Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, look at the time. It's behind the
Speaker 2: Bastards forty five. It's actually two eleven PM, otherwise known
Speaker 2: as eight am in the morning for me, because I
Speaker 2: let my sleep schedule get disastrously disordered and it is
Speaker 2: slowly destroying me and my life. But you know who
Speaker 2: it's not destroying is our wonderful guest for these episodes,
Speaker 2: Cowpen col How are you doing.
Speaker 3: I'm doing well. I was gonna make a joke about
Speaker 3: just perpetually being awake, but I had no I had
Speaker 3: no good punchline. I'm good. I am awake, more of
Speaker 3: a more of a morning person, but very excited to
Speaker 3: be here.
Speaker 4: I was.
Speaker 3: I was just telling you in the before we came on,
Speaker 3: what a fin I am and so especially remember, can
Speaker 3: we talk about Sylvia's voice. Sorry, I'm just jumping the.
Speaker 2: Gun and we'll be hearing more of it, don't you
Speaker 2: wear Okay, Okay, yeah, but no, I'm excited to be here,
Speaker 2: so thank you for thank you for having me. Yeah,
Speaker 2: let's put a pick, because I do want I do
Speaker 2: want to hear what you have to say about her voice.
Speaker 2: But let's give the listeners like a minute or two
Speaker 2: of it, which they're going to get in a minute,
Speaker 2: and then we can really we'll have something to sink
Speaker 2: our collective teeth into.
Speaker 1: We'll dive in. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So, in case you're coming into part two of this
Speaker 2: episode like a maniac, we're talking about Sylvia Brown, who
Speaker 2: is not named Sylvia Brown yet because she hasn't married
Speaker 2: the guy that she takes the last name from, but
Speaker 2: we're gonna call her Sylvia Brown anyway for the sake
Speaker 2: of making this simpler. She is a psychic who has
Speaker 2: found out that if you have are sick or Diana War,
Speaker 2: that's because you chose to do that in a past life.
Speaker 2: She's gotten out of her first marriage to an abusive cop.
Speaker 2: She's moved to California. She has started a psychic foundation
Speaker 2: where she is working to create her own new religion.
Speaker 2: So by nineteen seventy five, things are really starting to
Speaker 2: come together for Sylvia. She's getting more and more famous.
Speaker 2: She's getting paid to speak at events by local organizations
Speaker 2: in southern California. And usually what this means is like
Speaker 2: an Elks club or something well like entertainment, and they'll
Speaker 2: channel her right, or she'll channel Francine right, so she'll
Speaker 2: she'll bring in and they'll get to ask Francine questions
Speaker 2: about aliens or the other side or whatnot. Right, Like
Speaker 2: it's a game pick, you know, yeah, it could be fun.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 2: This isn't evil. This is just a hoot. It's it's
Speaker 2: the stuff that comes later that gets to be evil.
Speaker 2: This is also the period where she claims she starts
Speaker 2: working as a pro bono consultant for cops and quote
Speaker 2: several medical and psychiatric professionals that she knew. Now, this
Speaker 2: is one thing that's interesting to me about this book.
Speaker 2: It tells you what a different era Sylvia came from.
Speaker 2: Where she has to reiterate several times, I never tell
Speaker 2: anyone to come to me first. I'm always only brought
Speaker 2: in if they've already consulted a medical professional or already
Speaker 2: talked to the police and that didn't work. I'm just
Speaker 2: there to help if they've already tried traditional methods. Never
Speaker 2: go to a psychic before you go to a doctor,
Speaker 2: which is like a responsible thing to say, and she
Speaker 2: would absolutely not be saying if she were like doing
Speaker 2: this grift today. Right like today you can just do
Speaker 2: away with doctors altogether. It's just interesting to me how
Speaker 2: even back in her day, you had to be like, obviously,
Speaker 2: go to a doctor first. It's kind of a even
Speaker 2: the psychics just doctors less than they used to.
Speaker 3: My question about this is why not go to you first?
Speaker 3: Like the cost both in the actual what you're paying
Speaker 3: the doctor and the time you got to take off work.
Speaker 3: And if she's so great and you can solve something
Speaker 3: in twenty seconds, why would we not go to you first.
Speaker 2: I you know, logically, you're right, it does make no sense.
Speaker 2: If she's a legitimate psychic, she shouldn't be saying that, right.
Speaker 2: I think it's just that that was too much, Like
Speaker 2: it was too crazy to tell people to do that.
Speaker 2: In the eighties. People have been like, you tell people
Speaker 2: not to go to the doctor. That's fucked up, right, Oh,
Speaker 2: Like yeah, I think the disinfo ecosystem has just advanced
Speaker 2: so much now. But you're right, like, if she's a
Speaker 2: real psychic, you would want to go to her before
Speaker 2: a doctor, because doctors fuck up all the time, and
Speaker 2: God doesn't, right, Like the spirit will know where your humor? Yeah, right,
Speaker 2: So yeah, she's she's consulting and whatnot with all sorts
Speaker 2: of agencies. So she claims and she also starts to
Speaker 2: show up on television. Right this is when the beginning
Speaker 2: of her TV career starts, and she gets asked to
Speaker 2: come to San Francisco, where she will for the next decade,
Speaker 2: like almost twenty years, will be a semi regular guest
Speaker 2: on the local TV show People Are Talking. This is
Speaker 2: like a San Francisco like local access show or something
Speaker 2: like that. And finding episodes of local TV shows from
Speaker 2: the seventies is very hard. There's a ton of lost
Speaker 2: media for that era, which is actually really unfortunate, Like
Speaker 2: there's it's a there are efforts to archive a lot
Speaker 2: of that stuff that I'm very supportive of because it's
Speaker 2: a serious problem. That's so much of very important America
Speaker 2: like culture has been lost from that era. So I
Speaker 2: can't show you her appearances on People Are Talking from
Speaker 2: the seventies. I just haven't found any. But I did
Speaker 2: find a nineteen ninety one episode of People Are Talking
Speaker 2: with Sylvia Brown, and I think it's fair to assume
Speaker 2: that this is similar to the stuff she would have
Speaker 2: been doing in the seventies. In the eighties, so we're
Speaker 2: still in the seventies. I'm going to play this clip
Speaker 2: from the nineties because I want you guys to get
Speaker 2: an understanding of like what her TV appearances are like
Speaker 2: in the early stage of her career, right, I hope
Speaker 2: that makes some sense.
Speaker 3: And this was this is twenty years into her doing
Speaker 3: this show.
Speaker 2: She's she's well, she starts in like the late seventies.
Speaker 2: She's been doing it for like a dec a little
Speaker 2: over a decade. She'll be on the show off and
Speaker 2: on I think for like twenty years. Right, this is
Speaker 2: about a decade into her run something like that. And
Speaker 2: before you ask, since this is from nineteen ninety one, yes,
Speaker 2: if you can't see, all of the women in this
Speaker 2: clip are wearing it thick shoulder pads and everyone's hair
Speaker 2: looks terrible, just terrible, terrible hair.
Speaker 1: The age of big earrings as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I love the whale eye ball ear rings.
Speaker 2: It's beautiful. Yeah, Sylvia looks incredible. She's got, as Kal said,
Speaker 2: earrings that looked like whale eve rouse. So the episode
Speaker 2: starts with a very low stake story, right, some guy
Speaker 2: wanted to buy Sylvia is talking about a thing that
Speaker 2: had happened previously where some guy paid her to consult
Speaker 2: because he was going to buy an apartment with his wife,
Speaker 2: and he wasn't sure about it, so he asked Sylvia
Speaker 2: it was a good idea, and she said, no, don't
Speaker 2: buy the apartment. It's a horrible idea. And then sometime
Speaker 2: later that guy's wife calls in and leaves a voice
Speaker 2: message thanking Sylvia for telling them not to buy the
Speaker 2: apartment because of what had happened in it. And here's
Speaker 2: that voicemail. And by the way, I do think the
Speaker 2: person leaving the voicemail is intoxicated, but you can make
Speaker 2: your own opinions up on that.
Speaker 4: People that know me. I really don't beat around the
Speaker 4: bush that much. I probably was a little bit nicer
Speaker 4: than that, truthfully, but I said it's a bad idea,
Speaker 4: it's negative. There's something wrong with it. I feel all
Speaker 4: kinds of negative energy around it. And I came on
Speaker 4: very strong about it.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 6: He then called our producer Kathy Churmmel and left a
Speaker 6: message on her answering machine, and this is the message
Speaker 6: he left after he talked to Sylvia.
Speaker 5: It's Terry, It's I can see it thirty your time.
Speaker 5: I just wanted to tell you that the apartment that
Speaker 5: Eric Clapton's kids fell out of the window I don't
Speaker 5: know if you've heard he was killed the apartment that Billy,
Speaker 5: you know and I have been looking at forever that
Speaker 5: he just lost today that someone else bought. So Billy
Speaker 5: calls and says, maybe your psychic's right after all, because
Speaker 5: your psychic said there are major problems with that apartment.
