laughing at the fact that they're like heavier people, right?
Like it's kind of gross.
But I guess TV in 1991.
So the last question she asks about, and it is weird to me that she's so negative about IVF.
But the next question we get to is my favorite because she's asked about Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, who had recently gotten together in 1991.
And she's asked, like, is this relationship going to last?
And here's what she says.
How about Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman?
They're cute.
And I think that they're fun for each other.
And I think they're going to make it.
And I'll tell you why, because she's a real strong woman.
And I think he needs a strong woman.
And I think that's why it's going to be good because she's got the strength because he's got that sort of charming little boy way about him.
He really does.
And I think she's good for him.
And I think she'll whip him into line.
Psychic Predictions on Celebrity Couples00:13:49
Nope.
That one did not correct.
Yeah, they got divorced in 2001, citing irreconcilable differences.
And, you know, when you look at this, what you're seeing here, first off, this is a great situation to be a TV psychic in because you're all, it's a bunch of 50-50 guesses, right?
And your accuracy is pretty good.
First off, if you're being asked, will these celebrities who are already famous for having a tumultuous relationship, which was the case with a lot of these relationships, she's asked, are they going to stay together?
It's a pretty good bet to be like, well, probably not, right?
Because like they're already having a bunch of problems.
Also, the same thing with like, they've had one daughter.
Do you think their next child will be a daughter?
50-50 shot.
Pretty easy guess to get it right.
But in 1991, Cruz and Kidman had just gotten married.
They had not had any sort of, there wasn't anything in the media about the relationship having like problems yet, right?
Every, all the press about them was positive.
So Sylvia guessed that they were going to last.
Like she's not, it just really makes the case of what she's doing here.
She can get it right when it's kind of a thing anyone could guess well, but when there's less to go on, she's going to be wrong because she's just, she's just blindly guessing, you know?
Yes, this is, it's such a 50-50.
It's a 50-50 and you hate IVF.
Right.
And you, yeah, you're really against the idea of artificial dissemination.
God hates it.
Anyway, this episode is from the early 90s, but she's doing this stuff like this by like from the late 70s up through the 80s.
And so we can safely assume a lot of her TV appearances during that period are kind of similar to this.
She's a good performer for what that show is, right?
Like she's, that's why they keep bringing her on.
She does the job she's being brought on to do.
And the hosts of the show know what they're getting out of her, right?
And they're pretty smart about tailoring because she likes to talk about metaphysics and aliens and dead people.
That's more heavy than you want on like a daily talk.
You want to talk about celebrity marriages and babies, right?
So this is kind of her at her most public-facing, like media, like this is like the most digestible Sylvia tends to get.
She is a hit, though.
She starts doing fairly well, enough that she's able to rent a larger office and start hiring employees to handle her correspondence.
She brings in two full-time researchers for the Nirvana Foundation and even an early computer system because they're trying to map out all of the realities of the other side and they're ranking angels and how angels work and trying to figure out the science of all of this stuff that she believes.
Sylvia starts hosting regular hypnosis sessions and psychic readings and begins advertising that she can help clients quit smoking, lose weight, or fix their life in any number of ways.
Sylvia says that at first, these sessions were just a way for her to fund her foundation for psychic research.
Quote, it never occurred to me that these hypnosis sessions would contribute far more than money to the foundation and its efforts to prove that the spirit survives death.
So the way these sessions prove that life exists after death is that she starts having clients who start telling her about their past lives.
This begins with a guy named Frank, who just, he comes in because he wants to lose weight.
But wouldn't you know it, when she puts him down and hypnotizes him, he starts talking about, quote, his life in Egypt as a pyramid builder.
We're going to talk about Frank of the Pyramids in a second.
But before we continue with Frank, we need to make a quick detour to the history of past life regression therapy.
This starts like the origins of this kind of shit are in like the late, the end of the 1800s, early 1900s.
You get these occultists and scientists in London who are kind of like Sylvia says she's doing.
They're trying to, they set up foundations to try to find evidence of life after death.
And it'll be a mix at this point of like spiritualists and scientists because they're not that different in 1890, you know?
Like there's not a real strong reason to be like, well, ghosts don't exist based on the science of 1890.
It's like an arguable point, really, to a lot of scientists at that time, as opposed to, I mean, it's still an argument.
I guess you could say an arguable point now, but a lot of mainstream scientists are willing to explore the idea that, well, maybe they're spirits, right?
And maybe there's a way that we can like figure out scientifically how spirits work.
That's very much in vogue at the time.
In the 1930s, a researcher at Duke University tries to systematically study the experiences of people with past lives and start documenting them.
And then in the mid-1950s, Maury Bernstein writes a book titled The Search for Britti Murphy.
This is a fiction book inspired by a real story of a woman named Virginia Tai, an American lady who came to believe she was the reincarnation of a 19th century Irish woman.
The book was made into a movie that was fairly popular.
And this, obviously, reincarnation is like a major aspect of a number of world religions, but this book helps popularize the idea in a secular sense for Westerners.
Reincarnation, not as part of an existent belief system, but as something you can take all a cart.
And if you're a Christian, you can stick it in your Christianity.
If you believe in psychic powers and something weirder than that, if you're an occultist or a pagan or a Wiccan, you can stick some, like Americans start seeing reincarnation as something, I can just grab this, take this out of the grab bag of world beliefs and stick it into whatever I already believe, right?
