Internal Sunshine

Hey, True Weirdos, thank you so much for all your support. Because of your support, we were able to win some awards with this podcast in the past year. And be sure to stick around for the conversation we have after the episode. The promise of relief from pain and sickness without drugs. They called it the modern weapon of curative science.

Whatever ailed you from arthritis to high blood pressure, diabetes to menopause, premature senility to impotence, at long last there was an answer. Not a medicine, but something else. Something far more powerful and natural. This is a development of science that serves the purpose of supplying millions of rays from radium and mesothorium to the body to make up for the lack of the sun's rays.

These radioactive rays carry the curative effect of sunshine wherever they reach. It was called Radithor is the only product of its kind that produces internal sunshine. You owe it to yourself to investigate immediately this new hope, offering scientific course of treatment. Internal sunshine? Well, that sounds wholesome.

Radithor, a solution of radium and mesothorium in distilled water. The only standardized and certified radioactive water produced in this country. Internal sunshine of the deadly kind. Of the deadly kind. And they got a small beam of light again. It's really bright. It's really bright. It's really bright. America loves quack medicine.

We always have. Some people might say that's because we're poorly educated when it comes to science. OK, but what if we're also just boundlessly optimistic and real suckers for a well crafted pitch? Plus, thanks to our Puritan forebears, we tend to view illness and disability as punishment for sin, the righteous consequences of our own poor choices.

This mentality is alive and well today. Here's an example. In 2017, Alabama Congressman Republican Mo Brooks defended the notion that people with preexisting medical conditions should be excluded from health care coverage. Why? Well, according to Brooks and those who share this view, people who live good, healthy lives shouldn't have to contribute to care for people who don't.

As if illness, injuries, accidents and congenital disease follow some set of moral or theological guidelines. As if the human body, this marvelous and miraculous machine, wasn't made up of anywhere between 20 trillion and 100 trillion cells, any of which might spontaneously misbehave and cause mayhem. What guys like Mo Brooks call living good lives, the Puritans called being good livers.

It's all the same bulls**t. Steeped in the Puritan conviction that some, the elect, are chosen by God for salvation and everyone else is condemned to eternal damnation. And since you could never know on this side of the grave if you were team heaven or team hell, all a Puritan could do was live their entire lives in a freaking panic, desperate to behave as righteously as possible.

In that worldview, cancer, heart disease, infirmity, a birth defect even, was enough to let the neighbors know that your soul was shriveled from sin, that you deserved your suffering, that you had brought it on yourself. Of course, you could also heal yourself by reforming the sinful ways that caused disease in the first place, which meant that if you didn't get better, well, then everyone knew what you were, bad, wretched, and cast from God's light.

Do you see the trap? Your own sin made you sick. Then your own sin prevented your recovery. It almost didn't matter if you saw a doctor because without repentance, what good was medicine? Once you see the Puritan's fingerprints on the very foundations of our society, you can't unsee it. Swear to God, the only thing of any value bequeathed to us by that pack of joyless crows was their commitment to an all-black wardrobe, even their hats and big buckle shoes still managed to pack some real swagger.

So, the early colonists had their own reasons for embracing quackery beyond the groundwork that the Puritans laid. For starters, their doctors weren't exactly trained. Of the 3,000 plus physicians in the American colonies in 1775, only about 400 had been formally educated. With the vast amount of territory in play, the odds of you living anywhere near one of those trained doctors wasn't great.

But maybe that didn't much matter since bloodletting, lancing, and enemas were standard treatments whether your doctor had been to school or not. So picture a nation of people who don't have access to medical care, whether they were early settlers out there on the Oregon Trail or folks living today in rural communities where hospitals and clinics are closing, a nation of people who lacked the funds for medical care like during the Great Depression or today when insurance premiums are doubling and tripling and worse, a nation of people who saw illness as a moral failing, a sign of poor character.

Picture those people, sick and desperate for hope. When science and medicine are removed or ridiculed, other options find their way to the front of the line. Today we use the blanket term wellness. We have supplements and adaptogens and trackers and oils. Our ancestors had patent medicines and tinctures and tonics. We have a long history in this country of falling for junk like Dr. Bonker's Celebrated Egyptian Oil and Fat Off Obesity Cream and Make Man tablets and Mixer's Cancer and Scrofula Syrup.

Now some of these products were little more than alcohol, sugar and food coloring. Others like Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup for Babies and Children contained morphine. People bought that by the barrel and why not? Morphine will knock out even the crankiest teething baby. A French pharmaceutical company once sold sore throat lozenges made with cocaine.

It used to be you could handle a nagging cough with a dose of one night cough syrup. Ingredients included alcohol, chloroform, morphine and cannabis, which makes NyQuil look like Capri Sun. That whole party ended with the passage of the 1914 Harrison Narcotic Act. Suddenly there were regulations on just how much cocaine and opium were permitted in products sold to the public.

Now prescriptions will be required for meds that exceed those narcotics limits and doctors and pharmacists were made to keep much better records on which patients were getting what and how often, which was a bummer for the many who drank these medicines like cocktails. But it was a benefit for all of the infants and toddlers who were being dosed on the regular with spoonfuls of opiates.

The Pure Drug and Anti-Narcotics Acts in recent years have greatly reduced the number of patient preparations in this class. In the old days, thousands of infants were seriously injured by the use of soothing syrups containing opium. Treatments sold as cures for catarrh, that's an old-fashioned word that basically means post-nasal drip, used to contain cocaine.

Which made many cocaine addicts. Many persons acquired the alcohol habit through the use of preparations consisting largely of a poor quality of whiskey. The people are powerless against the patent medicine pest. You can take the alcohol, morphine, opium, cocaine, and cannabis out of the over-the-counter medications in America, but you can't take our faith in quick, quirky, and quackish cures out of us Americans.

Which made the moment perfect for a new kind of miracle cure. This one harnessing one of the most mysterious powers ever discovered. We are on the eve of one of the most startling developments that has ever occurred in the history of medical science. A development directly resulting from the discovery of radium. That mysterious mineral substance.

That perpetual radiator of light, heat, and energy. Which scientific thinkers all over the world have unitedly hailed as one of the most wonderful revelations of nature's secret ever yet vouchsafed to the human race. The whole world was abuzz about the genius Madame Marie Curie. Along with her husband and research partner Pierre, she'd been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 for their work on radioactivity.

Three years later, Pierre Curie was killed in an accident in Paris, crushed beneath the wheels of a horse-drawn carriage. Marie grieved, but she continued her work, ultimately discovering both polonium and radium. She was awarded the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for that, making Marie Curie the only person to win two Nobel Prizes in two different fields of science.

Beyond all question, radium possesses an extraordinary power. The power of changing the character of human tissue from bad to good. Any tissue which is diseased or disorganized, as in the case of lupus, birthmarks, psoriasis, shingles, burns and scabs, cancers, sarcoma, eczema, ulcers, wrinkles, scrofula, tumors, ringworm, boils, and all skin diseases.

What couldn't radium cure? It is yet too early for us to state definitely what radium precisely is. And what are the limits of its powers? Perhaps they have no limits. Okay, but wait, because on the one hand, it's nature's miraculous cure-all. And on the other hand, we're not sure about what it is or how it works. But just six years later, we were starting to figure it out.