Speaker 5: So for what it's worth, he's a big believer again
Speaker 5: in your psychic. Can you believe that anyway? I thought
Speaker 5: you'd want to know.
Speaker 3: Isn't that something?
Speaker 1: Wow?
Speaker 2: First off, I do think that lady's struck. But second,
Speaker 2: that's a true story. Eric Clapton's son did die falling
Speaker 2: out of a window in a New York City apartment building.
Speaker 2: That's what she's claiming is that, like the apartment they
Speaker 2: were going to buy was in the building that Eric
Speaker 2: Clapton's sun fell out of, which, like I mean, first,
Speaker 2: that's a tragedy obviously it's horrible, but also doesn't mean
Speaker 2: that anything was wrong with his apartment. He wasn't buying
Speaker 2: Eric Clapton's apartment, and the child didn't die because the
Speaker 2: apartment was bad. The window was left open while it
Speaker 2: was being cleaned, and the kid hadn't realized and he
Speaker 2: like ran towards what he thought was a closed plateglass
Speaker 2: window to like put his face against it or something,
Speaker 2: and he fell over the side. Like it's a really
Speaker 2: sad story. But again, there's nothing wrong with the apartment,
Speaker 2: Like they wouldn't have died falling out of the apartment window. Right,
Speaker 2: It's like again, whatever, it's just there's this And I
Speaker 2: have no idea at this point how much of this
Speaker 2: is even manufactured, Like if that was like an completely
Speaker 2: faked story because Eric Clapton's son dying was so in
Speaker 2: the news. Oh, it's kind of unclear to me the producers.
Speaker 3: Would they fact check calls that came in. We don't know.
Speaker 2: No, No, I don't know that they would. But also,
Speaker 2: this is like a show like it's about entertainment, they're not, yeah, purport,
Speaker 2: So I don't actually know what's going on here. That said,
Speaker 2: as we established last episode, Sylvia has a history of
Speaker 2: deciding homes are cursed and not wanting to.
Speaker 5: Be in them.
Speaker 2: So I can believe this just happened to be the
Speaker 2: same apartment Eric Clapton lived in. Right, So the next
Speaker 2: question here they go to break and when they come back,
Speaker 2: the hosts note that they're having weird electrical issues with
Speaker 2: the broadcast, which always seems to happen when Sylvia comes
Speaker 2: by and she's like, oh, every time I'm on TV,
Speaker 2: there's electrical issues somewhere. You know. It's the spirits. The
Speaker 2: ghosts mess with the equipment. The recording in the video
Speaker 2: looks pretty clear to me from recording from nineteen ninety one,
Speaker 2: but who knows. Next, they take questions from the audience,
Speaker 2: so she's being asked, now, this is a series of
Speaker 2: questions about celebrity marriages and celebrities trying to have kids
Speaker 2: and whether or not their relationships work out, and she
Speaker 2: gets a couple right. She's first asked if Maury Povich
Speaker 2: and Connie Chung are going to have a child together,
Speaker 2: and she says no, which we will call partially correct.
Speaker 2: The couple had fertility issues and we're not able to
Speaker 2: conceive together, But they did adopt a child not long
Speaker 2: after this broadcast, so partially we'll give her like a
Speaker 2: half score on that one. Right after that, they ask
Speaker 2: about Bruce Willis and Demi Moore's second child. Now, she
Speaker 2: does correctly predict that their second child will be a daughter,
Speaker 2: which is like a fifty to fifty guess, but okay,
Speaker 2: we'll give her that one, right, she's right about this.
Speaker 2: The next one she's asked about is Roseanne bar and
Speaker 2: Tom Arnold, and they were at the time attempting to
Speaker 2: have a child through artificial insemination, and she goes on
Speaker 2: a real rant here. Her whole mood changes because she
Speaker 2: thinks God hates artificial insemination. I can't think of anything worse.
Speaker 2: She is so angry at the fact that they are
Speaker 2: getting having artificial incemination. And there's also some weird like
Speaker 2: fat shaving parts of it too, because when they talk
Speaker 2: about do you think they'll have a kid? Like, the
Speaker 2: audience starts to laugh as they show pictures of Tom
Speaker 2: Arnold and Roseanne Barr, and I think they're just like
Speaker 2: laughing at the fact that they're like heavier people, right,
Speaker 2: Like it's shitty, it's kind of gross. But I guess
Speaker 2: TV in nineteen ninety one. So the last questions he
Speaker 2: asks about and it is weird to me that she's
Speaker 2: so negative about IVF. But the next question we get
Speaker 2: to is my favorite, because she's asked about Tom Cruise
Speaker 2: and Nicole Kidman, who had recently gotten together in nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety one. And she's asked, like, is this relationship going
Speaker 2: to last? And here's what she says.
Speaker 6: How about Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.
Speaker 4: They're job, they're cute, and I think that they're fun
Speaker 4: for each other. And I think they're going to make it.
Speaker 4: And I'll tell you why, because she's a real strong woman,
Speaker 4: and I think he needs a strong woman. And I
Speaker 4: think that's why it's going to be good, because she's
Speaker 4: got the strength. Because he's got that sort of charming
Speaker 4: little boy way about him. He really does. And I
Speaker 4: think she's good for him, and I think she'll whip
Speaker 4: him into.
Speaker 2: Line that one did not correct. Yeah, they got divorced
Speaker 2: in two thousand and one, siting and reconcilable differences. You know,
Speaker 2: when you look at this what you're seeing here, First off,
Speaker 2: this is a great situation to be a TV psych again,
Speaker 2: because it's a bunch of fifty to fifty guesses, right, sure,
Speaker 2: and your accuracy is pretty good. First off, if you're
Speaker 2: being asked, will these celebrities who are already famous for
Speaker 2: having a tumultuous relationship, which was the case with a
Speaker 2: lot of these relationships, she's asked her, they're going to
Speaker 2: stay together? It's a pretty good bet to be like, well,
Speaker 2: probably not right because like they're already having a bunch
Speaker 2: of problems. Also the same thing with like they've had
Speaker 2: one daughter, do you think their next child will be
Speaker 2: a daughter? Fifty to fifty shot, pretty easy guess to
Speaker 2: get it right. But in nineteen ninety one, Krus and
Speaker 2: Kidman had just gotten married. They had not had any
Speaker 2: sort there wasn't anything in the media about the relationship
Speaker 2: having like problems yet right every all the press about
Speaker 2: them was positive. So Sylvia guessed that they were going
Speaker 2: to last, like she's not. It just really makes the
Speaker 2: case of what she's doing here. She can get it
Speaker 2: right when it's kind of a thing anyone could guess, well,
Speaker 2: but when there's less to go on, she's going to
Speaker 2: be wrong because she's just she's just blindly guessing.
Speaker 3: You know, yes, this is it's such a fifty to fifty.
Speaker 3: It's a fifty to fifty and you hate I.
Speaker 2: Via right, and yeah, you're really against the itef artificial dissemination.
Speaker 2: God hates it anyway. This episode is from the early nineties,
Speaker 2: but she's doing this stuff like this by like from
Speaker 2: the late seventies up through the eighties, and so we
Speaker 2: can safely assume a lot of her TV appearances during
Speaker 2: that period are kind of similar to this, and she's
Speaker 2: she's a good performer for what that show is, right, Like,
Speaker 2: she's that's why they keep bringing her on. She does
Speaker 2: the job she's being brought on to do. Uh, And
Speaker 2: the hosts of the show know what they're getting out
Speaker 2: of her, right, and they're they're pretty smart about tailoring
Speaker 2: because she likes to talk about metaphysics and aliens and
Speaker 2: dead people. That's more heavy than you want on like
Speaker 2: a daily time you about celebrity marriages and babies. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: So this is kind of her at her most public
Speaker 2: facing like media like like this is like the most
Speaker 2: digestible Sylvia tends to get. She is a hit though.
Speaker 2: She starts doing fairly well enough that she's able to
Speaker 2: rent a larger office and start hiring employees to handle
Speaker 2: her correspondence. She brings in two full time researchers for
Speaker 2: the Neirvada Foundation and even an early computer system because
Speaker 2: they're trying to map out all of the realities of
Speaker 2: the other side, and you know, how they're ranking angels
Speaker 2: and how angels work and trying to figure out the
Speaker 2: science of all of this stuff that she believes. Sylvia
Speaker 2: starts hosting regular hypnosis sessions and psychic readings and begins
Speaker 2: advertising that she can help clients quit smoking, lose weight,
Speaker 2: or fix their life in any number of ways. Sylvia
Speaker 2: says that at first these sessions were just a way
Speaker 2: for her to fund her foundation for psychic research. Quote
Speaker 2: it never occurred to me that these hypnosis sessions would
Speaker 2: contribute far more than money to the foundation and its
Speaker 2: efforts to prove that the spirit survives death. So the
Speaker 2: way these sessions prove that life exists after death is
Speaker 2: that she starts having clients who start telling her about
Speaker 2: their past lives. This begins with a guy named Frank,
Speaker 2: who just he comes in because he wants to lose weight.