That kind of starts to really hit in the 60s and 70s and part is a result of this book.
So by the 70s, you get a number of psychologists and psychiatrists offering what they call past life regression services, where they'll hypnotize or otherwise like put people down and to try to bring up their past lives.
The idea that a lot of psychosomatic illnesses and ailments are really caused by if your foot hurts a lot and the scientists can't figure out why the doctor can't figure out why, it's probably because in a past life, you like lost your leg to a mortar in World War I or something like that, or got hit by a horse, you know, back on the prairie in the cowboy days.
And so, you gotta, if you can access that past life and that past life can explain what happened to it, you can fix the ailment.
That's the idea that a lot of these people are going into in the 70s.
And in 1991, the practice is pretty close to its peak of its popularity in the late 80s.
So, Sylvia's heading down very well-trod ground when she starts doing this.
Question, and I don't know if you mentioned it in part one.
Do we know what kind of religion, if any, she was raised with?
Yeah, she's raised Catholic.
She goes to a Catholic school as a girl, and she respects it and she believes in God, but she also has notes.
Sure, some of the IV, yeah, because some of the IVF stuff could stem from that.
Um, yeah, they're very, very anti-IVF, and yeah, it's just interesting.
The, I don't know, it's interesting to see like some of the Catholicism bleed into her beliefs here.
You can even see it in the idea that, like, well, before we're born, we're these fully sentient spirits that pick out our entire lives, right?
Like, you can see pieces of that there, too.
Yeah, so back to Frank, this guy who wants to lose weight and then starts talking about his life as a pyramid builder, what Sylvia puts him under.
Yeah.
Now, Sylvia says that the way he talks about pyramid building is, quote, so unremarkable and current to him that you would have thought he'd stop to see me on his lunch break and would be heading straight back to put some finishing touches on King Tut's tomb.
And this is where I got to stop us for the first time because King Tut was not buried in a pyramid.
King Tut is buried underground.
Simply not in a pyramid.
Not at all in a pyramid.
The opposite of a pyramid.
He's in kind of a basement.
She could have just picked the one that we've all heard of.
She could have just picked the one that's exactly right.
That's exactly right.
Now, I did want to look into a couple of things to try to parse out the actual history here.
Because, hey, maybe a pyramid builder might also make tombs too.
But that's also seems to be unlikely because Tut died around in the 1300s BC.
Pyramid building kicks off in Egypt in the 2600s BC and it evolves over time.
But by the 1700s or so, the practice is in pretty steep decline in Egypt.
One of the last significant pyramids was built for the Pharaoh Kinjer somewhere around 1760.
And by the time King Tut died, because of how all of the pyramids keep getting burgled, Egyptian royalty are being buried underground.
So Frank's recollections of pyramid building don't bear a lot of resemblance to what we know of the practice.
For one thing, when she asks him, How did you build the pyramids?
He says that we had anti-gravitational devices that we used in their construction, which is not how pyramids were built.
So he's definitely on the we had like alien technology things.
And at one point, when she's down, Sylvia says that Frank lapses into what she first describes as a steady stream of fluent Martian.
She thinks it's Martian.
And she records him talking.
She says she does this with his permission.
I hope so.
And she sends the tape to a psychology friend at Stanford who calls her back and is like, Where did you get this tape?
And she's like, What do you mean?
This was just one of my patients.
And he's like, Those nonsense syllables you said you heard, that was a fluent monologue in an obscure seventh century BC Assyrian dialect that would have been common among pyramid builders.
What?
So now I got to look into this.
First off, the Assyrians.
The research you had to do as you were reading this.
Jeez.
You got to do way more research to bust the line.
Were you on a plane or mid-Mardi Gras when this was happening?
Yeah, I'm doing this during Mardi Gras.
Yeah.
And the Assyrians did build ziggurats, which are kind of different from Egyptian pyramids, but close enough that I guess you could call yourself a pyramid builder.
However, there's not like a dialect of Assyrian.
I found no evidence that there was like a dialect that pyramid builders would have used because these were generally like public projects.
And also like you would have a lot of like artisans who get brought in to do work on these projects, but they had other skills.
There's not like a language that the pyramid guys use.
Was there a citation of who at Stanford this person was?
No, no, no.
She doesn't even say a professor.
She just says a psychology friend.
Also, I don't trust that you're a psychology friend at Stanford knows Assyrian.
How is he?
Who is he doing?
Is he playing it to the Assyrian guy?
I guess let's just take it over to the this could be a little tighter of a story this story on her behalf.
I have no zip it up a little I have editorial notes for her.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You could zip this up a little bit tighter, Sylvia.
Um, so the next several pages of her autobiography are just like a list of past life regressions that she does and she all the different illnesses she cures by finding out people's past lives.
So since this is working so well, Sylvia.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Does she ever mention?
I think one of the things I think is so interesting when whenever I've read about things like this is that like almost nobody seems to break gender with their past lives.
Yeah.
Like interesting, huh?
Is there any example of like one of her patients that's like, oh, yes, when I was a, he's a dude and he's like, hey, when I was a 14-year-old girl back in Mali, is there anybody, ever anybody in this book who breaks gender, any of her patients?
