Behind the Bastards - The Terrible Secret of Sea Monkeys (Live Show)
Aired: 2019-11-26
Duration: 02:03:20


=== Moving The Microphone (02:47) ===

[00:00:00]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[00:00:02]  Guaranteed human.
[00:00:04]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[00:00:13]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:00:15]  He is not going to get away with this.
[00:00:17]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:00:19]  We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
[00:00:24]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:00:25]  Trust me, babe.
[00:00:26]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:00:36]  Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
[00:00:41]  Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:00:44]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:00:47]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:00:48]  That's so funny.
[00:00:50]  Share each day with me each night, each morning.
[00:00:58]  Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:06]  What's up, everyone?
[00:01:07]  I'm Ego Modern, my next guest.
[00:01:09]  It's Will Farrell.
[00:01:12]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:01:15]  He goes, just give it a shot.
[00:01:16]  But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:01:23]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:01:26]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
[00:01:33]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:01:35]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:01:36]  There's a lot of life.
[00:01:38]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:45]  In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
[00:01:52]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[00:01:56]  I doctored the test once.
[00:01:58]  It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
[00:02:02]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[00:02:05]  Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
[00:02:07]  My mind was blown.
[00:02:08]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[00:02:10]  This is Love Trapped.
[00:02:11]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[00:02:13]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[00:02:17]  Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:02:32]  You're so new to Premier League.
[00:02:34]  Look at this.
[00:02:35]  Just you just left this in front of this.
[00:02:38]  It's such an amateur live performance move.
[00:02:42]  I didn't, I didn't do it right.
[00:02:43]  That's why I'm here.
[00:02:44]  The first thing you do is move the fucking microphone.
[00:02:46]  Stan.

=== Two Men Through It (07:03) ===

[00:02:47]  I don't know how to do it.
[00:02:48]  There's only two things I know how to do.
[00:02:50]  One of them.
[00:02:52]  Oh.
[00:02:52]  Oh.
[00:02:55]  There's only two things I know how to do.
[00:02:57]  One of them is read scripts about bad people, and the other is poorly introduce my show.
[00:03:03]  So I would like to say to my first live audience, what's cracking, my peppers?
[00:03:15]  Good.
[00:03:15]  Thank you.
[00:03:16]  Thank you.
[00:03:17]  I'm learning.
[00:03:17]  That was good.
[00:03:18]  Slowly.
[00:03:22]  We're getting used to the microphone still.
[00:03:25]  I think.
[00:03:26]  Am I doing something?
[00:03:27]  I don't know.
[00:03:27]  It's ideally like a wireless mic is not.
[00:03:32]  It's just the rule that if it's going to go wrong, a wireless mic will go wrong.
[00:03:36]  Well, I can shout, but only for a limited period of time.
[00:03:40]  Yeah.
[00:03:40]  And we told you guys when we this is going to go terrible.
[00:03:44]  It's going to be a disaster.
[00:03:46]  It's really going.
[00:03:47]  To give you an idea of what a disaster it's going to be, I brought a bag full of machetes, but I forgot to bring all of the recording equipment necessary to record my podcast.
[00:04:00]  I brought some recording equipment.
[00:04:02]  Isn't that fucking stupid?
[00:04:03]  Yeah.
[00:04:04]  I don't know how to use it.
[00:04:06]  I just handed it to Tori, the nice sound lady, and she was like, what?
[00:04:10]  I was like, dude.
[00:04:11]  Yeah.
[00:04:13]  Big ups to Tori.
[00:04:15]  And she did it.
[00:04:16]  Yeah.
[00:04:17]  We had to make some phone calls.
[00:04:19]  We did it to me.
[00:04:19]  We had to call Daniel.
[00:04:21]  But yeah, I think we got it.
[00:04:24]  Man, that's...
[00:04:25]  It's going to be interesting how this sounds after.
[00:04:27]  It really is.
[00:04:30]  Like, other people, if we release it, they'll be like, the sound was not good when they released it.
[00:04:35]  And you guys can be like, it wasn't good there either.
[00:04:40]  All on me.
[00:04:41]  Like, this is 100% on me.
[00:04:43]  Very accurate.
[00:04:44]  How they recorded it was how it was.
[00:04:51]  You want to trade?
[00:04:57]  Before we get into the show today, I feel like I should introduce our co-stars on this table.
[00:05:04]  Okay.
[00:05:04]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:05:04]  Now, they're in a sand.
[00:05:05]  Who the fuck's going to be here?
[00:05:07]  That's a toasted bagel.
[00:05:08]  We got some Thomas Everything bagels.
[00:05:10]  I usually use Sera Lee.
[00:05:11]  I'm not sure of the ballistics on these, but I'm excited.
[00:05:14]  I'm excited.
[00:05:23]  It's only going to record the bad sounds I make.
[00:05:27]  She's going to sound like Billy.
[00:05:28]  All it was is Billy just saying, really frustrated.
[00:05:33]  It's going to skip just the right words to make you sound racist.
[00:05:38]  I don't know if you've heard my accent, but that's any word.
[00:05:43]  It's not hard to do.
[00:05:45]  Like, hey, did you hear that guy?
[00:05:46]  Oh, the racist guy?
[00:05:49]  What do you say?
[00:05:50]  We didn't have to listen.
[00:05:54]  So next up, we've got some friends?
[00:05:58]  Original premium bagels.
[00:05:59]  These are from New York, maybe.
[00:06:00]  Is that what that means?
[00:06:01]  Well, it says they're from New York.
[00:06:02]  Franz.
[00:06:03]  Franz.
[00:06:03]  Let's see where they're really from.
[00:06:05]  Oh, I knew if it's like, I knew I thought it was some local thing.
[00:06:09]  And you guys are like, fucking Portland.
[00:06:11]  God damn it.
[00:06:13]  And then we've got more friends.
[00:06:15]  More friends.
[00:06:16]  Yeah, we got some more friends.
[00:06:17]  I had some pumpkin spice bagels.
[00:06:20]  Oh, here they are.
[00:06:21]  Brought by a friend of ours in the audience.
[00:06:23]  Pumpkin spice premium bagels.
[00:06:25]  The taste of autumn is here.
[00:06:28]  Now, we got this script, which who needs that shit.
[00:06:32]  So we got Little Knife.
[00:06:36]  We got Machete.
[00:06:38]  You take this one, Billy.
[00:06:39]  This one's for bandits.
[00:06:41]  It does look like...
[00:06:42]  Yeah.
[00:06:43]  Like, this is not for.
[00:06:46]  It's not for.
[00:06:47]  That's a good thing.
[00:06:48]  No, it's awesome.
[00:06:50]  Don't get me wrong, but it's like, this is a criminals.
[00:06:55]  It's my oldest machete.
[00:06:56]  Are you calling me a criminal?
[00:06:58]  I'd say your instincts are criminal.
[00:07:00]  Yeah, that is fair.
[00:07:02]  So.
[00:07:04]  You're also being like, you cheer for the wrong people in the movies.
[00:07:14]  And then we got the backup, just in case.
[00:07:16]  This one's real rusty and dull, so we don't want to use it on the bagels.
[00:07:24]  Yeah, this is the ghost knife.
[00:07:25]  This is the ghost knife.
[00:07:27]  No, it's just a little buoy.
[00:07:30]  You're getting real loose with the machete.
[00:07:32]  That's just a big-ass knife.
[00:07:35]  That's really all a machete is.
[00:07:37]  Yeah.
[00:07:39]  Cool word for big-ass knife.
[00:07:41]  So we're going to play a little bit of what we like to call bagel tennis here, which is exactly what it sounds like, although neither of us know how to play tennis.
[00:07:52]  We know the word love plays into it, but don't tell us what it means.
[00:07:55]  We're just going to say it a lot as we knock bagels around.
[00:07:58]  This is the splash zone.
[00:08:01]  Hopefully bagel splashes.
[00:08:03]  Most of the machines don't have a way to strap them to your hand.
[00:08:06]  So fingers crossed.
[00:08:11]  I'm just, oh, it's working.
[00:08:18]  I feel like if I think something terrible and make it think that that's what I'm about to say, it'll work.
[00:08:26]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:08:27]  Like it feels like it's out to get me.
[00:08:29]  Don't talk like a Nazi, but think like a Nazi and then say normal stuff.
[00:08:34]  Ah!
[00:08:37]  Try to think something terrible.
[00:08:39]  Like, and now I'm going to say this.
[00:08:41]  It's like if you're at Thanksgiving, you're just talking to your grandma and she walked off, and then you're talking to your cousin.
[00:08:57]  Now, people in the back are usually hearing the microphone.
[00:09:14]  Hello?
[00:09:14]  No.
[00:09:16]  That's the point of the microphone confidence.
[00:09:26]  You can tell somebody something's in the building.
[00:09:28]  Yeah, okay.
[00:09:28]  Well, that's good.
[00:09:29]  That's a start.
[00:09:30]  That's a start.
[00:09:31]  That's vaguely threatening.
[00:09:36]  That is vaguely threatening.
[00:09:37]  That is vaguely threatening.
[00:09:40]  You can't tell where the bad neighborhood is in Portland because it's all of them dying.

