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You're listening to Chameleon, Dr. Miracle. Before you dive in, if you want to listen to the whole story uninterrupted, you can. Unlock the entire season ad-free right now with a subscription to The Benj. That's all episodes, all at once. Unlock your listening now by clicking subscribe at the top of the Chameleon show page on Apple Podcasts or visit getthebenj.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts.
There is another way. You've found Chameleon, season eight. And this is Dr. Miracle. A production of Campside Media. Oh. The Bench. You know how some people are just kind of weird with money? Like they take themselves to five-star restaurants, but then they tip really badly.
Or maybe they live in a multi-million dollar house, but then send you an inflated Venmo request after they put dinner on their card. At first you think, well, that's odd. But then you end up realizing that those people who are weird with money, they're weird in other ways too. Dr. Robert Young, the guru of the alkaline diet, was weird with money.
I see you have somebody joining us. Yes, sorry. She likes to sit on the back of my chair. June Assisi is talking about her calico cat named Kit Kat. June was the accountant for Robert Young's Miracle Ranch and very on brand. On the wall behind her and the cat, there's a sign that says, quote, crunching numbers is my cardio.
June tells me that at first she worked at an accounting firm in Utah that was handling the Miracle Ranch bookkeeping. And pretty quickly, June notices something odd in the books. Robert was really bad about bouncing checks. And...
They were incurring thousands of dollars in bounce check charges on a regular basis. The year before, the ranch had paid over $12,000 in bounce check fees, which meant that, on average, they could have been bouncing a check every single day. It's not that the ranch didn't have money. They charged upwards of $2,000 a night for people to stay there.
June says the last year she was at the ranch, they brought in $5 million. But day to day, she noticed a cash flow issue. June was friendly with Robert Young's legal advisor, a guy named John Baird. So she flags what she sees. Sounds an alarm. I said, you guys need somebody in-house that's watching this. So John said, great. How about if that in-house person is you?
And so in mid-2010, June moves over 700 miles from her home, all the way from Provo, Utah to Southern California. When I went down there, I was expecting my job to just be the accountant, to write the checks, keep the bank accounts in order, deposit money coming in, the kind of things an accountant would do, or a bookkeeper. It turned into much more than that, because my first day there,
I went into the office and John Burt came in with me and he announced to everyone, "This is June and everybody on the ranch now works for her." So that kind of took me by surprise because then I turned out to be the general manager.
And as general manager at a place which will soon have over 20 employees, June notices that the money stuff was just the tip of the weirdness iceberg at Miracle Ranch. It basically went back to Robert being able to do whatever he wanted to do. I probably should have left at that time because it just got...
Things just got kind of crazy. He's very charismatic. He's a Jim Jones. From Sony Music Entertainment, Campside Media, and Dorothy Street Pictures, I'm Larison Campbell, and this is Dr. Miracle, Episode 2.
Health spas like Miracle Ranch say they are all about healing. It's sold to the customer like it's a spiritual rite of passage. By shifting your mindset, you can change your life. That's what women like Kim Tinkham believed. The woman we heard last episode who got breast cancer, went on Oprah, and went alkaline. Dr. Young had his wife there on the ranch, Shelley Redford Young. And he wanted employees who felt like one big happy family.
That close-knit feeling, a place to belong, that was appealing to someone like Dawn Calley because the family she'd come from was pretty messed up. Her dad smoked pot-like cigarettes, her mom was an acid queen, and the drug use got harder than that. She was bullied in school and felt different from the other kids, with her mom emotionally detached and her dad oversharing a lot, just always dreaming, encouraging her to use crystals to deal with her emotional problems.
I remember my dad saying things like, like you'd watch TV and watch the commercials of Fruit Loops or something, and he'd be like, one day those people are going to be put in jail. So when she met the Youngs at Miracle Ranch, she found a kind of surrogate family in them, one that was as messy and dysfunctional as her own.
One of the things that made the PH Miracle Center appear to be a safe, welcoming place was that it wasn't just some medical clinic or spa. It felt like a home, a family business, but deeper than that. Anyone who's worked for a company that tries to be, quote, like a family knows that this is definitely a red flag. And a literal family, the whole young family, was at the core of the PH Miracle brand.