I haven't, I don't remember perfectly, but everyone I remember, their past lives are the same gender as their current life.
So interesting.
Okay.
Yeah.
Now, what I will say, Cal, that did interest me about the past lives of her patients.
A lot of them were like commoners.
Normally, you get a lot of past lives like, oh, everybody was like a king, huh?
Everybody was like a great warrior.
This guy's like, I built pyramids or whatever.
I was just like a dude, a laborer.
And you actually do get a weird amount of that with Sylvia's, which I kind of like, oh, that's an interesting spin on the griff.
Like a lot of these are just like normal pastime jobs.
Sylvia, however, does not have normal past lives because she starts interrogating her own and she comes to the conclusion that, quote, I'd once been the most beautiful high priestess in all of Africa, and that in a later life, I'd been the first Eskimo to use shoelaces.
Now, I don't know how much debunking I need to do.
Like, Africa has never been one political entity.
Like, priestess of what?
There's a bunch of religions that have existed on that continent.
So many of them over history.
High priestess of what?
Most beautiful.
Who decided that?
Who voted on it?
Like, um, and then the whole thing about fucking shoe.
First off, Eskimo is like a slur.
It's a colonial slur that generally refers to there's a couple of different groups of people that it refers to, like the Inuit and the Yupik, but it's not a term that you would have used for yourself if that was your past life.
You wouldn't call yourself even in the 90s.
Even in the 90s, we knew that.
I did look into when these, like those different peoples had shoelaces, developed shoelaces just to see.
Man, your research.
Yes, go on.
I had to know.
I don't think we don't know when shoelaces first came into being, but the peoples who eventually wound like who like wound up in that part of the world probably took shoelaces with them because we've had the concept for very Otsi the Ice Man had shoelaces.
And there's actually, I think, the oldest shoelaces we've ever found were in an Armenian or someone buried in Armenia.
I don't know if they were Armenian or because people's move.
We had shoelaces for a long time.
I don't think there was a first girl who was like, I've invented shoelaces.
I really enjoy that she in the section you just read must have smoked such a beautiful little bowl before she penned those sentences, right?
She's like, and I had shoelaces.
And you're sitting here sober, just doing the research on when shoelaces made it to native Alaskan communities.
Yeah.
She kind of seems like they always had them.
She like is like, I'm Helen of Troy, but with shoelaces.
The Mystery of Shoelaces and Names00:03:54
Yeah, exactly.
Okay.
This has, just researching this has given me like a, if anyone ever starts talking about past lives to me, the first thing they ask is, what was your name?
And then you just look up.
Is that a name those people had?
Or is it a Greek name?
Speaking of Greek, our sponsors could be Greek.
You don't know.
Neither do I.
We don't ask.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, 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.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
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.
FBI Crank and the Big Bomb Plot00:15:34
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.
And we're back.
So Sylvia claims that her relationship with law enforcement began in the 1970s, like her professional relationship.
But she doesn't give any detail.
She doesn't talk about cases solved.
She doesn't say that, talk about specific interactions.
She just says that she'd been helping and, you know, the police valued her, but she gives us nothing else to go on.
And so we don't really get any details about how she used her so-called psychic powers to help solve crimes until one day in 1993, her friend Ted Gunderson, who she describes as an FBI agent.
Keep that in mind, Cal.
She calls Ted Gunderson an FBI agent, gives her a call.
A rider truck filled with explosives had just been detonated under the World Trade Center, killing six people.
And you know what happens a few years later as a result of that?
It's that attack is the 93 World Trade Center bombing.
And so Ted Gunderson, FBI, calls Sylvia and is like, we need your help tracking down the terrorists who did this.
You know, the FBI can't do this without Sylvia.
She writes, quote, I'd worked with Ted on other cases, and my respect for him wasn't as unparalleled.
Whatever I could do to help him, if I could help at all, no matter what, all he had to do was ask.
By the time he called me, I had read that three of the Islamic terrorist bombers had been arrested, and Ted wanted my psychic input on any others who might be involved.
I told her there were five, maybe six men involved, including the three in custody.
Now, I gotta dig into this, Cal, because since, and we'll talk about Ted in a second, but since a total of six terrorists were arrested, Sylvia claims victory, right?
I knew there were going to be five or six.
They arrested six.
I'm right.
Look at how psychic I am.
But that's not quite accurate.
That's not quite an accurate picture of how many people were involved in making that bomb, right?
There were six guys arrested, but there was a seventh person involved.
One of the government's key witnesses when they bring these guys to trial was an FBI informant, former Egyptian Army officer Ahmad Salem.
With the FBI's help and direction, Salem infiltrated the group that bombed the World Trade Center, and he built bombs for them and taught them how to build bombs using bomb-building techniques the FBI gave him.
We don't talk about this a lot.
We probably should.
It's a pretty big fuck-up.
Wow.
For an interview with him in history.com, Ibrahim Elga Brownie invited me, and this is Ahmed Salem talking about his time infiltrating this group.
Ibrahim Elga Brownie invited me into his house and blasted the radio loud because he was thinking the FBI was monitoring his apartment.
And he asked me, can you build big bombs?
I said, yes, I can.
He asked, what do you need to build big bombs?
Because 12 bombs, he built 12 pipe bombs for these guys already, are not really making me happy.
I wanted something big.
I said, I need a detonator.