=== Vaguely Threatening Confidence (02:51) ===

[00:09:50]  You guys keep a bad element in every.
[00:09:54]  I like that.
[00:09:55]  Yeah.
[00:09:56]  Keeps everybody on their toes.
[00:09:59]  So, I mean, I think we should just pray to the gods of microphones and get into this, son of a bitch, because these people paid to learn about somebody terrible.
[00:10:09]  And then the recording might be just the worst thing.
[00:10:15]  No, this is going to be a unique experience for the audience.
[00:10:19]  Yeah.
[00:10:23]  All right.
[00:10:29]  Billy Wayne Davis.
[00:10:31]  Yes.
[00:10:35]  When you were a lad, a wee child, did you ever have sea monkeys?
[00:10:46]  No, I didn't.
[00:10:47]  No, you didn't.
[00:10:48]  No, you didn't.
[00:10:49]  I remember seeing that.
[00:10:50]  You saw the ads.
[00:10:51]  Yeah.
[00:10:51]  You ever see ads for X-ray specs?
[00:10:53]  Fuck yeah.
[00:10:54]  Yeah, okay.
[00:10:54]  Okay.
[00:10:55]  You ever wondered about who made those?
[00:10:59]  I'll be honest, I never did know.
[00:11:01]  You ever wonder what they believed about, I don't know, races?
[00:11:09]  Like foot race?
[00:11:14]  No.
[00:11:15]  I mean, that probably did play into it at some point.
[00:11:18]  In the 1930s, what, six Olympics?
[00:11:21]  But yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:11:23]  We're going to talk about the guy who made those both and some other things you've heard about today.
[00:11:27]  And then we're going to talk about what that dude was into when he wasn't coming up with sea monkeys.
[00:11:34]  And it's going to be a happier story than some.
[00:11:39]  But yeah.
[00:11:40]  There's no dead babies.
[00:11:43]  If your business is sea monkeys, like your hobby's gonna be pretty interesting.
[00:11:47]  It's gonna be bad.
[00:11:48]  It's gonna be bad.
[00:11:49]  I do want to see, I want a show of hands.
[00:11:51]  Who here as a kid had them or their parents spend money on sea monkeys or x-ray specs?
[00:11:57]  That's a good number.
[00:11:59]  That's fun.
[00:11:59]  Remember these hands in the air.
[00:12:02]  Yeah.
[00:12:10]  He's a solid ghost dealer.
[00:12:11]  The object recording this event he bought off of a ghost detective?
[00:12:17]  Yes.
[00:12:19]  That's not a joke.
[00:12:20]  That's a thing.
[00:12:21]  That just happened.
[00:12:22]  I went to a tennis park in Orange County and bought a Zoom recorder from a guy that was recording ghosts.
[00:12:29]  So if this recording works out, there is a decent chance we will get to hear the ghost of Saddam Hussein react to this podcast, which I'm very excited about.

