Part One: Sylvia Browne: Fake Psychic Detective

Summary

Behind the Bastards – Sylvia Browne: Fake Psychic Detective (Part One)

Podcast: Behind the Bastards (Cool Zone Media & iHeartPodcasts)
Date: March 17, 2026
Host(s): Main Host (uncredited, referred here after as Host 1), Co-host (Host 2)
Guest: Cal Penn (actor, former government official, podcaster)

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Episode Overview

This episode of Behind the Bastards turns its focus to Sylvia Browne, the infamous TV psychic who made her fame by claiming to help police solve crimes and find missing persons—but, as the hosts reveal, often did far more harm than good. With special guest Cal Penn, the episode dissects Browne’s origins, the dubious ethics of her “psychic detective” persona, and the damage psychics like her can inflict—especially when inserted into tragedy. The tone is irreverent, at times darkly funny, and refreshingly skeptical.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The “Crime-Fighting” TV Psychic: Browne’s Harmful Legacy

[06:04 – 11:45]

• Browne is described as the archetype: “the first crime-fighting psychic,” popularized through her regular spots on talk shows, most notably Montel Williams.
• The episode opens with one of Browne’s worst moments: her incorrect, devastating “reading” of Amanda Berry’s mother on Montel, bluntly telling her that Amanda (then missing but actually still alive) was dead.
  • This reading led Amanda’s mother to lose hope and ultimately pass away, believing her daughter gone.
  • Notable quote:

    “So she's like, 'Am I gonna see her again?' and Sylvia says 'In heaven.' ... just how devastating that is.” – Host 2 (07:10)

Setting the Record Straight: Not Harmless, Not Helpful

[11:45 – 13:45]

• The hosts clarify: Browne’s interventions were not quirky or harmless—she often worsened suffering.
• Her notoriety helped set the media template for psychic detectives, influencing culture far beyond her corner.

Sylvia Browne’s Biography: Myth-Making and Contradictions

[13:45 – 21:45]

• The hosts consult Browne’s autobiography Psychic—a treasure trove of self-mythology.
• Browne’s spiritual beliefs involve elaborate “life charting” on “the Other Side” before birth, where souls pick families, enemies, even illnesses or tragedies to experience.
  • This is critiqued as “inherently victim blamey,” privileging those who have good lives, and distressingly illogical.
  • Notable quote:

    “You chose this before you even got here. You preordered your meal, right?” – Cal Penn (14:31)

• The hosts point out that Browne’s autobiography attempts to explain away the horrors of suffering by suggesting everyone chooses their destiny, even victims of abuse or genocide.

Early Life, Victim-Blaming, and Family Lore

[16:41 – 21:45]

• Browne recounts her mother as abusive and a “dark entity.” Whether such stories are real or crafted isn’t always clear.
• Her grandmother Ada, the “positive female influence,” seeds the idea of a centuries-long psychic lineage.
• Browne's early claims: childhood premonitions, seeing ghosts, warning strangers of health problems—none verifiable except through her (16:41).
• At eight, she claims to meet her lifelong spirit guide, “Francine,” whom she renames—contradicting the spirit’s supposed Aztec/Incan/Colombian heritage (historically and linguistically nonsensical).

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• The Life-Charting Nonsense:

  “God was like, you know what the right age is? Thirty.”
  – Host 2 (47:59)

• On Psychic Powers Failing at Home:

  “Okay, you can tell a guy's got liver cancer but not that a dude who's hitting on you has a wife and kids back home?”
  – Host 2 (33:11)

• Guest's Take—Why People Believe:

  “I appreciate this backstory... whether she actually believes this or whether it was a calculated fraud, she doesn't sound well from the beginning.”
  – Cal Penn (53:01)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• [05:41] — Are You Psychic? (Cal Penn says he’s not)
• [06:04 – 11:45] — The Amanda Berry Case: Browne’s Most Harmful “Prediction”
• [13:45 – 16:39] — Browne’s “Life Charts” and Spiritual Cosmology
• [16:39 – 21:45] — Abusive Mother, Psychic Grandma, and Invented Family Traditions
• [21:45 – 23:32] — Spirit Guides, Reincarnation, and Browne’s Claims of Lineage
• [24:21 – 25:56] — The “Aztec-Incan” Spirit Guide and Historical Inaccuracies
• [26:00 – 29:25] — Catholic School, Early Rejection, and Doubting Her Own Sanity
• [33:11 – 38:03] — Browne’s College Years: Hypnosis, Voices, Diagnoses (and Fraud)
• [40:12 – 41:34] — Exposed Lies: Browne Never Graduated or Taught Kids
• [41:34 – 44:29] — Marriage to a Cop, Domestic Strife, and Building Psychic Lore
• [47:04 – 50:32] — The “Thirty-Year-Old Rule” for Spirits, Founding a Psychic Nonprofit
• [50:32 – 53:00] — The Nirvana Foundation, Monetizing “Gifts,” and 1970s New Age Culture
• [53:01 – 55:07] — Cal Penn’s Reflections & “Breaking Bad” for Psychics

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Key Themes and Analysis

Victim-Blaming Spirituality

• The hosts skewer Browne’s worldview as callous, using invented spiritual laws to explain away suffering and rationalize exploitation.

Self-Mythologizing and Grift Roots

• Browne’s autobiography is treated as a window into her self-aggrandizing narrative: multiple marriages, a supernatural lineage, manipulation of her own story for personal gain.

The Psychic Industrial Complex

• The episode traces how Browne transformed from a self-styled psychic into a cash-generating machine—founding nonprofits, charging for classes, landing TV gigs, always reworking her mythology to justify authority and profit.

The Slippery Slope of Harm

• Through dark humor and careful attention to real-world consequences, the hosts argue this kind of psychic intervention is never harmless—sometimes with tragic results.

