Part Six: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?

Summary

Behind the Bastards: Part Six – Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?

Release Date: January 30, 2025
Host/Author: Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts

In the sixth installment of Behind the Bastards, hosts Andrew T., Bridget Todd, and Sophie delve deep into the multifaceted influence of Oprah Winfrey. This episode examines the complexities of Oprah's philanthropic endeavors, media influence, and the unintended negative repercussions of her actions. Through a blend of historical analysis and critical discussion, the trio assesses whether Oprah's legacy aligns with the show's theme of exploring the darkest aspects of influential figures.

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1. Oprah's Angel Network: From Charitable Beginnings to Controversial Endeavors

Origins and Positive Impact
Oprah's Angel Network was launched on September 18, 1997, inspired by a young girl’s Penny Harvest Project on her show. Initially, the network focused on raising funds for educational scholarships, amassing $3.5 million to provide 25,000 college scholarships for 150 deserving students (04:02). The Angel Network expanded its reach by 2000, collaborating with figures like Paul Newman and Jeff Bezos to support over 50 life-changing programs across 13 countries, including India, Ecuador, and China.

Shift Towards Charter Schools
Despite its noble beginnings, the Angel Network increasingly diverted funds towards establishing charter schools in the United States. These schools, operating outside the traditional public education system, often undermine public schools by siphoning resources and weakening teachers' unions. In 2010, the Angel Network donated $6 million to six charter schools in California, Colorado, Chicago, Pennsylvania, New Orleans, and Houston (12:52). The episode highlights how this shift contributed to the broader defunding of public education and the promotion of privatized schooling models, especially through the influence of documentaries like Waiting for Superman by Davis Guggenheim.

Critical Perspectives
Bridget Todd articulates the problematic nature of charter schools, emphasizing their role in resegregating the education system and neglecting students with disabilities. A notable instance involves New Orleans charter schools, including those backed by Oprah, which were accused of excluding children with disabilities, thereby artificially boosting test scores (14:04). The hosts reference a Brookings Institute piece titled "The Myth of Charter Schools," underscoring the flawed outcomes of such institutions.

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2. Elevation of Conmen and Self-Help Gurus

Prominent Figures Promoted by Oprah
Oprah's platform has been instrumental in catapulting several controversial figures into the limelight:

• John of God: A Brazilian faith healer who sexually assaulted over 600 women. His rise to international fame was significantly aided by Oprah’s endorsement and appearances on her show (18:15).

• Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil: Both became household names through their association with Oprah. Despite their medical backgrounds, their practices and advice have faced widespread criticism and skepticism (17:49).

The Case of James Arthur Ray
James Arthur Ray, a motivational speaker, epitomizes the dark side of Oprah's endorsements. Initially a mediocre figure, Ray gained prominence after narrating the 2006 documentary The Secret and appearing on Oprah's show. His seminars, especially the infamous 2009 sweat lodge event in Sedona, Arizona, resulted in the hospitalization of 21 participants and the death of three (22:21). The episode details how Oprah’s unwavering support transformed Ray from a struggling motivational speaker into a prominent figure, ultimately leading to tragic consequences.

Host Reflections
Andrew T. critiques Oprah’s ability to amplify harmful individuals, suggesting that her credibility and platform enable these figures to exert disproportionate influence. Sophie echoes this sentiment, labeling Oprah as “the enzyme for bastards” who amplifies the impact of unethical personalities.

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3. Oprah's Book Club: Championing Literature Amid Controversies

Positive Contributions to Literature
Launched in September 1996, Oprah's Book Club became the most influential book club globally, with every pick turning into a bestseller. The club promoted both classic and contemporary literature, significantly boosting the publishing industry (42:03).

Controversial Selections
However, the Book Club also faced criticism for promoting misleading and deceptive works:

• A Million Little Pieces by James Frey: Marketed as a memoir, this book was later exposed as largely fictional. Despite initial promotion, Oprah eventually confronted Frey, leading to his embarrassment but not a full disavowal of his work (46:26).

• Holocaust Memoirs: Books like Misha and Angel at the Fence were fraudulent, with fabricated stories about survival and love during the Holocaust. Oprah admitted to nearly promoting Misha but avoided fallout by pulling the episode at the last moment. A decade later, the Rosenblatts revealed their story as entirely false, yet Oprah did not issue a full apology (55:39).

Critical Analysis
Bridget Todd points out that Oprah's Book Club sometimes perpetuated Western stereotypes, particularly in African fiction, by promoting pedestrian narratives that oversimplify complex realities. The hosts argue that Oprah's editorial choices reflected a tendency to sensationalize suffering, aligning with broader media trends that commodify trauma for entertainment.

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4. Amplification of Anti-Vaccine Movements

Prominent Anti-Vaccine Advocates on Oprah’s Show
Oprah played a pivotal role in legitimizing and spreading anti-vaccine sentiments by featuring influential figures like Ginny McCarthy and Christiane Northrup:

• Ginny McCarthy: A former Playboy model turned anti-vaccine advocate, McCarthy appeared on Oprah’s show in 2007, where she falsely claimed vaccines caused her son Evan’s autism and promoted unscientific remedies (74:52). Her appearance significantly boosted the anti-vaccine movement, reaching millions of viewers and lending credibility to dangerous misinformation.

• Christiane Northrup: A former physician, Northrup shifted to promoting New Age health disinformation, disputing the necessity of vaccines and opposing established medical practices. Her COVID-19 denial further fueled public distrust in vaccines (77:04).

Impact and Consequences
The hosts emphasize the dire consequences of Oprah’s endorsements, highlighting how these appearances have contributed to widespread vaccine hesitancy and public health risks. Bridget Todd underscores the systemic damage inflicted by amplifying such harmful ideologies, questioning Oprah’s accountability in perpetuating anti-science movements.

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5. Broader Cultural and Media Influence

Sensationalizing Suffering
Oprah has been critiqued for turning human suffering into entertainment, presenting traumatic stories that often conclude with superficial or neutral resolutions. This approach simplifies complex social issues, making them consumable as daytime television entertainment (61:07).

Perpetuating Stereotypes and Simplistic Narratives
The episode discusses how Oprah’s content often reinforces stereotypes, particularly concerning marginalized communities. By focusing on individual trauma and self-help narratives, Oprah inadvertently downplays systemic issues like economic inequality and institutional racism.

Conclusion: Is Oprah Winfrey a Bastard?
In their final analysis, the hosts grapple with categorizing Oprah within the show's framework of "bastards." While acknowledging her significant philanthropic contributions and positive influence on literature, they argue that her role in amplifying harmful movements and endorsing unethical figures outweigh these positives. Andrew T. concludes that Oprah embodies many characteristics of a "bastard" as defined by the podcast—someone whose actions, whether intentional or not, have led to substantial societal harm. Sophie and Bridget Todd reinforce this stance by highlighting Oprah’s responsibility in shaping media narratives that propagate misinformation and exploit suffering for personal and corporate gain.

Notable Quotes:

• Andrew T. [04:10]: “Well, the answer is you could raise a lot more money.”
• Sophie [18:36]: “It does seem like Oprah is... the enzyme for bastards.”
• Bridget Todd [41:23]: “He’s responsible for making John of God...usenfavourable."""

Final Thoughts:
The episode presents a critical examination of Oprah Winfrey’s extensive influence, suggesting that her actions have had both positive and profoundly negative impacts. By leveraging her platform to promote both philanthropy and harmful ideologies, Oprah's legacy is portrayed as deeply conflicted, ultimately aligning her with the podcast's notion of a "bastard" due to the extensive societal harm facilitated through her endorsements and media influence.

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For more episodes and detailed analyses, visit Cool Zone Media or find Behind the Bastards on the iHeartRadio app and YouTube.

Transcript

[Andrew T.]

Call Zone Media. Welcome to behind the Oprahs, a podcast about bastards. This is, you know, the Oprah Winfrey show or the Oprah Winfrey show show, where we talk about the Oprah Winfrey Show. Yeah, that's as good as. I could do the intro here. Look, we're on part six. I'm exhausted. You're exhausted. Sophie's exhausted. I'm so tired. Let's exhaust everything we have to say about Oprah. How are we all feeling, Andrew T. And Bridget Todd, at this point in the Oprah Winfrey story?

[Bridget Todd]

Conflicted. I will say conflicted, but. Ready to hear more.

[Andrew T.]

Okay.

[Sophie]

Yeah. It's starting to feel like the six parts or the five parts have been leading to this. So, yeah, I'm ready.

[Bridget Todd]

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[Sophie]

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[Sophie]

Next time, make an appointment with an.

[Andrew T.]

Amazon One Medical provider. There's no waiting and no sweaty guy. Amazon One Medical Healthcare just got Less painful. Let's talk about Oprah's Angel Network. Now. This was Oprah's primary vehicle for charitable donor. I mean, she also has her own personal foundation. This is her primary vehicle certainly for educational focused charitable donations during, like the height of her fame. It got its start in 1994 when a little girl named Nora went on the Oprah Winfrey show to talk about what was called the Penny Harvest Project. Apparently she and some other kids had started collecting pennies and eventually raised like $1,000 via taking in pennies to donate to some different charitable organizations. And Oprah says this inspired her to wonder if you could do that. I wonder what I could do. And like, well, the answer is you have hundreds of millions of dollars, Oprah, much more than some children collecting pennies. I'm glad you think it this way, but obviously the answer is you could raise a lot more money.

[Sophie]

I do think it's, I'm loving hearing a kid did something and being like, I'm so much more money than you think.

[Andrew T.]

The way that oprah.com puts this, like, Oprah was inspired by this little girl. But there's certainly a read of it that's like, oh, I could beat the hell out of that little kid. You think $1,000 is a lot? Shoves her off the fucking stage. So on September 18, 1997, Oprah announces the launch of Oprah's Angel Network. The initial plan for this was to turn people spare change. Basically you donate, you know, your spare change, right? She has Hillary Clinton on the show. Hillary puts some change in a piggy bank. And this raises $3.5 million to provide 25,000 DOL college scholarships for 150 deserving students.

[Sophie]

I'm sorry, kid, is that more than $1,000?

[Andrew T.]

Let me 25 per kid. But no, no, no, your donation's good. Oh, yeah, no, no, yeah, for sure, for sure. Very impressive. I mean, you know, I raised three and a half million with like the shit in my seat cushions, but, you know, you're good, you're good. Yeah, yeah. Oh, did you have the first lady come on to help with your program? Oh, no, you didn't. You don't know the first lady. You don't have her on speed dial.

[Bridget Todd]

Huh?

[Andrew T.]

Oh, interesting. Oprah's not doing that. We're just being dicks.

[Sophie]

I, I just want to say for the record, I like the version of Oprah that does that better than the version of Oprah that exists.

[Andrew T.]