=== Strong Magician Reaction (07:21) ===

[00:12:42]  I would think he'd probably hang it in Portland.
[00:12:44]  Yeah, no, that's exactly where he would end up.
[00:12:46]  Yeah, you would hope.
[00:12:47]  There's a lot of Doritos in this town, so.
[00:12:51]  Well, I'm just going to roll into it.
[00:12:55]  Howard!
[00:12:56]  Or sorry, Harold.
[00:12:58]  We're up to a fucking great start.
[00:13:03]  These are the things that Sophie normally protects the audience from, protects me from, my incompetence.
[00:13:10]  She is not here right now, which means someone's going to get badly injured and I am going to fuck up even more than usual.
[00:13:16]  So heads up.
[00:13:25]  Harold Nathan Brownhood was born on March 31st, 1926, in New York City, the city where these bagels are not from.
[00:13:35]  His parents, Jeanette Cohen and Edward Brownhood, were Jewish.
[00:13:39]  This will become very important later on.
[00:13:43]  They had moved to Manhattan from Memphis.
[00:13:45]  Jeanette's family was in the toy business, and his father ran a printing shop.
[00:13:48]  Herman Brown, they went from Memphis to Manhattan.
[00:13:52]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:13:53]  That makes sense.
[00:13:54]  You could afford to do that back in the day.
[00:13:56]  Well, you could.
[00:13:56]  Yeah.
[00:13:57]  If I was Jewish and lived in Memphis, I would hate that.
[00:14:01]  I can't think of many reasons I wouldn't leave Memphis, but I'm a little biased.
[00:14:07]  It's that pyramid.
[00:14:08]  Memphis is the one with the pyramid, right?
[00:14:09]  Also, it's very dangerous.
[00:14:11]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:14:12]  I just don't trust any town with a pyramid.
[00:14:14]  So, Herman Brownhood, Harold's first cousin, recalled the family as fairly normal for the area, saying, quote, they were as religious as most other Jews.
[00:14:23]  I know they went to synagogue during the Jewish holidays.
[00:14:25]  I believe he was Bar Mitzvah.
[00:14:27]  I probably was there.
[00:14:28]  Again, this will be very relevant later on in the story.
[00:14:32]  Very Jewish answer that my wife is Jewish.
[00:14:34]  That is how Jews talk, but I don't know.
[00:14:40]  I'm sure he did the thing we all do.
[00:14:41]  Yeah.
[00:14:50]  As a child, Herman recalled that Harold was always fooling around with different kinds of gadgets.
[00:14:56]  He had an inventor's soul and a natural understanding of mechanics.
[00:15:00]  He graduated high school during the height of World War II and attended business school in 1945 and 1946.
[00:15:07]  At the time, he lived in Brighton Beach, a heavily Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn.
[00:15:11]  Are you guys catching the foreshadowing here?
[00:15:13]  Where this is going to head?
[00:15:14]  Yeah, it's not a good place.
[00:15:16]  Once he was out of college, Harold bounced around an almost dizzying variety of careers.
[00:15:21]  He served for a brief time in the Merchant Marine.
[00:15:23]  Then he became a motorcycle racer, working under the name the Green Hornet.
[00:15:27]  And I think this is before that.
[00:15:30]  What do you mean that's not a job?
[00:15:33]  You can't just tell your parents, like, I race motorcycles.
[00:15:37]  I mean, why not?
[00:15:39]  I just feel like there's some, I mean.
[00:15:41]  Bruce Springsteen did.
[00:15:43]  And look at him.
[00:15:44]  He's doing great.
[00:15:44]  Look at the leap he took from job to job.
[00:15:47]  Yeah, it is a little weird.
[00:15:49]  I'm going to help sell stuff on boats.
[00:15:51]  Now I'm a motorcycle racer.
[00:15:53]  Historically speaking, from our interact and our stories, did he hit his head?
[00:16:00]  I mean, you know, he was in the Merchant Marine.
[00:16:03]  So there's a lot of swinging, like, ropes with hooks on them.
[00:16:06]  Yeah, there's a good chance.
[00:16:07]  Yeah, because it sounds like you go from being on a boat to being like, I'm just going to race this motorcycle for a living.
[00:16:15]  He definitely picked up a couple head injuries in the motorcycle racing.
[00:16:18]  Yeah.
[00:16:18]  I don't know people who commute with motorcycles and don't grab a couple.
[00:16:23]  Now, yeah, I don't have any more about that period of his life.
[00:16:25]  I wish I could find a picture of him as the Green Hornet.
[00:16:27]  I want to know what the costume was.
[00:16:29]  Yeah, he doesn't either.
[00:16:32]  So, Harold also worked as a stage magician.
[00:16:40]  Strong reaction to the word magician.
[00:16:47]  How do you feel about magicians, Billy Wayne?
[00:16:49]  I don't like them.
[00:16:53]  I understand it's art or whatever.
[00:16:56]  I don't know that art is the term I'd use.
[00:16:59]  It is whatever, yeah.
[00:17:01]  It's whatever, yeah.
[00:17:02]  But can you imagine, like, he specified stage magician.
[00:17:06]  Stage magician, yeah.
[00:17:10]  No trick you out, Mr. I didn't even, I didn't even get to his name.
[00:17:18]  The great Teleppo.
[00:17:20]  I think that means he teleported, but again, I have no details on this.
[00:17:24]  But that's the name he worked on.
[00:17:25]  Spanish for the Green Hornet.
[00:17:34]  She did say, give me a second, I'll turn it on, and then I'll.
[00:17:37]  Immediately.
[00:17:44]  Terrible.
[00:17:46]  This one seems to be doing well.
[00:17:47]  Without your microphone bringing down the whole experience, yeah, it's been great.
[00:17:52]  This one's doing great now.
[00:17:54]  It's like your microphone was the enabler, and like this guy's sobered up now that it's.
[00:18:00]  I have friends like that.
[00:18:01]  Yeah.
[00:18:03]  All right, we're in business!
[00:18:07]  I mean, I always assume you guys don't turn the microphones on in the studio anyway.
[00:18:12]  No, Sophie's got to let me like say the things that can't ever go out on the air first.
[00:18:18]  The stuff that's bleeped out about what you should do to Jeff Bezos' house.
[00:18:21]  Like, that's, ah, shit, fuck.
[00:18:22]  Okay.
[00:18:23]  We're going to have to get that.
[00:18:24]  We're going to have to get that shit in post.
[00:18:26]  He heard you say that.
[00:18:28]  Yeah, he did.
[00:18:28]  There's an echo in the fucking room.
[00:18:30]  Yeah, he heard you.
[00:18:31]  He's listening.
[00:18:32]  That's an Amazon machete.
[00:18:36]  If you're low on toilet paper, it'll order it.
[00:18:39]  I did get the studio machete off Amazon.
[00:18:43]  And it's a beautiful machete.
[00:18:44]  So Bezos has got a supply of machetes.
[00:18:47]  He has more than I do.
[00:18:48]  Yeah.
[00:18:49]  So, back to Harold, now that we're fully operational.
[00:18:53]  Harold.
[00:18:54]  Harold.
[00:18:54]  Stage magician.
[00:18:55]  Harold the stage machician.
[00:18:57]  Magician.
[00:18:58]  Magician?
[00:18:59]  That was bad.
[00:19:00]  Harold segued rather naturally from racing and magicianing towards working as a talent agent for other performers.
[00:19:06]  Actually, this does make sense.
[00:19:07]  That's the first natural.
[00:19:09]  That's the first natural.
[00:19:10]  That's the only one that he's done that makes sense.
[00:19:11]  He's like, you know what?
[00:19:12]  I'm tired of doing all the bullshit.
[00:19:15]  I'm just going to sell the guys who do the bullshit.
[00:19:17]  Yeah.
[00:19:18]  It's a good call.
[00:19:19]  It's not a bad game.
[00:19:21]  His prize catch was Henry Lemour, one of the first magicians on television.
[00:19:26]  Lamore's claim to fame was a yearly stunt where he would dive from New York's flat iron building 40 feet down into a pool of water just 12 inches deep.
[00:19:35]  He won a Guinness.
[00:19:38]  You're not impressed by that?
[00:19:41]  I think I'd want to see it before I gave it my proper reaction.
[00:19:47]  I mean, the people, the fine people at Guinness, who we know cannot be bought, certified this as a world record.
[00:19:55]  It is.
[00:19:56]  It is.
[00:19:57]  He got this many people to believe it.

=== Crazy Crabs And Toys (04:11) ===

[00:20:03]  So, it would be fair to say, among a couple of other things, that Harold Brownhutt so far seemed to have a passion for performance.
[00:20:12]  But in 1957, when he was 31, his father died.
[00:20:15]  This spurred him to make a change in his life.
[00:20:18]  Starting in the late 1950s, Brownhood started inventing, filing patent after patent for a variety of kitschy toys.
[00:20:25]  Products like Amazing Hair Raising Monsters, which were basically a cross between a troll doll and a chia pet.
[00:20:31]  He had a peculiar preference for selling live animals to children through the mail, which is...
[00:20:40]  Here's the thing.
[00:20:41]  You don't get to see the result.
[00:20:45]  And that's why you do something like that.
[00:20:47]  Yeah.
[00:20:49]  You don't mail a pig to a kid without wanting to see that kid open that pig.
[00:21:00]  Also, can you imagine being like, I bought you a horse.
[00:21:06]  Mailman will be here in four days with it.
[00:21:09]  Says there's a 40% chance it's a little bit more.
[00:21:12]  There's holes in the packages.
[00:21:16]  Well, he didn't sell anything as cool as horses.
[00:21:18]  One of his inventions was crazy crabs, which were just normal, terrified hermit crabs, mailed to your door in a cardboard box.
[00:21:26]  Holy shit.
[00:21:29]  He's funny.
[00:21:30]  Yeah, he's good.
[00:21:31]  I think he's kind of funny, if I'm being honest.
[00:21:33]  So far, so far, nothing to hate.
[00:21:35]  Here's my business.
[00:21:38]  You know how you knock on somebody's door and you run and they're like, who's there?
[00:21:42]  You get him?
[00:21:42]  What if we left a crab there?
[00:21:53]  How do we make money?
[00:21:54]  I gotta go.
[00:21:58]  So what made Crazy Crabs special and sellable was the ad copy Harold wrote for the comic books and kids' magazines like Boy's Life, where he sold his gimmicks.
[00:22:08]  Here is the description he wrote for his crazy crabs.
[00:22:12]  As gentle as a pussycat, it lives on land instead of water.
[00:22:16]  Does not bite unless mishandled.
[00:22:18]  It loves to be touched and petted.
[00:22:21]  Unless you touch it.
[00:22:24]  Yeah, you touch it, it's going to fuck you up.
[00:22:28]  You don't get near it.
[00:22:30]  It won't bother you at all.
[00:22:31]  You just leave it in the box, let it die on the porch.
[00:22:34]  Yeah, you'll be fine.
[00:22:35]  Don't look at it.
[00:22:38]  Holy shit, that's fucking.
[00:22:41]  It loves to be touched and petted and enjoys running from hand to hand.
[00:22:47]  He's awesome.
[00:22:48]  I love this guy.
[00:22:50]  So far, Hardy.
[00:22:51]  Not a bastard.
[00:22:52]  Real good time, this guy.
[00:22:53]  He said swinging from your fingers or just cuddling your shoulder like an adorable tame parrot.
[00:23:00]  Like a parrot.
[00:23:01]  Firm crabs.
[00:23:04]  Oh, man.
[00:23:05]  I want that parrot that can bite you.
[00:23:08]  Yeah.
[00:23:09]  Does it talk?
[00:23:09]  No.
[00:23:10]  I want to parrot with vices for hands that can't think.
[00:23:21]  Pure, pure nature.
[00:23:23]  I just want.
[00:23:24]  That's the toy for a smaller one.
[00:23:25]  Just either fear or eating.
[00:23:28]  That's all it takes.
[00:23:33]  From the beginning of his career as a toy designer, Harold Brownhood knew that lying to truth.
[00:23:38]  He's so loose with the terms of what he's doing.
[00:23:40]  He's amazing.
[00:23:41]  He's amazing.
[00:23:43]  So you want a toy and he just hands you a hermit crap.
[00:23:48]  This is an uncle thing to do.
[00:23:51]  That's his whole target audience is like just half-lit uncles.
[00:23:56]  Late for a birthday party.
[00:24:00]  What'd you get you?
[00:24:01]  I got you, illegal turtle.
[00:24:11]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.