The New York Health Department, for example, began a program of warning the public against radium cures. No newspaper or publication whose owners have even a rudimentary conscience will publish radium care advertisements. There will be radium cures, and cures based on some distortion of the word radium. And it is essential that the public know that they are, each and every one of them, absolutely fraudulent.

Fraud would turn out to be the least of the worries for users of Radithor. William J.A. Bailey was born in Boston in May 1884. He was the youngest of nine. His father died not long after William's birth, and the family struggled to make ends meet. Though William was admitted to Harvard University, he dropped out after just three semesters due to financial hardship, which meant he wasn't actually a doctor, though he claimed to have graduated from Harvard and gotten a Ph.D. at the University of Vienna.

People in the press took him at his word, though. And Dr. Bailey was in business, in a lot of businesses, actually. It took Bailey a few years to find his calling as a patent medicine kingpin. He had a brief run in with an import-export company, but then got into the automotive business. Bailey said he had a car to sell, a completely new design, and priced right at just $600.

Orders poured in, accompanied by cash deposits, and that caught the attention of the federal government, who wondered how Bailey intended to fulfill those orders, since his automotive factory was actually an abandoned sawmill. His assembly line consisted of a single box of tools. He was arrested in 1915 and spent 30 days in jail.

By 1918, Dr. Bailey was in trouble again with the law, this time for selling a product called Las-I-Go for superb manhood, allegedly a treatment for impotence. The only lesson Bailey apparently learned from this was to pack his next patent medicine invention with at least one powerful ingredient. And it was right around this time that Bailey became obsessed with radium, which was having a pop culture moment, and remember, this was more than 20 years before the start of the Manhattan Project.

The romance of radium is a story that rivals the wildest dreams of Jules Verne or H.G. Wells. The powerful radium rays that are thrown off with a seemingly never-decreasing energy are as mysterious to science as they were the day that Madame Curie and her husband discovered them. In 1922, Dr. Bailey founded Associated Radium Chemists Incorporated and ran the company out of New York City.

He began making and selling an aphrodisiac called Arium, tablets made of lithium carbonate, starch, and talc with a few nanocuries of radium, mostly harmless, harmless-ish. There were other products manufactured by Associated Radium Chemists Incorporated like Klax, a treatment for influenza, Dax, a cough medicine, Linarium and Ointarium, your basic liniment and ointment but infused with radium, a toothpaste called Dentarium, and Caparium, a tonic for the hair.

Recent investigation shows that the pep, energy, endurance, and nerve force of the average man past 40 may often be increased by 100% by getting into his system the marvelous restorative radium power of Arium. Just ask the Reverend McKenna of Saintsville, Ohio. I feel like a kid. Business was good until the feds took notice.

U.S. attorneys for the states of Maryland, Connecticut, Washington, and the Western District of Pennsylvania were all over Bailey, calling the claims the company made for the love drug Arium false and fraudulent. Cases of the tablets were seized and destroyed and exasperated but not chastened Bailey ultimately shut Associated Radium Chemists Incorporated down and moved to New Jersey.

Bailey Radium Laboratories in East Orange, New Jersey, now that's where the real money was made. Bailey had taken swing after swing and he finally hit a home run with a small bottle of distilled water spiked with radium and mesothorium. He called it Radithor. William J.A. Bailey might have been a college dropout who never earned the title doctor but he was no fool.

His many run-ins with the feds had taught him a few tricks to help protect his new baby Radithor from scrutiny. He blanketed the country with print advertising. Good luck finding a newspaper of size anywhere in America that didn't have ads masquerading as news stories touting the miracle cure that was Radithor. He had pamphlets printed up and mass-mailed to physicians all around the world.

Many took the materials at face value and were convinced that Radithor was a legitimate medication. Plus, Bailey Radium Laboratories offered physicians a 17% rebate on every Radithor prescription and it was an effective incentive. Professional recognition of Radithor. Leading authorities and research workers have used Radithor in their clinical tests for reports on the effects of radium treatment and have used Radithor as the basis of research tests because Radithor is certified as to the contents of radium and mesothorium.

See what Bailey did there? Words like professional and clinical and certified all helping sell Radithor as a proven therapy and not just some more good old-fashioned snake oil. Radithor contains the full amount of activity required and recommended by leading authorities. What does that even mean? Radithor meets the requirements as to the strength of the American Medical Association which will not approve any radioactive treatment which is over less than 2,000 millimicrocuries per day.

Well now you're just saying words. Hear this message. No person has ever died of old age. 36 page booklet sent upon request. No person has ever died of old age? Oh we get it. People don't get a chance to die of old age because disease gets them first which is why we all need to be drinking Radithor every single day. Only if you want the radioactive rays of Radithor to carry the curative effect of sunshine wherever they reach.

About the only thing more American than our enthusiastic gullibility for a scam is our worship of celebrity. Radithor brought those two things together and the result was horror and tragedy. Eben McBurney Byers was the sort of iconic American figure that you think exists only in a novel or a movie not in real life. He was rich and handsome, charming and athletic, an internationally known industrialist sportsman and eventually chairman of the iron company founded by his father.

It was a privileged life. The family's wealth nudging open doors at the best schools. Byers attended an elite boarding school in New Hampshire and then went on to Yale where he played golf for the Yale team and later went on to become the U.S. amateur golf champion in 1906. Life was a good time for Eben Byers until November 1927.

Byers attended the annual Yale Harvard football game played that year in Boston and ending in a legendary 29-29 tie. Byers was taking a chartered train home to Pittsburgh snoozing in his berth when the train abruptly came to a sudden stop. The car lurched on the tracks and Byers fell out of his bunk. His arm was injured and the pain persisted despite every possible medical intervention.

Byers complained that the pain and limited mobility not only impacted his golf game but followed him into the bedroom and caused problems there too. Sidebar, if you're like us and picture all of these gilded age industrial types as the monopoly man and you're thinking of that portly little game piece having issues in the bedroom and going, oh yeah, same.

Now Eben Byers sought treatment from a highly regarded physiotherapist in Pittsburgh named Charles Clinton Moyar. Moyar had clearly been reading some of the pamphlets created by Dr. William Bailey because Moyar prescribed a course of Radithor and Byers was a most enthusiastic and compliant patient. He began putting away half ounce bottles of Radithor, first one and then a second.

Before long, Byers was drinking several bottles per day and recommending Radithor to all of his friends and colleagues. He said he felt his old vitality had been restored, that he once again felt young and strong and capable, virile and energetic. As the golf-loving industrialist cheerfully chugged his medicine, the FDA was quietly investigating the product because despite a global fixation on the curative powers of radioactivity, Radithor was the only patent medication on the market that actually was radioactive, I mean.

What did I know and when did I know it? Isn't that the question? The truth is we knew only that radium was a naturally occurring silvery white metal, a remarkable gift from nature herself. The incident on the train, startling, but nothing one would consider calamitous. I confess that I was taken aback by the stubbornness of the injury to my arm.