She would be on Margaret's Cool People who Did Cool Stuff. If this had just been for 12 straight, like literally like 20 years. Just shit talking this like 7 year old, like, yeah, you think that's fucking fancy? $80 million, that petty. So this is how the Angel Network starts, right? We're taking people spare change, we're giving out college student scholarships to deserving students. But it starts to expand. You know, they get involved with like funding Habitat for Humanity and stuff like that. And in 2000, the Angel Network expands, thanks to Paul Newman of Newman's Own as well as Jeff Bezos, they start like expanding it to like donating money to what the website describes as 50 life changing programs. And it's interesting, she describes as like 50 more than 50 life changing programs. Got the money they needed to help their local communities. Well, maybe some taxes from Jeff Bezos could help with that too. But eventually the Angel Network expands, taking in and taking in something like $80 million in donations, most of which ultimately go to helping to start 60 schools in 13 countries, including India, Ecuador and China. So that's nice, right? Helping to start schools, funding schools aspects, again, as is always the case with Oprah, aspects of this are quite positive. But also aspects of this are very toxic because particularly in the United States, the thing that Oprah spends most of her donation money on is not helping school systems. It is establishing specific charter schools. And in fact, the last thing the Angel Network does is it gives 6 million doll dollars in 2010 to six charter schools in California, Colorado, Chicago, Pennsylvania, New Orleans and Houston. Now, charter schools are two schools that are not part of the public education system. A lot of this gets started the charter school thing in the Bush years, right? This is a big part of like defunding public schools. Let's, you know, we don't need to be spending, we need to have. Parents need to have choice, they need to have vouchers that they can put into these, you know, different charter schools and magnate schools. And all of this kind of like both saps the power of teachers unions because these schools exist outside of that system. But it's also supposed to prove that the corrupt Department of Education is what's holding kids back. That if we just let rich people establish these charter, they'll obviously be vastly more successful. So it's this mix of like, there are some very good charter schools that are very good for kids. I have friends who went to some of them. But also the larger part of the charter school project is problematic and it continues on past the Bush era. One of the biggest roles in this is in 2010, there's a documentary called Waiting for Superman by Davis Guggenheim. This is a documentary about how broken the education system is and we're all just kind of like waiting for a Superman to fix it. And it winds up being a very pro charter school movie. There's a couple of other documentaries at the same time, the Lottery and the Cartel with the same basic attitude, but Waiting for Superman is featured twice on the Oprah Winfrey Show. She's not the only person who gives it a lot of media attention, but she gives it a ton of media attention. And that 6 million doll donation to those six private schools is directly off of the back of this. I found a good write up in the Brookings Institute on the myth of charter schools and it summarizes the message of all these documentaries. American public education is a failed enterprise. The problem is not money. Public schools already spend too much. Test scores are low because there are so many bad teachers whose jobs are protected by powerful unions. Students drop out because the schools fail them and they could accomplish practically anything if they were saved from bad teachers. They would get higher test scores if school schools could fire more bad teachers and pay more to good ones. The only hope for the future of our society, especially for poor black and Hispanic children, is escape from public schools, especially to charter schools, which are mostly funded by the government but controlled by private organizations, many of them operating to make a profit. Now that is, again, this is a thing that a lot of people are into. And Oprah is one of the folks who puts her money where her mouth is, like, this is the future of fixing private education or public education. And it's problematic, to say the least, to continue with a quote from that Brookings Institute piece. And this is talking about Waiting for Superman in particular. Some fact checking is in order and the place to start is with the film's quiet acknowledgment that only one in five charter schools is able to get the amazing results that it celebrates. Nothing more is said about this astonishing statistic. It is drawn from a national study of charter schools by Stanford economist Margaret Raymond. Known as the CREDO Study, it evaluated student progress on math tests in half of the nation's 5,000 charter schools and concluded that 17% were superior to a matched traditional public school, 37% were worse than the public school, and the remaining 46% had academic gains no different from that of a similar public school. The proportion of charters that got amazing results is far smaller than 17%. Why did Davis Guggenheim pay no attention to the charter schools that are run by incompetent Leaders or corporations mainly concerned to make money. Why propound to an unknowing public the myth that charter schools. Schools are the answer to our educational woes? When the filmmaker knows there are twice as many failing charters as there are successful ones, why not give an honest accounting? The propagandistic nature of Waiting for Superman is revealed by Guggenheim's complete indifference to the wide variation among charter schools. There are excellent charter schools just as there are excellent public schools. Why did he not also inquire into the charter chains that are mired in unsavory real estate deals or take his camera to the charters where most students are getting lower scores than those in the neighborhood public schools? Why did he not report on the charter principals who have been indicted for embezzlement or the charters that blur the line between church and state? Why did he not look into the charter schools whose leaders are paid 300 to $400,000 a year to oversee small numbers of students? I don't need to go on the Myth of Charter Schools from the Brookings Institute is a good piece on this. Yeah.

[Sophie]

I'm just. I don't actually know anything about this director, but does it have anything to do with his last name?

[Andrew T.]

I actually don't know. A journalist would check in on that. Let's do that.

[Sophie]

I just have a sinking feeling that maybe the reason one of the incentives has to do with the number of buildings his name is on.

[Andrew T.]

He's related to the family. At least the AI overview says he's related to the family, but not directly related to the foundation. Let's see here. Let's look up his Wikipedia to find a better.

[Sophie]

This is probably just a coincidence.

[Andrew T.]

His dad is filmmaker Charles Guggenheim. Oh. He helped make Deadwood. Won four Oscars.

[Sophie]

No one said rich kids can't make good stuff.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah.

[Sophie]

It's just that they get a lot more chances to do it.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah. So, anyway, I don't like. This is a problematic thing that Oprah Winfrey's charity is going to. Which is not to say that everything she donates to a lot of good schools. I looked into several of the schools that she. They put money on. They have pretty good academic records. But although they're not unproblematic as this article.

[Sophie]

Yeah. I. I will just say I. I feel like this should be said. Even if literally every single charter school had better test scores or. Or even. Or even a good measure was.

[Andrew T.]

And that of school.

[Sophie]

Yeah.

[Andrew T.]

Again, 37% are worse.

[Sophie]

70% or better, they are still a net negative on the education system. Literally Even, I mean, it's the same example with the Oprah school, which is like, yeah, okay, you can make a good school, but it comes at an immense opportunity cost. And that's what's, like, the problem here.

[Bridget Todd]

Exactly that. And like, fundamentally, they make public, they erode public education. They're at least where I live, they're like, full of, like, pretty. Like, like, they're basically racist in my mind. Like, the way that they talk about school choice, it's used as a giant dog whistle to be like, you don't really want your kids next to black and brown kids, do you?

[Andrew T.]

Right, right, right.

[Bridget Todd]

And I think so. Even if all of her schools, all of these schools were great, it still contributes to a lot of pretty, I think, messed up things in education.

[Sophie]

Oh, we're resegregating the education system. Cool.

[Andrew T.]

Yes. And it's also not all of these schools are. And again, because they abide by different rules, there's a lot of problematic aspects to some of them, including one of the schools that Oprah gave a shitload money to. This one, particularly in New Orleans. I'm going to quote from BET here. Numerous charter schools, including those backed by Oprah Winfrey, Microsoft's Bill Gates, retailer Walmart, and New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees, have been accused of breaking federal law by not serving children with disabilities. The children are named and placed plaintiffs in the legal battle, which stems back to 2010. Charter schools in New Orleans were seen as a way to rehab the city's failing education system and serve 70% of children. City's children. The Loop 21 reports. Lawrence Melrose, 16, needed counseling and speech therapy, which wouldn't be provided by the New Orleans Charter Science and Math Charter School that was made popular through its association with Oprah Winfrey. Instead, he was frequently suspended and not allowed to ride the bus. The lawsuit says the school kept him from attending a celebration where students watched Oprah Winfrey hand the principal a check for $1 million. The exclusion of children with serious learning and emotional disabilities occur often, says the lawsuit, at charter schools, which comprise the majority of public schools in New Orleans. The exclusion of special needs kids also helps charter schools test scores, since children with disabilities typically do not do well.

[Bridget Todd]

He couldn't even watch the assembly with Oprah like they. They would like.

[Andrew T.]

No, no. They literally locked him out of it.

[Sophie]

It's also like, these fucks will like. I mean, you see it on so many other places where they're trying to reinvent the wheel, where they like. I feel like transportation is such a clear One where it's like they're going to try to do self driving cars before they try.

[Andrew T.]

Oh yeah.

[Sophie]

Properly funding a subway Los Angeles.

[Andrew T.]

Oh yeah.

[Sophie]

And it's like, I don't, I'm sorry guys. All the solutions for these ills were invented in like fucking whatever, 1800. We're just electing not to do them. Because you're a billionaire.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah. I mean at this point I support Musk building a rich people tunnel under LA just because we'll have a quake. And the, the people who pay to access that tunnel will all learn a lesson very quickly at the same time.

[Sophie]

Listen, if he had even like an ounce of like self belief, his ass should be on Mars right now.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah, yeah, get yourself there, man. So I wanted to talk a little bit about Oprah in charter schools, but really when we talk about Oprah's direct bastardism, there's no better thing to discuss than the bevy of conmen that she helped to introduce to the world. She is responsible for making John of God, the Brazilian faith healer who sexually assaulted at least 600 women internationally famous. There are numerous cases of women who visited his compound and were raped or assaulted and say that they went there because they saw him on the Oprah Winfrey show. And specifically they saw Dr. Oz tell Oprah Winfrey that he couldn't explain the miraculous healings this man was responsible for. Now I'm not gonna say more about John of God or Dr. Oz or Dr. Phil because we have done two part episodes on all three of these guys, none of whom would have obviously there's specifically John of God was like in Brazil a famous faith healer and assaulting people. He would not have become an international star without Oprah. And I don't think Dr. Oz probably just stays a surgeon. Dr. Phil probably dies in a ditch. That's my guess for Dr. Phil is he dies in a ditch somewhere in rural Texas. At least that's if Oprah doesn't pick him up.

[Sophie]

Some kind of charisma. Dr. Oz, it's like he's the most. He's so repellent. You're just like, oh my God. Without Oprah's cosine, he is.

[Andrew T.]

There's no way this man is a star. That's the star power she has. Look, just listen to Dr. Oz speak. Yeah, amazing stuff. So we're not going to go into more detail on them, but I should note we have never ever had a bastard who is responsible for three different two parter episodes on other bastards or at least largely responsible. This be A mark in the column.

[Sophie]

This, I think, is. Is the place where I'll try to drop my. My. My quote, which is. I mean, it does seem like. Like Oprah is. She's like the enzyme for bastards. Like, she just makes. She takes. She finds the worst people or the worst people get into her orbit, and she makes them a million times stronger than they ever had any right to be.

[Andrew T.]

Yes, yes. And I think that really is the way to look at it.