=== From Addiction To Acceleration (03:29) ===

[00:24:15]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:24:18]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:24:21]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:24:25]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:24:28]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
[00:24:32]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:24:34]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:24:39]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:24:41]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:24:43]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:24:45]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:24:48]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:24:49]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:24:52]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:24:56]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:24:58]  Trust me, babe.
[00:24:59]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:25:09]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:25:14]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:25:19]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:25:25]  Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
[00:25:34]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:25:39]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:25:42]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:25:45]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:25:47]  That's so funny.
[00:25:49]  Share each day with me each night, each morning.
[00:25:57]  Say you love me.
[00:26:00]  You know I.
[00:26:02]  So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:26:09]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:26:15]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:26:22]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
[00:26:28]  From power to parenthood.
[00:26:30]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:26:34]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:26:36]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:26:38]  The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
[00:26:42]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:26:49]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:26:52]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:26:58]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[00:27:00]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:27:03]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:27:11]  What's up, everyone?
[00:27:12]  I'm Ego Modern.
[00:27:13]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
[00:27:21]  It's Will Farrell.
[00:27:22]  Woo, My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:27:27]  I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
[00:27:32]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:27:35]  I'm working my way up through it.
[00:27:36]  I know it's a place to come look for up-and-coming talent.
[00:27:39]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.