The pain vexed me true, but it was a malaise, the loss of my stamina that troubled me most. When Charles Moyar suggested a course of radium water, I had no reason to doubt his expertise. I was impressed by his forward thinking. It seemed to me that a man ought to unveil himself of progress and so I did. Between 1927 and 1930, Eben Byers consumed approximately 1,400 bottles of Radithor, a dose equivalent to more than three times the lethal acute level of radiation.

What kind of damage were those tiny half-ounce bottles capable of? The impacts were slow and gradual until suddenly they weren't. It began with headaches and fatigues. Then the headaches became monstrous beyond anything Byers had ever experienced. He began losing weight, the pounds falling off of his frame seemingly overnight.

His gums bled, his teeth loosened, and some eventually began falling out. Radithor was only triple distilled water with radium-226 and 228 at it. Just three ingredients and the main one was super clean water. How dangerous could it be? Well, since we're currently enjoying an anti-science moment where people assume the word natural always means better for you, here's the scoop on radium-226 and 228.

Yes, radium is natural. It's a total gift from the earth. But not all gifts are meant to be turned into drinks or snacks or medicine. Okay, so out there in nature, uranium and thorium get together and have a baby called radium. Works like this. Radium forms when uranium and thorium decay in the environment, which means that radium can be found in low levels in rocks and soil and water and coal and plants and even in our food.

When radium decays... Okay, wait, wait. Decay in this instance doesn't mean rot or putrefy. Decay means this occurs when the unstable atoms in radium spontaneously release energy on their way to becoming a more stable element. So in simple, simple, simple, simple terms, as radium decays, it emits radon gas and eventually turns into lead, which is a stable element, meaning it just sits there minding its business until it's acted upon.

But when those unstable radium atoms perform that energy release, the word for that energy is radiation. And radon gas, that's a known carcinogen. When it's inhaled, it's the second leading cause of lung cancer in this country. Radium-226 is part of the uranium decay sequence. And radium-228 is part of the thorium decay sequence, which for us is a mouthful of Charlie Brown's teacher.

I'm over here forgetting what any of this means as I'm literally saying these words out loud. So here's the important thing to remember. Both radium-226 and radium-228 are radioactive and both produce the very problematic carcinogen radon gas. And both were the active ingredient in ratathor. Eben Byers had cases of ratathor delivered to each of his homes, polishing off a bottle of the stuff after every meal.

And then came September 1930, when his jaw began to disintegrate. The Federal Trade Commission had quietly launched an investigation into Dr. William Bailey and ratathor. Having learned that Eben Byers was a regular user of the product, the FTC asked him to testify. But by that point, Byers was far too ill to travel. So an attorney named Robert Wynn was set to meet with him at his estate in Long Island.

Young in years and mentally alert, he could hardly speak. His head was swathed in bandages. Byers' personal physician, Dr. J.S. Wheelwright, had watched this nightmarish decline with horror. Of course, the damage went beyond what could be seen. Byers' kidneys were affected. An abscess was developing in his brain. A more gruesome experience in a more gorgeous setting would be hard to imagine.

Byers' whole upper jaw, except two front teeth and most of his lower jaw, had been removed. All the remaining tissue of his body was disintegrating and holes were actually forming in his skull. Dr. Harold Vaughn was called to testify, along with Dr. Wheelwright. They testified that Byers had taken a quantity of radithor and had come to them with a severe and serious condition of the mouth, facial bones, teeth, and gums.

Both testified to have treated Byers, but admitted that they were at a loss to understand the cause of his condition. Vaughn and Wheelwright sent Byers to another physician, Dr. Steiner. Steiner administered x-rays and suggested that Byers was suffering from radium poisoning. He referred the disintegrating golfer to Dr. Frederick B. Flynn at Columbia University.

Dr. Flynn determined that there were at least 365 micrograms of radium deposited in Evan Byers' body. 365 micrograms, more than three times the lethal limit. The Federal Trade Commission, in January 1932, issued a lengthy order against the Bailey Company, prohibiting them from advertising their products as harmless in the treatment of a long list of conditions and symptoms, more than 160 in number.

It further prohibited the advertisement of the product in the treatment of certain gland disorders. The knee bone connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone connected to the hip bone, the hip bone connected to the back bone, and then the shoulder bone, and then the neck bone, and by heck, don't you see what you do to me?

You know what radium loves? Radium loves your bones. Your bones are where it wants to be. It has a chemical resemblance to calcium, so it's readily absorbed into the skeletal system. Once it's made a home in your bones, it's there to stay probably for your lifetime. And don't forget, radium is unstable, so it's throwing off radiation in the form of alpha particles.

While alpha particles have a very short range of penetration, their capacity for damage is enormous. Even a single alpha particle, just one, can cause both strands of DNA to break, leading to cellular mutations and even cell death. Radium damages bone, but the mayhem goes far beyond that because it also impacts the bone marrow's ability to produce blood cells.

Uh-oh, here comes anemia, and worse, aplastic anemia. That's a condition where the bone marrow just can't produce enough new blood cells at all. And remember our buddies radium-226 and 228? They're both cheerfully decaying away inside the body, producing radon gas, which increases the risk of carcinomas in the sinuses and even leukemia.

Radon-226 has a half-life of 1,600 years, so there's no way you can outlast it. Radium-228 has a half-life of just under seven years, but it's every bit as dangerous. Fractured teeth and cataracts, for starters, but also increased risk of bone and breast cancer as well. And none of this mattered for Eben Byers. He was a dead man walking, and there was absolutely nothing that medicine or science could do to save him.

Nothing his extraordinary wealth could buy made any difference. Eben Byers, Pittsburgh pipe manufacturer and former national amateur golf champion, died Thursday, March 31st, 1932, of radium poisoning caused by drinking a radium solution put up for medical purposes. He is the first New York victim of radium water and the second known to the American medical profession.

Eben Byers was 51 years old, and even his very last breath was radioactive. Physicians made a desperate effort to rid Byers' body of the radium, but before he could show more than slight improvement, x-rays taken daily showed the development of a critical brain condition, which would prove fatal if spread rapidly. The official cause of death was listed as necrosis of the jaw, abscess of the brain, radium poisoning, terminal bronchial pneumonia, and secondary anemia, and accidental radium poisoning.

So extreme was Byers' condition that his body had to be buried in a lead-lined coffin to prevent radiation from seeping into the nearby soil and groundwater. Dr. Frederick Finn of Columbia University, a specialist on the use and effects of radium, said that Byers had contracted the radium poisoning by drinking a radium water prescribed by a Pittsburgh physiotherapist.

He added that more than 100 patients of this doctor are known to be afflicted with similar poisoning, and warned that the malady is impossible to diagnose until it reaches a mortal stage. That'd be Dr. Charles Moyar. Dr. Moyar was one of at least a half-dozen physicians known by the Federal Trade Commission to have prescribed Radithor.

I never had a death among my patients for radium treatment. I have taken as much or more radium water of the same kind Mr. Byers took, and I am 51 years old, active, and healthy. I believe that radium water has a definite place in the treatment of certain diseases, and I prescribe it when I deem it necessary. I know that Byers died from a combination of blood diseases which had induced gout.

Never had a death among his patients until the death of Eben Byers. Also, gout? Please be serious. Never in the history of the world has even the worst case of gout resulted in a person's jaw and skull dissolving. But Moyar wasn't the only one loudly refusing any responsibility for Byers' ghastly end. William J.A. Bailey, head of the Bailey Laboratories, which manufactured radium water until December 1929, disagreed with a diagnosis that Mr. Byers' death had been due to radium poisoning.