Speaker 2: But when you know it, when she puts some down
Speaker 2: and hypnotizes him, he starts talking about quote his life
Speaker 2: in Egypt as a pyramid builder. We're gonna talk about
Speaker 2: Frank the pyramids in a second, but before we continue
Speaker 2: with Frank, we need to make a quick detour to
Speaker 2: the history of past life aggression therapy. This starts like
Speaker 2: the origins of this kind of shit, or in like
Speaker 2: the end of the eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds, you
Speaker 2: get these occultists and scientists in London who are kind
Speaker 2: of like like Sylvia says she's doing, they're trying to
Speaker 2: they set up foundations to try to find evidence of
Speaker 2: life after death. And it'll be a mix at this
Speaker 2: point of like spiritualists and scientists, because they're not that
Speaker 2: different in eighteen ninety, you know, like there's not a
Speaker 2: real strong reason to be like, well, ghosts don't exist
Speaker 2: based on the science of eighteen ninety. It's like an
Speaker 2: arguable point really to a lot of scientists at that time,
Speaker 2: as opposed to I mean, it's still an I guess
Speaker 2: you could say an arguable point now, but a lot
Speaker 2: of mainstream scientists are willing to explore the idea that
Speaker 2: the maybe their spirits right, and maybe there's a way
Speaker 2: that we can like like figure out science typically how
Speaker 2: spirits work. That's very much in vogue at the time.
Speaker 2: In the nineteen thirties, a researcher at Duke University tries
Speaker 2: to systematically study the experiences of people with past lives
Speaker 2: and start documenting them. And then in the mid nineteen fifties,
Speaker 2: Maury Bernstein writes a book titled The Search for Britty Murphy.
Speaker 2: This is a fiction book inspired by a real story
Speaker 2: of a woman named Virginia Tie, an American lady who
Speaker 2: came to believe she was the reincarnation of a nineteenth
Speaker 2: century irishwoman. The book was made into a movie that
Speaker 2: was fairly popular and this Obviously reincarnation is like a
Speaker 2: major aspect of a number of world religions, but this
Speaker 2: book helps popularize the idea in a secular sense for Westerners,
Speaker 2: reincarnation not as part of an existent belief system, but
Speaker 2: as something you can take all a caart and if
Speaker 2: you're a Christian, you can stick it in your Christianity.
Speaker 2: If you believe in psychic powers and something you know
Speaker 2: weirder than that, if you're an occultist or a pagan
Speaker 2: or a Wiccan, you can stick some Like Americans start
Speaker 2: seeing reincarnation of something, I can just grab this, take
Speaker 2: this out of the grab bag of world believes and
Speaker 2: stick it into whatever I already believe.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 2: That kind of starts to really hit in the sixties
Speaker 2: and seventies, and part is a result of this book.
Speaker 2: So by the seventies you get a number of psychologists
Speaker 2: and psychiatrists offering what they call past life regression services,
Speaker 2: where they'll hypnotize or otherwise like put people down and
Speaker 2: to try to bring up their past lives with the
Speaker 2: idea that a lot of psychosomatic illnesses and ailments are
Speaker 2: really caused by If your foot hurts a lot and
Speaker 2: the scientists can't figure out why, the doctor can't figure
Speaker 2: out why, it's probably because in the past life, you
Speaker 2: like lost your leg to a mortar in World War
Speaker 2: One or something like that, or got hit by a horse,
Speaker 2: you know, back on the prairie in the cowboy days,
Speaker 2: and so you got to if you can access that
Speaker 2: past life, and that past life can explain what happened
Speaker 2: to it, you can fix the ailment. That's the idea
Speaker 2: that a lot of these people are going into in
Speaker 2: the seventies, and in nineteen ninety one, the practice is
Speaker 2: pretty close to it's the peak of its popularity in
Speaker 2: the late eighties. So Sylvia is heading down very well
Speaker 2: trod ground when she starts doing this question.
Speaker 1: And I don't I don't know if you mentioned it
Speaker 1: in part one. Do we know what kind of religion,
Speaker 1: if any, she was raised with.
Speaker 2: Yeah, she's raised Catholic. She goes to a Catholic school
Speaker 2: as a girl, and she respects it and she believes
Speaker 2: in God, but she also has notes sure some.
Speaker 1: Of the IVAN because some of the IVF stuff could
Speaker 1: stem from that. Yeah, they're very anti IVF. And yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just interesting. I don't know, it's interesting to see
Speaker 1: like some of the Catholicism bleed into her beliefs here.
Speaker 2: You can even see it in the idea that like, well,
Speaker 2: before we're born, were these fully sentient spirits that pick
Speaker 2: out our entire lives right, Like you can just see
Speaker 2: pieces of that there too.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So back to Frank. This guy wants to lose weight
Speaker 2: and then starts talking about his life as a pyramid builder.
Speaker 2: What Sylvia puts him there? Fry Uh Yeah. Now, Sylvia
Speaker 2: says that the way he talks about hit pyramid building
Speaker 2: is quote so unremarkable and current to him that you
Speaker 2: would have thought he'd stop to see me on his
Speaker 2: lunch break and would be heading straight back to put
Speaker 2: some finishing touches on King Tut's tomb. And this is
Speaker 2: where I got to stop us for the first time,
Speaker 2: because King Tut was not buried in a pyramid. King
Speaker 2: Tut is buried underground simply simply not in a pyramid,
Speaker 2: not at all in a pyramid, the opposite of a pyramid.
Speaker 2: He's in kind of a basement.
Speaker 3: Like now, she could have just picked the one that
Speaker 3: we've all heard of.
Speaker 2: She could have just picked the one that that's exactly right,
Speaker 2: that's exactly right now. I did want to look into
Speaker 2: a couple of things to try to parse out the
Speaker 2: actual history here, because hey, maybe maybe a pyramid builder
Speaker 2: might also make tombs too, but that's also seems to
Speaker 2: be unlikely because Tut died around in the thirteen hundred
Speaker 2: s BC. Pyramid building kicks off in Egypt in the
Speaker 2: twenty six hundreds BC, and it evolves over time, but
Speaker 2: by the seventeen hundreds or so, the practice is in
Speaker 2: pretty steep decline in Egypt. One of the last significant
Speaker 2: pyramids was built for the pharaoh Kinder somewhere around seventeen
Speaker 2: sixty by the time King Tut died. Because of how
Speaker 2: all of the pyramids keep getting burgled, Egyptian woryald here
Speaker 2: being buried underground. So Frank's recollections of pyramid building don't
Speaker 2: bear a lot of resemblance to what we know of
Speaker 2: the practice. For one thing, When she asks him, how
Speaker 2: did you build the pyramids, he says that we had
Speaker 2: anti gravitational devices that we used in their construction, which
Speaker 2: is not how pyramids were built. So he's definitely on
Speaker 2: the we had like alien technology things. And at one
Speaker 2: point when she's down, Sylvia says that Frank lapses into
Speaker 2: what she first describes as a steady stream of fluent Martian.
Speaker 2: She thinks it's Martian, and she records him talking. She says,
Speaker 2: she does this with his permission, I hope so, and
Speaker 2: she sends the tape to a psychology friend at Stanford
Speaker 2: who calls her back and it's like, where did you
Speaker 2: get this tape? And she's like, what do you mean?
Speaker 2: This was just one of my patients. And he's like,
Speaker 2: those nonsense syllables you said you heard that was a
Speaker 2: fluent monologue in an obscure seventh century BC, a Syrian
Speaker 2: dialect that would have been common among pyramid builders. So
Speaker 2: now I got to look into this. First off, the.
Speaker 3: Research you had to do as you were reading this, geez.
Speaker 2: You got do way more research to bust the line.
Speaker 1: Were you were you on a plane or mid Marti
Speaker 1: Gras when this was happening too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm doing this during Marti Gras. Look at the cigarettes. Yeah,
Speaker 2: because and the Assyrians did build ziggorots, which are different
Speaker 2: from Egyptian pyramids, but close enough that I guess you
Speaker 2: could call you call yourself a pyramid builder. However, there's
Speaker 2: not like a dialect of Assyrian. I found no evidence
Speaker 2: that there was like a dialect that pyramid builders would
Speaker 2: have used, because these were generally like public projects and
Speaker 2: also like you would have a lot of like artisans
Speaker 2: who get brought into the work on these projects, but
Speaker 2: they had other skills. There's not like a language that
Speaker 2: the pyramid guys use.