[Bridget Todd]

And it's funny because I would peg Oprah as somebody that I would assume would be a good judge of character, and she's a terrible judge of character. It's like, it truly is like, the worst people who come into her orbit. She's like, let's make you a star. What's up with that?

[Sophie]

I mean, on some level, she has to be following what she believes the audience wants. But why pick those specific people? It is a little baffling.

[Andrew T.]

I think there's a back. I'm sure there's a degree to which both of Those people, particularly Dr. Phil, being as Dr. Phil's a pretty manipulative person, I would argue. And I think he just understood how to make her like him and manipulate her. Dr. Oz has a legitimate thing that would make you like him and want to put him in front of people. It is not unreasonable at the start of things that you'd be like, this guy's literally one of the best heart surgeons who's ever lived. Maybe he'd be a good person to talk about public health. Turns out, no. Turns out, absolutely not. But I understand how that process starts. Now, Obviously, there was ample evidence, especially during the John of God shit, that he was not, in fact, a good person to be doing that with. But I don't think the evil is not in that. She initially was like, well, maybe the world's best heart surgeon is a good guy to talk about health. Right. I get how that starts with Dr. Phil. It's more like this guy made me feel good about myself during a lawsuit. Let's let him abuse teenagers on television for 20 years. But again, we're not gonna say any more about these guys. Cause we've said so much about them. But I did feel like we have to go into detail about one of Oprah's toxic bastards. Right? One of the con men that she elevated to the public eye, who we haven't done episodes on. And that's gonna bring us to James Ray. Born in 1957, Ray was a former telemarketer who got into the business of teaching motivational seminars to corporations. He was not an original dude and instead worked for Stephen Covey of the seven Habits of Highly Effective People, teaching Stephen Covey's particular flavor of self help bullshit to car salesmen and the like. Or at least Ray claims that he worked for Stephen Covey. There is no actual evidence of this and Ray is a serial liar. So it's entirely possible he just made that up for clout. Ray started his own motivational speaking business and it did. Okay. It's not huge, it's not really overwhelmingly successful, probably because he's not super successful himself. He is not rich and famous. So he's like telling people how to get rich. But like he didn't do it. Ray is like a lot of these guys. There's very little to separate him from the herd at this point. He's an advocate of the law of attraction, which we've talked about a few times in these episodes. This is the bullshit belief underpinning the secret. Whatever good or bad things happen to you happen because you drew them to yourself. Like a lot of guys in this space, he mixed in buzzwords from quantum physics because of course he's like a big, also a big masculine guy, right? So as a masculine guy you can't just be like, you know, you can't, you can't just be like this is the, you know, you can't do the wooey version of this, right? You have to say this is quantum physics. Right? I'm talking about science to you, you know. And so he would, he would rope in buzzwords from quantum physics to try to convince mild skeptics that what he was selling was in fact science. In one interview he said this about personal responsibility. I fully know for me that there is no blame. Every single thing is your responsibility and nothing is your fault. Because every single thing that comes to you is a gift, a lesson. Now you think that could like be bad?

[Bridget Todd]

I mean, I love the nothing is my fault angle like that. I really connect with that.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah, there's going to be a very interesting thing that becomes his fault in the near future here. So yeah, I think that's probably a good idea for him to be selling at this point given where he winds up. His motivational seminars involved board breaking and trust falls, all of which was done without proper medical staff present. Which is why prior to him getting famous, several people were badly injured during his events. At least one time at Walt Disney World in 2005, a 42 year old man was hospitalized after Ray made him exercise in a poorly Built sweat lodge. So this is all happening before he winds up on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Now, what gets him on the show is that he is one of several narrators for the 2006 documentary The Secret, which is what gets him on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Oprah lavished praise on Ray and urged her viewers to sign up for his courses and listen to his wisdom. Many did. And he goes in short order from a failing motivational speaker with several lawsuits against him to the hottest thing in town.

[Bridget Todd]

This is what I'm talking about with her. He just was the. Like, I am a voice artist, right? Like, I've narrated plenty of things. The fact that this, like, guy, who already had a pretty problematic history, just was a narrator, and then she's like, ooh, let's elevate you. Let's make you a star. Something must be like. Like, I don't know. I don't know where I'm going with this, but it just. It baffles me why she would want to be further mixed up with this person like, this just based on him being a narrator of the Secret.

[Sophie]

I mean, we'll never know because it's not like there's, like, whistleblowers from the Oprah camp, but, like, surely there were. There had to be discussions, right?

[Andrew T.]

Like.

[Sophie]

Like, Oprah, why these guys?

[Andrew T.]

You know, I think some of it is just that at this point, he's just another motivational speaker, and it looks like he's attached to the successful project. He probably had a good rapport with Oprah. All you really assume at that point is like, okay, well, maybe this will work, right? Like, this guy's probably someone smart to have on.

[Sophie]

I mean, I guess that's the other side of Oprah is like. Because she's gotten so far on gut. I mean, maybe it's just a charming five minutes at a fucking cocktail party or a meeting.

[Andrew T.]

I think a lot of cases, it is, like, literally, they charmed me for, like, five minutes. Yeah. Yeah, man, that's.

[Sophie]

It's wild to have a vibe. Spaced empire.

[Andrew T.]

Yes.

[Sophie]

I mean, I guess we are living in one, so what do I know?

[Andrew T.]

But that's not 0% of Cool Zone's business, right? That's just the way entertainment works now, you know? Take that what you will. So let's go to ads, and then we'll come back and talk about what happens next in the James Ray story. 2025 is here, and Mint Mobile has a resolution for you. Skip the gym. Skip the fad diet. Skip the BS Resolutions you'll forget about by next week. Instead, make a resolution to save some serious cash by making the switch to Mint Mobile. And right now you can get half off their 3 month unlimited plan Plan it's time to leave your overpriced wireless plans jaw dropping monthly bills, unexpected overages and all their other BS. In 2024, Mint Mobile is dropping huge savings for the new year by offering any three month plan for only 15 bucks a month. Even their unlimited plan. All plans come with high speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can even bring your current phone and your number with you. So ditch overpriced wireless With Mint Mobile, it's so easy. Sign up online and get three months of premium wireless service for 15 bucks a month. Switch to Mint and new customers can get half off an unlimited plan until February 2nd. To get your new wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month and get the plan shipped to your door for free, go to mintmobile.com behind that's mintmobile.com behind $45 upfront payment required equivalent to $15 a month. New customers on first three month plan only speed slower above 40 gigabits on unlimited plan. Additional taxes, fees and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details. Did you know that there's a victim of identity theft every three seconds? It's Identity Theft Awareness Week, which means it's the perfect time to protect your identity with Lifelock. Lots of places like doctor's offices and retailers can accidentally expose your personal info, leaving you open to identity threats. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second and alerts you to more uses of your personal information. And if you do become a victim of identity theft, LifeLock has professional restoration specialists with the experience and know how to fix identity theft issues guaranteed or your money back. Plus, plans include the million dollar protection package with up to $3 million in coverage for the most comprehensive plan. Protect yourself this Identity Theft Awareness Week and every week of the year with Lifelock. Save up to 40% off your first [e-mail] iheartra that's lifelock.com iheart to save up to 40% terms apply lifelock for the threats you can't control. Looking for excitement? Chumba Casino is here. Play anytime. Play anywhere. Play on the train. Play at the store. Play at home. Play when you're bored. Play today for your chance to win and get daily bonuses when you log in. So what are you waiting for? Don't delay. Chumba Casino is free to play, experience social gameplay like never before. Go to Chumba Casino right now to play hundreds of games including online slots, bingo, Slingo and more. Live the chumba [e-mail] VGW Group no purchase necessary void. We're prohibited by law.

[Bridget Todd]

Seek terms and conditions.

[Andrew T.]

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[Sophie]

And feels like yay.

[Andrew T.]

Okay, we could be here all day. Try Clorox Scentiva for a trusted clean with long lasting freshness. Also available in lavender and coconut. News as directed. We're back. So I want to read a quote from the New York Times about kind of the explosion in Ray's business after this. Because he goes from again, a middling figure, not a ton of money, not super successful to for a while like the biggest name in self help or at least like the biggest new name in self help. Quote. He offered a hierarchy of courses, each more expensive than the last. Culminating in spiritual warrior, a $10,000 retreat near Sedona, Arizona. After a series of endurance exercises, including extended fasting, participants spent hours in a sweat lodge where temperatures soared above 150 degrees. Mr. Ray presented spiritual warriors several times. And some past participants had raised questions about whether he or his staff members had sufficient training to run a sweat lodge.

[Bridget Todd]

They probably didn't, right?

[Andrew T.]

Oh no, they didn't. Bridget, I'm gonna tell you right now, if there's a fucking white guy running a sweat lodge, he does not have sufficient training. That's just a rule in sweat lodges. Or white lady, let's be fair, 150 degrees.

[Sophie]

When the room gets closer, it goes like. That's closer to my oven controls than my therm fat controls.

[Andrew T.]

Yes. Which is real bad when you are in the able to cook meat spectrum people.

[Sophie]

Yeah.

[Andrew T.]

And again, you know, sweat lodges. And I'm not competent to talk about this exhaustively, but there's a long history in several Native American traditions of use of sweat lodges. And they can be have been part of like therapeutic treatments run by people who know what they are doing. I'm not saying there's. Sweat lodges are inherently bad. James does not know what he's doing and he is not utilizing this as part of an actual like therapeutic thing. He is sticking people in a hot room because it's unpleasant. And he wants to make them do something incredibly unpleasant and physically straining because that when you get out of. When you do that with a group of people and you have like this dangerous, painful physical experience and then you get out of it on the other side of it, you feel bonded to those people and to the program. Right. That's why he's doing this. And when you use a thing like that, that way, your concern is that they suffer. Right. And not that we're doing this in a way that is safe or going to, like, have a therapeutic benefit. It's that this is as intense an experience as possible. And in fact, he would brag about it when he does his big sweat lodge event on October 8, 2009, for a group of people each paying 10gr for the spiritual warrior seminar. The guy, he brags to the group that he just talked to. The guy stoking the fire, you know, setting it with good intentions, you know, he's part of it, is he. He's got to really think about positive intentions for your experience to help make sure it is a good one. And this is the hottest fire we've ever had. You know, make them feel special. Right. Make them feel like they're getting this uniquely intense, life changing experience. They did get that. You know, I gotta say, it is a uniquely intense, life changing experience for all of them. 21 of the people in that sweat lodge are hospitalized and three of them die when first responders show up. One compares what he saw. To quote the site of a mass suicide.