I have drunk more radium water, he said, than any man alive, and I have never suffered any ill effects. Besides, the radium water, radithor, had been prescribed for Mr. Byers by a Pittsburgh physician. I could no more be held responsible for his death than could any pharmaceutical manufacturer for the death of a patient who had taken his product under the direction of a physician.

There is more actual radium in the waters of some well-known springs, both here and abroad, than in radithor. Yet these waters are recommended by physicians, and government officials praise their curative qualities. Evan Byers didn't know that there was no hope for him until just two weeks before his death. Here's another thing Byers didn't know.

In 1965, his body would be very briefly exhumed by the federal government for study. Byers' remains were still dangerously radioactive 33 years after his death. You may have heard of the radium girls. You probably have. These were young women employed at watch factories in New Jersey, Illinois, Connecticut, and Canada.

Roughly 4,000 women, all told. During World War I and in the years that followed, these workers used a paint called Undark. It was made with radium. The workers used very fine camel hair brushes to paint watch faces and clocks, making them glow in the dark. To get the finest point on the brush, the women were encouraged to use their lips to moisten the brush tip.

Workers started getting sick, fractured and rotting teeth, sores in mouth, weakened and dying bone tissue in their jaws, anemia, cancer. Their bodies disintegrating. The factory workers tried to keep the women from learning about the hazards of handling the paint, of licking it. Then they try to cover up, hiding the results of their own tests.

Then they fought like rabid coyotes to deny the workers compensation for their suffering and loss of health and life. Maybe you're thinking that the authorities ought to have learned from Evan Byers that it was deadly to ingest radium in any form, whether in triple distilled water or in glow-in-the-dark paint. Why didn't Byers' death prevent the watch painters from suffering a similar fate?

Byers was a celebrity in his day. His death was widely covered and few gruesome details were left out. The answer is simple and more than a little shocking. The radium girls came first. By more than a decade, the United States Radium Corporation began supplying undarked paint and radium illuminated instruments and watch faces to the military starting in 1917.

They knew the material was dangerous. The United States Radium Corporation had created and distributed materials to the medical community, detailing the risks associated with radium. Even the inventor of the radium dial paint, Dr. Sabin Arnold Von Schake, wasn't spared. He died in 1928, becoming the 16th known victim of his own creation.

And that's right about when Evan Byers began drinking three or more bottles of Radithor a day. So you have to wonder, how did no one make the connection between the radium dial painters, the death of Dr. Schake and Radithor? How was a man with Byers' resources so oblivious to a news story involving the deaths of at least 50 women?

Deaths due to ingesting radium, which he was chugging like he was getting paid to the tune of 1400 or so bottles before his death. Because the dangers were known. Marie Curie herself had gotten radiation burns from handling radium. The men who worked in the labs at the U.S. Radium Corporation were issued lead aprons and special ivory tip tongs they knew what radium was, they knew the risks.

But the painters? Come on, they were barely touching the paintbrush with their mouths. Surely the tiniest trace of radium made in just that way would actually be beneficial to their health. Lucky, lucky girls and getting paid about three times as much as they could earn in any other factory. Some of the women were skeptical.

They had questions about safety. Hush, hush now, they were told. That little bit of radium won't do nothing, but add a pretty little flush to your cheeks. Now get to work. Besides, they said, we have the research to prove just how safe and good for you radium really is. Research that came from the very companies who stood to profit from products like Undark and Radithor and even one device that was marketed to men as a treatment for impotence.

It was worn like a jockstrap. The radium nestled beneath the testicles, cheerfully irradiating those boys while the wearer conducted his regular everyday business. When the owner of U.S. Radium Corporation was confronted with the findings of an outside expert who found that the injuries and deaths among the dial painters was a direct result of their prolonged exposure to radium, he blew a gasket.

He denied and he lied and he even went so far as to pay for new studies that came to the opposite conclusion about radium. It was a magical gift. The workers were simply trying any crazy stunt for attention and money for their so-called medical bills. I'm going to try right now to not scream as I tell you that it took the death of a male employee at U.S. Radium for the experts to go, you know, wait a minute, there might be something to this radium being hazardous to human health.

Not that any of that mattered for the victims. It didn't matter for Eben Byers. And as for Dr. William Bailey, he was never tried for any crime, any wrongdoing in the death of Byers. Yeah, sure, the feds shut down his New Jersey-based facility. Radithor would become a curiosity, a little footnote in the run-up to America's atomic age.

But Bailey was still in business and still in the business of selling radioactivity to the public. His new venture was called the Radium Institute. Products included a radioactive paperweight or radioactive belt clip, and even a little device meant to let the user make their own radioactive water at home. Bailey just kept going.

Like, OK, King, a man died, but whatever. I guess you could say that karma did finally catch up to Bailey. He died of bladder cancer in 1949, and his corpse was radioactive. So much so that when his body was dug up in 1970 for testing, it was still pinning the Geiger counter, and his skeleton was nearly completely disintegrated from radiation damage.

Back he went into his lead-lined box in the ground. William Bailey and the U.S. Radium Corporation had the glow-in-the-dark blood of their victims on their hands, but some good did come of this bizarre chapter in American medicine. It was pretty much the end of the road for dangerous patent medications. And, too, a great deal was learned about the hazards and correct handling of radioactive materials, knowledge that was later applied to workers on the Manhattan Project.

And beyond that, progress was made in what we now call nuclear medicine, where radiation and radioactive materials are deployed to fight cancer. You've got to watch guys like William Bailey. As Americans, we're such suckers for a charismatic con man selling health and wellness. We've been falling for it for centuries.

Because when fear has us in its grip, fear of illness, fear of aging, fear of dying, we're so vulnerable to the promise of hope. People like Bailey know that hope is what they sell, even if it's a scam, and it often is. Folks scream about not wanting the government all up in their business, but an operation like Bailey's thrived in the absence of oversight.

Back then, and still today, because human nature, greed, expediency, shortcuts, all in the name of profit and success. Oh, sure, if we could count on the inherent goodness of people, we wouldn't need so many rules or regulations around what we put into or onto our bodies. A world that runs on inherent goodness. It's a fantasy.

It's a dangerous fantasy. Just ask those radium dial painters or Eben Byers. Next time on True Weird Stuff. They say that deep below the Vatican in a secret archive that no member of the public can access, a machine sits in the dark, growing dusty with the years. A machine allegedly invented by some of the world's greatest scientific minds.

A time machine. One that lets you watch the past just like you're watching TV. And the priest who came up with the idea, he says he recorded The Last Supper. That's on the next True Weird Stuff. Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode, Kary "Doc" Bowser, Don Morgan, Erin Cox, and Lamar Richardson. This is one of those crazy true stories that has so many current events echoes in it.

I mean, doesn't it? America, you know, America is not the world. In other places, people are mobilizing differently. We are obsessed with quack cures in this country. We love a miracle cure. I can't tell you. I'm the biggest sucker. I'm not criticizing or judging because there is no limit to the things that I'll watch on YouTube or Instagram and go, oh, yeah, it might work.