And then I gave him some demands.
So they switched gears from 12 small pipe bombs into a big massive bomb similar to the Oklahoma City bomb.
So first, that's Ahmad's, the guy the FBI sent into this group saying, well, they got the idea to do one big bomb because I told them it would work better than 12 pipe bombs, which already I would say, if I'm a psychic, that makes him involved in the creation of this bomb.
Now, what happens next is a little unclear to me, but per a 1993 New York Times article by Ralph Blumenthal, it looks like the FBI found out that there was a cell of terrorists in New York who were working to build a bomb to attack the World Trade Center.
So they come up with an initial plan to infiltrate Ahmad into the group and have him basically provide them with fake ingredients.
So they're going to build a real bomb, but the explosives inside it are fake.
So the mechanics of the bomb would be real, but there'd be fake stuff inside of it.
So the bomb doesn't work when they set it off, and then they arrest everybody, right?
That's how you'd think something like this should go, right?
If you're going to do this.
However, that plan was called off at the last minute by an FBI supervisor who had a different plan about how to use Mr. Salem.
And it's unclear what his plans were.
A lot of this is very murky because it's the FBI.
Lam may have had a feud with his supervisor.
Ultimately, he's pulled off the case.
And when he's not in the group, they succeed in finishing the bomb that he'd helped them start building and they detonate it in the World Trade Center.
It is unclear how much Salem actually helped them and how much of what the bomb they used he had had a hand in.
We really don't know, but the evidence we have does suggest that he helped them figure out some aspects of bomb making.
Either way, Sylvia's psychic powers gave her no hint that this guy existed whatsoever.
For her part, Sylvia takes a lot of pride in the fact that during her recorded interview, which is a real interview, she told her friend, Agent Gunderson, quote, One of the men you need to, and I'm doing the psychic hand thing here, if you can't see, one of the men you need to look for has a short build, wiry, black hair, black eyebrows.
There's an M on there.
An S?
S-A-L-Z-E-M, something.
Salzion, Salzimon, Mon, okay, Salzamon.
And she predicts one of the men is named Salzamon.
Now, one of the men who had already been arrested at that point was named Mohamed A. Salama, which isn't really all that similar to Salzaman.
They start with an S, otherwise very different names.
I would say you got it wrong.
It's like if I, if I was like, I'm going to have a guest for a podcast.
I'm reading a K, Kevin, Calvin.
Oh, Cal.
I got it right.
Perfect.
Like, no, I didn't.
I didn't foresee anything.
And this is cold reading, right?
That's the technique she's using, right?
This is, that's where it's a very old psychic fraud.
You start with, I'm hearing, and you start going through a couple of different, and someone of the adults would be like, oh, I had an aunt whose, if you said M, was Mary, or my cousin, Mike, you know, and then you kind of, you, you, you zero in from there and you kind of refine the grift a little bit.
This is cold reading.
That's what she's doing in this interview.
She writes about getting this wrong.
No doubt about it.
I was off by a few letters, but when Ted told me they had arrested someone named Salama, it was this close enough that I screamed, you got him.
Now, obviously, she accomplished nothing at all, but she carts this around as a, you know, he was, they had him in custody when she's interviewed.
She doesn't do shit.
That said, I need to point out here, it's not accurate for her to say you got him to Ted Gunderson.
Because, and here's the fun part: Ted Gunderson wasn't an FBI agent in 1993 and had nothing to do with arresting the men who bombed the World Trade Center.
Ted?
Yeah.
Who was he?
The fuck is this guy?
This is great question.
Ted Gunderson was a retired FBI agent at the time of the World Trade Center attacks.
He'd had a successful career.
He'd at one point run the Los Angeles branch.
Like, branch is the wrong word, but he'd run the LA FBI office, right?
But in the 1980s, he'd retired and he went into private practice where he became an insane crank.
He becomes a major figure in the satanic panic.
He is the guy doing the McMartin preschool trial.
He's the guy like digging up stuff in the fucking yard of the McMartin preschool and making public statements about, I can tell from that children were sacrificed here, babies were murdered, right?
He's that fucking lunatic, right?
He is a huge figure in American conspiracism.
Like Ted Gunderson, because he used to be in the FBI, has all of this unearned credibility.
And so when he says stuff like that, oh, I've seen a lot of satanic ritual abuse.
I know there's thousands of babies being trafficked for the devil in this country.
People trusted him, right?
That's who fucking Ted Gunderson is.
She's not working with the FBI.
She's working with a crank who used to be in the FBI.
Wow.
Perfect.
Incredible.
A little chef's kiss moment there.
Yeah.
Beautiful.
Of all the ex-FBI agents, it had to be Daryl Ted.
I'll admit, at first, I took it at face value.
They're like, yeah, maybe the FBI brought her in for an interview.
They've done crazier things.
And then I like, I'm going to look up Ted Gunderson just on a, oh, for a little more on Ted, at a 1995 conference in Dallas, he alleged that the New World Order controlled the U.S. government and was performing 4,000 human sacrifices in New York City every year.
He also claimed that the Oklahoma City bombing was carried out by the U.S. government to slander the far right.
Later in life, he wrote copiously about child slave labor in underground alien-controlled facilities.
He's like, there's a white, a big part of QAnon is the belief that there's these underground, like evil military bases where the aliens are like sucking adrenochrome out of kids' heads.