[Sophie]

I just double check. 150 is medium, is north of medium rare.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah. Like, if your meat is cooked to 150 in the center, you're pretty, pretty much good. Yeah. Yeah. Mm. So this is very bad. You're not supposed to kill multiple people in a single sweat lodge. You're not supposed to ever kill people in your sweat lodge. These are overwhelmingly not old people. There's a podcast called Guru on Wondery that is just about Ray and goes into detail about this. One of the women who dies is, I think, like 39 years old. And it's like the story you hear a lot. This is a woman who's like, career ambitions hadn't really worked out and she didn't really have a clear idea of, like, what she wanted to do. And so she gets into a lot of this self help type stuff. She sees James on the Oprah Winfrey Show. She has the same attitude of a lot of people that like, well, if Oprah says this guy is good, he must be. She gets his books. She drops tens of thousands of dollars on courses, and then eventually all of her savings on this spiritual warrior weekend. That fucking kills her.

[Bridget Todd]

I do think we're in this. I mean, today I think we are in a weird golden age of like, Entrepreneurism and tech and like bullshit risky spirituality kind of coming together. Like I, I feel like this was on the, like this, this guy was sort of on the early days of what is definitely here. Because I have heard so many people in tech who are sort of of like that woman describes, like not sure what they should do. Maybe they've been laid off. They're not sure what's next for them. And there are so many hucksters that will take their money and offer them something that they. That is meant to be like a spiritual, whether it's psychedelics. That's like a thing that's really taking off right now in that space. It makes me so sad that people who probably could have used like therapy or a career coach would turn to somebody who was so callously exploit them and put them at such danger that they would die and like die paying for the pleasure. It's just so disgusting and it like, it just. Yeah, it's just these people have no values and they are such hucksters.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah, yeah. And Rey is the epitome of that. And of course as soon as he kills a bunch of people, Oprah distances herself from him. He does not show back up. And by God, at least last time I checked, I couldn't find good clips of him in on Oprah's show. A lot of that stuff gets. Let's get this shit out of here.

[Sophie]

It's impressive that she's able to scrub so much off the Internet. I will.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah. I mean it's all rights, claims and stuff, you know.

[Sophie]

Yeah.

[Andrew T.]

So he is charged and convicted. He spends some time in prison. Oprah, obviously nothing happens to her. She does not stop putting self help gurus on her show or stop encouraging new age experimental alternative medicine. I do want to listen to something that I didn't have in the script, but I just came across it and maybe we'll try seeing this video. This is something that James Ray posted after getting out of prison called be careful what you wish for. So I'm just gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna take the wheel here. Sophie. Insights into success. Be the best you can be. I love that. Be the best you can be. This man killed three people. I like the website is just is into success.com. also I have to say before we start this, James Arthur Ray. It is one of those like three word names. Like that's a very serial killer.

[Bridget Todd]

Yeah, he was definitely gonna kill somebody for sure.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah, he was always doomed to it. Although not a bad fit on the suit anyway. And I Thought I'd finally arrived. Well, that's a dangerous place to be. And I would say this to any entrepreneur. If you believe you've arrived, you may have likely arrived, most likely have arrived at a very, very dangerous place. Because nothing stays the same. It just doesn't. And I don't know how much you know, Paul, about my history, but in 2009 I was at the top of my game. I was worth north of $20 million. I had built an Inc. 510 million dollar company. You know, I had all these other accolades going on and then I was involved in a horrible, horrible accident in 2009 in a five day retreat in the desert of Sedona. And I'll shorten the story, but it was quite a lengthy journey and I, I talk about this in great depth and detail in my book, the Business of Redemption because it, I went from the pinnacle to the pit. I, I literally, you know, we had at the end of this five day event which is a very intensive week of hard work and diving deep into those psychological issues that drive behavior and bringing those to the forefront of our mind so we can heal them, release them and move forward in life and integrate those things. And so it was a very emotional week. It was an arduous week. And at the end we had this experiential learning opportunity called a sweat lodge. I love how long it takes him to get to like. So we had a sweat lodge and I killed three people.

[Sophie]

Oh my God.

[Andrew T.]

It's also, there's a master class here and like this guy hospitalized almost two dozen people and killed three. And he immediately is like, as soon as I get out, I'm going to write a book about redemption, right? I'm going to have like, this is, I'm just going to pivot this to being about my, my success journey. And like I thought I was at the top, but you know, I didn't realize what fate had around the corner when I accidentally killed three people at a sweat. This is just one of those curve balls life senses sometimes, right? Sometimes you're just out there living your life, trying to do your best and you get three people killed in a sweat lodge. It happens.

[Sophie]

If anyone's just listening to this also, I didn't realize he was such a TEMU ass Wolf Blitzer looking motherfucker.

[Andrew T.]

He is a really, really Wolf Blitzer looking motherfucker. Yeah, that's how I would describe him. Yeah.

[Bridget Todd]

I also like how he describes it as like, I was involved in an accident out in Sedona.

[Andrew T.]

He was involved in an accident.

[Bridget Todd]

You might think that he means like a dirt bike. He was involved in a dirt bike accident or something.

[Andrew T.]

I crashed my car. I hit a kid with my, you know, total accident. They darted into traffic. No, no, no, no, no, no. You engineered a situation that was definitely going to kill people because you didn't know what the fuck you were doing and had lost your mind with arrogance and belief in your own power. So this does not stop Oprah from putting self help gurus on her show or encouraging new experimental alternative medicine again. And she puts ray on in 2006. He kills people in 2009. The John of God episodes air. I think after that, Jesus. So it's good stuff. In my research I came across an article by Jean Brown, the sister of Kirby Brown, who died in that sweat lodge. Jean and her family started a nonprofit, Seek S E K All Caps Safely. Focused on trying to establish protections and guardrails for the self help industry. She wrote this in an open letter to Winfrey. You helped make this sham of a man what he was. In fact, it was after seeing him on your show that my sister, Kirby Brown read the Secret and became a fan of James Ray. I remember when we were together for my wedding at my parents house in July of 2009, three months before she'd die of heat stroke in a plastic tent in Arizona. I remember Kirby telling me that I had to read this book, that it was amazing that James Ray was amazing that he'd been on Oprah and that she was looking forward to the Ray event she'd be attending a few months later. That's right, she mentioned you by name. And Brown is begging Oprah in this to speak up and use her incredibly powerful unique platform to advocate for regulations to protect people from the predatory aspects of the self help industry. To my knowledge, Oprah never took her up on this strident plea. And yeah, that's a bummer.

[Sophie]

It's a little though also like, I mean, listen, I'm coming at this from a place of utter non belief in this and I do understand that parts of this industry have helped people in certain ways. But the idea of like advocating for regulations on. I guess this is, this is like the same as the FDA technically has to, you know, have a handle on the supplements industry or like casinos have some guardrails but it is so dark because it's like this shit is fake. So like what regulation other than this should not be. These should not be claims that you can make because they are lies. Can there possibly be. I guess I Guess you shouldn't kill people. You can lie to them, but you can lie to them. Take their money, but you shouldn't kill them. I don't know. It's very dark.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah, it's pretty bleak. Now, I can't conclude a series on Oprah Winfrey without at some point discussing her infamous book club. And so that's what we're gonna do now. You get to talk about. We're not gonna keep doing that joke. I should say something about the car thing probably. So she does this episode where she has like three people on who can't afford cars and, you know, the problems that causes in their life. And then they all find out they're getting brand new Pontiacs. And then gradually it becomes clear everyone in the audience is getting a free new Pontiac. Now, two things. Number one, the specific, if you know anything about Pontiac, you know that that's a curse more than it's a blessing.

[Bridget Todd]

I used to drive a Sunfire.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had a cousin with a Firebird and boy, howdy, was that thing a piece of shit. But also, like, these are. This was an advertising ploy. In part, Pontiac pays for the cars. That's why they're free. Right. But also, the Oprah Winfrey show does not remember to give the people money in addition to the cars, because when you get given a car, there's tax implications. And everyone wound up owing six grand as a result each for that car, which was like a big problem for a lot of people because these are folks who couldn't afford cars. Now, in terms of the bastard column, this was more of like a thing. They just didn't. Because in the future, when she would give expensive gifts to people, the show would also give them checks to account for the tax burden. So I think this probably lands on just like you weren't thinking about. This was like an ill thought out advertising ploy that worked pretty well for Pontiac. Although look at where Pontiac is today.

[Sophie]

It's still Pontiac.

[Andrew T.]

It's still Pontiac.

[Sophie]

Honestly, there's a part of me that's like, the bigger thing is, like, that will never be in an era where any media is consolidated enough that it's worth that level of outlay. Like, what is it, like A hundred cars, 50 cars? Something like that as an advertising stuff. Like, it's just not, you know, in addition to all the other shit, like whatever Oprah got or like, I'm just like, I just don't think that's gonna happen anymore.

[Andrew T.]

I mean, what's most funny to me is that the specific model of Pontiac has gone down as like, one of the very worst cars ever made. So it really was like, you get a shitty car. You get a shitty car and you owe 6k and you owe 6 grand. Anyway. That's not really a bastard thing. It's just kind of funny. Let's talk about the book club. In September 1996, Oprah launched her book club as a regular feature on her show, making monthly picks and discussing them on air. Instantly, it became the largest and most influential book club on earth. Every single book club pick that she would make for like 15 years or something became a bestseller. Every one of them. Some sold many millions of copies. I read a paper analyzing Oprah's literary choices by Alana Cullen of Salv Salve Regina University. And Cullen quotes a scholar named Lofton as saying nearly every one of the novels she suggested for the original book club followed the same narrative trajectory. A woman, usually of eccentric yet compelling character, experiences an enormous trauma. The remainder of the novel follows the woman as she manages the psychological, material and social after effects of the trauma. Usually the stories conclude on a neutral note. The central character is wiser for her experiences, though on the whole, not entirely happy with the way her life is resolved. Obviously, Oprah believes this paradigmic plotline will not only resonate with her viewers, but also expresses a universal truth critical to her spiritual work. The suffering of women is universal, unabated, and endured only through solidarity with other women. And I don't read that because that's like evil or anything. That's just an analysis of the fiction picks. It's interesting to me that, like, oh, okay, the fiction that you are drawn to is very much a mirror of your own life. Yeah, just an interesting thing. And Oprah does in fact pick a lot of good books, including some great works of classic literature that she helps to spread to a wiser, wider audience. Her book club is an extreme positive for the publishing industry as a whole. Now, when it comes to what is this net positive or negative for society, that's a little harder because in addition to some very good works of classic literature and just books that are fine, that more people read and more people are reading because Oprah's a good example, there's also shit like a lot of poisonous stuff gets very famous. And I'm speaking here about the secret, which we have, I think, discussed adequately, but also the infamous nonfiction book that turned out to be a fiction book, A Million Little Pieces by James Frey. We all know this story. Maybe not you at home, but everyone sitting Here does, right? Yeah. Did anyone read this fucker before it came out? I did. I did too. My mom made me. She wanted to scare me away from drugs. And this is a book about this guy, like, and it's his crazy drug and alcohol life, and he goes to prison and loses all his teeth. It's like this fucked up addiction memoir of, you know, addiction and redemption. And it is just horseshit.