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Recurring Humor, Tone & Notable Exchanges

• The hosts’ tone is sardonic, with plenty of side jokes about “preordering your meal” in the afterlife and poking fun at psychic logic.
• Cal Penn brings a grounded outside perspective, frequently flabbergasted by the absurdities but empathetic about human vulnerability to such grifts.
• The psychic “revelations”—with spirits all being eternally thirty years old—draws both laughter and incredulity.
• There’s consistent outrage at Browne’s unaccountable harm:

  “This is not a harmless psychic ... you’ve become a monster,” – Host 2 (11:00)

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Final Thoughts & Reflections

[53:01 – 55:07]

• Cal Penn reflects on growing up seeing Browne on TV, his surprise at the dark elements of her backstory, and the complex mix of belief, self-delusion, and opportunism underpinning her grift.
• Host 2 sums up the psychology: "Nobody starts ... mapping out, 'And then I'm going to lie to people about their kidnapped relatives.’ ... things snowball and eventually you get a lot less ethical."

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For Listeners: Why This Episode Matters

Even for those unfamiliar with Sylvia Browne, the episode goes well beyond biography. The hosts explore:

• How seemingly “harmless” hucksters can cause tragic, outsized harm.
• The mass culture fascination with psychics and “paranormal detectives.”
• The fine line between self-delusion and calculated grift.
• The pernicious tendency for victim-blaming in pseudoscientific belief systems.

Through irreverence, history, and a healthy dose of skepticism, Behind the Bastards exposes how Sylvia Browne built her “brand”—and why it still echoes into the present.

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“That was a sign of a threshold, and she is going to be from this point forward making money full time off her psychic research ... after this point, Sylvie is not going to apologize for anything she does over the next fifty years.”
– Host 2 (51:53)

[End of Part One. To be continued in Part Two.]

Transcript

[Host 1 (likely the main host of Behind the Bastards)]

call zone media

[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

welcome back to behind the bastards a podcast about the very worst people in all of history and if you're listening to this we've had a heavy start to the year doing four episodes on some of the new releases in the epstein files it's been dark and whenever things get dark i like to go back to like a lighter kind of fare you know something a little more fun now since this is still a podcast about the worst people in history we're still gonna be talking about horrible things but yeah this is all a preamble to say we're talking about a kooky psychic today you're welcome everybody i know these are a lot of people's favorite episodes and to hear about this person we've got a great guest for you this week cal penn cal welcome to the show thank you for coming on thanks for having me i appreciate it yeah obviously people i'm sure most people listening are very well aware of you for your career in film and television and your time in the obama white house but you are now a podcaster you've gotten dragged into the podcasting trenches your life has

[Host 1 (likely the main host of Behind the Bastards)]

been upgraded some might say yeah yeah

[Cal Penn (guest, actor and podcaster)]

there weren't enough podcasts until i had

[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

one too that's right it was a real problem we were all worried about it but thankfully you've filled the gap you want to talk about the show you're doing before we get into our

[Cal Penn (guest, actor and podcaster)]

episode thank you thanks for the shameless plug opportunity it's a podcast called here we go again that looks at the past present and future of things in pop culture so we've had bill nye the science guy to talk about things like the space race had on mehdi hassan to talk about the lack of trust in mainstream news even like one of my favorites right after he was done being transportation secretary we had pete buttigieg on and technically i was supposed to talk about infrastructure but i really wanted to understand why when your flight is early there's not a gate available like it's almost never early but if it's early what's the problem here they always say that we they didn't know we were coming yes they did that's

[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

how it works how do you not

[Cal Penn (guest, actor and podcaster)]

so now that i have a podcast i get to ask all of those that rock all of those kinds of

[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

questions yet transportation secretary seems like one of those like every time i'm in an airport i'm like oh if i had that power the things i'd change and then the second i leave the airport it's like oh i can't imagine wanting to think about airports for another second when i'm not in one totally

[Cal Penn (guest, actor and podcaster)]

agree yes that's exactly

[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

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[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

know eddie and i recently stopped by yeah in nashville it's an incredible non profit empowering kids through music education thanks to hyundai we recorded a special podcast episode while we were there how do you think learning an instrument helps kids with confidence learning an instrument allows them

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to discover a little bit further of

[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

who they are and be comfortable with it and then share a little bit

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about that with others and if it's

[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

done in an environment that is celebrating and championing them then that confidence can only go up the full episode is out now presented by the hyundai ioniq nine to donate and learn more about yeah's mission just visit yeahrocks dot org well cal i'm going to start by asking a question that we we ask all of our guests are you psychic

[Cal Penn (guest, actor and podcaster)]

i am not sat well see if you were psychic you would know the answer to that question yeah yeah i'm

[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

not psychic i knew that yeah have you ever heard of a famous tv psychic named sylvia brown yes of course

[Cal Penn (guest, actor and podcaster)]

she was she had all those daytime

[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

talk shows everywhere everywhere she was on larry king montel was the big one she was on yeah there are all