You don't know, right? We're suckers for it. But there are a couple of really loud echoes going on here. So, for example, people were chug-a-lugging, not just Edmund Byers, but hundreds and thousands of people were chug-a-lugging radioactive water and water that was being marketed as radioactive on the say-so of these charismatic wellness gurus.

So that sounds to me really similar to people who, and, you know, feel free, whatever, email, come to my house. But you really should not be mass-consuming cow fat beef tallow. Like all the things we know about the impact on your cardiovascular health, but you do you, right? Because in America, we want to believe that there's an answer for things that are vexing and perplexing.

Radium was that. Radithor was that in this time. And a gazillion bogus supplements from weight loss teas to miracle pain medication are that right now. And I also have to point out to you that Radithor, Bailey sold Radithor as internal sunshine. I will invite you to go back to 2020 when people thought maybe if you could get sunshine inside your body, what would happen?

You wouldn't have to worry about COVID. Do you see why sometimes I can't believe I have hair because sometimes I just pull it and howl at the moon at how we don't seem to learn anything. Well, you know, radio activities, it's it's mysterious to most people because they don't understand that they don't necessarily understand the science of it.

And we don't generally, it doesn't come up as a problem too much for us. I mean, I think the biggest one in our lifetime was when Chernobyl and the ones over in Japan who were the nuclear power plants that were Fukushima, the one with the meltdown and in Chernobyl. But the other one was because of an earthquake. But we don't, we still don't understand radioactivity and how that works exactly.

And I would think Madame Curie died in 1934, and I'm sure that she was sick before that. I mean, it wasn't like she just up and was sick one day. She she had all kinds of things with this. But I guess nobody took that seriously or thought that it was part of the work she was doing with radium. You know, I think I think it was like you don't know what you don't know.

Right. And we we didn't know. This is pre-Manhattan Project. People didn't know. And we are there. We have such a huge market in this country for quack cures that has never gone away. I got it. I mean, I hate to be the person to say this to you if you don't already know. But a lot of the stuff that's coming across your newsfeed.

Don't buy it. It is OK. Don't give it your money. I just saw a thing for hydrogen water. Now, I have no idea whether this is good for you or not, but it's sparkling water that has extra hydrogen in it. And this is going to this is going to be the elixir that's going to change your life. And I looked at that and went, not so sure about that.

But there's there's any one of a number of things that are out there right now. People are so desperate to lose weight that they have these drugs which have been approved. But I still don't think we know what the long term side effects of some of these drugs are that people are using to to lose weight. Well, we learned, I believe it was in the late 1990s with Olestra, which was a kind of a cooking fat.

Yeah, that you're that passed through the body undigested, which meant you could eat a bag of potato chips, but your body wouldn't take the fat in. And and everyone was like, yes, please. But I have to ask you, eat bag of chips. Where does if Olestra doesn't go, if it leaves your body, how do you think it exits? Me first.

Remember, Olestra and oily, explosive, uncontrollable diarrhea that you didn't really get much of a warning for. I mean, I like potato chips. I don't like that much. Yeah, right. And please don't think that I'm like snarking it up and lecturing anybody. You are listening to a woman who puts snail mucus on her face every morning when I get out of the shower, because some Korean beauty influencer told me to.

Like, I am such, I am such an American when it comes to this stuff. But I'm a little bit skeptical about these over the counter medications and supplements that just look and feel so bogus to me. Like they just, I wouldn't have taken Radithor. I can tell you that I would not have done that. And that's even not knowing about radium 226 and 228 and all of that.

I just would have been, I'm suspicious about stuff that you swallow. Well, and I think part of it might have been that the communication wasn't as good at that time. That might be a part of it. And also it's horrifying to think that these women were being encouraged to dip the brush in their mouth. And then that started to happen.

And then that was not some sort of big news story. That that's what. No, when I found out that, because I knew about the radium girls, I think most people do. We've actually gotten some DMs from people saying, do an episode on the radium girls. And maybe we will eventually, like we tend to go for more obscure, lost kind of stories.

Plus, I think that I'm not sure we could do the radium girls in one episode. There's a lot to that. But anyway, anyway, anyway. The radium girls came first. And so the fact that all of those women suffered and died and the public still wasn't aware of the risks. I find that unsettling and disappointing. And Madam Curie, the woman who and Madam Curie who had done all the work on that.

And and one reason I think that might be is Bailey created what today we call them advertorials. That word didn't exist back then. I see them all the time on the interwebs. It looks like a news article from a legitimate source, like the American Medical Compendium, which is not the same thing as the AMA, but it sounds official.

And it'll say somewhere on the page, if you look, it'll say this is an advertiser. Yeah, but it'll say it in teeny tiny letters and in grayed out font. If you're not paying attention and you're not looking for that, you find yourself reading. Oh, it says here that if I drink this special concoction three times a day, I'll lose belly fat and my A1C will go down or whatever.

Well, we, the Federal Trade Commission today and this this comes down to what are your tax dollars for? Your tax dollars are to help you, help all of us live as a society, a better life. OK, your tax dollars are not just for roads, prisons and the military. In theory, your tax dollars are supposed to make your life better.

And once upon a time, the Federal Trade Commission was like, you know what? We can't let unscrupulous people make Americans sick or dead. We've got to put some rules in place. And so they created the rule about if you're going to sell bullshit, you have to warn people up front that this is an advertisement. Well, that, you know, William Bailey wrote these incredibly scientific sounding advertorials and then paid newspapers all around the country to run them.

And they took his money. And so you'd open the front page of, you know, I don't know, some paper in Topeka or Pittsburgh and there'd be the news and then there'd be this article about this incredible cure for what ails you. And people thought it was the news. They thought it was legitimate. It was so unethical. It was so sketchy.

Well, that's why they now have to say sponsored story at the top of it. And I think they do do a better job of that now. But I mean, I wondered something and that is that even buyers, I'm sorry, stranger things. I kept on wanting to call him Will Byers. Joyce or Will. Jonathan. Anyhow, but he said that he felt better.

And what I was wondering is, does this actually make you feel better initially? And what is it that's happening that would make you feel better initially? Or is that just a placebo effect that they think they're feeling better? Eben Byers swore that. So I hinted at it in the episode, but the man is dead and radioactive.

So I decided not to include the fact that this man could not keep that thing in his that hog would not stay in his pants. He considered himself such a ladies man going all the way back to college. And one of the reasons that he was so upset about his arm injury, and it was a freak accident. He fell out of his bunk on the train and hurt himself.

And I guess today, you know, we have like sports medicine and physical therapy. They didn't have that back then. They put it in a cast. It didn't really heal. Not only did he did it damage that arm and impact his ability to play golf, but suddenly he wasn't able to perform sexually. And that would not do. It was one thing for Eben Byers to not be able to swing a golf club.

It was another thing to not be able to get an erection and sustain it. And he wasn't going to be having that. So a big motivator in him trying the Radithor were all the promises it made about vitality and energy, which seemed to him to be things that might help out in the bedroom. And so he had multiple motivations for this.