[Bridget Todd]

It's complete lies when you don't know it's lies. It's. I mean, I remember the opening. It opens with him, like, coming to on a plane and he doesn't know where he's going. And it turns out he was on a bender and they're sending him to rehab. Like. Like, it opens and you're like, I'm locked and loaded. Like, lock in. And when you find out it's bullshit, you realize, like, oh, I like it. Really questioned my bullshit detector. Cause I was like, how did I not realize that this was fiction? Going back and reading it, knowing it's lies, like, it really reads like bad fiction.

[Andrew T.]

Yep. Yeah. And it is, like, very, like, bad fiction is a good way to look at it. Anthony Bourdain described it as an obvious, transparent and steaming heap of false. From the first page, I was enraged that anyone on earth would believe a word. As a former addict, I found this fake redemption memoir to be morally repugnant. You know, I remember thinking it sounded kind of cool, like, oh, man, this guy had some fun adventures being on drugs and alcohol. Maybe I should be an addict as an adult. Didn't have a positive impact on me. You could say. While Frey's book spent, he spends. This is such a hit. Like, it's hard to over. Like, books almost don't. Almost don't go viral the way A Million Little Pieces did. He spends 15 weeks on the bestseller list, which is huge for any author, especially one coming out of nowhere. And as soon as Ray is the top of the literary game, this guy goes mad with power. He starts. You can find, like, writings of his and, like, public comments he made attacking other authors like Dave Edgar and David Foster Wallace, calling them hacks and bragging that he was the best writer of his generation just immediately loses might. Journalists start after this book is on the market a while, like, looking into some of the obvious provable lies in his book and pointing out stuff that, like, well, you talk a lot about the time you spent in prison and, like, you didn't. Like, you never got arrested or sentenced for a thing. Like, you didn't. You didn't do the thing that's like, the centerpiece of your book. Is it possible other things are lying if this obvious, provable thing is a lie? Now, when the allegations come out, Oprah initially defends him. And in fact, Oprah even calls into Larry King Live to describe the allegations against Frey as Much ado about nothing, which is, like, a unique and in part because, like, she's put her ego into backing this guy. Right?

[Sophie]

Yeah.

[Andrew T.]

Like, she called him brilliant and said his book was wonderful. If she got conned, that doesn't look good for the Oprah brand. Journalists kept pointing out inconvenient details, and eventually the whole edifice of lies came crumbling down. Frey eventually admits, like, I fictionalized large portions of this. Oprah was furious. And so she does the logical thing and has him back on her show. There's like three times she has him on after this. One of them is, like, extremely hostile, where she is clearly like, oh, you are pissed. Like, this guy made you look bad. But she also lets him explain at length. He goes on a rant at one point where he's like, well, all memoirs are kind of lies, right? Because people don't remember things accurate. He's saying the stuff we were saying at the start. We're like, well, your past is to some extent, like fiction. Right. Because we all remember things that didn't happen or didn't happen that way, or our memory is different from memory of other people who were there. He interprets that as. So it's fine if I just lie about my entire backstory and call it nonfiction. Right. Like, which is a leap, maybe, I would say.

[Sophie]

Speaking of the publishing industry, though, is there. Is there no. Like. Like, fact checking? Like, what the fuck is happening?

[Andrew T.]

I mean, actually, today there is no fact checking. There still was a little bit back then. It's very much. It's very, very rare in publishing to get functional fact checking these days. Those are some of the first jobs you eliminate when you're cutting costs. Newspapers are unfortunately the same thing. There is some minimal fact. At least the last time I did a nonfiction book, which was 15 years ago, there was minimal fact checking. But it is mostly on the author, right? Yeah. And I don't think they thought to fact check something like a memoir by this guy about his own experiences, even though there's stuff like his time in jail that would have been very easy to check. More to the point, Oprah continuing to have Frey on after he's exposed, sells more copies of the book, like it benefits him financially that she keeps having him on because people keep buying the goddamn thing.

[Bridget Todd]

I remember reading a piece about how other memoirists who genuinely lived experiences that Frey kind of, like, made up or fabricated, like people who genuinely struggled with addiction or, like, had rough circumstances that they had a hard time selling their book because of him, and, like, the impact that it made on people who were trying to write about those tough experiences. Really? Yeah.

[Andrew T.]

Cool stuff, Oprah. Cool stuff. Now there were near calamities too. In 2008, Oprah picked a Holocaust memoir as her book of the month. The book was called Misha, and it was the purported true story of the life of the author Misha di Fonseca, who was a little Jewish girl during World War II, had to search Europe for her parents in the midst of the Holocaust and was adopted and saved by Nazi murder by a pack of wolves. That is literally the claim that she makes in this. This memoir. Now, you guys want to hear something shocking didn't happen? Little Jewish girl was not, in fact, saved by a family of wolves during the Holocaust. In fact, Misha was not a little Jewish girl. She was raised Roman Catholic. She was not caught up in the Holocaust. This is just nonsense sense. Thankfully, Oprah was saved from plugging her novel because the truth came out at the 11th hour before the episode could air. So they had time to scrap the fucker, but very nearly got brought in on that one. That said, in 1996, she was conned by the author of a different Holocaust novel. Authors Herman and Roma Rosenblatt wrote a book titled angel at the Fence, about how Roman had saved Herman's life while he was interned at Buchenwald by throwing apples over the fellow fence. Or Roma had saved his life by throwing apples over the fence, and that's how they'd met and fallen in love, and they'd been together ever since. Oprah called it the single greatest love story she'd ever heard. It was also total bullshit. Now, this was not revealed for more than a decade. So, like, this book goes out as her book of the month. A decade later, it comes out like, they just lied. None of this happened. Oprah's response was basically a fart noise. She said she was disappointed, but refused to admit that she had been tricked. And I don't know how much deeper to get into the weeds with this stuff, right? Like, when it comes to most of the harms of her book club, they kind of boil down to, like, I don't think that her taste in books was always great, but that's a personal opinion. And then number two, and this is the big one. She doesn't. Nobody really does. Very few people read enough that every month for like 20 years you can recommend your favorite book of them month that you have actually read cover to cover. Some people do read them. I read that much because I have to. But like you're being pitched, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oprah's not reading that much. She's got too much to do. And so she's not actually like reading multiple books every month and picking her favorite because that's very hard to do. She's got a team of people who are picking books and that leads to them making some very lazy picks that, that can, can elevate ASP literature. Especially when she's focusing on like literature from other countries. There's an element of that that could be problematic. And this is not something I would have picked up on on my own. But I had the good fortune during my research to come across an article by Rob Spillman, the editor of Tin House magazine and the author of an anthology of contemporary African fiction titled Gods and Soldiers. And he made a complaint about Oprah's elevation of a book called say youy Are One of Them by Nigerian author Uwem Akpa. Quote Akpan, a Nigerian Jesuit priest, is a model and sappy writer and his book only reinforces Western stereotypes about Africa, that it is a wasteland of child soldiers, poverty and corruption. While there are serious problems in much of Africa, this is not the only reality. And strictly from the point of view of African fiction, Oprah could have done a lot better. The stories in say you Are One of Them are drawn directly from the well known African headlines, but with little added imagination. Nation they have nothing of the power of Akpan's countryman Uzoddinma Iweala, Iweala's searing novel about a child soldier, Beasts of no Nation or Senegalese author Bobokar Boris Diop's novel about the Rwandan genocide Murambi, the Book of Bones. Akpan's writing is pedestrian and plotting, but that has never stopped Oprah before. I am sure Akpan, who is by all accounts a very nice person who is dedicated to doing good work in the world, will make for compelling daytime tv. It is just a shame that this one mediocre book is going to be to stand for all of African fiction.

[Bridget Todd]

This doesn't surprise me at all because this was certainly a well worn claim about Oprah that she was really interested in mining like the trauma specifically of the black community and sort of packaging it and turning it into a commodity and, yeah, I mean, I can't help but see reflections of this and how she might have been thinking about some of those schoolgirls when she was coming up with the idea to launch. Like, I think that our experiences do often have traumatic legacies and life baggage and all of that. But that's not the only story that there is. And so I wonder if, like, maybe she does have a preoccupation with, you know, kind of the. Kind of not just traumatic, but, like, traumatic in a very specific, recognizable way that this author is calling her out for.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Sophie]

There's also a thing that, like, white audiences, like white Americans assume black Americans know, have special insight into Africa or. Africans.

[Andrew T.]

Right.

[Sophie]

But why would they.

[Andrew T.]

No, they're Americans.

[Sophie]

Yeah.

[Andrew T.]

Like, they don't need to know anything at all about Nigeria. Like. Yeah, what do you know? Like, okay, what's Your last name? O'Malley. How much do you know about contemporary Irish politics? Oh, Is it just St. Patrick's Day? Is that all you really know? Okay, okay, okay.

[Bridget Todd]

And I wonder, like, Robert, to your point, about, like, certainly Oprah is not reading these books, you know, on her compound and then hand picking them. Someone's picking them for her. So, like, why not consult, like, a Nigerian? Like, why? Like, she has infinite resources. It wouldn't be that hard to find somebody who knows what a good pick would be.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah, there's a way you could still be doing good as her by saying, like, hey, I'm gonna pick this month. I've got this. This expert on Nigerian literature who put together this, like, you know, compilation of books, and he's gonna talk about some literary, you know, Nigerian literature that you should read and recommend it to you like that. Again, that kind of takes the focus off of Oprah.

[Bridget Todd]

Yeah. She doesn't pass the mic. I feel like that is like, really the theme here is that she wants it to be about her. She won't pass the mic.

[Sophie]

Yeah, well, and the other thing is, like, just knowing anything about the media and entertainment industry, those readers were two to three white people who are just doing their best speed reading, like, 80.

[Andrew T.]

This really is such a revealing novel about modern Nigeria, a place I've never been or read anything about other than this novel. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, that's a thoughtful and complex critique. I don't know that you would. Again, is this a bastard column? Yeah, probably a little bit here. But it's also. It's more than anything, it's a reflection of the fact that even with someone as. As famous as Oprah tries to use fame in a good way to encourage reading which is generally positive. There will always be negative externalities precisely because fame is a brute force and it is very hard to use in a way that doesn't cause spillover harm. Right? That's the nature of fame. I've quoted a couple of times in these episodes from a paper by Alana Mullen of Salve Regina University, and that paper's title is salient to this point. Quote Despair Disguised as Entertainment. Does Oprah Winfrey sensationalize human suffering in order to fuel her media empire and encourage other media to follow? So the argument here is essentially that Oprah's content largely consists of a mix of horrific, heartrending stories of suffering meant to generate emotion that usually ends on an uplifting note where the subject somehow pulls themselves up by their bootstraps. This is augmented by segments on self help featuring gurus and fitness experts who offer a mix of mental and physical expert exercises through which the individual might fix their problems. Under the advice section of O, the Oprah Magazine, after the reader reads the panic button, Martha Beck on the only rational way to weather life's big and little snafus, Dr. Phil on getting along with a surly son in law and tips on raising a grandchild and sues Orman on an oppressive load of debt, a cramped house and a money squandering husband. The reader finally comes to the journaling portion. Here the reader is encouraged to write down her feelings about philosopher fear. It begins, at times we all fear we're not good enough. Before you can convince yourself otherwise, you have to simply admit to yourself and no one else what you want. Then tell yourself, I am good enough. Say it until you believe it. The reader is given five questions and is asked to reflect on such things like how does your self talk change when you're fearful? We must keep in mind here who Oprah's readers are. These are not children. These are middle class women with families and careers. I would argue that the childlike dialogue Oprah exploits presents her audience with a simplistic discourse on suffering. Suffering is a powerful source of lessons and moral knowledge and it should guide the individual. But what Oprah ends up doing is making suffering and the exploitation of your own suffering into a desirable and commonplace experience.