[Cal Penn (guest, actor and podcaster)]

those viral clips of her right yes

[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

she's been going viral with the the gen z or gin alpha i i'm split as to which gin has rediscovered her but one of the younger ones has rediscovered her in clips on tiktok and she's has a i think a lot of people like when you get little clips out from someone and maybe she sounds kind of motivational in that one or optimistic in another and kind of encouraging you get a different picture of the woman that i think is accurate to her because sylvia browne she was like the first crime fighting psychic that's how she built she didn't actually fight crimes she committed them but she was like the first tv psychic to be like i work with police and the fbi to help like solve missing persons cases right she was the one who kind of turned that into a trope and in fact i think you could probably argue that she's like you know the tv show psych kind of played that idea for laughs but i think it like psych probably wouldn't exist if sylvia brown hadn't have been around in the nineties like you know making that into a thing otherwise you'd be like well with psychic detectives that's like that's just a weird concept you know what's interesting about sylvia is that while she's this person who claims to be helping the police who claims to be finding people with her powers she's not just bad at it she's so bad that she like adds harm to situations that were already disastrously dangerous and we're gonna start these episodes as we usually do with her early life and childhood i've got her she wrote an autobiography thank god which i always love when a grifter writes an autobiography you learn so much about how they want to be seen but part of the problem is she kind of paints herself as a very sweet and reasonable person in that and it might seem like as it goes through we're kind of being unfairly mean to her so before we get to her autobiography i want to actually open with a later chapter from her life to kind of set the stage and make sure people know there's a reason why we're talking about this lady right this isn't just like a harmless a harmless crank in two thousand four sylvia brown made one of her many appearances on the montel williams show at the time amanda barry a seventeen year old girl had been kidnapped about a year earlier amanda goes missing in two thousand three and the last time amanda had been heard from was at eight pm on april twenty first she'd called her sister to say she was getting a ride home from her job at burger king and then she's just gone the fbi initially describes her as a runaway which i think is generally what they do in cases like this but a day or two later an anonym person calls barry's mother using her daughter's cell phone and says i have amanda she's fine and will be coming home in a couple of days amanda was not fine she was not home in a couple of days and as the months go on her family gets understandably desperate and her mother decides she's willing to do anything to keep public interest up about her daughter's case obviously right like what other what else can you do in this sort of situation so she's willing to talk to anybody and she's willing to go on any show to keep amanda's name in the news so in two thousand four she decides to get on the montel williams show for years montel williams had had a profitable arrangement with sylvia brown who was a popular psychic reader and had in fact worked with law enforcement on several missing persons cases or at least that's how she billed herself she was brought in to do a reading on amanda's distraught mother loana miller sylvia very bluntly tells loana your daughter is not alive based on her psych my psychic she's like i looked into it psychically your daughter's dead and she says your daughter's not the kind who wouldn't basically because she hasn't contacted you like she's definitely gone so she's she's very blunt about this and the whole interview is pretty brutal it's hard to find full episodes of of the show from that period of time online but we've got a little a little segment just a couple of seconds sophie's going to play to give you an idea of how sylvia is talking to this woman don't think i'll ever see her again yeah in heaven on the other side so she's like am i gonna see her again and sylvia says in heaven which is pretty you can see on her mom's face like just how devastating that is and this is really fucked up because amanda's not dead she is in fact alive and aside from being kidnapped and locked in a basement she is in good health at the time of this montel williams broadcast it turns out she was one of three women or i mean they're women after a period of time but i think they're mostly girls when they're kidnapped by a maniac you've all heard of this case a guy named ariel castro kidnaps three women and imprisons him in the basement of his cleveland home this is the you know that guy gets like recorded talking about the case when they escape and it gets like auto tuned and stuff and turned into like it's an early meme like this is that case right i mean i don't mean to distract from the severity of it but this is the yeah this is why i mean it's a very famous story and amanda actually escapes in may of two thousand four thirteen she's the one who gets out of the the the prison that he's built for them and calls for help and gets them all rescued this is a story you've heard obviously it's it's it's fairly famous but what you probably hadn't heard is that amanda's mom had been told by a tv psychic ten years earlier that her daughter was dead and when lawana goes home after appearing on the montel williams show she tells a friend that she has been devastated by sylvia's prediction she calls sylvia ninety eight percent credible and she accepts that her daughter has died her friends and say that she kind of stops her efforts to find amanda she basically gives up she's hospitalized a year later with pancreatitis and she dies believing her daughter was dead so that's bad like awful i mean just yeah what can you say other than i think that sets the stage of like this is not a harmless psychic this is not someone who's like playing around and pretending to have powers and talking to aliens and not doing any danger at the time at which you're inserting yourself into missing person's cases you've become a monster kind of right this is terrifying yeah it's terrifying it's interesting how she gets to this stage because it's not kind of what i would expect like the the the version of her life that she told people is not very accurate to like how she actually gets on television because she portrays herself as like someone whom the police come to and and start using in the seventies as a resource and that's very much not true so let's talk about the reality of sylvia's life sylvia celeste shoemaker she's not born brown was born in kansas city missouri in nineteen thirty six in her autobiography psychic she states that she believes this is like because she lays out in this book kind of her it's almost a religion that she's kind of trying to put out she has her own like set of spiritual beliefs that she's trying to get people to embrace and based on that she believes that when we're born we come from the other side and we plan out our new incarnation before like we come into the world so our spirit laboriously plots out every step of our future lives to quote help guarantee that we accomplish the goals we set for ourselves so sylvia says we choose our families which i'm sure will come to a surprise to people with abusive relatives we choose our enemies which i'm sure is a real shocker to the victims of genocide and we choose our careers which i assume will at least come as a surprise to the guy i saw mucking out the slurry of old booze urine and trash in the streets of new orleans after mardi gras we pick all of that when we're on the other side like it's the kind of thing i guess if you're happy with your life and who you are that's a comforting thing to believe but like you have to imagine somebody sitting back in the spirit world being like what am i gonna do with this next life you know it'd be great having like a crippling substance dependency and working a series of marginal jobs until i die at age twenty nine from meningitis and then another guy spirits like yeah you know what i'm going to grow up in the congo and get maimed by a landmine at age eleven that sounds awesome like that's literally what

[Host 1 (likely the main host of Behind the Bastards)]

she believes that's like such a crazy level of like privilege and entitlement it's

[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

kind of inherently victim blamey yeah right like how can you if that's what you believe how can you sympathize with people who are suffering yeah yeah you