Dawn and the staff members at the ranch remember Shelley Young as Robert's co-pilot in All Things Miracle Ranch. Dawn often traveled with him to speaking events, and Shelley was there too. We did an event, and he got up there, and he just, it was one of those speeches where he wasn't following the PowerPoint at all. But when he was done, they flocked Caroline and us for books. I mean, it was like a herd of people.
You get invigorated by the experience and just like you're a part of this movement. And then Shelley Young gives up there and she gives an equally powerful speech. But hers is to the point on the presentation all the way through. Young is the public facing rock star and Shelley and her long dangly earrings and perfectly coiffed hair is the neat composed wife keeping everything together behind the scenes.
They're a dynamic duo with books selling millions of copies and supplements that are flying off the shelves. The pH Miracle Young Forever L-Arginine is a synergistic formulation. We've got some dehydrated greens powders with grasses, kale, celery, parsley, broccoli. It's a farmer's market there and a powder.
Robert and Shelly had everything you needed to cleanse yourself of toxins, to cleanse your blood and thereby, supposedly, become less acidic and more healthy, more alkaline. They can go to our website, www.phmiracleliving.com, and we have almost everything that you need to live the Alkalarian lifestyle. We can even get you a vitamins. Shelly loved the healing power of food.
In one of their books, she writes, I treasure the tangible nurturing that feeding my family represents. I like to spend a little time preparing a meal and a lot of time relaxing and enjoying every mouthful and enjoying the company of my family, which is also part of the healing power, if you ask me. At the ranch, Dr. Robert Young lived in a main house with Shelly.
and their four adult children made frequent appearances on the ranch while patients were there. Shelly and her daughter Ashley were particularly close. Here they are in a cooking video touting the benefits of the alkaline diet. Hi there. It's Shelly and Ashley with the pH Miracle Fun Food Show, and today we're going to do a summer seaweed wrap. You know my Ashley's Nori pull-ups that I came up with a long time ago?
They stand side by side in a clean white kitchen filled with personal touches. Cookbooks wedged on either side of the microwave, jars of supplements on the counter. Ashley has her mother's dark hair and healthy glowing skin. And then I've also got some edamame, some organic edamame. So we'll just sprinkle them on there. And you can even put like different seeds and nuts or sesame seeds. Wow. I've got some hemp seeds. Avocado? Avocado is like the perfect food, right? Yes.
The couple's youngest son, Alex, who was in his early 20s, was often seen at the ranch. He was a massage therapist and worked with some of the clients. And he made music, which Dr. Young sometimes played during his exercise classes. This picture is a perfect family, always together, a cohesive unit. Robert Young is Mormon, and Nias is very boyish-ish.
innocence about him. He's Mormon. He didn't push the religion. I just knew they were because, you know, I had to do their laundry. Dessa Ireland worked as a cleaner at the ranch. You know, the Mormons wear their underwear, their undergarments. They have special garments and the initials VH and something over each nipple and down at the genitals.
Dessa was already interested in wellness when she found a Craigslist ad for a cleaning job at the ranch. She was excited to be there in such a healing place. I know what I do. I clean the energy. I clean auras, spaces. So I'm not not familiar with energy work. I do Reiki. I do Jin Shin Jitsu. I do reflexology. So I'm a very well-rounded person.
Hence the reason why I thought, well, this will be a nice fit. Some of the people visiting the ranch are sick, like Dawn. But others are just looking to lose weight. If someone is eating a 2,000 calorie, is taking in 2,000 calories of acidic foods, they'll actually gain weight. In fact, they'll gain weight on a 500 calorie acidic diet. In other words, it's not about the calories.
It's about whether the food is acidic-forming or alkaline-forming. Anything that's alkaline is going to be electron-rich. Anything that's acidic is going to be proton-rich. Our body is electrical, and it doesn't run on calories. It runs on electrons. Actually, our bodies do run on calories. But that aside, keeping track of what's going to make you more acidic or more alkaline, at least according to Dr. Young,
can get a little confusing. Some stuff you thought was good, like brown rice and pears. Young says those are actually acidifying. He says almonds are alkalizing, so they're okay. But walnuts are acidifying. Hemp oil, alkaline. Sunflower oil, acidic. Oranges are acidic, but lemons somehow are alkaline? I don't know. But still, everyone on the ranch is alkalizing away. And Dawn is busy all the time.
You would make each person's schedule for the day and you'd hand them a piece of paper and it would say, you know, that they had their lymphatic massage at this time. Maybe they were meeting with Young that day and having a blood microscopy at this time.