[Bridget Todd]

I mean, I think that's. I mean I hate to make like. I hate to brand that as a positive, but I do feel like today like she was ahead of her time. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, in terms like look how popular things like True crime are like the idea of packaging suffering as entertainment. That's all. I feel like sometimes that's all media is right now. And I feel like I can't not see the ways that she was onto something before it had really become, like, that much of a thing.

[Andrew T.]

And to an extent, it becomes that much of a thing because she. She does prove the market right. Which isn't to say that she's morally responsible for everything that media has done since, but you do have to look at the evolution that these things follow. Yeah.

[Sophie]

I mean, it's sort of like the question is like, do you create the market or does the market create you? Because it's like, even from the early stories, it's like, it was also clear she was just trying a bunch of shit. And the thing that worked was the thing she gravitated towards and more and more and more and more, which is just like, you know, how you do it.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah. And this sort of. I mean, like, there's. Yeah, I think we've. We've gone into that enough for these episodes. I just kind of. It's. It's something I think about a lot because the nature of this podcast is talking about awful things and like, these. These stories that are often, like, very terrible and horrible. And part of the popularity of this show is that people are drawn. That sort of thing. And there's not 0% Oprah in the background of, like, what I do now. I don't ever. For one thing, we don't end our episodes on a. On a high note. Usually there's not like an inspiring moral journey that makes you think, don't worry. Just by changing my opinions and attitudes, I can fix the problem like Hitler. Because you can't. The thing that fixes a problem like Hitler or any other major problem in our societies, like collective action. And when that action is absent, there's often just nothing but terror, Right?

[Sophie]

Yeah.

[Andrew T.]

But, like, you know, it's still. It's this kind of thing. Like, reading about these critiques of Oprah, I have certainly thought about, like, what I do. You know, it's hard not to, like, in part because there's so much of how influencer and media stuff works today that's downstream of Oprah. You kind of have to. But speaking of downstream of Oprah, let's sell some fucking products. 2025 is here, and Mint Mobile has a resolution for you. Skip the gym. Skip the fad diet. Skip the BS Resolutions you'll forget about by next week. Instead, make a resolution to save some serious cash by making the switch to Mint Mobile and right now you can get half off their three month unlimited plan. It's time to leave your overpriced wireless plans jaw dropping monthly bills, unexpected overages and all their other BS. In 2020, Mint Mobile is dropping huge savings for the new year by offering any three month plan for only 15 bucks a month. Even their unlimited plan. All plans come with high speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can even bring your current phone and your number with you. So ditch overpriced wireless With Mint Mobile, it's so easy. Sign up online and get three months of premium wireless service for 15 bucks a month. Month Switch to Mint and new customers can get half off an unlimited plan until February 2nd. To get your new wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month and get the plan shipped to your door for free, go to mintmobile.com behind that's mintmobile.com behind $45 upfront payment required equivalent to $15 a month new customers on first three month plan only speed slower above 40 gigabits on unlimited plan. Additional taxes, fees and restrictions apply. C Mint Mobile for Detective Tails.

[Sophie]

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[Andrew T.]

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[Bridget Todd]

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[Andrew T.]

Hi, I'm Cindy Crawford and I'm the founder of Meaningful Beauty. Well, I don't know about you but like I never liked being told oh wow, you look so good for your age. Like why even bother saying that? Why don't you just say you look great at any age? Every age. That's what Meaningful Beauty is all about. We create products that make you feel confident in your skin at the age you are now. Meaningful Beauty. Beautiful skin at every age. Learn [e-mail] and we're back. So I want to read a quote that kind of gets into the fact that Oprah, she primarily understands the world through the things that happen to her. And that's kind of what her journey, the possibility that you can have no matter how bad things are for you, you can wind up like Oprah, rich and famous and beloved by changing your attitude effectively. That's what she is selling her viewers and readers. And there's an extent to which it's kind of dangerous to get people thinking about mass problems that way. And this is a point that's made very well in book the Age of Oprah by Janice Peck. Quote. Inspired by a New York times series from 2005 titled Class Matters, the show's opening segment suggested a serious treatment of issues of class inequality. Clips of experts citing the growing gap between rich and poor, shots of Hurricane Katrina victims crying for help, and Winfrey's own statement that nearly 40% of all the country's wealth is being held by the richest 1%. The fact that one of the guests was Robert Reich, US Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton, underscored the solemn tone as he spoke of declining manufacturing jobs, a shrinking middle class, mounting economic anxiety, and millions of Americans who are working very hard but still not making it in what some are now calling the new Gilded Age. But even as Reich called into question the viability of the American Dream, Winfrey reaffirmed it. She referred to a New York times poll where 80% of those surveyed said they believe you can go from rags to riches in America. Followed it up with a video clip of a young woman convinced she would acquire the big house, fantasy engagement ring, and nice cars, because if you work hard, you can achieve anything. Oprah finally declared herself not only a believer in the American dream of rags to riches, but living proof of its veracity. Although Reich dutifully decreed his host a great model for America, he pressed on with his argument that success and failure are not simply matters of individual effort. Part of it is luck, he said. Part of it is connection. Part of it is education. Winfrey replied, tertiary. I don't believe in luck, Bob. I think luck is preparation, meeting the moment of opportunity. I don't consider myself lucky at all.

[Bridget Todd]

Wow.

[Andrew T.]

Oprah, Oprah, Oprah, Oprah, Oprah, Oprah. No, no, no.

[Sophie]

But also, like, just on its face, how stupid is that statement? Like, what do you think the fucking moment of opportunity is, you dummy? That's luck.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah, that's luck. Your dad may not be your biological dad. The fact that he chose to take that responsibility for you is luck. You know, like, the fact that your grandma, you have credited aspects of her with, like, instilling in you some of these values that, like, led to you being a success. That's also luck. You didn't have to have that grandma and it's this thing of, like, if my life is hard and a lot of bad shit happens to me, I'm not a lucky person. Both happen. Like.

[Bridget Todd]

And there are so many things from her story that you've told us that were just pure luck. Like, the reaction to her higher ups when she, you know, took the gam. The gamble and took the risk on, like, I'm gonna berate this woman on the show. And like, luckily, it's gonna be a hit. That's luck. Cause her higher ups could have fired her for that. Like, that could have. Her story couldn't have ended there. Luckily, it didn't. And they had a different reaction. But, like, to say, like, oh, that was a calculated choice, obviously. Not, like, I just can't believe that someone would discount sort of, like, right place, right time luck. Like, oh, just luckily it worked out that way to their success story. Everybody has that in their success story. Everybody.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah. And it's this problem of, like, conflating I benefited from luck to saying, like, I'm lucky. And, like, especially if you've had as nightmarish an upbringing as she has, I get why there's some offense to that. But luckily, like, you know, there's buildings that were airstruck and like, one member of a family in Gaza survives. They survived due to luck. They're not lucky their family got killed by an airstrike. Right. But it's just luck that they lived through that thing. Right. Like, but I don't know. I think people, a lot of people, especially, particularly Oprah, doesn't like thinking about it that way. Like, maybe it's better to say, because luck has a positive connotation, blind fortune might be better. You know, it's the kind of blind fortune of, the guy next to me took a bullet through the head. But I didn't. You know, that didn't happen to me. I'm just making an example.

[Sophie]

But it's the. Like, everyone's grandpa survived the landing of Normandy.

[Andrew T.]

Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Through luck. Other guys died because their luck was shitty.

[Sophie]

Yeah.

[Andrew T.]

You know, that doesn't mean you didn't also, like, grow up fucking poor in the Dust Bowl. Right.

[Bridget Todd]

I wonder for Oprah if there's some aspect to where she thinks that, like, her success was, I don't wanna say predetermined, but, like, I know a lot of people who believe that they are where they are because it was, like, divinely written that way. And it doesn't matter what choices they make, because it's all gonna work out for them. In the end, that's definitely a mindset of people that I know. And I wonder if she feels that way.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah, she talks sometimes that way in terms of like, does she actually believe that God picked her spec? I actually don't. She said stuff that you can interpret that way. I don't really get the vibe that's how she thinks about it. I think her attitude is like, I succeeded because of my attitude and my hard work. Right. That's it. You know, Anyway, since this is behind the bastards, I think it's prudent for us to end these episodes and by God, they're finally fucking ending with a very clear cause. This is all. A lot of this is murky, the book stub, like, like not, you know, the luck thing. We can talk about the harms there and like how that perpetuates capitalism and makes it harder to get people behind, you know, solutions to the problems of capitalism. But like, it's not bastardry to just feel differently about to have that kind of reaction. You're not like evil. I just think you're wrong. So we're gonna end on a real clear bit of Evil. In 2007, Oprah had Ginny McCarthy on her show as a guest. McCarthy was at that point an actress and a former playboy model turned anti vaccine advocate. McCarthy is largely responsible for making Andrew Wakefield famous in the United States. Ginny believes, with no evidence, that vaccines gave her son Evan autism and that she cured his autism with dieting and pills she got from the Internet. Now, McCarthy had a degree of fame in her own right, which is why people listen to her in the first place. Place. But she would never, ever, ever, ever have reached more than a fraction of the people that she ultimately reached if Oprah had not had her on as a guest that fateful day in 2007. This turns her to the kind of person who thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people, you know, were aware of and you know, some chunk of that, probably in the tens of thousands at this point took her very seriously. Oprah puts her in front of like 30 million people. Yeah. You know, and this is. You talk about her as like an enzyme. Yeah. This is that moment for the anti vax movement, which is at this point one of the most dangerous and dominant social forces in the United States, pushing back against all of the gains of the last 150 years of medical science. It's a real nightmarish problem. And this is one of the single most important moments in the growth of the anti vaccine movement. Very little equals this in its toxicity. And I'm gonna quote from an article in box here. Science journalist Seth Mnookin, who covered this meeting of the minds in his book the Panic Virus, reported that Winfrey praised McCarthy's unwillingness to bow to authority, her faith in herself, and her use of the Internet as a tool for bypassing society's traditional gatekeepers. Here's an excerpt from the interview. Translated transcript McCarthy first thing I did Google, I put in autism and I started my research. Winfrey, thank God for Google. McCarthy, I'm telling you, Winfrey, thank God for Google. McCarthy, the University of Google is where I got my degree from. And I put in autism. And something came up that changed my life that led me on this road to recovery, which said autism, it was in a corner of the screen, is reversible and treatable. And I said, what? What? That has to be an ad for a hocus pocus thing? Because if autism is reversible and treatable, well, then it would be on Oprah.