[Cal Penn (guest, actor and podcaster)]

chose this before you even got here you preordered your meal right yeah it's

[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

like you're picking an in flight meal but it's like pancreatic cancer sounds good at like age forty five you know right in the middle there i was

[Host 1 (likely the main host of Behind the Bastards)]

like you know what podcaster yeah that

[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

that makes sense i think podcasters are picked before birth anointed and there's also like some inconsistencies that i just can't like square out in here like for example she says that you pick your parents right and you pick their good and their bad traits but presumably didn't your parents also start off as spirits that like picked their life so then like how does that all work right like what room is there for you

[Cal Penn (guest, actor and podcaster)]

i enjoy that you're trying to rationalize

[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

this this is yeah you have to think about these things right like the

[Host 1 (likely the main host of Behind the Bastards)]

math is not mathing is what you're

[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

saying no exactly yeah it's a pretty it's a pretty like hard to kind of draw a logical line between all of this and obviously you know religion is never perfectly consistent with what we'd call human logic that's kind of the point god works in mysterious ways and all but i think we can all agree this is pretty incoherent right like when you're saying like victims of human trafficking like sat down at some sort of celestial d and d table and like picked that out as a trait like that that's just kind of messed up even in her own autobiography which opens with her wedding to husband number five in her seventies kind of makes funny about how silly this idea is she writes quote obviously when i was on the other side writing my chart it seemed like a great idea to wait until i was in my seventies to meet the real mister right i repeat what the hell was i thinking yeah because maybe that's a really dumb way to think about life oh man back to her story sylvia has a good relationship with her dad she really likes him she kind of describes him as a scumbag but she has a good relationship with him i guess like he's constantly cheating on her mom but she hates her mom so she winds up sympathizing with her dad over it

[Cal Penn (guest, actor and podcaster)]

well look she chose it she shows

[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

it right yeah and her mom must have chosen to have a bad husband she describes her mother celeste as basically the devil herself quote she was physically abusive when my father wasn't around and she delighted in telling me about lying awake at night trying to figure out if she could kill me and get away with it and it's hard when you're dealing with an autobiography of someone who is talking about their horrible child abuse and then talking about the fact that they can see the future or talk to aliens and you're like well i know a lot of this isn't true how much of it is true right i tend to try to take some of that like the stuff about her the basics of her life at face value just because usually even when people are kind of like manufacturing a backstory for themselves they don't make everything up out of whole cloth and this is all like fairly consistent the consistency of her anger towards her mother means that i it seems pretty believable to me that they had a really fraught relationship sylvia has concluded that her mother is something called a dark entity dark entities are those who because they've turned away from god and abandoned his light choose to spread nothing but darkness in their lives by their own choice when they die their spirits don't transcend the sacred perfection of the other side instead they enter what's known as the left door plunge through a godless joyless abyss and cycle right back into some poor unsuspecting fetus again if one of these days you read about someone in their late teens triggering a violent uprising in some historically peaceful country you can confidently say to yourself oh look it's sylvia's mother is that from her autobiography yeah really doesn't like her mom it's interesting too because that's like she's basically saying that i guess kind of the normal way like reincarnation is what happens like if you're a bad person and the good people get to sit down as spirits and pick out what they're going to do otherwise you just kind of like it happens at random seems to be more or less how she's saying it it goes down yeah her earliest childhood memories also she's angry at her mom but she also says that her spirit picked the bad traits of her mother before birth so how much anger could you really have i don't know her earliest childhood memories are all about her mom being like just terrible and she tells one story in here called the time she tried to burn my foot off and i'm not actually sure if this is just like a story of sylvia's mom sucking or a story of like a mother getting distracted during bath time i was three years old it was bath time what i distinctly remember is mother putting me into the tub turning on a full blast of scalding hot water and leaving the room my feet had to be treated for some second degree burns and yeah like that is the kind of thing i can believe happened her mom says it was like a maintenance issue she didn't realize the water heater heater was broken sylvia's convinced from an early stage that her mom tries to murder her i kind of wonder if maybe this all she starts feeling about her mother this way just because of like a fuck up with like the heating but it's really impossible to say sylvia's main positive female influence in her life is her grandmother ada coyle it was ada who seems to have first told sylvia that she was a psychic and not just a psychic but one of a very long line of psychics she was in fact quote another link in a three hundred year psychic family history so she's got like she's like the mayflower of psychic families grandma ada doesn't tell her about this history at first because she doesn't want to unfairly prejudice the baby into thinking she was psychic because not all the kids in the family get to be psychic if you're grandma ada you know that you don't want to disappoint the ones who wind up not being psychic this is the way sylvia writes it at least and then kind of at age six sylvia predicts the birth of her baby sister and the death of her grandfather and then the deaths of several other family members in short succession and this starts to freak her out because she's worried she's causing these deaths until grandma sits her down and tells her it's not your fault and talks to her about her gift after this point she starts to see ghosts on a regular basis and she'll begin like warning stopping strangers on the street and saying your gallbladder has a problem you need to go to a doctor about your liver i don't you know i don't think this is real i think this is her working backwards and inventing a psychic backstory for herself but this is at least what she wants us to believe about her life that like as a child she's trying to like save people you know warn them about like their random health issues and whatnot she she tells several stories of her powers saving the day like the time she made her dad leave a movie with her and they got home just in time to save her sister who had come down with pneumon and get her to a hospital oddly enough none of her relatives beside her grandmother seem to find this in any way noteworthy they don't seem to realize that she's psychic even dad just grandma when she's eight sylvia says that she's visited for a spirit for the first time and this is going to be her spirit guide and all this all

[Host 1 (likely the main host of Behind the Bastards)]

this information is coming from her autobiography there isn't like a second source on