They had their colonic at this time, getting a thermography and an ultrasound at this time, maybe going to town to get some labs done at this time. And if they had any free time in between, they were to be doing saunas, they were to go to the pool if they had some time. But Dawn isn't being paid for any of this work. She's compensated with room and board and treatments to help her alkalize her body.
But then an opportunity presented itself to start making real money on the ranch, an administrative job. I actually got hired as a joke. I overheard a conversation that the emails hadn't been answered in months and the guy who had done them had been fired. And I just went, "Ha ha, I'll do 'em." And that evening he had me sitting with June Assisi getting hired.
She graduates to bona fide employee. And she starts coaching people, too, along with her friend Caroline Robitaille. Caroline came up with the idea of the whole
cleansing program. So then we would set up meetings and we would pitch them the coaching division. We developed a coaching division. We developed the cleanse thing. And then we also did all the sales that were coming into the ranch. That's Caroline. She was into real estate before she went to the ranch. And she was really into Tony Robbins.
That's how she found out about Dr. Young. Unlike Dawn, Caroline wasn't at the ranch for a miracle cure. She was one of the people there to lose weight. What's a group cleanse? A group cleanse was two weeks long, and you do juicing, avocado, tomato, and cucumber. But really, we were teaching the diet. And we were teaching, like, so you wake up at this time and you do this. I was teaching what I was doing.
when I couldn't be at the ranch. And that was like a big passion because he always said, well, people can't be here. Well, let's teach them how. Let's teach them how. The diet was changing Don and Caroline's lives. We believed so wholeheartedly in this whole program that we were there helping people. That's how we saw this whole thing. This wasn't just a passion project.
Don and Caroline were making good money. Selling the products, organizing for people to come stay on the ranch, and doing personal coaching. It was a commission-based job, so there was no hourly. So if it was products, it might have been a 40% commission. It would be these group cleanses. So we would split it with him 50-50 on that. We started doing personal coaching. We would split that with him 50-50. The cost of these products and the services at the ranch are pretty wild.
Each person who joined their group cleanse paid an average of $1,000. A product called a water ionizer, which turned your tap alkaline, was $1,200. Major money. And Dawn and Caroline brought a lot of business into the ranch.
But they said that Dr. Young started telling staff not to give calls to them so they couldn't make commission. And so he would go around the ranch and tell everybody that I was making more money than him. And the weirdness and dysfunction, it didn't end there.
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So Miracle Ranch was the kind of place that people would go to for a little while, or as long as they could afford it. Then they'd buy a bunch of products and go home to follow the program themselves. But as much as Dawn believed in the program, even on the ranch, she struggled to stick to the diet.
And just like at home, she feels really guilty about it. She believed so much in what Dr. Yang was selling and practicing. She herself was earning money touting the alkaline diet. But following the rules becomes almost impossible for Dawn. She's pregnant. And when you're pregnant, you're hungry. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Oh my God, shit, shit, shit. I hate myself, I hate myself.
Why did I do this? I chewed today. I chewed a cucumber. You know, I mean, you were allowed to chew cucumbers, tomatoes and avocados. When I was pregnant, he was against me chewing.
Dawn was on this extra-strict, no-chewing version of the diet, not just because she was pregnant, but also because this was Young's, quote, treatment for her breast cancer. Kitchen staff was very concerned about me. They see this pregnant young woman not eating. And women in the kitchen at the time would just want to feed me. But Dawn is determined to get it right, to somehow find the discipline to stick to it, even as she's starving.
On this particular diet, there was hardly any protein or B12. Here's Dawn talking with Shelly about being on the alkaline diet while pregnant. During my pregnancy, I understood that I would be eliminating the metabolic waste, not only of my own, in essence that would make me twice as acidic. So I felt it was really important for me to stay really alkaline and to keep my pathways of elimination open.
Dawn was talking to Shelly on the ranch, but soon she was getting back to her kids in Northern California and having her baby. With her first three children, she'd had home births. But during the birth of her third, she'd hemorrhaged and lost a lot of blood. Everything was okay ultimately, but it made her nervous enough that this time she agreed to go to a hospital.
So she entered through those gates of Western medicine and, surrounded by nurses, through gritted teeth, she birthed a beautiful son, Jonathan. He was healthy, with a shock of bright blonde hair. But as soon as they were out of the hospital, it was right back to the alkaline lifestyle.