=== Brine Shrimp Success (14:07) ===

[00:27:44]  Yeah.
[00:27:44]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:27:47]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:27:49]  He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:27:57]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:27:59]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:28:07]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:28:09]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:28:10]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:28:11]  Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:28:21]  So, yeah, Harold was aware very early on that the key to making money was lying to children.
[00:28:26]  Yes.
[00:28:26]  Still is.
[00:28:27]  Still is.
[00:28:27]  Yeah.
[00:28:28]  Now, hermit crabs were a good proof of concept, but, you know, only so many kids want crabs, right?
[00:28:34]  Like, if crab is in the name, you got to limit it.
[00:28:37]  You got to do it.
[00:28:38]  No adults want crabs.
[00:28:42]  So Harold had another more ambitious dream.
[00:28:45]  He wanted to mail children packets of brine shrimp and pretend that they were aquatic apes.
[00:28:50]  That's a specific dream.
[00:28:52]  Very specific dream.
[00:28:54]  Now, the inspiration for this unique vision came in 1957 when he was in a pet store and saw a bucket of brine shrimp.
[00:29:01]  I was like, mushrooms.
[00:29:03]  He was chewing his fucking teeth.
[00:29:08]  I want to go in this pet store.
[00:29:13]  Yes.
[00:29:13]  I need a business idea.
[00:29:17]  So he's in this pet store.
[00:29:18]  He sees a bucket of brine shrimp being sold as fish food, not as pets, because they're not pets.
[00:29:24]  And he's, yeah, for the record, brine shrimp are very tiny.
[00:29:27]  They're almost invisible to the naked eye.
[00:29:28]  When magnified, they look like a weird cross between a centipede and a seahorse.
[00:29:33]  They do not look anything like a moment.
[00:29:34]  They're beautiful.
[00:29:36]  Majestic creatures.
[00:29:39]  No rational person would consider them interesting by the standards of most pets.
[00:29:43]  But Harold thought brine shrimp were the perfect animal to sell and moss to children around the country.
[00:29:49]  He would label.
[00:29:50]  You know he's dumb as hell.
[00:29:52]  Fucking kids.
[00:29:54]  Those little people.
[00:29:55]  You can make those sons of bitches do buy anything.
[00:29:57]  Wait, I don't know anything.
[00:30:00]  You see how well Londards did?
[00:30:02]  Fucking dumb.
[00:30:06]  He would later tell an interviewer, I was always interested in wildlife, and I was looking for something that would interest, and I was looking for something that would interest other people in it.
[00:30:19]  What do you even say to that?
[00:30:20]  I don't.
[00:30:22]  Even if you're the journalist, you're just like, man, what are you doing?
[00:30:26]  You are full of shit.
[00:30:27]  God, I got to print this.
[00:30:30]  So he started research later that year in between working on games like Balderdash and patenting bulletproof clothing.
[00:30:37]  For three years, he experimented.
[00:30:39]  He was a busy fucker.
[00:30:40]  For three years.
[00:30:41]  You don't have to prove the patent works.
[00:30:43]  No.
[00:30:44]  No.
[00:30:44]  You just got to sell it.
[00:30:46]  You just got to be like, yeah.
[00:30:48]  It's a shirt.
[00:30:48]  Yeah, there's no internet back then, so nobody's going to come on Amazon and be like, there's a problem with this bulletproof shirt.
[00:30:56]  Yeah.
[00:30:58]  I just healed my friend.
[00:31:02]  So for three years, he experimented with brine shrimp, trying to figure out ways to essentially freeze dry their eggs so they could be safely shipped.
[00:31:09]  How long was he working on this?
[00:31:11]  Three years, Billy.
[00:31:12]  Three years.
[00:31:13]  It's hard.
[00:31:14]  Okay, I'll give it to him.
[00:31:15]  It's not easy.
[00:31:15]  There's a level of like just sticking to it that is impressive.
[00:31:21]  No, he's not a lazy man.
[00:31:23]  Because three years is a long time.
[00:31:26]  Look, man.
[00:31:26]  To be like, how am I going to freeze these fish food?
[00:31:31]  All of history is built by men and women with visions.
[00:31:36]  They're stupid, but they're not that stupid.
[00:31:39]  Yeah.
[00:31:42]  This was a quest of love for him.
[00:31:44]  He loved the idea of selling brine shrimp to children.
[00:31:48]  And he, yeah, he eventually figured it out.
[00:31:52]  Now, in 1960, his mom died of a car crash, and later that year, he revealed the first iteration of what would prove to be his greatest innovation.
[00:32:00]  instant life.
[00:32:01]  Essentially, a packet of dried brine shrimp eggs he sold for 49 cents.
[00:32:06]  Now, at this stage, the product did not work well.
[00:32:09]  Harold later recalled, keeping them alive was a terrible struggle.
[00:32:13]  So he makes them, but they're still dying, like all the time.
[00:32:17]  Jesus.
[00:32:17]  Well, I mean, they're brine shrimp.
[00:32:19]  I mean, I understand, but still, it's like the way he talks about it.
[00:32:22]  It's kind of just like, I just, they die so fast.
[00:32:29]  You can hear them.
[00:32:30]  It's terrible.
[00:32:32]  They're real screamers.
[00:32:33]  He's like, hey, I'm alive.
[00:32:38]  My experiments didn't make them live longer, but it made them real yellowish.
[00:32:42]  Yeah.
[00:32:48]  You freeze them, it makes them loud.
[00:32:53]  Now, Harold promised instant happiness to the children who purchased his brine shrimp, but his sales were less than impressive.
[00:33:01]  Even a kid's like, fuck off.
[00:33:02]  Fuck off.
[00:33:03]  Yeah, I don't want your fucking brine shrimp.
[00:33:04]  There's no instant happy.
[00:33:05]  You don't got cocaine.
[00:33:06]  Yeah.
[00:33:09]  That would be the first Amazon review today.
[00:33:13]  There were two problems.
[00:33:14]  The first was that the name brine shrimp did not inspire wonder in the hearts of children.
[00:33:19]  Brian is a bad marketing word, as a rule.
[00:33:22]  The second was that all the brine shrimp he sold kept dying.
[00:33:26]  It was considered incredibly lucky for just two of the little critters to survive for 30 days.
[00:33:31]  Not content to let nature.
[00:33:32]  Lucky.
[00:33:33]  Yeah, lucky.
[00:33:35]  Imagine you got a puppy and it lived for 30 days.
[00:33:37]  You're like, that's pretty lucky.
[00:33:40]  I mean, that's when they're at their cutest.
[00:33:42]  How long do you need them after that?
[00:33:43]  I like this.
[00:33:44]  I was pretending, you guys, there's no dead puppy.
[00:33:47]  There's no real dead puppy.
[00:33:49]  Now, Billy Wayne, we're like maybe 10 years off from a service where they mail 30-day puppies to your house.
[00:33:55]  And then you get a new puppy 30 days later when that one just sort of, you know.
[00:33:58]  Oh, I wish that's so.
[00:34:00]  Amazon Genetics is working on it right now.
[00:34:04]  It's a $30.
[00:34:05]  No one's laughing because they know it's true.
[00:34:07]  No, this is coming.
[00:34:08]  This is going.
[00:34:09]  What's happening right now?
[00:34:10]  Everyone's like, ah, stop talking about the future.
[00:34:13]  Yeah.
[00:34:14]  We're trying to be funny, and you guys are like, it's going to happen.
[00:34:16]  Jeff Bezos was at Christmas pretending to be a human for one brief night when a friend of his said, I wish my puppy could stay this way forever.
[00:34:23]  And he was like, I'll be right back.
[00:34:25]  I know how to fucking monetize this shit.
[00:34:27]  Yeah.
[00:34:30]  That's how he sounds when he walks away.
[00:34:36]  So, like all great heroes in history, Harold was not content to let nature beat him.
[00:34:43]  So, Mr. Brownhout teamed up with a marine biologist, Anthony Diagnostino, a microcrustacean expert.
[00:34:51]  They started claiming they'd invented a hybrid species, Artemia nios, specially bred to be sold over the mail to children.