[Bridget Todd]

I love that the specific things that she was praising her for are the most like Karen conspiracy theorist attributes like way to know the Internet, way to not trust authority, way to like, yeah.

[Andrew T.]

This is an er moment. This is in Lord of the Rings terms, this is Sauron forging the rings of power, right? Like that's, that's Oprah's involvement in the anti vax movement, right? So days after that Oprah appearance, and this is continuing that quote from Vox, McCarthy was invited on Larry King Live and Good Morning America to spread her anti vaccine message even further. Between the three shows, she reached between 15 million and 20 million viewers with her anti vaccine message. Manookin estimated. I think there's actually a good cause to suggest that it was more than that substantially. But all, all because I think her, her Most was like 26 something million viewers somewhere in those line along those lines. But Anyway, Oprah ended McCarthy's bit by calling her a mother warrior, which incidentally helped to set off one of my least favorite linguistic trends. I really fucking hate people using the word warrior for basically anything outside of war. It's just irritating to me. Not a moral thing, but like fucking like it's always alarming. I mean, the sweat lodge that killed three people was the spiritual warrior seminar, right? Like, you're not a warrior because you want to meditate and sit in a hot room. You're not a warrior because you got on Google because you don't think your kid is worth loving because they have autism.

[Sophie]

You know, you shouldn't want to have to Be a warrior.

[Andrew T.]

It's. Well, I mean that's what McCarthy would say. I had to be one for my son to cure him of the horrible specter of autism, which is actually really like deeply hateful to your kid that like you're going to move heaven and earth to like change them as opposed to just being like, yeah, this is my kid. This is how they are now. The only slight nod to reality was when Oprah read a brief statement from the CDC which pointed out that vaccines save lives. Even then McCarthy got the last word, insisting, my science is named Evan and he's at home. That's my science. Oh God.

[Bridget Todd]

Jenny McCarthy. McCarthy.

[Andrew T.]

Oh man. The episode with McCarthy is still featured. I think the actual clip clips of it aren't. I mean you can still find some of them but like the episode is still featured on the oprah.com website. Like there's a write up about it on there. Winfrey has never retracted or apologized for her role in the anti vaccine epidemic. In fact, she had her production company sign McCarthy for a TV show that eventually fell through because Ginny McCarthy is bad. We'll say bad because that's not legally actionable. I think she's really bad. And the show didn't happen, thank God. But Winfrey made her a recurrent guest. She keeps on coming on. And Winfrey does not limit herself to just McCarthy as an anti vax figure. In fact, I found a Mother Jones article that informed me that Ginny McCarthy was not even the first person with anti vax views on the Oprah Winfrey show. Quote, months before McCarthy's appearance, Katie Wright, whose son has autism, said on the show show, the vaccine connection has not been refuted at all. In fact, we give 37 vaccines to babies under the age of 18 months. Nobody has shown that safe. A wise idea, the multiple vaccines at once. I would say that the fact that most kids who are born survive to be adults shows that that's a good idea. Look at where things were there in 1850 with kids who were born surviving to adulthood. That I would say is pretty good evidence. Anyway. Yeah, the next year. Oh, sorry, please. Are just really bummed out now. Uh huh. It's bleak.

[Sophie]

It's also though like, I mean so much of like what's wrong with America is like can, can just we make everyone learn basic statistics just once?

[Andrew T.]

No, absolutely never going to do that, Andrew. We can't even teach people how to read anymore. I know. Like the next next year Oprah had Christiane Northrup on. Northrup is a physician or at least a former physician who started making the switch to New Age health disinformation Grifter on Oprah's program. Her initial target was the HPV vaccine, which she suggested should be replaced by a healthy diet. Northrop added, look, just eat right and you can't get hpv. Everyone knows that.

[Bridget Todd]

Of all the things I thought you were, where you thought you were gonna go, if you had said prayer, that would be the only thing, like, more ridiculous.

[Andrew T.]

No, this is why, like, you know, in my own personal life, I don't use any kind of protection. We just eat a salad first. You know, that makes it safe. If you're both eating a salad, nobody can pass anything to anybody else.

[Bridget Todd]

It's like, hey, babe, do you have a condom? Like, no, I've got some tomatoes, but.

[Andrew T.]

I got this excellent Caesar. Oh my God, it's so good. And it's spinach. None of that fucking, like, lettuce bullshit, right? Like the good stuff. Mixed greens by kale. Fucking hysterical. So Northrop added, I'm a little against my own profession. My own profession feels that everyone should be vaccinated. Yeah, nothing new to say about that. You won't be surprised, but should be saddened to hear that Northrop is still with us. She pivoted to COVID 19 denial. This is particularly a problem because in two 2013 Reader's Digest declared her one of the hundred most trusted people in the country. I want to read a quote from a McGill University article on Christiane for the Office of Science and Safety, which calls her the doctor Carl Sagan warned us about. And she's specifically talking about a Carl Sagan quote about, like, his fear that anti science attitudes will lead to a return. A new dark ages is like this. People start to believe in a demon haunted world rather than a world of, like, problems and solutions that can both be understood scientifically. And yeah, I think that's both a damning and accurate way to describe northrop. Quote from McGill University. She does not believe vaccines are necessary if your body is healthy and has spread unsubstantiated fears about safe vaccines throughout her career. She claimed that the COVID 19 vaccines will target specific chromosomes that act as the seed of our empathy. An utterly absurd and unscientific statement. She believes that artificial intelligence has somehow been incorporated into these vaccines. Absolutely nonsense. And that this AI will integrate itself into our DNA. She warns her viewers that the injection of patented vaccines inside our body will turn us into the property of the patent holders. Thanks for that one, Oprah. That is Let me just check. Bill Gates.

[Bridget Todd]

Is that true?

[Andrew T.]

That is. A lot of people don't know this. Bill Gates actually moved into your house and because you're legally his property, you couldn't say anything about it. Now the good news is Bill Gates is right. Super clean roommate. Super clean roommate. God.

[Bridget Todd]

Why, that is nonsense.

[Andrew T.]

That is complete and utter thanks bullshit. Thanks, Ops. Great, Great that she's in the discourse forever now. And that's part of the thing, is like, Oprah kind of takes a step back in, like, 2010, 11. She's on less. She's clearly, like, partially retired. But, like, all of these fuckers are still with us. You didn't take them with you. Oprah do. If she'd just been like a pharaoh and been buried with them all, I'd be fine. But, like, alas, no.

[Bridget Todd]

And, like, the harm they do. Like, she's. She's gonna be fine. It's like she unleashed this chaos.

[Andrew T.]

She's gonna be so good.

[Bridget Todd]

She's gonna be fine forever.

[Andrew T.]

She's. She's gonna be. Yeah, she's doing good. What government job does Dr. Oz have now? Not yet. Not yet. But probably by the time people listen to this, like, there's a good chance he might have been confirmed. I think it's Health and Human Services. No, it's Medicaid for him, right?

[Bridget Todd]

Yeah, Medicaid.

[Andrew T.]

Great shit. So the good news is that in recent years, the world has slowly started catching up to the many, many harms that Oprah and her celebrity have caused. I found a good article about this in the Root, which noted that after the catastrophic maui fires in 2023, she and the Rock asked random working people to. To rebuild the island. They put in $10 million themselves. Even though both of them are worth substantially more than that, shall we say? In earlier years, I think they both would have been praised for giving 10 million. But in 2023, coming from a woman with more than $2 billion in the bank, especially considering she was clearly talking about the parts of Maui where the rich people lived. It was taken widely as in insulting. Speaking of insulting. And I'm getting a little petty here, but I'm going to tell this story anyway. In 2014, Oprah went on tour with her mystic buddy Deepak Chopra, selling tickets for $1,000 for a motivational presentation called the Life youe Want. Because there would be long lines to get in and the whole event would be something of a spectacle, Oprah and her organizers decided to hire local talent to play on stages around and outside the weekend long Event. Oh, did I say hi? No, no, no, sorry. I meant they begged local artists to work for free for exposure.

[Bridget Todd]

Ooh, a page from the Amanda Palmer playbook.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah, yeah. Now, what's interesting about this, to me, I started this by talking about that. It was like, in 2000, she did her first, like, big tour. I think it was called the Life youe Want. Or was that the. Oh, no, this one's the Life youe Want. I forget what the first tour was. We talk about it at the start of episode five. But she did a tour, and in that one she made a real point. Tickets were like 20 or 30 bucks, and all of the proceeds were donated to the Angel Foundation. So whatever you want to say about, like, you know, and this is the thing that the LA Times was like calling her a. Basically a God for putting on. But at least it was an extremely affordable event made for, like, working people to be able to attend. And she didn't profit directly off of it. All of the money went to her charity.

[Sophie]

Although foundations. Come on.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah, yeah.

[Bridget Todd]

Yes.

[Andrew T.]

By 2014. But there's pretense. No pretense by 2014. How much is that for this one? A thousand dollars. Okay. Or at least those are some of, like, going ranging from 100 to $1,000. Right. And these are the venue in the town where she specifically like. Cause this specific article comes from a performer named Revolva. R E V O L V A. Or at least that's her stage name, obviously. Um, and Revolva is one of the people who Oprah's team reaches out to asking her to work for free at this event. And Revolva points out that the venue in her town had an 18,000 person capacity. And if tickets are ranging from 100 to $1,000 with 18,000 seats, that adds up to what I think doctors know as a shitload of money. Um, enough to pay someone like Revolva. I don't know, couple thousand bucks, something like that, you know, literally any money, literally anything.

[Bridget Todd]

What if the life that I. While I was being paid for my labor.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah. I'm sure they'd be like, hey, it's like 500 bucks. I know that's lower than standard, but you'll get exposure. At least you're offering money. Right? You know, so the producer she talked to framed it as a favor that Oprah and the crew were doing. The local arts community. People started calling us, asking to perform. So we thought we'd add a stage for local acts. Look at how good we are. Like, motherfucker, Now I've got again, I'm criticizing this cause it is shitty and bad. I have no idea how much Oprah was aware, if at all about the specifics of this. I highly doubt she was like, send Revolva an offer. Right. There's a good chance though that someone said, hey, should we have a bunch of local actors perform on a stage where you aren't for free? And she was like, yeah, sure, sounds great. They'll get exposure. Yeah, I think that's probably somewhere close to the case or even less to be fair.