When Jonathan was old enough to eat solids, Dawn began feeding him all the alkaline foods she was eating, or rather, drinking. He's on a total liquid diet. And that makes his hair grow so well, doesn't it? Well, you know, he was born with it. I've never seen a blondie born with a crop as much as his. I wonder if it had something to do with the alkalizing and pregnancy. Yeah.
The alkaline lifestyle seemed to be doing wonders for Dawn. She felt good, she was enjoying her new baby. She wasn't even thinking about cancer.
But not everyone on the alkaline diet had that luxury. Because at a certain point, cancer becomes impossible to ignore. It's not about fighting disease. It's about staying healthy and living a long time. We heard from Kim Tinkham in the last episode. She'd been diagnosed with breast cancer, went on Oprah after deciding to heal herself, and went all in on the alkaline diet. Making this decision, she was full of joy and hope.
And I look a lot younger now than I did when I was 50. A lot younger. Kim spoke in a testimonial video for Robert Young's website. Isn't that exciting? It's amazing. Yes! So this is also not only possibly, I hate to use this word, a cure for cancer, but also a program that can reverse aging. But the diet didn't cure her cancer.
In fact, her tumor, which was the size of a golf ball and protruding from her chest, had been growing. Here's her husband, Scott Tinkham. About in August or something, she actually had a mastectomy because the lump was just there and it wasn't going away. A mastectomy was one of the big things she'd been avoiding for years. It was one of the reasons she went on the alkaline diet to begin with. You couldn't really even tell that she had gotten it.
That summer of 2010, Kim was still feeling good, still had energy, was exercising and eating avocados. But by autumn, suddenly she started feeling off. It was before Thanksgiving, so she wasn't feeling well. So we went to the doctors and then they found out that the cancer had spread to her whole body. And basically, they said to call your son in college and tell him to come home because you're not going to live more than the next 30 days.
I remember that exactly, driving back. Her sister was with us, and literally they just gave her the death sentence. And we were in the truck. That's when we called our son from the truck, driving back. It was just, it was Kim, her sister, and me calling Garrett, telling him that he needed to come home. At home, Kim started sleeping a lot, slipping in and out of consciousness. It was the end, a haze of morphine. And Scott stayed by her side.
Taking care of her, just like they've been taking care of each other for more than 20 years. We met at a club in Fort Worth and I saw her on the other side of the dance floor and I saw that she was going to walk right by me. And so I stepped in front of her and gave her my best line, which was, hi, would you like to dance? And then, you know, we danced for 23 years. She wrote a note to me and she wrote a note
to her son for us to open after she passed away. And then she called everybody in the whole family. Like, I remember them all being around the bed and she just spoke to every single person. As Kim's health got worse and worse, Scott made a phone call to Dr. Young to ask if he had any advice on how to help Kim to ease her discomfort. He was jogging at the time and I felt like I was putting him out.
I just remember him being short with me on the phone, that he couldn't even stop freaking jogging, and my wife is dying. And I just feel like he put me off and wanted to get off the phone and wasn't that concerned. I remember that. And I remember hanging up thinking, he doesn't give a shit. Kim died on December 7, 2010. I really feel that she gave a lot more than she received, right? So she was always, had lots of friends and
When we had her memorial for her, probably a thousand people came. When word of Kim's death reached the ranch, it was weird. Dr. Young didn't say the same sorts of nice things that people had said at that memorial. He said that Kim was an alcoholic. He said she hadn't followed his diet strictly enough. Don and Caroline.
That's what he told us. She went home. She was doing beautifully. She had a drinking problem. Had a drinking problem, didn't follow the protocol. That's what happened to her. Scott says Kim had an occasional glass of wine, but she wasn't an alcoholic and otherwise followed the diet very strictly. Instead of becoming a cautionary tale about the diet, Kim became a cautionary tale about not following the diet strictly enough.
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Not long after Kim's death, Dawn, now a mother of four, went back to working for Young.
She also traveled back to the ranch often, and when she did, she'd bring little Johnny with her. And when Johnny was born, he would pretend like he was his. Young used to say, "Would you like to meet my son, Jonathan?" You know, in front of everyone there. I would be like, "Oh, Dr. Young." It was weird.