Ted Gunderson helped start all that.
Like, he is a foundational figure in American conspiracism.
So that's good.
Yep.
Good that she's working with this guy.
Glad they found each other, question mark.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's nice when two grifters do.
I want to know what their friendship was like outside the interview.
Yeah.
Did they just kick it and talk about conspiracies?
Did they have a normal did they just like have beers and play ping pong?
And it wasn't weird?
Like, what was the question?
Yeah.
Like, do you watch movies together or do you just like sit alone together listening to numbers stations or something?
Like, what does your friendship with Ted Gunderson look like?
So Sylvia has a lot of pride in her long history of collaboration with the FBI.
And you'll hear her bring it up in her book and in most interviews where she talks about her work with law enforcement.
The skeptical inquirer actually filed a series of requests for FBI files because they wanted to know, did she have any relationship with the Bureau whatsoever?
Did she do anything for them?
And the FBI, the short answer is no.
The FBI has no record of her ever helping any agent on any case.
That doesn't mean they had no record of her, though.
Quote, recently obtained FBI files shatter her insinuation that she had a relationship with federal law enforcement and showed that the only interest the agency had in Brown was investigating her for fraud.
So she was involved with the FBI, but not in a good way.
Yeah.
Oh, Sylvia.
In her book, Sylvia claimed that the interview I quoted from had been conducted by the FBI, but no FBI record exists that she ever spoke with him about the World Trade Center bombings.
The inquirer then filed a FOIA request for any documents or video the agency had about Brown's interviews regarding the attack.
And the Bureau responded, We conducted a search of the central record system.
We were unable to identify the main records responsive to FOIA.
Ultimately, the inquirer concluded there is no documentation released by the FBI to support the claim that Brown conducted any psychic readings for the FBI, either directly or indirectly.
Moreover, Gunderson's name appears nowhere in her FBI file, and the topics in the FBI release do not discuss working with the FBI.
Thus, there is no evidence from the records that Brown was involved with the agency.
That said, she has a criminal record herself.
There's a criminal complaint that gets filed against her in Santa Clara County, California on May 26th of 1992.
And it alleges that Sylvia and her husband at the time, I think this is husband number three, had been selling securities under false pretenses.
And this is really good.
I want to quote from the Santa Clara Chronicle here.
Although telling a couple their $20,000 investment was to be used for immediate operating costs, the complaint stated, the Browns transferred the money to an account for the Nirvana Foundation for Psychic Research.
Just one month later, in April of 1988, the complaint stated they declared bankruptcy in the venture.
So the idea is this is like a gold mine that they're selling shares in, basically.
So it's like a securities fraud scam.
And they're just taking the money and instead of investing it into this mine, they're putting it directly into the foundation and just robbing people.
Per, like during the like the pair's arraignment, the San Francisco or the Chronicle noted, quote, Sylvia Brown claimed to have strong psychic feelings that the mine would pay off, but it doesn't.
And she and her husband, Kinzil Dalzel Brown, and that's where she gets the last name Brown, plead no contest to a felony charge and are made to pay back their victims, right?
So they each get a year of probation and now they're felons.
So that's good.
We got a little gold con in here, you know?
This is kind of a law.
She does a lot of conning of people in banks to fund her foundation, which kind of, I had just said she was starting to see success.
And that's how she writes it.
And most of the articles on her will say that, like, yeah, in the 70s and 80s, she builds a larger and larger business.
The skeptical inquirers reporting makes it look like she probably wasn't ever very successful prior to the late 90s.
She's just stealing money to fund her foundation.
People aren't paying her for her psychic.
She's a total fraud in that regard, right?
We'll talk a little bit more of that.
I do want to note, Sylvia and Kinzel are estranged at the time that they get charged with felonies, but she keeps his name and adds an E to it.
I don't know why.
I just kind of think that's funny.
That's amazing.
So let's talk about those FBI files on Sylvia about her other financial fraud cases because there's a lot of them.
The Bureau describes her as a self-proclaimed psychic and notes that they investigated her starting in the 1980s and the Nirvana Foundation as well for violations of federal law and applying for loans from FDIC institutions in the amount of $1.253 million.
So she is getting more than a million dollars in fake loans for her business.
They know, or well, the loans are real, but she's lying on her loan paperwork.
They note that her fraudulent advice also caused multiple businesses sustained losses.
So she's also getting money for the foundation by giving business advice that's fraudulent.
Most of what she's doing is falsifying financial statements to enhance her net worth and lied that she's worth $2 or $3 million when she's not worth anything close to that to get these hundreds of thousands of dollars and eventually well over a million dollars in loans.
The FBI notes that her loan proceeds went to support an extravagant lifestyle, and they have her dead to rights and don't prosecute because the U.S. attorney decides there's insufficient evidence of criminal intent.
Basically, we know she got all this money and we know she lied on her loan applications, but she may have believed the business could work.
Oh, gosh.
This goes back to that.
I feel like she believes the things she's saying.
Right.
Right.
And apparently convinced a U.S. attorney of that as well.
Wow.
Now, Cal, you know who never commits financial crime?
Kermit the frog.
Well, that is probably the case.
Yeah.
I have trouble imagining him getting away with it.