[00:34:58]  Brine shrimp already have eggs that essentially go dormant in the right circumstances.
[00:35:02]  Brownhutton D. Agostino claimed their hybrid was even more survivable, able to spend weeks in a state of suspended animation.
[00:35:08]  Brownhutt also invented a mixture of what he called magic crystals.
[00:35:12]  Yeah.
[00:35:15]  These help.
[00:35:16]  Because you know it's good science when the word magic's involved.
[00:35:23]  These apparently helped keep the brine shrimp eggs alive.
[00:35:26]  Now, it's still rather unclear to me if all this talk of hybrids was complete BS or not, almost certainly.
[00:35:31]  But the brine shrimp sold by Brownhood and DiAgostino from this point forward showed a markedly greater tolerance for shipping, and nobody really knows how they did it.
[00:35:40]  Now, making the brine shrimp more survivable was only one part of the plan.
[00:35:43]  Harold also had to invent a unique lie to sell children on the idea.
[00:35:48]  He started packaging his brine shrimp in two little packets.
[00:35:51]  The first was labeled a water purifier, although it was actually just brine shrimp eggs.
[00:35:56]  Harold's instructions were to pour this into the water first and then let it sit for a few days.
[00:36:00]  During this time, unbeknownst to the child, the brine shrimp would sneak in their mouth.
[00:36:06]  Sorry, just the way you worded that was fucking.
[00:36:09]  No, it's good.
[00:36:09]  Unbeknownst to them, he'd sneak in their house.
[00:36:13]  So that the brine shrimp in their mouth.
[00:36:17]  They'd hatch and they would grow.
[00:36:19]  Now, the second packet, which supposedly contained brine shrimp eggs, was actually nothing more than dye, which stained the now grown brine shrimp and made it look like they were appearing instantly.
[00:36:29]  That was a pretty fucking smart cause.
[00:36:31]  Like, that's a good idea.
[00:36:34]  What a waste of fucking energy.
[00:36:36]  What?
[00:36:37]  No, you gotta impress the kids.
[00:36:38]  They're not gonna stay impressed.
[00:36:39]  I mean, just to take it this far.
[00:36:43]  It's so, like, do you think his friends are like, are you still doing the thing?
[00:36:48]  I mean, I hate to say it, but he did make millions of dollars.
[00:36:54]  There is one friend who's like, the whole time, I told you you could do it.
[00:36:57]  Yeah.
[00:36:59]  You're going to go to Water Park again.
[00:37:01]  We're going to Maui this weekend, right?
[00:37:03]  I love it.
[00:37:05]  So, Harold's next and probably greatest innovation was to create a bald-faced but beautiful lie about what his brine shrimp were.
[00:37:13]  He hit upon the name Sea Monkeys and hired a future Marvel artist to draw colorful depictions of humanoid-looking aquatic creatures for his comic book ads.
[00:37:21]  Future Marvel artists.
[00:37:22]  Yeah, future, future shrimp.
[00:37:23]  So he used that to get his Marvel job.
[00:37:25]  Yeah, I think so.
[00:37:27]  You want to describe those sea monkeys to the audience?
[00:37:29]  I mean, they look like if, like, you split the conehead's head open.
[00:37:36]  And then...
[00:37:41]  I mean, they have, like, human features, which is very strange.
[00:37:44]  Very unsettling.
[00:37:46]  Yeah, but they're also like lizard-like.
[00:37:48]  There's no monkey to them, really.
[00:37:50]  They look vaguely ape-like, you know, water.
[00:37:53]  They look like a human, though.
[00:37:54]  Sea apes.
[00:37:55]  Yeah.
[00:37:57]  But, I mean, they have a nice...
[00:37:59]  The dad's doing well.
[00:38:00]  They have an underground castle.
[00:38:03]  Family looks happy.
[00:38:05]  He's got a castle.
[00:38:07]  Yeah, he definitely has a fucking castle.
[00:38:08]  Hey, look, they've got a gardener because the plants are very nice around.
[00:38:15]  A couple kids.
[00:38:16]  Yeah, you can see the idea.
[00:38:17]  Like, buy these brine shrimp and you'll have to get Marvel of a human hard.
[00:38:23]  Because that's what he used in his resume.
[00:38:24]  Like, what have you done?
[00:38:25]  You're like, seen this shit.
[00:38:26]  Seen this shit?
[00:38:28]  Everybody has these fucking monkeys.
[00:38:29]  Yeah.
[00:38:30]  So, I'm going to read a little bit from the ad copy, which was written by Harold Brownhood himself.
[00:38:36]  So eager to please, they can even be trained.
[00:38:39]  Always clowning around these troublesome pet tropes.
[00:38:42]  Oh, sorry, Trollixum, which is not a word.
[00:38:44]  Pets swim, stunt, and play games with each other.
[00:38:47]  Because they are so full of tricks, you'll never tire of watching them.
[00:38:50]  And raising sea monkeys is so easy, even a six-year-old can do it without help.
[00:38:53]  Sea monkeys eat very little, and they keep their water so clean they require only a minimum care, although they love attention.
[00:39:00]  Anyone who enjoys the company of pets will adore sea monkeys.
[00:39:03]  Best of all, we even show you how to teach them to obey your commands like a pack of friendly trained seals.
[00:39:12]  He's having fun.
[00:39:13]  He's having a great time.
[00:39:16]  Up to this point, I'm totally on board with Hyde.
[00:39:21]  Billy, what's the best lie you've told a child?
[00:39:29]  Not my children.
[00:39:31]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:39:33]  But we did convince my younger sister that we found her under a rock.
[00:39:41]  And then we found out years later she wasn't even upset.
[00:39:44]  She just considered herself very lucky.
[00:39:51]  See, Billy.
[00:39:52]  Because we brought it up one year at like Christmas or something.
[00:39:54]  Remember when we convinced you that you lived under a rock and we found you?
[00:39:57]  And she was like, yeah, I just thought, God, I'm lucky they found me.
[00:40:05]  See, you could have monetized that impulse, Billy.
[00:40:07]  I guess I did have a rich fucking guy.
[00:40:11]  So, Harold also hit upon the idea of selling his sea monkeys with a two-year life insurance policy because there's nothing kids love more than life insurance.
[00:40:20]  Oh, my God.
[00:40:22]  So we pay it every month?
[00:40:23]  Yeah.
[00:40:23]  Okay.
[00:40:23]  Every month.
[00:40:25]  Now, this all worked.
[00:40:26]  Sea monkeys took off like gangbusters and millions of little children, including like about a third of the audience, it seems, haranged their parents for the 125 or however much it was in your day it would take to build their own marvelous underwater civilization.
[00:40:40]  Most of those kids were profoundly disappointed by the tiny, gross-looking little monsters that grew from the kits, but enough became obsessed with Brian Shrimp that there are still fan sites for sea monkeys today.
[00:40:49]  This is a thing people are into.
[00:40:52]  Although Roy Orbison clings to the audience also there.
[00:40:55]  What?
[00:40:59]  Someone in the audience, when you said there's still people that do it today, just went, what?
[00:41:03]  You know what the internet is.
[00:41:07]  It's Nazis and weird shit like this.
[00:41:12]  Sea Monkeys were an enormous success.
[00:41:14]  Hundreds of thousands of kits were sent out, netting millions of dollars for Harold Brownhutt and the Transience Corporation, his partners in the venture.
[00:41:21]  With this massive success under his belt, Harold began to put out other hit products.
[00:41:24]  He invented X-ray specs, which he claimed were glasses that imparted X-ray vision to the wearer.
[00:41:30]  Ads for the specs inevitably showed, see, this is how fucking incompetent I am without the fucking paper.
[00:41:35]  I'm useless.
[00:41:37]  I don't have the talent that this guy has.
[00:41:39]  I just got paper.
[00:41:42]  You know what, Billy?
[00:41:43]  It's all in here.
[00:41:44]  You know what, Billy?
[00:41:45]  We are on page four.
[00:41:47]  And if I know one thing about the number four, it means that we should hit some bagels with some machines.