But Dawn believed in Young. She so badly wanted him to be a father figure to her, wanted him to save her. So she did her best to ignore his advances. Nothing ever happened. I never stopped calling him Dr. Young. I didn't want to call him Rob, but everyone called him Rob. I just wanted him to be that person.
Now that Dawn had a baby, she was doubling down on the alkaline lifestyle. And back on the ranch, she became an even bigger part of the operation. She was filling the role that Kim Tinkham had occupied as poster child for the pH Miracle Cure. And she was bringing her baby Jonathan on camera with her. Here they are in an interview with Shelley. And look at this beautiful, beautiful baby.
Jonathan. Hey, big boy, what are you eating? You like those greens. They're sitting in a beige room on a beige sectional sofa. Shelley's smile is impossibly large, her teeth impossibly white. In contrast, Dawn's wearing a black shirt, black pants, and black puffer vest.
Fifteen-month-old Johnny is sitting in Dawn's lap. He is adorable, in little khakis and brown booties, happily enjoying a bright green smoothie that his mother is feeding him with this tiny little spoon.
I hear that this baby was conceived in alkalinity and you went through your pregnancy in alkalinity and he was delivered as an alkaline baby and look at him, look at him go for the greens. As an alkaline toddler, Johnny doesn't eat regular solid food like other toddlers. Instead, he drinks green smoothies full of things like raw spinach, avocado and coconut.
Young says that if his body is alkaline, he'll be healthy, grow strong, and won't get sick like other kids. He's just a very calm, happy, easygoing child. Sweetheart, baby. The whole picture feels a little off, a little too cheerful, a little too much of a hard sell. Dawn had seen all those little red flags, and then the one big one, which was Kim's death.
But she was already fully invested in the pH Miracle Cure. She wanted Young to be like her dad. She needed the hope he was giving her about curing her cancer and leading her to a better, healthier life. She couldn't turn her back on the ranch now, not after she planted roots with these people. So here she was, on camera with Shelly, these two beautiful women, both faces of the pH Miracle brand. They're the picture of health.
But behind the scenes, things were a little different. And one day, Shelley pulls Dawn aside. She confronts her. She told me, "I've never seen you look worse." She said, "Just be careful, you know." Be careful of what? Dr. Young was just there to help her, to help everyone. Here he is talking to Tony Robbins. How do you want to be remembered? When your life's work is done,
You know, what do you want to be thought of or remembered or said about Dr. Robert Young? Well, that I cared, that I loved, and that I respected my Creator who's empowered me to help my brothers and sisters who I care for as well. This isn't about money. This is about love, and I would just like to be remembered as one that truly cared and wanted to share this information which I've received from my Creator.
But the more time Don spent on the ranch, the more it started to seem like Robert Young was thinking of himself as the creator, playing with life and death with cold irrationality, like God himself. And after Kim's death, the story Don had been sold started to seem weirder. Because even as Young was telling everyone at the ranch that Kim's death was her own fault, he was still using her case as an example of a successful treatment.
To this day, you can go to his YouTube channel and watch Kim's testimonials about how the diet healed her. For over 15 years, Robert Young has been taking credit for curing Kim's cancer, even after the cancer killed her. Robert Young was lying, but Dawn didn't realize it then. She also didn't realize yet that even though Young was telling her she was getting better, her cancer was actually getting worse.
And she needed to get out.
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My mom's sucking on that bottle of greens and I took it and I fucking threw it at that woman. And then I said, here's your check. Give me my mother. Well, I want them to know that there is hope. I saw Shelly in a very vulnerable, weak woman, insecure state.
scared to death to be out on her own. I kid you not, there was probably an inch and a half of rat shit in the bottom of the oven, in the bottom of the cupboards. Dr. Miracle is a production of Campside Media, Sony Music Entertainment, and Dorothy Street Pictures. The show was hosted by me, Larison Campbell. I reported it with Lily Houston-Smith, our producer, and also our field recordist.
Shoshi Smolovitz is our managing producer and editor. Our executive producers are Vanessa Gregoriatis and me, Larison Campbell. From Sony Music Entertainment, our executive producer is Catherine St. Louis. Our sound designer and mix engineer is Michelle Macklem. Studio recording by Ewan Lai-Tremuin. Story editing by Amy Padula. Fact-checking by Julia Case-Levine.
Additional help from Rachel Yang and Rajiv Gola. If you're enjoying the show, please tell a friend. It really does help spread the word.