And he started taking it and he felt pretty good. And, you know, I suspect that there is like if you think about the way we use radiation to treat cancer now, um, you know, there are therapeutic doses of radiation. Maybe maybe he did get a little spring in his step, but I think a lot of it had to be placebo effect. And oh, by the way, it seemed like they were doing a lot of x-rays on him.

I think at that time we didn't know that there were there was radioactive problems with x-rays, which is why people wear, you know, lead suits and that sort of thing whenever they're around that. So he had that going on as well. It was the thing about Eben and he was alive when the camera was invented, there are pictures.

When we say that his jaw disintegrated and he was left with just a couple of teeth, it's horrifying what happened to this man. This was not a fast, painless death. He literally disintegrated and it sucked. And he was in agony. His life was hell. Um, ditto for the women, the radium painters that got such whomping big doses of it.

And how pissed off were you at the way U.S. Radium Corp tried to tap dance around their accountability? They knew. They knew. It reminded me of the tobacco companies knowing, knowing what and kind of hiding the information that they had. I swear, the older I get, the more I, the more my early years in Catholic school come back to me when I think it is far better.

Because when you're a kid, you cannot comprehend how it would be better to be a poverty stricken shepherd than a rich man that can't fit through the eye of a needle. Do you know what I'm saying? Because when you're a kid, you're like, I think I would like to be a rich man and I'll try to be good and get through that. The older I get and the more I understand about how corrupt these systems are because human beings are weak and selfish and greedy and sometimes awful, the more I think better to be the poor shepherd who doesn't even know there's a big world out here.

Because as soon as, as soon as you get a little bit of taste of power or privilege or wealth, it seems really hard for a lot of people to maintain their humanity in that. There were so many folks in this story who knew. They couldn't have maybe told you the science behind it. They couldn't have discussed thorium decay, but they knew that they were giving people poison.

And the only good karma here is that Bailey himself was also just fallen to dust from being so exposed. Sherry, that is so spooky that it continues doing that even after you're dead, working on your bones. A half-life of 1600 years, like these men, these victims, because they're victims, they had to be buried in lead bolts in order to protect the groundwater.

Which brings us to, you mentioned Chernobyl earlier. So, you know, here we've got the reactor, it's melting down. It's a disaster. What are we going to do? We're going to blow up the world. Oh, I know. Let's pour a bajillion tons of concrete on it and seal it and cap it. Remember? Well, let's see if Max would like to tell the class what's happening in Chernobyl.

We think that just because we haven't heard about that, I think that was in 1986 that that happened, 87, somewhere around in there. We think that because we haven't heard about it in a while, that it's gone away. It has not. The Russians, when they were involved with, because Chernobyl's in Ukraine, so when the Russians were involved with it, and then the fall of the wall, they kind of went, all right, that's it for us and left the rest of the scientific community of the world to try to deal with this.

And they've built like a giant dome over top of it. Well, guess what's going on in Ukraine right now? What's going on is there's a war and Russians keep on saying we're going to bomb it because it's going to cause problems there again, because they know what would happen in that situation. And this situation, this, it's still, it's not like they put the dome over it.

No, wow, that's it. It's still a major disaster there. So here's the thing. In December 2025, which was about a minute ago, OK, these don't you love when we're in these stories and you're hoping that I'm going to say in the year 1712. And instead I say December 2025. In December of 2025, the UN, the United Nations team, they're kind of their nuclear watchdogs.

They said that the protective concrete cap around the Chernobyl site is no longer containing radioactive waste. It's damaged because of a Russian drone strike on Valentine's Day last year, Valentine's Day 2025. The Russian drone hit the cap and now we're leaking radioactivity. So we need to do a new one, obviously, or we just need to throw our hands up in the air and, you know, party like it's 1999.

I don't know. Well, even before that, the situation still was not rectified. Scientists were still working on ways to try to contain what had happened there. Well, and the they've got that exclusion zone, isn't that what they call it? The area all around that you're not allowed to go into. Although some of those those urban explorers, they go in there and they bring Geiger counters to be able to to tell what it is.

It's parts of it are real, real radioactive. Some parts of it, experts say there are parts of the exclusion zone that you could use again now. And they've found that the wildlife rebound it, in part because when people left, it became sort of a natural automatic overnight nature preserve. If you think about that, there's there's some fascinating.

We're learning so much from Chernobyl. But if we're going to have drones dropping bombs on the containment cap, we're going to run out of ways to repair that and keep the world safe. And I just, yeah, whatever. So that's like here we are. We're having this conversation in 2026 and we're still we have not triumphed over the atom.

Are you kidding me? No, we are not triumphed over the the people trying to reverse aging with. There's a there's a there's a there's a product they have. It's probably safe. I don't know. It's called eugenics. They go, we'll send you the first bottle for free. And I'm going, what kind of scam is this? And then the guy in the ad always goes.

And she'll like it, too. Like, you know what that means? We know what that means. And I'm thinking to myself, she probably reached the point where she went, oh, my God, finally, some relief. Yeah, she won't. I promise you. And you'll be and you'll be staring down and hoping that eugenics is about to kickstart something.

And it's not because chances are good. You just took a sugar pill. But yeah, what with it, with some with some Ashkawanda in it or I don't know something that's supposed to like. So I'll say maybe there is something to it just to cover us here. But I have no idea. But the idea of the snake oil that's going to fix all those things, it's we still do it, of course.

Yes, we just we're so vulnerable to it. And I think I choose to think it's because at our hearts, we're just such cockeyed optimists. You know, we're ready to believe we want to believe we want to believe. And so, you know, we buy it and we say to ourselves, this is probably bogus. But what if right? How many things have you spent money on that if you think back, you go, it's probably bullshit.

But maybe, maybe. Yeah, I'm sure that I I'm sure that I have none is coming to mind, but I'm sure that I have done that through the course of time. That one of the frustrating things in this story is the same thing that frustrates me in a lot of the true weird stuff stories is there's no justice. There's no accountability.

No, look what William Bailey did. And he when they shut him down in New York, he hopped over the river and started up in New Jersey. Look at the look at the harm this man caused. And yeah, he died, you know, sick and radioactive. But there's a point, folks, where listen, we're all going to die. That's not a special punishment.

What about some justice? All these people are still alive, right? The fact that he did indeed die from it is some justice. I will say that. I mean, that was the thought that I had as we were going through on it. If the U.S. Radium Corp had been held to the fire after the radium girls, this would never have happened. Never.

This could this could not have happened. So this is what when we talk about if you give a mouse a cookie, he's going to want a glass of milk. And before you know it, the mouse has you face down on the floor and it's telling you to call him daddy. You cannot allow minor transgressions because they paved the way for major atrocities.

But Sherry, I mean, you think that when we started doing tests on nuclear bombs, right? They were doing them outside of Las Vegas and people were out there watching it. They knew what radiation did then. And that was in 1940. What, 44, 45? They certainly knew by then the dangers of radiation. You know, they they allowed.

So what you're talking about with the Manhattan Project, I mean, even enlisted military were just a handful of yards away from these blast sites on mattresses. We've all seen the newsreels and hopefully you've read the books. But a lot was allowed, a lot of like really questionably, morally questionably, things were allowed under the banner of national security and saving the world.

I'm not saying that was right. William Bailey can't even fall back on that. He can't fall back on, we were trying to save the world. It's just greed. It's just greed and he did it because he could. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's true that, you know, he did die and he disintegrated and he's radioactive. And you could say, well, yeah, karma got him and it did.