=== Buying Into Own Bullshit (12:58) ===

[00:41:51]  Okay.
[00:41:52]  Yeah, I think that's what that all means.
[00:41:55]  I didn't.
[00:41:56]  Robert sent me a text today.
[00:41:58]  He was like, did you get permission to do the machete and bagel stuff?
[00:42:02]  And I was like, I just figured it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission on that stuff.
[00:42:09]  I just know from the past when you're like, can I bring a machete?
[00:42:11]  They always say no.
[00:42:13]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:42:14]  Now, Billy, the dangerous thing about serving the bagels, because we have a mic in one hand, is that you've got to serve with your machete hand, which means there's a chance the machete is going to go flying.
[00:42:23]  Now, they're rusty.
[00:42:25]  Awesome.
[00:42:26]  But that's not a plus.
[00:42:29]  Oh, tetanus feels good.
[00:42:31]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:42:32]  A little bit of lockjaw, it helps with some of the stuff.
[00:42:34]  I'm just going to whack it down.
[00:42:35]  Don't whack it this way.
[00:42:37]  Love serving on zero?
[00:42:39]  Eleven?
[00:42:40]  Sure.
[00:42:40]  Tennis!
[00:42:46]  Okay.
[00:42:49]  God.
[00:42:49]  You hit it, though.
[00:42:50]  Yeah, I think just enough to piss it off.
[00:42:55]  There's nothing more dangerous than pissed off throwing bagels.
[00:42:59]  Oh, you're doing it the responsible way because you care about the audience.
[00:43:02]  I know.
[00:43:02]  I'm going to throw it like this so you get a good rate.
[00:43:05]  No, don't.
[00:43:08]  I'm also going to do it like this.
[00:43:10]  All right, all right.
[00:43:11]  There.
[00:43:12]  Oh, yeah.
[00:43:13]  Yeah.
[00:43:16]  There's so much.
[00:43:19]  I feel like I'm probably more relaxed than you as a person.
[00:43:25]  That's probably true.
[00:43:26]  Yeah, I feel okay about that.
[00:43:28]  Yeah, I mean, I'm out of cider, but so.
[00:43:33]  Oh, we've got plenty.
[00:43:34]  We have so many, you guys.
[00:43:36]  Oh, shit.
[00:43:39]  Thank you.
[00:43:42]  I assume this is a collective manifestation of will from the audience.
[00:43:47]  I was in Alaska one time.
[00:43:49]  Okay.
[00:43:51]  Speaking of grifters.
[00:43:52]  Yeah.
[00:43:54]  I've been in Alaska a bunch.
[00:43:55]  It's awesome.
[00:43:56]  They've got a good spirit up there.
[00:44:00]  But I put a beer down.
[00:44:02]  This is back when I used to drink.
[00:44:03]  I put a beer down.
[00:44:05]  And three minutes later, four beers showed up on stage.
[00:44:10]  Because people in the, like, four different people, as soon as I was done with my beer, like, get him another one.
[00:44:18]  He could die.
[00:44:21]  And I was like, Alaska is awesome.
[00:44:23]  It's great.
[00:44:25]  It's great because it's one of the states that's testing vaguely what UBI could be.
[00:44:30]  And I had a discussion online with some people about Andrew Yang's plan for universal basic income.
[00:44:35]  And one thing I said is that if you've got a problem with how many AR-15s there are, wait until how many more there are when people are getting $1,000 a month from the government.
[00:44:43]  And somebody from Alaska chimed in and said, we get like $4,000 from the government every year, and yet people spend it all on guns.
[00:44:51]  Yes.
[00:44:53]  Everyone's hammered and armed in Alaska.
[00:44:56]  Hammered and armed in Alaska.
[00:44:57]  It's awesome.
[00:45:00]  It's great.
[00:45:00]  It is awesome.
[00:45:02]  Yeah.
[00:45:02]  Now, we should probably get back to this whole...
[00:45:05]  I know.
[00:45:05]  I just want to go to Alaska now.
[00:45:07]  You know what?
[00:45:09]  We should do a show there.
[00:45:11]  They wouldn't even care what we're doing.
[00:45:12]  They're just happy when people show up.
[00:45:14]  Oh, man.
[00:45:15]  We could get bear guns.
[00:45:17]  You got to have a bear gun in Alaska.
[00:45:18]  You do.
[00:45:19]  It's safety.
[00:45:20]  It's like a seatbelt for bears.
[00:45:23]  And also people.
[00:45:25]  And people.
[00:45:27]  So, okay, yeah, ads for the x-ray specs.
[00:45:29]  We're talking about x-ray specs, Harold Brownut's other genius invention.
[00:45:33]  Now, ads for these specs inevitably showed a sleazy-looking 70s man leering at a woman in a dress.
[00:45:39]  The implication, of course, is that if you buy these x-ray specs, you will.
[00:45:42]  You get butt bone.
[00:45:43]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:45:45]  You get to see yourself.
[00:45:46]  You can see they would sell them to Boy Scouts and be like, you want to look under girls' clothes?
[00:45:52]  Buy these glasses.
[00:45:54]  This is the Boy Scouts, and we're fine with this.
[00:45:57]  It was, that is true.
[00:45:59]  It was a wild time.
[00:46:00]  As long as you're not gay.
[00:46:03]  No, then you get your ass kicked right away.
[00:46:06]  Get out of here.
[00:46:07]  No, no.
[00:46:08]  Now, obviously, in reality, they were not x-ray specs.
[00:46:12]  That would also be horribly dangerous.
[00:46:14]  There would be so much more cancer if they were really x-ray glasses.
[00:46:19]  They were just a gimmick that basically created a double vision illusion that made it look sort of like you could see into your own hand.
[00:46:25]  It was like a bunch of slits into the plastic and stuff.
[00:46:28]  I don't want to bore you with that.
[00:46:29]  Sounds like if it's a bunch of slits, sounds like it works.
[00:46:35]  They did not let you see through women's clothing, but the specs.
[00:46:39]  I'm trying to just talk right to that.
[00:46:41]  I watched the Mighty Gemstone the other day.
[00:46:47]  Yeah, the specs sold very well nonetheless.
[00:46:50]  As did Bronhutt's most brilliant invention.
[00:46:53]  You're going to like this one, Pelle.
[00:46:54]  This is his most brilliant one yet.
[00:46:56]  The Invisible Goldfish.
[00:47:00]  I have some for sale tonight.
[00:47:05]  Get your money out.
[00:47:07]  He was basically just shipping fish food and an empty glass bag.
[00:47:11]  That's amazing.
[00:47:13]  I do have a friend early on and like just with people messing around with the internet when we were figuring out what it was, he got kicked off of eBay because he was trying to sell a ghost in a jar.
[00:47:28]  I laughed for like two fucking days straight.
[00:47:33]  That guy should have gotten a fucking TV show.
[00:47:35]  Well, no, and he had a good job.
[00:47:37]  He wouldn't quit it to do comedy.
[00:47:39]  I was so mad at him.
[00:47:40]  I was like, you're one of the funniest people I've ever fucking heard.
[00:47:43]  He's like, I'm in charge of people.
[00:47:45]  I was like, you need to be out there doing stuff.
[00:47:48]  The world needs you.
[00:47:50]  Oh, God, he's so fucking funny.
[00:47:52]  Yeah, yeah, it was really good.
[00:47:53]  Also, the invisible goldfish came with a 100% guarantee that you would not see the fish, which was a really easy to like, yeah.
[00:48:01]  I told you.
[00:48:02]  Yeah.
[00:48:02]  I told you.
[00:48:03]  He was so fucking goldfish in those days.
[00:48:05]  Invisible.
[00:48:08]  He's so good you can't even feel him sometimes.
[00:48:10]  Now, at this point, we've all had fun with Harold Brownhood's story.
[00:48:14]  But the worst thing you could say about him is that his products were a little bit of a scam, playing on the reality distortion field generated by comic books and the desire of small children to believe in wonderful things.
[00:48:24]  But of course, this is not just the story of a man who scammed some kids out of their allowance money.
[00:48:29]  You see, Harold Brownhood lived a second life outside of the bustling world of shitty comic book scam toys.
[00:48:39]  And he funneled the profits from Sea Monkeys and X-Ray Specs and Invisible Goldfish towards a very specific political end.
[00:48:46]  Now, I want to get a show of hands who spent money on any of these products.
[00:48:50]  Come on, get them back up.
[00:48:51]  Get them back up.
[00:48:52]  Get them back up.
[00:48:54]  All right.
[00:48:54]  Keep them in the air.
[00:48:56]  That specific political end was National Socialism.
[00:49:01]  Yeah, he's a fucking Nazi.
[00:49:07]  Thanks a lot, you guys.
[00:49:11]  Thanks a lot.
[00:49:13]  A lot of people just learned they helped fund the Aryan nations tonight.
[00:49:19]  Jesus Christ.
[00:49:22]  What if you think that.
[00:49:30]  What are you going to do with your millions?
[00:49:31]  I got some plans.
[00:49:35]  You're like, holy shit, he did.
[00:49:38]  Because the way he sold stuff is the way that preachers work.
[00:49:42]  Yeah.
[00:49:42]  Yeah.
[00:49:44]  It's like at the end of a comic book, which is like, oh, it's a crazy fucking story.
[00:49:48]  And you're all worked up.
[00:49:49]  And at the end, you're like, hey, here's some shit for $3.
[00:49:52]  Got me.
[00:49:52]  Yeah, fuck it.
[00:49:54]  And then Nazism.
[00:49:56]  And then, yeah.
[00:49:58]  And then he's like, you know what?
[00:49:59]  The Jews.
[00:50:01]  Of which he was.
[00:50:02]  Yeah.
[00:50:03]  Now, starting at some point after the 1960s, he changed his name from Harold Brownhood to Harold Vaughan Brownhood.
[00:50:12]  There we go.
[00:50:13]  Subtle Germanism.
[00:50:14]  Yeah.
[00:50:15]  Now, the Vaughns suggested he came from German noble blood and was thus a true Aryan rather than a working-class Jewish kid from Manhattan.
[00:50:23]  This is 15 years after the stuff.
[00:50:28]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:50:29]  In the 60s.
[00:50:30]  This is like right when they're taking off, actually.
[00:50:32]  Okay.
[00:50:33]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:50:34]  This is the height of Sea Monkeys.
[00:50:37]  Yeah, 60s, 70s.
[00:50:38]  Yeah.
[00:50:39]  He's doing well.
[00:50:40]  He's...
[00:50:40]  Okay.
[00:50:41]  Yeah, he's a Nazi.
[00:50:42]  Yeah.
[00:50:43]  But he was before.
[00:50:45]  Yeah.
[00:50:46]  Now, I'm not really sure why Harold changed his name.
[00:50:50]  And I'm not really sure at what point he became enthralled with National Socialism.
[00:50:56]  I would guess after you make a crazy amount of money from selling dumb shit to kids, you start buying into your own bullshit a little bit.
[00:51:07]  So you're like, I'm Vaughn now.
[00:51:09]  Yeah.
[00:51:10]  And you know who else was good at selling bullshit to kids?
[00:51:13]  Hitler.
[00:51:13]  Hitler.
[00:51:16]  The king.
[00:51:17]  Yeah.
[00:51:18]  Now, what we do know is that Harold was not particularly shy about his infatuation with fascism.
[00:51:24]  He lined his personal study with a poster autographed by Hermann Gohing and an inscribed picture of Benito Mussolini.
[00:51:34]  He had a Mussolini.
[00:51:36]  Look at that.
[00:51:37]  Pretty cool, right?
[00:51:40]  That's the worst of the fascists, if you want to know how much I like fascism.
[00:51:44]  He was bad.
[00:51:46]  That's the fucking carrot top of fascism, and I've got him on my wall.
[00:51:50]  I got it.
[00:51:52]  That's my guy.
[00:51:54]  Pretty cool, right?
[00:51:57]  He spent some of his sea monkey money on a rare print of a World War II Luftwaffe aircraft signed by four top Nazi ace pilots.
[00:52:06]  Where do you even get gun shows?
[00:52:08]  You buy that at a gun show.
[00:52:09]  I know exactly.
[00:52:10]  You buy that at a gun show in Dallas, Texas.
[00:52:12]  I've seen that on sale.
[00:52:13]  Yeah.
[00:52:17]  Or just some dude's barn.
[00:52:18]  Or at Grant's Pass.
[00:52:26]  That was a great reaction.
[00:52:27]  Yeah, that's sad.
[00:52:29]  We all know Josephine.
[00:52:30]  Yeah.
[00:52:31]  That's very accurate.
[00:52:32]  I don't like how accurate that is.
[00:52:37]  Yeah.
[00:52:38]  In short, he had the kind of office that only a Nazi or a very specific kind of podcast host would have.
[00:52:46]  I do have a Gohring original, but it's a tasteful nude.
[00:52:49]  Yeah.
[00:52:53]  He does the same thing.
[00:52:54]  Look at it.
[00:52:54]  I don't like him.
[00:52:56]  I don't like him for the bombing of Britain.
[00:52:58]  I like him for his opiate addiction.
[00:53:00]  He was a real artist when it came to being addicted to painkillers.
[00:53:03]  One of the best.
[00:53:04]  One of the best.
[00:53:04]  You know, you got to separate the art from the artist.
[00:53:07]  That's all I'm going to say.
[00:53:10]  It seemed to affect him a little bit.
[00:53:13]  Seemed to have affected London, too.
[00:53:15]  Yeah.
[00:53:16]  Yeah, he let it get to his head.
[00:53:17]  Yeah.
[00:53:18]  Now, it's possible that Harold's growing Nazism was responsible for his divorce from his first wife in 1966.
[00:53:25]  Maybe.
[00:53:26]  Why do you want to divorce your husband?
[00:53:28]  He's a Nazi.
[00:53:30]  You know what?
[00:53:31]  We're not even going to deal with the paperwork.
[00:53:33]  Yeah, don't.
[00:53:37]  Give me it.
[00:53:37]  The x-ray spec money.
[00:53:40]  He keeps the sea monkey money.
[00:53:44]  They had one child together, a boy, who she took.
[00:53:47]  Now, some journalists who reported on him later in life did manage to get in touch with his first wife.
[00:53:52]  She claimed to be, quote, unaware of his other activities, despite their occasional contact.
[00:53:58]  Which may have been true, may have been not.
[00:53:59]  She got out, so I'm not going to labor too long on that.
[00:54:02]  We'll talk about his second wife in a little bit.
[00:54:04]  Now, once the 1970s rolled around, those other activities that Harold was involved in included membership in the Aryan Nations.
[00:54:13]  Now, if you haven't heard about these dudes, the Aryan Nations are based up in Hayden Lake in the great may not be the right word, in the state of Idaho.
[00:54:24]  It's pretty good.
[00:54:25]  I've been in a jail there.
[00:54:26]  Yeah.
[00:54:30]  You and a lot of members of the Aryan Nations, actually.
[00:54:33]  They weren't there that night.
[00:54:36]  They were not there.
[00:54:37]  There was just one scared kid.
[00:54:42]  And just me going, what do you mean I can't smoke?
[00:54:47]  They're like, you can't smoke in jail.