[Sophie]

Like, hey, we should get some local artists. Great. Make it happen.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah, make it happen.

[Sophie]

End of story as far as Oprah's concerned.

[Andrew T.]

End of story. That said, I suspect if asked honestly, Oprah would consider getting to perform on a stage kind of near her to be worth much more than money. And I do want to note we'll have a link in our source notes to Revolva's website where she writes this up. But I'm going to have Sophie show you the little, the, the little image infographic that she put together about the different people involved in this. It shows Oprah Winfrey, net worth 2.9 billion. Deepak Chopra, net worth 80 million. Elizabeth Gilbert, net worth 25 million. Revolver, net worth negative $20,000. She's like a fire spinner.

[Bridget Todd]

Awesome spinning fire, doing the traffic.

[Andrew T.]

It's a great traffic hire. Revolver, give her money. If she still doing this, I don't know. This was 10 years ago. Best of luck, Revolva. Thanks for writing about this. Now those of you who are in your 30s will remember that fun year or so where large numbers of people thought the world was gonna end in 2012 because of the Mayans. The Mayans did not in fact predict the world was going to end in 2012. But there was a lot of money in lying about that for a little while. You may be surprised to hear that Oprah had a big part in that panic too. From an article by Kurt Anderson of Slate. Right around the time the secret came out, habitus of the of its general vicinity started buzzing about the year 2012. Ancient Mesoamericans, people were saying, had predicted that in 2012, specifically December 21, humankind's present existence would transition when the current 5,125 year long period ends. New age religion makers, like American Protestants now had their own ancient prophecy for their dreams of something like a near future army, Armageddon and supernaturally wonderful aftermath. Winfrey ended the daily Oprah broadcast in 2011, a month before the final episode, she interviewed Shirley MacLaine for the millionth time and asked about 2012. What's gonna happen to us as a species? We're coming into an alignment. MacLean explained. It is the first time in 26,000 years. 36,000 years, 26,000 years. I'm sorry that this has occurred. You have an alignment where the solar system is on a direct alignment with the center of the gap that carries with it a very profound electromagnetic frequency vibration, Winfrey interjected. Vibration, McClane agreed. And gravitational pull, hence the weather. What does that do to consciousness? What does that do to our sense of reality? It's why people feel stressed and rushed, she said.

[Bridget Todd]

Sometimes I think Oprah should have just been like me in college, doing psychedelics and looking at black light posters and just like. Like, if she had just kept this in, like, the common area of the dorm, we all might have been a little better off.

[Andrew T.]

It's remarkable how many transcripts of her show sound like stuff that, like, 15 years ago, like, a pot dealer told me while we played PlayStation, because I, like, I really just wanted to get out of there with my eighth. But, like, you kind of gotta hang with the guy a little bit. He's cutting me a deal, you know? These are the experiences legal weed is making kids miss out on now. That's why they need Joe Rogan.

[Sophie]

God, it's so deeply idiotic. I mean, the. The thing that's coalescing now is, like, Oprah has, like, a professional credulity verging on idiocy. That is just what audiences want, because that's what everyone is wanted.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah.

[Sophie]

Yeah.

[Andrew T.]

And that's kind of so dumb. That brings us to the end, because the worm is sort of turned for Oprah here. You know, the. The Oprah Winfrey show ended after 25 years on the air in 2011. She still does specials. O magazine continued until 2020, when it stopped publicizing. Oprah still has a sizable production company. Her current show. She has a current show that's called Life Class, so she still does shows and stuff, but the Oprah Winfrey show was, like, an everyday thing, ended in 2011, and her cultural influence has faded substantially from its peak 13 years ago. Perhaps Oprah might have been able to rein in the legions of new age curious fans before they fell into the abyss of QAnon or flat earth or whatever kind of white supremacist shit is currently going viral with, like, a weird number of, like, Gen X people who spent 20 years watching Oprah, but not anymore. She doesn't have that juice anymore. It's one of those things. She came out big for Kamala Harris during the election, and it didn't do shit 10 years ago. Oprah may have been able to. Bummed me out. Yeah. Might have been able to swing an election, but not anymore. You know, Oprah's well past her peak, but it's also too one late to undo the damage. Right. This march into unreality that she helped to lead and organize, we're still going down that road. Even though I think she herself yourself sees how dangerous a lot of it is. Like, there's no. There's no turning the wheel anymore. There's no jerking us back. We've gone too far. So thanks. Oops.

[Bridget Todd]

So is she a bastard?

[Andrew T.]

Yeah. I mean, that's kind of where I'm landing now. I mean, where are y'all? I'm interested. I think. I don't think she wanted evil things is the tough thing. Right. She's not malicious generally, yeah.

[Sophie]

But I guess neither do most of the bastards, at least from their point of view.

[Andrew T.]

I think most of the bastards have their malicious moments. Right. Even if they would argue that what I'm doing is the best thing, they have moments where you're just acting out of petty hatred or anger.

[Sophie]

Yeah.

[Andrew T.]

Oprah's bad is never that.

[Sophie]

Yeah, well, like, that's what I'm. That, like, the credulity. The, like. I mean, look, at least as far as, like, all this anti vax and, like, anti science and anti reality stuff goes, it's like, you know, while she is like an enzyme for. For this stuff, like, she herself is also just, like, down the line from, like, if there wasn't medical racism, it's unlikely that she would have a foot to stand on or, you know, would have even delved into this, like, anti vax, anti. You know, or like, any other number of structural things that exist. So it's like the bastards are still the people that set up all the inequality in the first place, and she has really done some part to intensify it. But I do think if it weren't her, it would have been someone else. Like, it's just a niche that exists, and, like, someone would have fallen into it.

[Andrew T.]

I think there are pieces of that that are accurate and pieces that aren't. It's the great man versus trends and forces. Right. I think reality TV happens without Oprah. I think this movement to, like, as long as social media is coming out, I think this movement towards, like, authenticity and, like, the weird parasocial bonds that are being built, that was inevitable before we were on that road. But I also think the characteristics of Oprah herself, particularly her credulity for a lot of this anti reality woo, you know, from Deepak Chopra, the secret Marianne Williamson stuff, I don't think that was inevitable. And I don't think the role and seriousness that she gave, like anti vaccine stuff was necessarily inevitable. Right. Well, I think it's a mix, I.

[Sophie]

Guess to me the pushback on that is. That is what the audience likes and like someone would have filled that role if it wasn't her.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah. I mean, I guess that's the thing that we'll never know, right?

[Sophie]

Yeah, yeah. But I'm just like, I mean, we as a society, species, I don't fucking know, are inclined to believe this stuff because it is the path of least resistance on how you perceive reality and solve problems.

[Andrew T.]

I guess where I go with that is. But also like our inclination towards it is why it's good business. It is not necessarily written that we are going, like, because people have not always bought into as much of this shit. There were periods of time where that was less common, certainly less common to talk about publicly with the position that she had. Right. And I do think that leaning into it was not necessarily going. That was a choice that she and other people made. And more resistance to it could have ensured that we were in a better position now vis a vis the existence of reality as a thing, consensus reality. I don't know.

[Bridget Todd]

Yeah, I think the choice to like lean into it is what is the thing for me, like, that wasn't happenstance. She made a clear editorial decision about what it was, what kind of work she was going to prioritize, what kind of voices she was going to ambush. It's kind of hard to come back from that for me. But I do take your point, Andrew. I do think that a lot of this is like she really held a mirror up to our worst base instincts and desires and impulses. And like, I mean, I kind of.

[Sophie]

You know, Sorry, please. I like part of her calculus of amplifying this stuff is on some level, I don't even know who the competitors would be. But she's like, if it's not me, me, I'm just going to pull an analogous, I think talk show host, like, it's not Jenny Jones, but Kelly Clarkson will do it.

[Andrew T.]

Like Sally Jesse Raphael.

[Sophie]

Yeah. It's like someone is going to put these people on and this message is going to make waves because the fucking idiots who watch my show crave this, you know, that's the version where at least she's kind of an aware person.

[Bridget Todd]

Are you saying that the real bastard is us?

[Sophie]

Yeah, well, white people, but yeah.

[Bridget Todd]

Not me, y'all.

[Sophie]

Yeah.

[Bridget Todd]

Robert, Sophie, we're not disagreeing.

[Andrew T.]

No, I mean, like, this is. Yeah, like this is why. I mean, the show, the fact that this is behind the bastards, a show about the worst people in all of history would seem to, to always kind of lean into the great man stuff. I do try. I try to like pull back from that as often as I can. Right. In that all of the. You could say the same thing about like Hitler too. Right. All of these monsters are both individuals and the bad things they do are what they are because of their individual choices and also the product of trends and forces. Like if there's not a Hitler, there is another guy who finds a way to, to take to who finds a way to take advantage of German anger and fury at the way the war had ended in the peace and whatnot and turn that into political power. Now that guy's not necessarily the Holocaust guy, right? But there's some. The, the energy would have been. Has to be harnessed almost because it exists, you know, I don't know. Like, this is. We're getting a little bit.

[Sophie]

We're, we're. We had our bong hits in the commercial break, so now we're just going for it.

[Andrew T.]

That's right. You're getting effectively three parters worth of episodes today because this week alone is three hours, so. Yep. You're welcome. You're welcome. Anybody got anything they want to plug?

[Sophie]

Not anymore.

[Bridget Todd]

Fuck yeah. Now I'm like questioning my whole media career. Am I just like pumping out stuff that I don't realize is going to have like down the line is going to have a bad effect on society? I don't even realize it yet. Am I early on Oprah? God, I hope so.

[Andrew T.]

Just kidding. Yeah, I mean, you do and you don't. Look, if I wind up with $3 billion, who gives a fuck? Not me, baby. Bridget, can I have a car better than a Pontiac? No.

[Bridget Todd]

Everyone gets a Pontiac Sunfires and that's that.

[Andrew T.]

I am going to go out of my way to buy up all of the surviving or find the scrapped remains of all of the Pontiacs that Oprah gave out and give them back out to ara audience.

[Sophie]

Whatever it takes. It's gotta be doable.

[Andrew T.]

Uh huh. Yeah. Yeah. This is, this is, this is my, my new quest. Well, I'll plug for Bridget. Listen to. There are no girls on the Internet. I'll plug for Andrew. Listen to yo. Is this racist? That's right. And you know. Until next time, light your television on fire. I don't know. I don't know what to tell you to do.

[Sophie]

We already did. Snap your phone in half and throw it in the sea.

[Andrew T.]

What a mess. What a fucking mess.

[Bridget Todd]

What a mess.

[Andrew T.]

Good God. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzone media.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you you get your podcast behind the Bastards is Now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube.com BehindTheBastards Amazon One Medical presents Painful Thoughts I could catch anything sitting in this doctor's waiting room. Okay, just wiped his runny nose on my jacket and the guy next next to me sitting in a pool of perspiration insists on sharing my armrest.

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