[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

this we hit some second sources for pieces of this but no from her like when she's eight i don't have a secondary source sure sure other than that a lot of her family members don't seem to have believed this stuff right like there's some evidence from people who were kin to her that like sylvia was not always like this but nobody else like writes about her as a little girl so this this spirit guide comes down in a beam of light and it tells her not to be afraid and sylvia is of course afraid until her grandmother finds her and explains what all this is about quote a spirit guide it turns out is someone who when we decide to come to earth for another incarnation agrees to be our vigilant companion and help mate while we're away from home they've studied our charts and know what we intend to accomplish here and it's their assignment to support and advise us along the way without depriving us of our free will and you know i find the whole script your life before birth thing to sort of rob people of free will and it also doesn't if you think about like the history of it like so theoretically hitler like scripted out being hitler back before he was born and was like okay i'm going to do this and he must have gotten like eighty million other people to be like oh great idea hitler soul and we're all going to die in the horrible war that you start that's what i'm writing out from my chart this will be cool like how like what how else could it possibly be functioning unless all of the people who suffer in wars are these dark souls like her mother and then they kind of deserve it right there's no there's a kind of sinister side if you think too much about what all this stuff

[Host 1 (likely the main host of Behind the Bastards)]

means yeah who was hitler's spirit guide that's my question yeah who was hitler's

[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

right now sylvia's spirit guide oh it

[Host 1 (likely the main host of Behind the Bastards)]

was sylvia's mom that's who that's right

[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

that was the first incarnation of sylvia's mom jesus christ so what's interesting to me is she talks about who her spirit guide was in life because her spirit guide had originally been a person and sylvia praises this guide for its wisdom and whatnot and talks about her throughout the entire book and also shows no respect for her guide's past life and identity like listen to this she lived her one incarnation on earth as an aztec incan who at the age of nineteen was killed by a spear in fifteen twenty while protecting her infant daughter during the spanish invasion of colombia she told me her name was elena i apparently either didn't care for or couldn't remember it because i promptly renamed her francine and have never called her anything else that's kind of offensive right you're like spirit's a genocide victim and you're like i'm gonna call you francine

[Cal Penn (guest, actor and podcaster)]

it's kind of bonkers the whole thing

[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

is bonkers yeah and this is supposed to be enticing to people you're supposed to read this and be like wow this is how the world works like you're really you've convinced me i want to believe the things you believe sylvia now because i'm me i had to dig into the backstory of her spirit guide to see is like any of this even plausible so first off she claims that elina is an aztec incan name alina is a greek name it's a variant of the word helen so right off the bat we're having some trouble also the fact that elena was apparently an aztec incan woman makes no sense because despite the fact that both the aztec and incan empires existed contemporaneously they were very far from each other and there's very minimal evidence for direct contact between the two empires there's indirect trade between them but there's not a ton of cross pollination and i haven't found any evidence of like aztec incan people like that's not like a that's not like a thing that that really happened also when i looked into like colombia during this period of time the area we now call colombia was not settled by the aztec or the inca it was primarily settled by the tayrones and the muiscas peoples right so none of this makes sense like this this is like a this is a white lady who doesn't know anything about aztec or incan history trying to wanting to have a connection to like shamans and like the mystique of like south america and so she's just like bullshitting and made didn't even bother to be like is alina a greek name or is it a name someone might have had from this period yeah she just wanted

[Cal Penn (guest, actor and podcaster)]

an ayahuasca trip pre internet right oh

[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

yeah she would have if she'd come up a little later she would have really been a big advocate of the ayahuasca therapy i suspect so sylvia grows up you know talking to francine in her head she goes to catholic school and she gets in trouble with the nuns because nuns don't like it when you claim that you're channeling spirits not a thing nuns tend to be huge fans she gets in trouble because she talks up in class and because francine has a lot of disagreements about the way god works and so when the nuns will say something she'll be like well actually the the voice in my head says something very different and this does not go over well she tells the nuns that hell doesn't exist they're not thrilled about that nuns are kind of big on hell so she has a tough time in her early school career sylvia herself actually gets pissed at her spirit guide francine a few years later when her grandmother gets sick because francine refuses to fix the illness she just keeps telling sylvia everything will work out as it's meant to work out so she kind of will go dark on francine for periods of time as a kid when she gets angry at her she in general doesn't seem to have had a super happy like early childhood she doesn't like living at home she doesn't get along with her sister because she thinks her mom programmed her sister into being sick and introverted i think maybe she just had a different personality than you sylvia so at age sixteen she decides to free herself from her family via a foolproof plan she's going to get married she convinces one of her male friends to get hitched with her and she doctors her birth certificates that it says that she's eighteen then she and this guy joe cross state lines and get married by a justice of the peace this works as well as you'd expect when she comes back home and is like i got married her dad says the fuck you did and they annul the hell out of that marriage very quickly wow sylvia graduates and gets accepted to saint teresa's college in kansas city she majors in education and theology and it's at around this time that her grandma takes a final turn for the worst and passes on in the hospital francine assures sylvia everything's fine but she doesn't believe her spirit guide until she and her boyfriend are driving home and her boyfriend sees grandma's spirit in the car which convinces her that not only is everything fine but that her psychic gifts are definitely real so she comes into adulthood she goes to college and she's she's training to be a teacher she's never wanted to do anything but teach her spirit guide tells her she's there to be a teacher her grandma says she's there to be a teacher and she she takes that very literally that she's meant to like teach kids in a school so she's on her own now she knows she wants to be a teacher but she doesn't really know what kind of like she thinks she wants to be like school teacher is the thing that she's supposed to be but her grandmother had always told her that like she needs to use her gifts to speak to large groups of people and she's not sure like which direction to go in and you might say wouldn't a real psychic know what the future held in store for her but sylvia's come up with a workaround to that as francine informed her none of us is allowed to read our own charts while we're here on earth which is why there's not a psychic on earth who's psychic about themselves themselves which is an extremely convenient way to work this out yeah it's kind of a load bearing part of sylvia's narrative that she can't read her own future but i can read your future listeners and it's going to send you to the advertisers of this podcast right now