But here's the problem. Justice didn't get him. And now if we're not careful, his bitch ass skeleton, it'll poison the groundwater. And that just seems to me like unfair, you know, that he got away with it. Well, you wonder in taking 1400 bottles of this, how much did Bailey get? Yeah, if Evan Byers drank that much, I was thinking, I was thinking about the thing that that one doctor said when Matthew Perry died from that ketamine, how much is this fool willing to spend on this?

I'm wondering whether Bailey said that himself. Well, I want you to think about there were lots of lots of details in the way Bailey set up his business. He created a 17% rebate as an incentive to get doctors to prescribe Radithor. And they took it. Well, like, like, there aren't certain things that happen now with pharmaceutical companies and doctors that are very unethical.

I mean, when you said that, I went, oh, oh, how times haven't changed. If I was in charge of things, well, if I was in charge of things, there would be UFO disclosure on day one. But the other thing would be if I was in charge of things, you would not be allowed to advertise prescription medications online or on TV or in magazines.

You would not be allowed to. The general public does not need to be asking their doctor of Jardians is right for them. That's that should be between that should be like your doctor's job. I agree with you. Decide if Jardians is right for you. And here's another thing. The drug companies, whether it's Glaxo or whoever, they need for the doctors to know that Jardians exists or whatever the drug is, pick one.

But do they need them to buy their enthusiasm to prescribe it? Because we know, don't we, that there's a lot of gray in the pharmaceutical sales. There's a lot of gray in that, yes. Industry. We've known people that do that for a living and it's very gray. It's very gray. So I don't think that that should be. I think that was the beginning of a very bad thing when they agreed to allow those pharmaceutical companies to advertise and the pharmaceutical companies own your politicians.

They own your elected representatives. Absolutely. Along with the insurance companies and the patrolling companies. And it's all a big joke. L.O.L.O.L. Except we're the punchline. And people that that pisses people off. No one listening to this is pissed off by that because y'all are awake and aware and you know. But there are a lot of people out there that get absolutely, they get so furious when I say this to them that I'm like, I'm sorry, is your mom GlaxoSmithKline?

Why are you carrying water for these companies? They're evil. They just exist for purely for profit. And by the way, the only drugs that make it to market are the drugs that you have to take chronically. You don't see them advertising take this and you're cured. It ain't a cure. It's for treatment of chronic conditions because chronic conditions are kachang.

And so I know, I know, I mean, believe me, I know I'm a kook. Pharmaceutical companies know going in with certain medications that some people are going to get the side effects. But it's the risk of that against the reward. And so it's a math game. I can tell you how I know about this close up. I know. And so they say, well, yes, that's going to happen for some people.

And they will be forever changed by this with the side effect. But, you know, we need to sell it. And we just say, well, this is going to help a bunch of people. And those people are just that's collateral damage. And and we're not talking about snake oil salesmen. We're talking about pharmaceutical companies doing this.

Big companies, companies that are my air quotes, respectable, reputable, you know. You can't in a for profit health care system, you have to understand what the priority is. It's not the patient and it's not the good curative outcome. It's the profit. A for profit entity, their motivation is profit. If you get better along the way, that's nifty.

That's cool. We're really expecting it. That's awesome for you. But that's not really the priority. The priority is the profit. And one of the interesting things about Dr. William Bailey with his three semesters of Harvard is that in at the beginning of the last century, he had such an instinctive grasp on how to sell how to sell bogus pharmaceuticals.

If he were alive today, he'd be the CEO of one of these companies. Because he just got it and he understood about staying. Like you and I, we're not, we weren't born to be criminal masterminds. We don't have that thing inside us that makes it fun to stay one step ahead of the law. No, no, I don't. We are the people who were driving to the grocery store, minding our business.

The blue lights come up behind us and we immediately try to remember if we've murdered anyone. Right? Yes. We don't know what we did, but it's about to go down and the cop just passes us. We're those people. Dr. Bailey? One step ahead of the law and it was a fun game. Well, that's how many psychopaths and sociopaths have pulled off all kinds of elaborate scams on people.

Sometimes I think to myself, girl, you're poor and you're weird and your head is too big for your body, but at least you're not an amoral. You're not a psychopath and that's something. That's a win. This goes under the heading of special police in hell. Yeah, it's a win. Sure, you know, I don't have a yacht. My head's too big, but my God, at no time do I wish to inflict harm on innocent bystanders.

No. So question for you, because I've resisted the Radium Girls just because there's such a great book on the subject and I feel like doesn't everybody know that story? I don't. See, here's the thing, as is so much the case with anything pop culture or newsy or anything else, I have a bit of information about it. I knew there were Radium Girls.

I knew the gist of the story. So when you did that, I sort of knew what the gist of the story is. The actual full story. I don't know. I think that for a lot of people, they would be more willing to listen to it on a podcast than maybe read a book. And so in that way, I think that it might be something people will be interested in.

I have a lot of like love for those women in those factors. Four thousand women were affected, by the way. We're not talking about just a handful of malcontents, which is what the Capitalism Industrial Complex always tells you. They, oh, this person was just looking to make trouble. Four thousand victims of the pointing technique with this radium paint.

And I have so much love for them because they thought that they were helping their country in World War I. They thought they were doing such a good thing. The boys fighting for freedom. You know, the army needs. And you know, you've got men away at war. And the same thing happened again in World War II, right? Somebody had to step into those jobs.

So you had like young women who were so excited to get these jobs and so proud for the part that they were playing in freedom. And they were earning their own money. And it was so exciting and so thrilling. And the very people that hired them knew as they instructed those workers to dip that paintbrush in their mouth.

They knew. And here's how I know they know. Because back at the factory where they were making undark paint, they were taking every safety precaution. Suddenly, the same material that required all of these safety measures and all of these layers of precaution, suddenly that material, when it leaves that building, is fine for you to put it in your mouth.

Folks, you think you only go to hell if you pull the trigger. But the people who stand by and knowingly watch harm be committed and say nothing are also going to find their asses kind of warm. We are called as moral creatures to not look the other way. And unfortunately, reality is such that we often feel we have to look the other way.

I can't afford to lose this job. I'm afraid to get into trouble. Maybe I'm wrong. I should mind my business. What do I know? Right? That's why we created protections for whistleblowers so that somebody could come forward and go, they're telling these women to lick poison. You should investigate. We created protection for those people who could come and speak on behalf of all of us when we see something that is harmful, that's committing harm.

It pisses me off to no end how many people at US Radium really do, like I said in the episode, have glow-in-the-dark blood on their hands. It just pisses me off. We are used to guys like William Bailey around here. Give us a charming, unscrupulous con man who either makes his own religion or comes up with a crackpot business scheme and we got you.

But what happened? Layers upon layers of administration bureaucracy at US Radium. So yeah, eventually we'll get around to telling that story. So, like you have to use common sense. You probably know that you shouldn't take your hand and scoop up a big fistful of cow fat and put it in your mouth. You probably know that, right?