Speaker 3: Was there a citation of who at Stanford this person was?
Speaker 2: No, no, no, she didn't even say a professor. She
Speaker 2: just says a psychology friend. Also, I don't trust that
Speaker 2: you're a psychology friend at Stanford knows the how is he?
Speaker 2: Who's he doing? Is he playing it to the Assyrian guy?
Speaker 2: I guess let's just take it.
Speaker 3: Over to the This could be a little tighter of
Speaker 3: a story, this story on her behalf. I have editorial
Speaker 3: notes for her.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, you can zip this up a little bit tighter. Cylvia.
Speaker 2: So the next several pages of her autobiography are just
Speaker 2: like a list of past life regressions that she does,
Speaker 2: and she all the different illnesses she cures by finding
Speaker 2: out people's past lives. So, since this is working so well.
Speaker 3: For a second of a question, does she ever mention?
Speaker 3: I think one of the things I think is so
Speaker 3: interesting when whatever I've read about things like this is that,
Speaker 3: like almost nobody seems to break gender with their past lives.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like interesting, huh?
Speaker 3: Is there any example of like one of her patients,
Speaker 3: It's like, oh, yes, when I was a he's a dude,
Speaker 3: and he's like when I was a fourteen year old
Speaker 3: girl back in Mollie. Is there any anybody ever, anybody
Speaker 3: in this book who breaks gender and her patients.
Speaker 2: I haven't. I don't remember perfectly, but everyone I remember
Speaker 2: their past lives are the same gender as their current life.
Speaker 3: Oh interesting, Okay, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Now what I will say cal that that did interest me.
Speaker 2: About the past lives of her patients, A lot of
Speaker 2: them were like commoners. Normally you get a lot of
Speaker 2: past lives like oh, everybody was like a king. Huh,
Speaker 2: everybody's like a great warrior. This guy's like I built
Speaker 2: pyramids or whatever. It's just like a dude, a laborer.
Speaker 2: And you actually do get a weird amount of that
Speaker 2: with Sylvia's, which I kind of like, oh, that's an
Speaker 2: interesting spin on the grift, Like a lot of is
Speaker 2: you just like normal pastime jobs. Sylvia, however, does not
Speaker 2: have normal past lives, because she starts interrogating her own
Speaker 2: and she comes to the conclusion that quote, I'd once
Speaker 2: been the most beautiful high priestess in all of Africa,
Speaker 2: and that in a later life, I'd been the first
Speaker 2: Eskimo to use shoelaces. Now, I don't know how much
Speaker 2: debunking I need to do, Like Africa has never been
Speaker 2: one political entity, like a priestess of what. There's a
Speaker 2: bunch of religions that have exist on that continent, so
Speaker 2: many of them over history, high priestess of what, most beautiful? Who,
Speaker 2: who decided that, who voted on it? Like, and then
Speaker 2: the whole thing about fucking shit. First off, Eskimo is
Speaker 2: like a slur. It's a colonial slur that generally refers
Speaker 2: to There's a couple of different groups of people that
Speaker 2: it refers to, like the Inuit and the upiic, but
Speaker 2: it's not a term that you would have used for yourself.
Speaker 2: If that was your past life, you wouldn't call yourself
Speaker 2: in the nineties. Even in the nineties, we knew that
Speaker 2: uh I did look in to win these like those
Speaker 2: different peoples had shoelace developed shoelaces just to.
Speaker 3: See in your research, Yes, go.
Speaker 2: On, I had, I had to know. I don't think
Speaker 2: we don't know when shoelaces first came into being, but
Speaker 2: the peoples who eventually wound like who like wound up
Speaker 2: in that part of the world probably took shoelaces with
Speaker 2: them because we've had the concept for very Oh see,
Speaker 2: the ice man had shoelaces. And there's actually I think
Speaker 2: the oldest shoelaces we've ever found were in our Menian
Speaker 2: or someone buried in Armenia. I don't know if they
Speaker 2: were Armenian her because people's move we had shoelaces. It's
Speaker 2: a lot for a long time. I don't think there
Speaker 2: was a first girl who was like, I've invented shoelaces.
Speaker 3: I really enjoy that she in the section you just read,
Speaker 3: must have smoked such a beautiful little bowl before she
Speaker 3: penned those sentences. Right, She's like, and I had shoelaces,
Speaker 3: and you're sitting here sober, just doing the research on
Speaker 3: when shoelaces made it to Native Alaskan communities.
Speaker 2: Yeah, she kind of seems like they always had them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, is like.
Speaker 1: I'm Helen of Troy, but with shoelaces.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. Okay, this has just researching this has given
Speaker 2: me like a if anyone ever starts talking about past
Speaker 2: lives to me, the first thing to ask is what
Speaker 2: was your name? And then you just look up. Is
Speaker 2: that a name those people had? Or is it a
Speaker 2: Greek name? Speaking of Greek? Our sponsors could be a Greek.
Speaker 2: You don't know. Neither know why, we don't ask, and
Speaker 2: we're back. So Sylvia claims that her relationship with law
Speaker 2: enforcement began in the nineteen seventies, like her professional relationship,
Speaker 2: but she doesn't give any detail. She doesn't talk about
Speaker 2: cases solved, she doesn't say that I talk about specific interactions.
Speaker 2: She just says that she'd been helping and you know,
Speaker 2: the police valued her. But she gives us nothing else
Speaker 2: to go on, and so we don't really get any
Speaker 2: details about how she used her so called psychic powers
Speaker 2: to help solve crimes. Until one day in nineteen ninety three,
Speaker 2: her friend Ted Gunderson, who she describes as an FBI agent.
Speaker 2: Keep that in mind, cal she calls Ted Gunderson, an
Speaker 2: FBI agent, gives her a call. A rider truck filled
Speaker 2: with explosives had just been detonated under the World Trade Center,
Speaker 2: killing six people. And you know what happens a few
Speaker 2: years later as a result of that, it's that attack
Speaker 2: is the three World Trade Center bombing. And so Ted
Speaker 2: Gunderson FBI called Sylvia and is like, we got we
Speaker 2: need your help tracking down the terrorists who did this.
Speaker 2: You know, the FBI can't do this without Sylvia. She writes, quote.
Speaker 2: I'd worked with Ted on other cases, and my respect
Speaker 2: for him wasn't as unparalleled. Whatever I could do to
Speaker 2: help him, if I could help it all, no matter what.
Speaker 2: All he had to do was ask By the time
Speaker 2: he called me, I had read that three of the
Speaker 2: Islamic terrorist bombers had been arrested, and Ted one of
Speaker 2: my psychic input on any others who might be involved.
Speaker 2: I told her there were five, maybe six men involved,
Speaker 2: including the three in custody. Now I got to dig
Speaker 2: into this cal because since and we'll talk about Ted
Speaker 2: in a second, but since a total of six terrorists
Speaker 2: were arrested, Sylvia Clem's victory. Right, I knew they were
Speaker 2: going to be five or six. They arrested six. I'm right.
Speaker 2: Look at how psychic I am. But that's not quite accurate.
Speaker 2: That's not quite an accurate picture of how many people
Speaker 2: were involved in making that bomb. Right, there were six
Speaker 2: guys arrested, but there was a seventh person involved. One
Speaker 2: of the government's key witnesses and they bring these guys
Speaker 2: to trial was an FBI informant, former Egyptian Army officer,
Speaker 2: Emad Salem. With the FBI's help and directions, Salem infiltrated
Speaker 2: the group that bombed the World Trade Center, and he
Speaker 2: built bombs for them and taught them how to build
Speaker 2: bombs using bomb building techniques the FBI gave him. We
Speaker 2: don't talk about this a lot, we probably should. It's
Speaker 2: a pretty big fuck up.
Speaker 5: Yep. Wow.
Speaker 2: For an interview with him in history dot com, Ibrahim
Speaker 2: Elga Brownie invited me and this is uh sorry, this
Speaker 2: is Immad Salem talking about his time infiltrating this group.
Speaker 2: Ibrahim Elga Brownie invited me into his house and blasted
Speaker 2: the radio loud because he was thinking of the FBI
Speaker 2: was monitoring his apartment, and he asked me, can you
Speaker 2: build big bombs? I said, yes, I can. He asked,
Speaker 2: what do you need to build big bombs? Because twelve
Speaker 2: bombs he built twelve pipe bombs for these guys already
Speaker 2: are not really making me happy. I wanted something big.