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[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

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[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

and we're back back back again yeah back again talking about sylvia so she falls in love and almost gets married wants to drop out of school to get hitched with this guy right she's about nineteen at this time but he tells her he wants her to move to a farm and like give up her career and raise children with him and she's down to do this until she finds out that he has a wife and children badge one of those things and i'm kind of wondering like okay you can't predict your own future but shouldn't you been able to psychically tell that this guy had a secret family yeah that

[Host 1 (likely the main host of Behind the Bastards)]

seems i love how often you're bringing up this flawed theory of hers you're

[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

like ah girl it's very inconsistent the way these powers are supposed to work yeah you can tell a guy's got liver cancer but not that like a dude who's hitting on you has a wife and kids back home yeah so during her time in college she becomes increasingly fascinated with the workings of the human mind and she signs up for a class in abnormal psychology psychology which like who didn't she takes this evening she also yeah a lot of people do this she also starts taking classes in hypnosis and just so we're clear because i don't think a lot of people know this hypnosis is like a thing with like demonstrable effects that's written about by like actual like mental health like professionals there's a i found an article in the journal of the apa by kirsten weir that notes hypnosis is as old as the field of psychotherapy itself but today advocates pointing to its evidence say it deserves a fresh look and a much wider audience hypnosis has a certain historical mystique that can sometimes make it difficult for practitioners to understand its modern relevance said david godot phd a clinical psychologist in long beach california in fact clinical hypnosis has clear benefits in psychotherapy improving outcomes in areas such as pain management anxiety depression and sleep and there's so what i want to say is that like this is a this is like a real thing and there's very real evidence that hypnosis has impacts on people which is part of why it's very dangerous when people get trained in it and like around with it because you can actually like really mess people up by screwing with this stuff it's it's a it's a potentially like dangerous thing to to mess with and i'm not qualified enough to go into like the weeds of how all this works but it's enough for you to know that it is a potentially powerful tool for therapy and sylvia decides she likes this and she's enthralled with her abnormal psychology course but once she gets further along in the course she starts to get scared too because she she starts reading that things like hearing voices in your head are potentially symptoms of like mental illnesses and she writes that some of these illnesses quote describe me too much too closely for my own comfort and i might be like ma' am maybe this is time to like self reflect a little bit more this is actually the only self reflection she does in this book she writes out that she knows all the things she's described experiencing the voices the seeing people that aren't there are classic signs of schizophrenia and she decides to go to a psychiatrist to like actually like talk this out and see am i crazy like that's the way she writes she's like she she comes to the conclusion maybe i'm nuts and so she sits down with one of her professors and engages her professor like as a psychiatrist to to analyze her which you're not supposed to do i looked around a little bit and per the liaison committee on medical education health professionals who provide psychiatric and psychological care to medical students must have no involvement in the academic evaluation or promotion of students receiving those services you are not supposed to teach someone and be their psychiatric analyst it's it's like considered a very bad idea and i think this anecdote like really makes the case as to why because this teacher clearly likes sylvia that she makes the appointment with and he's not going to be very critical towards what she says to him so right before she meets with her professor about this sylvia says goodbye to francine she's like look i've decided you're just a figment of my imagination and i'm going to cut off contact because i don't want to be crazy but if you're not a figment of my imagination i'll give you one last chance to appear in person before me which had not happened before and she starts to like show up in person in front of sylvia and her whole family sylvia claims and sylvia runs out of the room because she gets so scared by this and unfortunately none of her family members were alive by the time of this book being published for me to like did anyone else see this lady has anyone else told this story but this convinces sylvia that francine is real so she goes to her appointment with doctor renick and she tells him what happens and for some reason this psychologist and professor is like oh this is all perfectly normal the fact that you're scared that your psychic powers might make you crazy means that you're definitely sane and he writes down the diagnosis on a piece of paper normal but has paranormal abilities question mark sir i don't think you're supposed to do that good for you good for yeah yeah sir she's gonna keep this diagnosis her whole life like this is he just this is like handing liquor and a loaded gun to an angry fifteen year old like there you go there you go sylvia you've got like your backup from a professional now go out into the world and mess with people that was dark robert that was really dark it's not great this professor seems to really give her like a wide pur he lets her channel francine in class for her classmates in the abnormal psychology class what

[Host 1 (likely the main host of Behind the Bastards)]

the fuck is wrong with this guy

[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

genuinely they question her spirit guide for hours on end while sylvia is apparently insensate quote there was unanimous agreement that even though it was my voice they were listening to the speech patterns the terminology the rhythms and everything else that came out of my mouth sounded absolutely nothing like me at all and gee here's the good news everyone loved her and wanted her to come back soon everybody clapped it's a great experience for them i'm pretty hesitant to believe a lot of what she says if you think back to like the sixties and think back to like the science fiction of the sixties and seventies even like early star trek episodes and stuff there was this fairly widespread acceptance even from very scientifically minded people that there was something to psychic phenomenon that this was real that there was some reality behind claims of psychic powers and so it's not actually weird to me that like a college class in like the sixties and seventies would let someone get up and channel and people might take it seriously like that kind of stuff wasn't as kooky then as it as it seems now in part because we've had another like fifty years of psychics trying to prove their psychic powers and like not doing it on television so maybe this really happens sylvia claims in her autobiography that she graduates shortly after this at age nineteen and starts teaching at a small school near kansas city this is a lie and it's here that i can bring some outside evidence finally into her autobiography because in two thousand seven one of her ex husbands made a public claim that she had lied about her higher education experience and her teaching experience in order to kind of disprove his lies she sends her college transcripts over to a critic who had published his claims and the transcript she sent accidentally reveals that like she did attend college but she never graduates and she never gets a teaching degree and she probably never works as a teacher which is good because i don't have to go through the long section of the book where she does like a stand and deliver and she talks about i knew which kids were being abused and i would like secretly help them and talk to them and maneuver to help them out it's all lies she never teaches kids i'm pretty glad she