Although it is fun to think of Kermit on the witness stand and some like reading back his like text to Miss Piggy about embezzling money.
Oh, no.
I can't do a good Kermit voice otherwise.
I thought it was more Patrick Mahomes than Kermit, but yeah.
It was, it was.
Well, think about Kermit the Frog as we go to ads.
Kermit the Frog vs Financial Crime00:03:20
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 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 that, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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.
Sherry 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 Laurie 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.
Unsolved Murders and Skeptical Inquirer00:15:20
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
We're back.
Call, are you familiar with the theory that Kermit caused 9-11?
No, but I'm here for it, please.
Oh, it's fucking crazy.
So in the Muppet movie that comes out in like 2001, it's like basically Muppet, it's a Wonderful Life, where Kermit wonders like, what would happen if I'd never been born?
And in like the normal Muppet world before, it's like New York after 9-11, right?
There's no Twin Towers.
But in the version, when he like sees life if he'd never been born, the Twin Towers are back.
No.
So something about Kermit's life caused 9-11.
No.
It's fucking crazy.
Oh my gosh.
All right, I got it.
I'm a big Muppets fan, so I need to go look at this.
I love it too.
Yeah, Kermit 9-11 should bring you most of what you need to know.
Jeez, there goes my weekend.
Thanks.
So, weirdly enough, it's only after her 1993 no contest plea to a felony that Sylvia Brown gains national fame and renown.
If you look at like what and what it looks like from what the skeptical inquirer uncovered is that she's kind of a middling psychic, and most of her money and its success comes from fraud until she starts getting on real TV.
She's on this local channel for a while, but it's when she hits like national television that she becomes a big deal.
Now, she does continue.
It's also weird to me after her fraud conviction, she keeps working with police departments.
There are some who hire her.
In 1997, the Thibodeau, Louisiana Police Department pays her $400 to consult on the murder of a priest.
So this priest has been killed, and Sylvia is brought in.
She tells the authorities the priest was killed by a young mulatto homosexual who was enraged by the priest's rejection of his advances.
So basically, she blames it on a non-white person who was gay who hit on this priest and then murdered him out of rage.
And she said that someone with the street name of King had had gang people do the murder, which I'm sure is also more racism, right?
Now, this murder is eventually solved.
10 years later, the culprit, Derek Adomes, had murdered the priest in a robbery gone bad.
Nothing, no gay stuff, no gangs, just a guy who killed another dude in a robbery.
Happens all the time.
Do you guys do merch for this pod?
We have in the past.
You got a suggestion?
Yeah, young mulatto homosexual is an amazing t-shirt.
I would buy this t-shirt.
That's a solid performer name.
Yeah.
Or a good band name.
Or a good band name.
So there's no real evidence to suggest that she had any kind of extensive, long-lasting relationship with law enforcement.
Again, Thibodeau hires her once, but not again because they waste their money on her.
And there's certainly no evidence that she catches any bad guys.
But she sure starts claiming that she had once she gets famous due to her appearances on the Montel Williams show.
As best as I can tell, the relationship starts in 1990 because Montel wants to do a Halloween episode about the haunting of the Queen Mary, which is like this boat.
Sophie, it's like a boat you can tour that's like off of Long Beach, right?
Yeah.
Right.
And, you know, it's an older boat.
There's, I think, supposed to be ghost on it.
So she, she gets brought in.
They're like, we need a psychic.
Montel's people are like, we want a psychic for this episode.
They bring in Sylvia.
She does a really good job on the episode because she knows how to entertain an audience.
And Montel's like, you're great.
They hit it off and he keeps having her on, right?
It's just a good match.
Montel provides her with instant fame and legitimacy, treating her with casual deference and opening her up to a whole world of major entertainment figures.
She does a whole series about angels on Montel's show that's so successful.
Larry King rings her on his show to do the same thing.
They're talking about how to have callers tell stories about how angels saved their lives.
And she'll explain how angels really work, right?
It's very 90s, but like she is, you know, by the time you're on Montel and Larry King, you're pretty prominent, right?
It doesn't get a lot bigger than that.
You're borderline a household name, if not.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Quote: No matter the situation, the basic experience was always the same.
During a crisis, a stranger arrived, seemingly out of nowhere, had a profound impact on the crisis, carrying a drowning woman out of the sea and delivering her safely to the beach, removing a trapped driver from a badly damaged car moments before it caught fire, laying hands on the forehead of a feverish child in the hospital seconds before the fever coincidentally broke and then disappearing before anyone could find out who they were and thanked them.
And these are the angel stories people tell.
And I get why people believe in this.
As someone who's had like loved ones just like die tragically and not had an angel, it does kind of render like, well, why, why don't the angels help everybody?
Yeah.
Like, why don't the angels really seem to like to help people like affluent kids in like Western hospitals and not like kids with like gut worms in the sub-Saharan Africa?
It's weird the angels don't like save them, huh?
Just the kids in Nice Hospital.
Okay.
So Sylvia starts writing books.
I mean, she had been for a while writing books, but they start to become bestsellers.
She claims she has more than 20 New York Times bestsellers.
And I think this is pretty much accurate.
She has her books sell very well.
She makes a shitload of money.
And this is all after the Montel stuff?
Yep.
All after the Montel stuff.
This is all in the late 90s, right?