Speaker 2: I said, I need a detonator, and then I gave
Speaker 2: him some demands. So they switched gears from twelve small
Speaker 2: pipe bombs and a big, massive bomb similar to the
Speaker 2: Oklahoma City bomb. So first, that's a mad the guy
Speaker 2: the FBI sent in to this group saying, well, they
Speaker 2: got the idea to do one big bomb because I
Speaker 2: told them it would work better than twelve pipe bombs,
Speaker 2: which already I would say if I'm a psychic, that
Speaker 2: makes him involved in the creation of this bomb. Now
Speaker 2: what happens next is a little unclear to me, but
Speaker 2: per a nineteen ninety three New York Times article by
Speaker 2: Ralph Blumenthal, it looks like the FBI found out that
Speaker 2: there was a cell of terrorists in New York who
Speaker 2: were working to build a bomb to attack the World
Speaker 2: Trade Center. So they come up with an initial plan
Speaker 2: to infiltrate a mad into the group and have him
Speaker 2: get basically provide them with fake ingredients. So they're going
Speaker 2: to build a real bomb, but the explosives inside it
Speaker 2: are fake. So the mechanics of the bomb would be real,
Speaker 2: but there'd be fake stuff inside of it, so the
Speaker 2: bomb doesn't work when they set it off, and then
Speaker 2: they arrest everybody. Right, that's how you'd think something like
Speaker 2: this should go, right, if you're gonna do this. However,
Speaker 2: that plan was called off at the last minute by
Speaker 2: an FBI supervisor who had a different plan about how
Speaker 2: to use mister Salem, and it's it's unclear what his
Speaker 2: plans were. A lot of this is very murky because
Speaker 2: it's the FBI. Lamb may have had a feud with
Speaker 2: his supervisor. Ultimately he's pulled off the case, and when
Speaker 2: he's not in the group, they succeed in finishing the
Speaker 2: bomb that he'd helped them start building, and they detonated
Speaker 2: in the World Trade Center. It is unclear how much
Speaker 2: Silim actually helped them and how much of the how
Speaker 2: much of what the bomb they used he had had
Speaker 2: a hand and we really don't know, but the evidence
Speaker 2: we have does suggest that he helped them figure out
Speaker 2: some aspects of bomb making. Either way, Sylvia's psychic powers
Speaker 2: gave her no hint that this guy existed whatsoever. For
Speaker 2: her part, Sylvia takes a lot of pride in the
Speaker 2: fact that during her recorded interview, which is a real interview,
Speaker 2: she told her friend agent Gunderson, quote, one of the
Speaker 2: men you need to and I'm doing the psychic hand
Speaker 2: thing here. If you can't see one of the men
Speaker 2: you need to look for has a short build, wiry
Speaker 2: black hair, black eyebrows. There's an M on there, an S, S,
Speaker 2: A l Z E M something, salzeon, Salzemon Mon, okay, Salzemon,
Speaker 2: And she predicts one of the men is named Salzamon. Now,
Speaker 2: one of the men who had already been arrested at
Speaker 2: that point was named Mohammed A Salama, which isn't really
Speaker 2: all that similar to Salzemon. They start with an S,
Speaker 2: otherwise very different names. I would say, you got it wrong.
Speaker 2: It's like I'm going to have a guest for a podcast.
Speaker 2: I'm reading a K. Kevin Calvin, Oh cow, I got
Speaker 2: it right, perfect, Like, no, I didn't. I didn't foresee anything.
Speaker 2: And this is cold reading, right, that's the technique she's using, right,
Speaker 2: This is that's where it's a very old psychic frat.
Speaker 2: You start with I'm hearing a and you start going
Speaker 2: through a couple of different and someone of the adults
Speaker 2: would be like, oh, I had an aunt who was
Speaker 2: if you said m was Mary or my cousin Mike,
Speaker 2: you know, and then you kind of you you zero
Speaker 2: in from there and you kind of refine the grift
Speaker 2: a little bit. This is cold reading. That's what she's doing.
Speaker 2: In this interview, she writes about getting this wrong, no
Speaker 2: doubt about it. I was off by a few letters.
Speaker 2: But when Ted told me they had arrested someone named Saloma,
Speaker 2: it was this close enough that I screamed, you got him.
Speaker 2: Obviously she accomplished nothing at all, but she carts this
Speaker 2: around as a he was they had him in custody.
Speaker 2: When she's interviewed, she doesn't do shit. Oh that said,
Speaker 2: I need to point out here it's not accurate for
Speaker 2: her to say you got him to Ted Gunderson because
Speaker 2: and here's the fun part. Ted Gunderson wasn't an FBI
Speaker 2: agent in nineteen ninety three, and had nothing to do
Speaker 2: with arresting the men who bombed the World Trades It.
Speaker 3: Ted, Yeah, who was he?
Speaker 1: The fuck is this guy?
Speaker 2: This is a great question. Ted Gunderson was a retired
Speaker 2: FBI agent at the time of the World Trade Center attacks.
Speaker 2: He'd had a successful career. He'd at one point run
Speaker 2: the Los Angeles branch, like the branch is the wrong way,
Speaker 2: but he run the LA FBI office, right. But in
Speaker 2: the nineteen eighties he retired and he went into private practice,
Speaker 2: where he became an insane crank. He becomes a major
Speaker 2: figure in the Satanic panic. He's the guy doing the
Speaker 2: McMartin preschool trial. He's the guy like digging up stuff
Speaker 2: in the fucking yard of the McMartin preschool and making
Speaker 2: public statements about I can tell from that children were
Speaker 2: sacrificed here, babies were murdered. Right, He's that fucking lunaty right.
Speaker 1: He is close gosh figure.
Speaker 2: In American conspiracism, like Ted Gunderson, because he used to
Speaker 2: be in the FBI, has all of this unearned credibility,
Speaker 2: and so when he says stuff like that, oh, I've
Speaker 2: seen a lot of satanic ritual abuse. I know there's
Speaker 2: thousands of babies being trafficked for the devil in this country.
Speaker 2: People trusted him, right, That's who fucking Ted Gunners it is.
Speaker 2: She's not working with the FBI. She's working with a
Speaker 2: crank who used to be in the FBI.
Speaker 3: Wow's perfect, incredible school chef's kiss moment there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what beautiful of.
Speaker 1: All the ex FBI agents that had to be Darryl Ted.
Speaker 2: I'll admit at first I took it at face value.
Speaker 2: They're like, yeah, maybe the FBI brought her in for
Speaker 2: an interview. They've done crazier things. And then I like,
Speaker 2: I'm gonna look up Ted Gunderson just an oh for
Speaker 2: a little more on Ted. At a nineteen ninety five
Speaker 2: conference in Dallas, he alleged that the New World Order
Speaker 2: controlled the US government and was performing four thousand human
Speaker 2: sacrifices in New York City every year. He also claimed
Speaker 2: that the Oklahoma City bombing was carried out by the
Speaker 2: US government to slander the far right. Later in life,
Speaker 2: he wrote copiously about child slave labor in underground alien
Speaker 2: controlled facilities. He's like, there's a white A big part
Speaker 2: of QAnon is the belief that there's these underground like
Speaker 2: evil military bases where the aliens are like sucking adrenochrome
Speaker 2: out of kids heads. Ted Gunderson helped start all that,
Speaker 2: Like he is a foundational figure in American conspiracism. So
Speaker 2: that's good. Yeah, good that he She's working on this guy,
Speaker 2: so whatever he thought.
Speaker 1: They found each other question mark.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's nice when two grifters do.
Speaker 3: I want to know what her friendship was like outside
Speaker 3: the interview? What did they just kick it and talk
Speaker 3: about conspiracies or did they have a normal did they
Speaker 3: just like have beers and play ping pong and it
Speaker 3: wasn't weird?
Speaker 2: Like that was the Yeah, what do you watch movies together?
Speaker 2: Or do you just like sit alone together listening to
Speaker 2: numbers stations or something like? What is your friendship with
Speaker 2: Ted Gunderson look like? So Sylvia has a lot of
Speaker 2: pride in her long history of collaboration with the FBI,
Speaker 2: and you'll hear her bring it up in her book
Speaker 2: and in most interviews where she talks about her work
Speaker 2: with law enforcement. The Skeptical Inquirer actually filed a series
Speaker 2: of requests for FBI files because they wanted to know
Speaker 2: did she have any relationship with the bureau whatsoever did
Speaker 2: she do anything for them and the FBI. The short
Speaker 2: answer is no. The FBI has no record of her
Speaker 2: ever helping any agent on any case. That doesn't mean
Speaker 2: they had no record of her, though quote recently obtained
Speaker 2: FBI files shatter her insinuation that she had a relationship
Speaker 2: with them law enforcement and showed that the only interest
Speaker 2: the agency had in Brown was investigating her for fraud.
Speaker 2: So she was involved with the FBI, but not in
Speaker 2: a good way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh, Sylvia.