You know that. Well, I'm not going to. You know that. And low doses of arsenic will make you lose weight, but it's probably not a good way to do it. You know that. You know, I'll defer to my parents on this. And that is, they just did everything in moderation. Did they eat beef? Yeah. In moderation. I love steak. Did they eat pork and bacon?

Yeah, they did in moderation. Did they drink? Yeah, they did in moderation. I mean, they did everything in moderation. So the idea, there's no one big thing that's going to fix anything. Whether it's... There's no magic bullet. There's no magic superfood. You know, there's foods that are better for you than others, but there's none that's going to fix everything.

I think maybe because of just everything that I've read my whole life, you grow up enough, you spend enough of your childhood without access to TV, radio, or telephone. Sooner or later, you will find the library. And, you know, my older brothers, we've talked about my older brothers' absolute obsession with like the Manhattan Project and nuclear winter and the Russians bombing us and all that.

I think because I read all that stuff that by the time I hit adulthood, I sort of was like built in skeptical. There's a lot of really popular things that I simply don't do. Like, for example, I don't eat any artificial sweeteners. I can't. I don't have a good reason for it. I don't like the way they taste. I don't trust them.

I do. I eat stevia, but that's supposed to be... But stevia is a plant, isn't it? Yeah. Stevia tastes weird to me. If I'm going to eat something with sugar, I just eat some sugar. Like I have all these weird things that I just won't do. And I'll say to like a friend of mine, why are you buying that? Don't buy that. Don't eat that.

Don't take that. Don't do that. Have you read the ingredients? It's nothing. It's wax. Like, don't give them your money. But those products, William Bailey, when he was selling Radithor, and Kim Kardashian, when she was selling Diet Tea, and most of what's on my Instagram right now, what they're really selling is hope.

Yeah. And who doesn't want to buy some of that? Who does not want some of that? I'm here for it. I recently... I recently... I am such a sucker. Like such a sucker. Over the Christmas holidays, I saw a thing on my Instagram. And this woman, she was like the makeup director for the movie Parasite. And she's very beautiful.

And she's like, and these Korean actresses will come into the makeup chair. And they were like 45 years old, but they look 12. And now we cut away to the B-roll of these exquisitely beautiful women. What was their secret? I had to learn. Well, their secret turns out to be this clear liquid that you brush onto your face before you go to bed at night and in the morning, you peel it off or wash it off.

So I was like, well, I would like to have glass skin and look like a breathtaking movie star from Korea. So I bought it. And I'm pretty sure it's useless. But I don't know. Right? I don't know. Maybe I need to use it for longer. When I tell you, don't take that, don't buy it, don't eat that. I'm telling you, as someone who bought it, takes it and eats it, but don't.

And anything, anything that's harnessing the power of the sun is, you need to look sideways at that. Yep. So the current thing that's going around, and I cannot click on it because I refuse to give the algorithm the satisfaction. Have you seen, it's all over all the social platforms, the gelatin recipe that allegedly caused Melissa McCarthy, I think, to drop 80 pounds.

Yeah, I have seen that. And there's somebody else that, you know, it's not, it's natural, Munjaro, which is a weight loss. It's a diabetes medication that people are using for weight loss. So it's like, this woman is, she's standing in front of the camera and she's got that crying voice. She talks like this, and she's like making this recipe.

And she's like, you know, I was skeptical, but, you know, I thought, well, what can it hurt? And I tried this recipe and three weeks later, like I couldn't fit into any of my clothes. They were falling off of me. And my husband was like, babe, what did you do? You look pretty good. And she's stirring this jello. And I'm thinking, are the three ingredients, uncut cocaine, radium, and Jesus?

Because what could you stir into jello that would cause you to drop 80 pounds? There's no magic. There's no magic. And, you know, God, whatever. Life is miserable. If you want to do it, do it. And maybe it works. And maybe we should all be clicking on the viral jello recipe that only has three ingredients. And you eat some of it every day.

I don't even know what the hell it is. But when I see stuff like that, all I think about is these guys, these snake oil, patent medicine guys that just were scooping dirt up into baggies and selling it to folks. Do you remember the guy out in Zyzix? You know what? Look what he was telling people. Yeah, that's right. He was very big into snake oil.

Yeah, bogus supplements. So just keep your money. Got really wealthy. Need an apple. Hey, you want to hear as we as we depart? Can I tell you something cool about Chernobyl that I remembered when you were talking about it? Yeah. So there are in the exclusion zone, you know, where people lived and farmed. There are orchards and they picked some of the apples out of this orchard in the exclusion zone and they tested in the apples were radioactive, not not insanely radioactive, but radioactive.

And so they were like, OK, the apple is radioactive. Let's do some things to the apple and see if that changes their radioactivity. They ended up fermenting some of these radioactive apples and making apple schnapps and the finished product was not radioactive at all, which is interesting, isn't it? That somehow in the fermentation process, it made the clean these apples up.

Oh, that's very interesting. Yeah, and the the one the person I can't remember where I read this. It's not that long ago because all this came out in late last year. He said the apple schnapps is surprisingly delicious and it's not radioactive at all, which is quite a marketing slogan. It just shows you. Yeah, there's like so much we don't know, but I don't trust somebody says that, but I don't trust even I don't trust that.

I'm like, no, I don't think so. Well, Max doesn't drink, so I don't have to worry about you having Chernobyl. No, I'm not going to have three or however you say it. No, but isn't isn't that a cool little fun fact that when they turned the apples into a liqueur, they weren't radioactive anymore. And there's that's something to remember for the future in the event that everything turns into Mad Max and you and I have to figure out because you will be drinking by then.

I mean, my God. Yeah. If anything's going to knock off that, yeah, that'll be it. You know, there'll be ways to take these contaminated fruits and vegetables and maybe do something with them. OK, so that's the end of Internal Sunshine. Next time on True Weird Stuff, we're going to take you to the Vatican's Apostolic Archives, what we call the secret storage room beneath the Vatican.

It's it has it's 53 miles worth of shelves. I don't know if you knew that. It's vast. It is vast. I did know that it was vast, but I am fascinated by this story and I cannot wait for us to do this. It's so vast. There are things in Vatican storage. Wonderful, terrifying, marvelous and miraculous things. Some of them are just, you know, books and manuscripts and letters and scrolls.

But also down there are said to be terrible prophecies of catastrophic doom. And in a box on one of those shelves, far, far, far from prying eyes is a machine that's been taken apart for storage. A machine that a Benedictine priest says he built with some of the greatest scientific minds in history, including Enrico Fermi, the physicist behind the Manhattan Project.

He says he built a time machine and he can't travel through time, but you can go back and look at it and watch it like it's TV. And so he had himself a look at, among other things, the Last Supper. It's the story of the Vatican time machine, the Chronovisor, on the next True Weird Stuff. Thank you for listening. We'll see you there.

And if you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, hit the plus button in the top right corner and now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it if you subscribe, rate and review True Weird Stuff. Hit our website, trueweirdstuff.com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content.

Everything True Weird is waiting for you at trueweirdstuff.com. And follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram. True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser.

Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr. Original graphics by Kevin Nash. Original artworks by Olivia Axland. True Weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Zane Nash. Copyright 2026 Now! Media. All rights reserved. All wrongs remembered.

And it was right around this time that Larry Munson sat on my keyboard and deleted my document.