In 1998, she co-writes the book Adventures of a Psychic with Antoinette May, in which she blames her 1988 bankruptcy on her husband Kinzel's attempts to hide his criminal behavior.
She does not acknowledge being convicted of a felony for gold mine fraud.
Per the Chronicle, she laments that while ignorant people say, Well, if you're so psychic, why didn't you blank?
The answer she says is that I'm not psychic about myself.
So she is consistent about that.
But like, that doesn't answer the question of why did you defraud people for a fake gold mine.
Now, despite all these very obvious lies and his history of failed predictions, she's really good on TV.
So she keeps getting invited on Montel's show.
All Sylvia has to do is make sure that every word out of her mouth is a lie, per the skeptical inquirer.
In her November 2004 appearance on the Montel Williams show, Brown said, I remember when I was working on the Bundy case, talking about Ted Bundy, outside of this offhand comment, there's no evidence to affirm that Brown worked on a Bundy case, much less the case of serial killer Ted Bundy, whose capture was not connected to a psychic.
So she'll just start dropping this.
Whenever a famous murder or crime or terrorist actually says, oh, I helped on that.
I consulted.
I can't talk about it.
But there's literally no evidence to support that claim.
Whatsoever.
Cool.
No.
We started these episodes by talking about the case of Amanda Berry, who was abducted in 2003 and whose mother in 2004 consulted with Sylvia on the Montel Williams show and got a very bad reading.
As I noted, she's devastated by this.
She returns home and gives away her father's or her daughter's things, takes down the pictures.
And it's very sad, but what's interesting to me about this is that Amanda Berry's mom is actually responsible for the only verified contact with the FBI that Sylvia ever had.
Per the Cleveland plane dealer, at Miller's request, FBI agents investigating Amanda's disappearance met with Miller after the show to discuss Brown's other psychic views on the case.
Special Agent Kelly Liberty said, Brown said she envisioned Amanda's jacket in a dumpster with DNA on it.
So she likes tells them, the psychic told me that my daughter's jacket was in a dumpster and it was covered in blood.
And the FBI is like, okay, we'll look into it.
That's her only real connection to the FBI.
Wow.
That's the only one that there actually is.
Now, when the real abductor was caught, most people would be ashamed.
Brown took a victory lap, even as the media rightly lambasted her for wrongly declaring a woman dead.
Because, well, here's the thing.
Sylvia had gotten the fact that she was dead wrong, obviously.
But she was right about who did the crime because she predicted that Amanda was abducted by a sort of Cuban-looking man.
Oh, maybe 21 or 22.
Now, the actual culprit was first off born in Puerto Rico.
Not to be.
And second, was in his 40s.
Not 21 or 22.
Yeah, just wrong.
She also described him as short and he was of average height.
She's wrong about everything.
In a statement posted to her Facebook page following Barry's dramatic escape, Brown acknowledged that she'd been wrong about her death, writing, For more than 50 years as a spiritual guide and psychic, when called upon to either help authorities with missing persons' cases or to help families with questions about their loved ones, I have been more right than wrong.
If there was ever a time to be grateful and relieved for being mistaken, this is that time.
Only God is right all the time.
Okay.
All right.
All right.
Okay.
She's got a little something.
She's got a little like suburban mom PR going.
Right.
I feel like, honestly, the version of this today would be like, oh, she's not alive.
That's a fake.
You know, the government planted her or something.
Like you, like, our modern grifters can't even admit to being that wrong.
It's weird how refreshing it is that she at least acknowledged reality.
Yeah, good point.
So this is not her only fuck up.
In 2003, Brown gives a reading on Montel yet again, this time about the 2001 disappearance of Jerry Chusney Jr.
She told that man's sister that Chusney had been hit on the head, choked, and thrown into a river, and added that he'd been killed because he saw something he shouldn't.
In 2010, that man's roommates were charged with shooting him and hiding his body over a drug debt.
He was buried in the woods.
Again, wrong about every detail in the case.
In 2005, she gave a reading on Montel to Tamara Ivey, the mother of a murder victim named Dustin.
She blamed a teenage boy and a young dark-haired woman, one of whom was a sexual predator and had used a rock to kill Ivy.
Then she promised the case would be solved soon.
There is no evidence that Dustin was sexually abused.
Police ultimately charged his brother for the murder, although his brother was found not guilty at trial.
So the case is still unsolved, and she says it would be solved quickly.
So again, wrong.
Wrong, wrong.
That same year, per the skeptical inquirer.
Sylvia Brown's November 30th, 2005 reading for Samantha Mater, mother of Christopher Mader, had a much clearer outcome.
Brown gave the mother a name, which was again censored, and claimed Christopher's murder stemmed from the killer not liking the food at the bar he worked at.
Then later, the killer saw him passing by and shot him.
Brown also told the mother to start looking where he ate breakfast.
Matthew Correll and Sean Myers were charged with the murder, and Coral was found guilty and Myers pled guilty in 2012.
The two had attempted to rob Mater.
Again, totally fucking wrong.
Perhaps her most devastating fuck-up was in 2002.
An 11-year-old boy, Sean Hornbeck, went missing while riding his bike.
Sean's parents went on the Montel Williams show and Sylvia told them their son was dead and that his body would be found buried beneath two boulders.
Per an article on Grunge.
Fortunately, not everyone believed her.