Speaker 2: In her book, Sylvia claimed that the interview I quoted
Speaker 2: from had been conducted by the FBI, but no FBI
Speaker 2: record exists that she ever spoke with him about the
Speaker 2: World Trade Center bombings. The Inquirer then filed a Foyer
Speaker 2: request for any documents or video the agency had about
Speaker 2: Brown's interviews regarding the attack, and the BUEAU responded, we
Speaker 2: conducted a search of the central record system. We were
Speaker 2: unable to identify the main records responsive to FOYA. Ultimately,
Speaker 2: the Inquirer concluded there is no documentation released by the
Speaker 2: FBI to support the claim that Brown conducted any psychic
Speaker 2: readings for the FBI, either directly or indirectly. Moreover, Gunderson's
Speaker 2: name appears nowhere in her FBI file, and the topics
Speaker 2: in the FBI release do not discuss working with the FBI. Thus,
Speaker 2: there is no evidence from the records that Brown was
Speaker 2: involved with the agency that said. She has a criminal
Speaker 2: record herself. There's a criminal complaint that get filed against
Speaker 2: her in Santa Clara County, California, on May twenty sixth
Speaker 2: of nineteen ninety two, and it alleges that Sylvia and
Speaker 2: her husband at the time I think this is husband
Speaker 2: number three, had been selling securities under false pretenses. And
Speaker 2: this is really good. I want to quote from the
Speaker 2: Santa Clair Chronicle here. Although telling a couple their twenty
Speaker 2: thousand dollars investment was to be used for immediate operating costs,
Speaker 2: the complaint stated the Browns transferred the money to an
Speaker 2: account for the Nirvana Foundation for Psychic Research. Just one
Speaker 2: month later, in April of the nineteen eighty eight, the
Speaker 2: complaint stated, they declared bankruptcy in the venture. So the
Speaker 2: idea is this is like a gold mine that they're
Speaker 2: selling shares in basically, so it's like a securities fraud
Speaker 2: scam and they're just taking the money and instead of
Speaker 2: investing it into this mine, they're putting it directly into
Speaker 2: the foundation and just robbing people per during the like
Speaker 2: the pair's arraignment San Francisco or the chronical note in quote,
Speaker 2: Sylvia Brown claimed to have strong psychic feelings that the
Speaker 2: mind would pay off, but it doesn't. And she and
Speaker 2: her husband Kinzil Dalzel Brown, and that's where she gets
Speaker 2: the last name Brown, plead no contest to a felony
Speaker 2: charge and are made to pay back their victims, right,
Speaker 2: so they each get a year of probation and now
Speaker 2: they're felons. So that's good. We got a little gold
Speaker 2: con in here. You know, this is kind of a law.
Speaker 2: She does a lot of conning of people in banks
Speaker 2: to fund her foundation, which kind of I had just
Speaker 2: said she was starting to see success, and that's how
Speaker 2: she writes it. And most of the articles on her
Speaker 2: will say that, like, yeah, in the seventies and eighties,
Speaker 2: she builds a larger and larger business. The Skeptical Inquirer's
Speaker 2: reporting makes it look like she probably wasn't ever very
Speaker 2: successful prior to the late nineties. She's just stealing money
Speaker 2: to fund her foundation. People aren't paying her for her
Speaker 2: psychic She's a total fraud in that regard. Right, we'll
Speaker 2: talk a little bit more that. I do want to
Speaker 2: note Sylvia and Kensel are estranged at the time that
Speaker 2: they get charged with felonies, but she keeps his name
Speaker 2: and adds an E to it. I don't know why.
Speaker 2: I just kind of think that's.
Speaker 1: Funny, that's amazing.
Speaker 2: So let's talk about those FBI files on Sylvia, about
Speaker 2: her other financial fraud cases, because there's a lot of them.
Speaker 2: The Bureau describes her as a self proclaimed psychic and
Speaker 2: notes that they investigated her starting in the nineteen eighties
Speaker 2: and the Irvana Foundation as well for violations of federal
Speaker 2: law and applying for loans from FDIC institutions in the
Speaker 2: amount of one point two five to three million dollars.
Speaker 2: So she is getting more than a million dollars in
Speaker 2: fake loans for her business. They know, well the loans
Speaker 2: are real, but she's lying on her loan paperwork. They
Speaker 2: note that her fraudulent advice also caused multiple businesses sustained losses,
Speaker 2: So she's also getting money for the foundation by giving
Speaker 2: business advice that's fraudulent. Most of what she's doing is
Speaker 2: falsifying financial statements to enhance her net worth and lie
Speaker 2: that she's worth two or three million dollars when she's
Speaker 2: not worth anything close to that. To get these hundreds
Speaker 2: of thousands of dollars and eventually well over a million
Speaker 2: dollars in loans. The FBI notes that her loan proceeds
Speaker 2: went to so an extravagant lifestyle, and they have her
Speaker 2: dead to rights and don't prosecute because the US attorney
Speaker 2: decides there's insufficient evidence of criminal intent. Basically, we know
Speaker 2: she got all this money, and we know she lied
Speaker 2: on our loan applications, but she may have believed the
Speaker 2: business could work.
Speaker 3: Oh gosh. This goes back to the feel like she
Speaker 3: believes the things she's saying.
Speaker 2: Right right, and apparently convinced a US attorney of that
Speaker 2: as well. Wow, now, cal you know who never commits
Speaker 2: financial crime?
Speaker 3: Kermit the Frog.
Speaker 2: Well, that that is probably the case. I have trouble
Speaker 2: imagining him getting away with it. Although she is fun.
Speaker 2: It is fun to think of Kermit on the witness stand,
Speaker 2: and something like reading back is like texts to miss
Speaker 2: Piggy without investling money. Oh no, I can't do a
Speaker 2: good Kermit voice.
Speaker 1: Otherwise that was more Patrick Mahomes than Kermit, but.
Speaker 2: Yeah it was. It was. Well, think about Kermit the
Speaker 2: Frog as we go to ads, we're back call. Are
Speaker 2: you familiar with a theory that Kermit caused nine to eleven?
Speaker 3: No, but I'm here for it please.
Speaker 2: Oh it's fucking crazy. So in the Muppet movie that
Speaker 2: comes out in like two thousand and one, it's like
Speaker 2: basically Muppet, it's a wonderful life where Kermit wonders like
Speaker 2: what would happen if I'd never been born? And in
Speaker 2: like the normal Muppet world before it's like New York
Speaker 2: after nine eleven. Right, there's no Twin Towers, but in
Speaker 2: the version when he like sees life if he'd never
Speaker 2: been born, the Twin Towers are back. No, So something
Speaker 2: about Kermit's life caused nine to eleven? No, why it's
Speaker 2: fucking crazy?
Speaker 3: Oh my gosh, all right, I got I'm a big
Speaker 3: Muppets fan, so I need.
Speaker 2: To go and I love it too. Yeah, Kermit, nine
Speaker 2: to eleven should bring you most of what you need
Speaker 2: to know.
Speaker 3: There goes my weekend. Thanks.
Speaker 2: So weirdly enough, it's only after her nineteen ninety three
Speaker 2: no contest plead to a felony that Sylvia Brown gains
Speaker 2: national fame and renown if you look at like and
Speaker 2: what it looks like from what the skeptical inquirer uncovered
Speaker 2: is that she's kind of a middling psychic and most
Speaker 2: of her money and the success comes from fraud until
Speaker 2: she starts getting on real TV. She's on this local
Speaker 2: channel for a while, but it's when she hits like
Speaker 2: national television that she becomes a big deal. Now she
Speaker 2: does continue. It's also weird to me. After her fraud conviction,
Speaker 2: she keeps working with police departments. There are some who
Speaker 2: hire her. In nineteen ninety seven, the Thibodau, Louisiana police
Speaker 2: department pays her four hundred dollars to consult on the
Speaker 2: murder of a priest. So this priest has been killed
Speaker 2: and Sylvia is brought in. She tells the authorities the
Speaker 2: priest was killed by a young mulatto homosexual who was
Speaker 2: enraged by the priest's rejection of his advances. So basically
Speaker 2: she blames it on a non white person who was
Speaker 2: gay who hit on this priest and then murdered him
Speaker 2: out of rage. And she said that someone with a
Speaker 2: street name of King had had gang people do the murder,
Speaker 2: which I'm sure is also more racism right now, this
Speaker 2: murder is eventually solved ten years later, the culprit, Derek Adomes,
Speaker 2: had murdered the priest and a robbery gone bad. Nothing
Speaker 2: no gay stuff, no gangs, just a guy who killed
Speaker 2: another dude in a robbery. Happens all the time.
Speaker 3: Do you guys do merch for this pund.
Speaker 2: We have in the past.
Speaker 3: You got a suggestion, Yeah, Young Mulatto homosexual is an
Speaker 3: amazing T shirt. I would buy this.