[Host 1 (likely the main host of Behind the Bastards)]

never worked with children because

[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

can't even

[Host 1 (likely the main host of Behind the Bastards)]

imagine the harm she would have caused

[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

yeah yeah especially imagine like somewhat with as wrong as she was about things her just like going up to a random kid with a normal whole life and being like your dad's hitting you isn't he i can see it exciting psychically yeah miss brown is really scary dad i don't understand what she's saying

[Host 1 (likely the main host of Behind the Bastards)]

teacher comes up to you did you know that your mother murdered that man

[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

and they're like there's a dark vibe to your house there's a ghost in it by the way the dog did

[Host 1 (likely the main host of Behind the Bastards)]

not get sent to a farm

[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

yeah so the next thing we can verify in her life is that she starts dating in fact the ex husband who later reveals that she didn't graduate college who is a police officer at the time a guy named gary dufresne so she meets this cop and they start dating and they get hitched on october nineteenth nineteen fifty mary's a cop yeah he's a cop it's a start for that doesn't feel compelled to me he gets fired presumably for being a crooked cop she doesn't say that but they like have to move oh it's bad what year is it yeah this is fifty eight okay into fifty eight you

[Host 1 (likely the main host of Behind the Bastards)]

gotta be pretty bad to get moved as a cop in the fifties yeah

[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

yeah fifty eight yeah now and she also says that almost he's very sweet when they're dating but as soon as they get married he starts becoming physically and mentally abusive which i have no trouble does she not know it's not just that it's the fifties but like you know forty percent of police households experience domestic violence this is a credit and also he publicly hates her like her whole life now she's also pretty bad but i don't doubt that he abused her in any way shape or form like everything she writes here seems very credible and yeah brutal that said what i will note is that sylvia gives us some hints that she herself was not an easy partner which doesn't justify anything but she tells a story that is incredibly frustrating if you put yourself in the other person's shoes where they buy a house they go through the whole process of buying a house the huge expense all the nightmare of signing all the paperwork and the day they move in she panics and says there's an evil spirit in the house and like something's wrong we can't live here oh god you didn't figure that out during the walk there yeah exactly during the inspection that there's a ghost so they have to live in the house for a while because like they can't just leave they don't have enough money she concludes the house was built on an old native burial burial ground and when she i do i gary's a bad guy but i love his response to this because she's like we're built this house was built on on an indian burial ground and gary says so what i'm sure someone's buried pretty much everywhere where are we supposed to live in midair not a bad response so per sylvia there's a bunch of storms that hit the house and then gary loses his cop job and the family moves to california her parents move with them and they like live next door in a duplex but the marriage continues to degrade sylvia has an emotional affair with a creative writing professor who's into the occult and who starts giving her occult books like helena blavatsky's theosophy books to read and tells her like you're a great psychic and you have to use your powers to change the world and then he dies very suddenly and tragically i have no idea i can't verify this guy's existence so i don't know if he was real or if she just invented him because he was narratively convenient but about after this point she leaves gary they get divorced and she takes their now two children with her she meets a new man shortly thereafter a guy named dal and they move into a house together while she completes her hypnotism classes to become a master hypnotist and she's starting to practice primarily as like a psychic she's not doing a lot of like professional hypnotism right now she's doing readings on people and she's sometimes giving like speeches and stuff to classes and that's kind of how she's making her living i think dal is primarily supporting her at this point but she's starting to build up her career and we'll talk about what comes next but first ads when

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[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

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[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

and we're back so my favorite detail from this period of time after she moves in with her new husband is that one day sylvia's cooking dinner for her family and she starts a massive grease fire that nearly kills her and she's rescued from the grease fire by a spirit that looks to be a young woman in her thirties francine informs her that the spirit was really grandma ada and i gotta read this is my favorite chunk of her whole stupid book i gotta read this to you guys okay i impatiently pointed out to her that grandma ada's hair was white it was blonde when she was thirty she said all spirits on the other side are thirty years old why are they thirty considering all the years i'd been communicating with her i should have seen this answer coming because they are i couldn't argue with that thirty flirty all dead people are thirty thirty because they are because they are god was like you know what the right age is

[Host 1 (likely the main host of Behind the Bastards)]

thirty thirty thirty yeah i mean it's giving jennifer garner it's giving it's giving thirteen going on thirty thirty flirty and

[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

thriving thirty i think that that shows

[Cal Penn (guest, actor and podcaster)]

us that she actually believed this she

[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

has to have to some extent right

[Cal Penn (guest, actor and podcaster)]

she must have believed that because if you're not gonna bother to justify it with anything other than they said the cuts just because that's how it is like damn you're in deep yeah that's