When a boy named Ben Ownby went missing in 2007, journalist Michelle McNamara, who would later be credited for helping to identify the Golden State killer, connected Hornbeck and Ownby based on physical similarities and their ages when abducted.
Sure enough, it was McNamara who was right.
When Ownby was found by law enforcement four days after his disappearance, they were shocked to find Hornbeck was still two.
He was still fucking alive.
She did it again.
She was wrong about another person that she declared dead to their family.
It's great that he was alive.
It's great that he was alive.
Thank fucking God.
And I'm glad that there was like an air of disbelief.
Yeah.
Hornbeck's father later told CNN, hearing Brown's prediction was one of the hardest things we've ever had to hear.
And that stuck with The Guardian's John Ronson.
So the same year, 2007, he booked himself on a brown-led cruise and got an interview.
When he asked her what happened, she claimed she had focused on three missing children.
Two were dead.
And I think what I did was I got my wires crossed.
There was a blonde and two boys who are dead.
I think I picked the wrong kid.
Still, her ex-husband, Gary Dufran, condemned her, saying the damage she does to unsuspecting people in crisis situations is just atrocious.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Clearly.
Jeez.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's all pretty bleak.
And there's a lot of these that we could go through.
Like, there's, there's so many of these different like cases.
The skeptical inquirer has like a whole list of them.
And even in the cases where she's kind of right, we're like, she got the murder, the fact that someone was murdered right.
And more or less the cause.
She's always wrong about where the body is, what happened to it, all that stuff.
Now, Sylvia doesn't limit her predictions to crimes or the personal lives of her clients either.
In her 2005 book, Prophecy, Sylvia wrote that after Pope John Paul II passes, there will only be one more elected pope and wrote, he will be succeeded by what is essentially a triumvirate of popes.
That's not what happened.
I don't have to bust that myth.
We all live through it.
We're several popes down now.
We've been going through popes left and right.
You know, still, it sounds fun having three popes, but not yet.
But a pope of Palooza.
Yep.
In 2008, she wrote a book called End of Days, in which she predicted there would be a manned mission to Mars in 2012.
And in 2011, she predicted Mitt Romney would defeat Barack Obama in that next year's presidential election.
All wrong.
In her later years, Sylvia attracted increasing criticism for being wrong about everything, but she stayed on Telvi and TV until late in her life and continued to give $850 readings to thousands of customers who trusted her implicitly.
On her website, she claimed an accuracy rate of between 87 and 90%.
A 2010 analysis of 115 predictions she made on the Montel Williams show, done by the Skeptical Inquirer, rated her success as roughly 0%.
To really make that point for you, Cal, Sylvia predicts her own death.
In 2003, on the Larry King show, she tells Larry that she would die on peacefully at age 88.
She actually dies 11 years earlier, age 77 on November 20th, 2013.
Wrong right up to the end.
Girl.
Whoa.
Yeah.
That is quite the roller coaster.
Yeah.
I knew none of this.
I knew who she was and I knew none of this.
Yeah.
It's so funny that like you can really just be wrong constantly as long as you've got a fan base and it's okay.
Like they'll, they'll back you up, you know?
Like she never loses the core of her support despite how wrong she's.
I guess it's a prediction for where we are today, like politically and in everything else.
Why We Want to Believe00:05:18
There's a massive desire that we have to want to believe things.
Yeah.
So I can, I can somewhat empathize with, I mean, people who want to believe something.
Yeah.
Also, can we just acknowledge, are you really?
This is not a call out to a parent who's desperate to find their kid, obviously.
But like, are we really thinking that the Montel Williams show is the apex of how we're solving scientific crimes?
Crimes?
That's our, that's what we're all elections.
And I think you're right on the money, Call, in that, like, it's everyone is to blame the viewers, the people on the show, Montel, Sylvia, but the parent.
Because you can't, like, the parents can't be expected to be sane when their kids have been kidnapped.
Of course.
Did you see that documentary on the Jerry Springer show?
Yes.
No, it's fantastic.
It's worth a watch.
It's very similar to a lot of, like, peeling back the curtain on that just makes me think, you know, I don't know anything about how the Montel Williams show worked, but obviously it's a TV show.
So to your point earlier, Robert, like the, it's about entertaining people, period.
Right.
More than anything else.
And Springer was, you know, the sort of most egregious version of that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's, it's, I mean, it really is like pulling back an unfortunately like a dark curtain on this part of my childhood that I had never really analyzed before.
Yeah, there's psychics on TV and they read PSF.
And it's like, no, no, no, it could be pretty harmful too.
Sometimes they also defraud banks, which I have less of a problem with.
That's not my primary issue with her.
Well, Cal, you want to plug anything?
Oh, sorry.
No, go ahead, good.
Oh, I was just asking if you had anything to plug at the end here because we're coming to the end.
I would love to plug my podcast, which is not about psychics.
It's called Here We Go Again.
And we look at topics through pop culture and politics, past, present, and future of the specific topic and hopefully leave the audience with feeling a little smarter about what you learned and a little more hopeful about how you plug into that particular issue.
Awesome.
Well, hopeful sounds good right about now.
So check that out.
Thank you, Cal, for coming on the show.
Thank you all for this.
Thank you for having me.
That's going to be it for us today.
Go away now.
Listen to something else.
Bye.
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