Speaker 2: Teacher that's a solid performer name yeah, or a good
Speaker 2: band name or a good band name yeah. So that
Speaker 2: there's no real evidence to suggest that she had any
Speaker 2: kind of extensive, long lasting relationship with law enforcement. Again,
Speaker 2: Thibodeaux hires her once, but not again because they waste
Speaker 2: their money on her, and there's certainly no evidence that
Speaker 2: she catches any bad guys, but she sure starts claiming
Speaker 2: that she had once she gets famous due to her
Speaker 2: appearances on the Montel Williams Show. As best as I
Speaker 2: can tell, the relationship starts in nineteen ninety because Montell
Speaker 2: wants to do a Halloween episode about the Haunting of
Speaker 2: the Queen Mary, which is like this, Sophie, it's like
Speaker 2: a boat you can tour that's like off the Long Beach, right, yeah, right,
Speaker 2: and you know it's an older boats there's I think
Speaker 2: supposed to be ghost on it. So she gets brought
Speaker 2: in there like we need a psychic. Montell's people like,
Speaker 2: we want a psychic for this episode. They bring in Sylvia.
Speaker 2: She does a really good job on the episode because
Speaker 2: she knows how to entertain an audience, and Montell's like,
Speaker 2: you're great. They hit it off and he keeps having
Speaker 2: her on. Right, It's just a good match. Montel provides
Speaker 2: her with instant fame and legitimacy, treating her with casual
Speaker 2: deference and opening her up to a whole world of
Speaker 2: major entertainment figures. She does a whole series about angels
Speaker 2: on Montell's show that so successful. Larry King wrings her
Speaker 2: on his show to do the same thing, to talk
Speaker 2: about how and to have callers tell stories about how
Speaker 2: angels save their lives, and she'll explain how angels really work. Right,
Speaker 2: it's very nineties, but like she is, you know, by
Speaker 2: the time you're on Montela and Larry King you're pretty prominent, right.
Speaker 2: It doesn't get a lot bigger than.
Speaker 1: That your borderline of household name if not right?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah quote. No matter the situation, the basic experience
Speaker 2: was always the same. During a crisis, a stranger arrived
Speaker 2: seemingly out of nowhere, had a profound impact on the crisis,
Speaker 2: carrying a drowning woman out of the sea and delivering
Speaker 2: her safely to the beach, removing a trapped driver from
Speaker 2: a badly damaged car moments before it caught fire, laying
Speaker 2: hands on the forehead of a feverish child on the
Speaker 2: hospital seconds before the fever coincidentally broke, and then disappearing
Speaker 2: before anyone could find out who they were and thank them.
Speaker 2: And these are the angel stories people tell. And I
Speaker 2: get why people believe in this, as someone has had
Speaker 2: like loved ones just like die tragically and not had
Speaker 2: an angel, it does kind of render like, well, why
Speaker 2: why don't the angels help everybody?
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like, why.
Speaker 2: Are the angels really seem to like to help people
Speaker 2: like affluent kids in like western hospitals and not like
Speaker 2: kids with like gut worms and sub Saharan Africa. It's
Speaker 2: where the angels don't like save them. Huh, just the
Speaker 2: kids in nice hospital. Okay, So Sylvia starts writing books.
Speaker 2: I mean she had been for a while while writing books,
Speaker 2: but they start to become best sellers. She claims she
Speaker 2: has more than twenty New York Times bestsellers, so I
Speaker 2: think this is pretty much accurate. She has her book
Speaker 2: sell very well, she makes a shitload of money. And
Speaker 2: this is all after the Montel stuff. Yep, all after
Speaker 2: the Montell stuff. This is all in the late nineties, right.
Speaker 2: In nineteen ninety eight, she co writes the book Adventures
Speaker 2: of a Psychic with Antoinatte May, in which she blames
Speaker 2: her nineteen eighty eight bankruptcy on her husband Kensel's attempts
Speaker 2: to hide his criminal behavior. She does not acknowledge being
Speaker 2: convicted of a felony for gold mine fraud. Per the Chronicle,
Speaker 2: she laments that while ignorant, people say, well, if you're
Speaker 2: so psychic, why didn't you blank? The answer, she says,
Speaker 2: is that I'm not psychic about myself. So she is
Speaker 2: consistent about that, But like, that doesn't answer the question
Speaker 2: of why did you defraud people for a fake gold mine? Now,
Speaker 2: despite all these very obvious lies and his history of
Speaker 2: failed predictions. She's really good on TV, so she keeps
Speaker 2: getting invited on Montell's show. All Sylvia has to do
Speaker 2: is make sure that every word out of her mouth
Speaker 2: is a lie per the skeptical inquirer. In her November
Speaker 2: two thousand and four appearance on The Montell william Show,
Speaker 2: Brown said, I remember when I was working on the
Speaker 2: Bundy case talking about Ted Bundy. Outside of this offhand comment,
Speaker 2: there's no evidence to affirm that Brown worked on a
Speaker 2: Bundy case, much less the case of serial killer Ted Bundy,
Speaker 2: whose capture was not connected to a psychic. So she
Speaker 2: should just start dropping this whenever a famous murder or
Speaker 2: crime or terrorist act's say, oh I helped on that
Speaker 2: I consulted. I can't talk about it, but.
Speaker 1: There's literally no evidence to support that claim whatsoever. Cool.
Speaker 2: No, we started these episodes by talking about the case
Speaker 2: of Amanda Barry, who was abducted in two thousand and
Speaker 2: three and whose mother in two thousand and four consulted
Speaker 2: with Sylvia on The Montell Williams Show and got a
Speaker 2: very bad reading. As I noted, she's devastated by this.
Speaker 2: She returns home and gives away her father's or her
Speaker 2: daughter's things, takes down the pictures and it's very sad.
Speaker 2: But what's interesting to me about this is that Amandaberry's
Speaker 2: mom is actually responsible for the only verified contact with
Speaker 2: the FBI that Sylvia ever had, per the Cleveland Plaine dealer.
Speaker 2: At me Allier's request. FBI agents investigating Amanda's disappearance met
Speaker 2: with Miller after the show to discuss Brown's other psychic
Speaker 2: views on the case. Special agent Kelly Liberty said Brown
Speaker 2: said she envisioned Amanda's jacket and a dumpster with DNA
Speaker 2: on it. So she tells them the psychic told me
Speaker 2: that my daughter's jacket was in a dumpster, it was
Speaker 2: covered in blood, and the FBI is like, okay, we'll
Speaker 2: look into it. That's her only real connection to the FBI. Wow,
Speaker 2: that's the only one that there actually is. Now, when
Speaker 2: the real abductor was caught, most people would be ashamed.
Speaker 2: Brown took a victory lap, even as the media rightly
Speaker 2: lambasted her for wrongly declaring a woman dead, because well,
Speaker 2: here's the thing. Sylvia had gotten the fact that she
Speaker 2: was dead wrong obviously, but she was right about who
Speaker 2: did the crime, because she predicted that Amanda was abducted
Speaker 2: by a sort of Cuban looking man. Oh maybe twenty
Speaker 2: one or twenty two. Now, the actual culprit was first
Speaker 2: off born in Puerto Rico, and second was in his forties. Yeah,
Speaker 2: just wrong. She also described him as short, and he
Speaker 2: was of average height. She's wrong about everything. In a
Speaker 2: statement posted to her Facebook page following Barry's dramatic escape,
Speaker 2: Brown acknowledged that she'd been wrong about her death. Writing
Speaker 2: for more than fifty years as a spiritual guide in
Speaker 2: psychic when called upon to either help authorities with missing
Speaker 2: persons cases or to help families with questions about their
Speaker 2: loved ones, I have been more right than wrong. If
Speaker 2: there was ever a time to be grateful and relieve
Speaker 2: for being mistaken, this is that time. Only God is
Speaker 2: right all the time.
Speaker 3: Okay, all right, all right, okay, it's something she's got
Speaker 3: a little like suburban mom pr going right.
Speaker 2: I feel like, honestly, the version of this today would
Speaker 2: be like, oh, she's not alive. That's a fake, you know,
Speaker 2: the government planted her or something like. You like our
Speaker 2: modern grifters can't even admit to being that wrong. It's weird,
Speaker 2: how refreshing it is that she at least acknowledged reality.
Speaker 3: Yeah, good point, so this is not.
Speaker 2: Her only fuck up. In two thousand and three, Brown
Speaker 2: gives a reading on Montel again, this time about the
Speaker 2: two thousand and one aspearance of Jerry Chusney Junior. She
Speaker 2: told that man's sister that Chustney had been hit on
Speaker 2: the head, choked, and thrown into a river, and added
Speaker 2: that he'd been killed because he saw something he shouldn't.
Speaker 2: In twenty ten, that man's roommates were charged with shooting
Speaker 2: him and hiding his body over a drug debt. He
Speaker 2: was buried in the woods. Again wrong about every detail
Speaker 2: in the case. In two thousand and five, she gave
Speaker 2: her reading on Montel to Tamara Ivy, the mother of
Speaker 2: a murder victim named Dustin. She blamed a teenage boy
Speaker 2: and a young dark haired woman, one of whom was
Speaker 2: a sexual predator and had used a rock to kill Ivy.