[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

such a it's also just objectively like you know what age people want to be when they're on the other side forever the age when their knees started to give that's the that's the perfect age not in their early twenties when you could like drink like a sieve or whatever like thirty yeah so not long after this she and dal go to see a famous psychic give a lecture sylvia very decently doesn't name this psychic because they were still practicing at the time the book came out and she didn't want to start beef but sylvia is very offended at how ignorant this psychic is and she's particularly offended because the psychic takes credit for her gift for having for their gift right that like this is my gift i'm special as the psychic and sylvia believes that you have to give god credit for everything right so she's kind of offended at that and she's just in general angry that this woman's getting a lot of important details wrong so she turns to her husband dal and she expresses fury that this woman has quote a whole audience sitting there looking for answers looking for comfort about their deceased loved ones on all they got back was a bunch of double talk lies and half truth truths which is a very ironic sentence to come out of the lady whose whole career is going to be lying to people about their dead loved ones later and sometimes their alive loved ones who aren't dead her husband dal i don't know maybe he just wanted to like get her to stop yelling but he's like why don't you do something about it if you're so much better of a psychic than this lady you know why don't you become a big psychic and start giving psychic lectures and so sylvia does she founds the nirvana foundation of psychic research a registered nonprofit in california in nineteen seventy four her stated goal with this is to create a new religion right to like or at least to augment the existing world religions you get the feelings part of she wants to like correct the other religions she thinks they all get pieces right but they don't know that you're thirty forever when you're dead you know that's not in the bible we gotta we gotta pencil that

[Cal Penn (guest, actor and podcaster)]

in right sounds like somebody didn't wanna pay their taxes oh yeah oh yeah

[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

that's cal you you've hit the nail on the head whenever someone wants to start a religion so she starts running ads in the newspaper for classes and it being the nineteen seventies people show up sylvia gets so many students that regrettably and she hates this she hates to do this oh my god she has to start charging the money it breaks her heart she has to get money from these people oh my gosh

[Host 1 (likely the main host of Behind the Bastards)]

i have to scam the people i'm

[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

scamming there's just too many of them for me to not take their money

[Host 1 (likely the main host of Behind the Bastards)]

how can i not take advantage of

[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

these people quote i'd been offering for free for so many years but for one thing it was the only way i could afford to make a full time commitment to the foundation for another thing as more and more people have been pointing out to me making a living putting one's gifts to work is pretty much the definition of virtually every career you can name so long as i devoted my gifts to god's greatest good i had no reason to apologize i don't know that is the definition of virtually every career you can name nope we all like to think that that's the case but i don't know if i think most of the people i know who worked as a bank teller weren't like i'm putting my gifts to work they were like well i needed a job while i was in college yeah i needed something to do

[Cal Penn (guest, actor and podcaster)]

i can teach acting classes for free

[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

yeah so true to her word though after this point sylvie is not going to apologize for anything she does over the next fifty years we have now that's a sign of a threshold yeah and she is going to be from this point forward making money full time off of her psychic research she's going to start hiring people bringing them in and expanding the nirvana foundation and by nineteen seventy five or so she is a full time psychic teaching classes and extra sensory skills like dream and interpretation and becoming increasingly like prominent within like the kooky world of new age thought as that starts to kind of explode in the mid seventies through the early eighties she's one of these people who's like in southern california giving it's always in southern california like giving classes and putting out books and pamphlets on like how the psychic world is supposed to work and there's very much this idea that like we're treating this like a science and so we'll see how this science develops cal in part two how are you feeling at the end of part one about our friend sylvia yeah

[Host 1 (likely the main host of Behind the Bastards)]

what do you think of sylvia so

[Cal Penn (guest, actor and podcaster)]

far i appreciate this backstory because i grew up in the nineties so i remember like when you were sick home from school with a flu on the couch watching just bad daytime shows she was a fixture of a lot of them i guess montel especially i don't remember what i would watch back in the day but i remember that and then i remember just there was the gas obviously college after once the internet comes around youtube and then obviously now social media like these clips that circulate of her i have that weird memory of remembering that as a kid but then not knowing anything else about her so all of that was very interesting and i guess i didn't realize how troubled she was from such an early age and i'm trying to use that term generously instead of saying that she was a fraud or whatever like it just sounds like whether it's whether she actually believes this or whether it was a calculated fraud she doesn't sound well

[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

from the beginning right no no and i think it's probably accurate to think that this doesn't nobody starts or at least very few people start you know the way she would say mapping it out she's not as a twenty year old or whatever mapping out and then i'm going to lie to people about their kidnapped relatives yeah right this is a kid who she's got a difficult home life you know she's got a grandma who makes her feel feel special i don't have trouble believing because a lot of people could have experiences like an older and though i've i'm a little touched i've got a little bit of the of the gift or whatever and her grandma pro certainly didn't say everything that she puts in her grandma's mouth but she probably said a few things and then sylvia expands the lore over time because it makes her feel special and comforted and you know things snowball and eventually you get a lot less ethical you start making compromises to keep it going you you find opportunities yeah and and i do think you like breaking bad is a more gradual experience for a lot of these people you know they're not all l ron hubbard who came out of the gate like i'm going to con as many people as i can we can't all be lrh though we might wish we could well cal you want to plug your show again before we roll out

[Cal Penn (guest, actor and podcaster)]

here sure i'm the host of a podcast called here we go again where we look at the past present and future of specific topics you can think of it as like like a place where you can have fun make some jokes but at the end of the episode feel like you've actually learned a little bit of something a little bit of maybe maybe like a little just tiny tiny bit of hope about the

[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

topics that we cover a tiny bit of hope sounds incredibly generous for twenty twenty six so i am looking forward to that you all should be too all right everybody until thursday this has been behind the bastards we'll be back and we're like a day or so you know how this all works we've been doing this for almost ten years sweet

[Host 1 (likely the main host of Behind the Bastards)]

behind the bastards is a production of cool zone media for more from cool zone media visit our website coolzone media dot com or check us out on the iheartradio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcast full video episodes of behind the bastards are now streaming on netflix dropping every tuesday and thursday hit remind me on netflix so you don't miss an episode for clips in our older episode catalog continue to subscribe to our youtube channel youtube dot com behindthebastards we love about forty percent of you statistically speaking

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[Host 2 (co-host of Behind the Bastards)]

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