Speaker 2: Then she promised the case would be solved soon. There
Speaker 2: is no evidence that Dustin was sexually abused. Police ultimately
Speaker 2: charged his brother for the murder, although his brother was
Speaker 2: found not guilty at trial, so the case is still unsolved,
Speaker 2: and she says it would be solved quickly, so again wrong.
Speaker 2: That same year, per the skeptical inquirer, Sylvia Brown's November thirtieth,
Speaker 2: two thousand and five reading for Samantha Materer, mother of
Speaker 2: Christopher Mader, had a much clearer outcome. Brown gave the
Speaker 2: mother a name, which was again censored, and claimed Christopher's
Speaker 2: murder stemmed from the killer not liking the food at
Speaker 2: the bar he worked at. Then later the killer saw
Speaker 2: him passing by and shot him. Brown also told the
Speaker 2: mother to start looking where he ate breakfast. Matthew Coral
Speaker 2: and Sean Myers were charged with the murder, and Coral
Speaker 2: was found guilty and Myers pled guilty. In twenty twelve,
Speaker 2: the two had attempted to rob Mader, again totally fucking wrong.
Speaker 2: Perhaps her most devastating fuck up was in two thousand
Speaker 2: and two, an eleven year old boy, Sean Hornbeck went
Speaker 2: missing while riding his bike. Shawn's parents went on the
Speaker 2: Montel Williams Show, and Sylvia told them their son was
Speaker 2: dead and that his body would be found buried beneath
Speaker 2: two boulders per an article on Grunge. Fortunately, not everyone
Speaker 2: believed her. When a boy named ben Ohenby went missing.
Speaker 2: In two thousand and seven. Journalist Michelle McNamara, who would
Speaker 2: later be credited for helping to identify the Golden State Killer,
Speaker 2: connected Hornback and Owenby based on physical similarities and their
Speaker 2: ages when abducted. Sure enough, it was McNamara who was right.
Speaker 2: When Omby was found by law enforcement four days after
Speaker 2: his disappearance, they were shocked to find Hornbeck was still too.
Speaker 2: He was still fucking alive. She did it again. She
Speaker 2: was wrong about another person that she declared dead to
Speaker 2: their families. It's great that he was alive, Thank fucking God.
Speaker 1: And I'm glad that there was like an air of disbelief.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Hornbeck's father later told CNN hearing Brown's prediction was one
Speaker 2: of the hardest things We've ever had to hear, and
Speaker 2: that stuck with the guardians. John Ronson So the same year,
Speaker 2: two thousand and seven, he booked himself on a Brown
Speaker 2: lead cruise and got an interview. When he asked her
Speaker 2: what happened, she claimed she had focused on three missing children,
Speaker 2: two were dead, and I think what I did was
Speaker 2: I got my wires crossed. There was a blonde and
Speaker 2: two boys who are dead. I think I picked the
Speaker 2: wrong kid still. Her ex husband Gary Duffrayan condemned her,
Speaker 2: saying the damage she does to unsuspecting people in crisis
Speaker 2: situations is just atrocious. Yeah yeah, clearly, Yeah yeah, uh yeah.
Speaker 2: It's all pretty bleak. And there's a lot of these
Speaker 2: that we could go through, Like, there's there's so many
Speaker 2: of these different like cases. The skeptical inquirer has like
Speaker 2: a whole list of them. And even in the cases
Speaker 2: where she's kind of right, where like she got the
Speaker 2: the murder, the fact that someone was murdered right, and
Speaker 2: more or less the cause, she's always wrong about where
Speaker 2: the body is, what happened to it, all that stuff. Now,
Speaker 2: Sylvia doesn't limit her predictions to crimes or the personal
Speaker 2: lives of her clients either. In her two thousand and
Speaker 2: five book Prophecy, Sylvia wrote that after Pope John Paul
Speaker 2: the Second passes, there will only be one more elected pope,
Speaker 2: and wrote he will be succeeded by what is essentially
Speaker 2: a triumvirate of popes. That's not what happened. I don't
Speaker 2: have to bust that myth. We all live through it.
Speaker 2: We're several popes down now, we've been going through popes
Speaker 2: left and right. You know, still it sounds fun having
Speaker 2: three popes, but not yet palooza yep. In two thousand
Speaker 2: and eight, she wrote a book called End of Days,
Speaker 2: in which she predicted there would be a manned mission
Speaker 2: to Mars in twenty twelve, and in twenty eleven she
Speaker 2: predicted Mitt Romney would defeat Barack Obama in that next
Speaker 2: year's presidential election. All wrong. In her later years, Sylvia
Speaker 2: attracted increasing criticism for being wrong about everything, but she
Speaker 2: stayed on tel v TV until late in her life
Speaker 2: and continued to give eight hundred and fifty dollars readings
Speaker 2: to thousands of customers who trusted her implicitly. On her website,
Speaker 2: she claimed an accuracy rate of between eighty seven and
Speaker 2: ninety percent. A twenty ten analysis of one hundred and
Speaker 2: fifteen predictions she made on The Montel Williams Show, done
Speaker 2: by The Skeptical Inquirer rated her success as roughly zero percent.
Speaker 2: To really make that point for you, cal Sylvia predicts
Speaker 2: her own death in two thousand and three on The
Speaker 2: Larry King Show. She tells Larry that she would die
Speaker 2: on a peacefully at age eighty eight. She actually dies
Speaker 2: eleven years earlier, age seventy seven, on November twentieth, twenty thirteen.
Speaker 2: Wrong right up to the end, barrel.
Speaker 3: Whoa, Yeah, that is quite the roller coaster. Yeah, of
Speaker 3: I knew none of this. I knew she was and
Speaker 3: I knew none of this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's so funny that like you can, really, you
Speaker 2: can really just be wrong constantly as long as you've
Speaker 2: got a fan base and it's okay, like they'll they'll
Speaker 2: back you up, you know, like she never loses the
Speaker 2: core of her support despite how wrong she's I guess
Speaker 2: it's a prediction for where we are today, like politically
Speaker 2: and and everything else.
Speaker 3: There's a massive desire that we have to want to
Speaker 3: believe things. Yeah, so I can somewhat empathize with I mean,
Speaker 3: people who want to believe something.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Also, can we just acknowledge are you really This is
Speaker 3: not a call out to a parent who's desperate to
Speaker 3: find their kid, obviously, but yeah, like, are we really
Speaker 3: thinking that the Montel Williams Show is the the apex
Speaker 3: of how we're solving scientific crimes? Crimes? That's that's what
Speaker 3: we're all.
Speaker 1: Elections.
Speaker 2: And I think you're right on the money, Calan, that
Speaker 2: like it's everyone is to blame the viewers, the people
Speaker 2: on the show Montel Sylvia, but the parent because you
Speaker 2: can't like the parents can't effect to be sane when
Speaker 2: the kids have been kidnapped.
Speaker 3: Of course, Like you see that that documentary on the
Speaker 3: Jerry Springer Show. No, it's fantastic, it's worth a watch.
Speaker 3: It's very silar to a lot of it, like peeling
Speaker 3: back the curtain on that just makes me think, you know,
Speaker 3: I don't I don't know anything about how the Mantel
Speaker 3: Williams Show worked, but obviously it's a TV show. So yeah,
Speaker 3: to your point earlier, ever, like the it's about entertaining
Speaker 3: people period more than anything else. And Springer was you know,
Speaker 3: the sort of most egregious version of that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's it's I mean, it really is like
Speaker 2: pulling back an unfortunately, like a dark curtain on this
Speaker 2: part of my childhood that i'd never really analyzed more. Yeah,
Speaker 2: there's psychics on TV and they read it's fun and
Speaker 2: it's like no, no, no, it could be pretty harmful too.
Speaker 2: Sometimes they also defraud banks, which I have less of
Speaker 2: a problem with. That's not my primary issue with her. Well,
Speaker 2: you want to plug anything.
Speaker 3: Oh sorry, no, go ahead, good.
Speaker 1: Oh.
Speaker 2: I was just asking if you had anything to plug
Speaker 2: at the end here, because we're coming to the end.
Speaker 3: I would love to plug my podcast, which is not
Speaker 3: about psychics. It's called Here we Go Again and we
Speaker 3: look at topics through pop culture and politics, past present
Speaker 3: and future of the specific topic and hopefully leave the
Speaker 3: audience with a feeling a little smarter about what you
Speaker 3: learned and a little more hopeful about how you plug
Speaker 3: into that particular issue.
Speaker 2: Awesome, Well hopeful sounds good right about now, So check
Speaker 2: that out. Thank you Cal for coming on the show.
Speaker 2: Thank you all for thank you for having me. That's
Speaker 2: going to be it for us today. Go way out,
Speaker 2: listen to something else Hie.
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