=== Aryan Nations In Idaho (03:54) ===

[00:54:49]  You can smoke in prison.
[00:54:49]  I was like, well, let's go to fucking prison.
[00:54:51]  I want a cigarette.
[00:54:57]  They thought it was pretty funny.
[00:55:00]  And I knew I was going to get out in the morning so I could be a little bit of a smartass.
[00:55:03]  You know what I mean?
[00:55:11]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:55:15]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:55:18]  If you play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:55:21]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:55:25]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:55:29]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
[00:55:32]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:55:35]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:55:39]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:55:41]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:55:43]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:55:45]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:55:48]  They said, oh, hell no.
[00:55:50]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:55:52]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:55:57]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:55:58]  Trust me, babe.
[00:55:59]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:56:09]  I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:56:15]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:56:22]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
[00:56:28]  From power to parenthood.
[00:56:30]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:56:34]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:56:36]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:56:38]  The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
[00:56:43]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:56:49]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:56:52]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:56:58]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[00:57:00]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:57:03]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:57:11]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:57:17]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:57:22]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:57:27]  Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
[00:57:37]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:57:42]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:57:45]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:57:48]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:57:50]  That's so funny.
[00:57:51]  Share each day with me each night, each morning.
[00:58:00]  Say you love me.
[00:58:03]  You know I.
[00:58:04]  So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:58:11]  What's up, everyone?
[00:58:12]  I'm Ago Modem.
[00:58:13]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
[00:58:21]  It's Will Farrell.
[00:58:24]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:58:28]  I went and had lunch with him one day and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
[00:58:33]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:58:35]  I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
[00:58:39]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.

=== Dad's Best Advice Ever (06:04) ===

[00:58:44]  Yeah.
[00:58:45]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:58:47]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:58:49]  He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:58:57]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:59:00]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:59:07]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:59:09]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:59:10]  There's a lot in life.
[00:59:12]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:59:21]  Now, the Aryan Nations had started off as a single church in the Christian identity tradition.
[00:59:27]  For those of you who don't know what that means, Christian identity beliefs focus around a couple of core concepts.
[00:59:33]  Number one, white people are the real Israelites.
[00:59:36]  Number two, Jewish people are faking it.
[00:59:39]  And number three, their dad is Satan.
[00:59:42]  That's funny.
[00:59:43]  You guys are faking.
[00:59:45]  You guys are faking.
[00:59:47]  We're the Israelites.
[00:59:48]  Your dad's Satan.
[00:59:49]  Yeah.
[00:59:50]  That's it in a nutshell.
[00:59:53]  That was a weird speech.
[00:59:54]  Yeah.
[00:59:55]  Yeah.
[00:59:57]  Can you show your work?
[01:00:03]  How did we come to these conclusions?
[01:00:05]  You know, they can, Billy, but it's just going to be a pamphlet of why the courts aren't real because they're trying you under a flag of admiralty.
[01:00:12]  That is.
[01:00:15]  And you're just like, well, I can't argue that.
[01:00:17]  Sounds right.
[01:00:18]  I don't even know what it means.
[01:00:20]  Now, in 1957, the same year our Boar Harold came up with his famous sell-mummified Brian Shrimp Eggs to Children plan, the founder of the church, a dude named Wesley Swift, settled on a name, Church of Jesus Christ Christian, because fascists are not very creative people.
[01:00:37]  Now, in the late 1970s, yeah, it's a good name.
[01:00:40]  Church of Jesus Christ Christian.
[01:00:41]  It's strange.
[01:00:43]  Like, you have, you could call it anything.
[01:00:45]  Yeah.
[01:00:46]  And you're just like, Jesus Christ, Christian.
[01:00:50]  I mean, it's like, it's either, it's either we go to the Church of Jesus Christ Christian up in Hayden Lake or we drive five and a half hours to the movie theater.
[01:00:57]  We're in the middle of Idaho.
[01:00:58]  That's true.
[01:00:59]  Yeah.
[01:01:00]  That's true well.
[01:01:00]  I guess we're Nazi.
[01:01:01]  I'm a Nazi man.
[01:01:04]  Because I didn't have enough money for gas.
[01:01:11]  Now, in the late 1970s, a guy named Richard Butler took over and he moved the church to a big compound in the woods.
[01:01:17]  The Aryan Nations.
[01:01:18]  Yeah, yeah, you do.
[01:01:19]  Yeah, I mean, look, we're not against, we're all fans of compounds in the woods here.
[01:01:25]  That's why we do most of what men do.
[01:01:28]  Yeah, to get a compound in the woods.
[01:01:29]  I'll have it in the woods.
[01:01:31]  That's why I'm moving towards my career goal of becoming a freelance cult leader.
[01:01:36]  Tax situations better.
[01:01:37]  Freelance.
[01:01:38]  You don't want to own me full-time.
[01:01:40]  Y'all need a leader?
[01:01:43]  I'm pretty free for two more months.
[01:01:45]  I can do it 29 hours a week.
[01:01:49]  I only do weird sex ones, though.
[01:01:50]  That's the only one.
[01:01:51]  Well, of course, yeah.
[01:01:52]  Yeah, I ain't into murder cults.
[01:01:54]  I don't do that.
[01:01:58]  The Aryan Nations would be a central location in virtually every act of white supremacist terrorism that occurred from the end of the 1970s up until 2001.
[01:02:07]  Butler himself is an interesting guy, and we're definitely going to, we're going to be talking about Richard Butler in a future episode.
[01:02:13]  But for now, what's most important is that you know his middle name was Gernt, which I think is objectively Gernt, like nobody's fucking G-I-R-N-T.
[01:02:22]  That's fucking stupid.
[01:02:25]  Explains the anger.
[01:02:27]  Yeah.
[01:02:28]  I would be pissed.
[01:02:29]  Yeah, he's mad.
[01:02:30]  Yeah.
[01:02:31]  Also, if you're going to start like a white supremacy thing like that, you need to do it in the woods.
[01:02:37]  You got to do it in the woods, yeah.
[01:02:38]  Because they don't need to see any other people.
[01:02:42]  I guess we are the best.
[01:02:43]  There's nobody else with a will for ourselves.
[01:02:45]  It's just us.
[01:02:46]  We're the best.
[01:02:47]  So that's on that movie theater.
[01:02:49]  I don't know.
[01:02:49]  I turned on ESPN the other day.
[01:02:51]  I don't think we're the best.
[01:02:55]  He just shoots the TV.
[01:02:59]  So old Gernt Butler grew up in Los Angeles, California.
[01:03:03]  He majored in aeronautical engineering.
[01:03:06]  In his youth, he was a member of the Silver Shirts, an American fascist organization that were basically the proud boys of the 1930s.
[01:03:13]  He had a successful career as an engineer, and he moved to Idaho in the mid-50s in order to become the human center of American fascism.
[01:03:21]  Like Harold, he was an inventor.
[01:03:23]  Butler held the American and Canadian patents for quick repair tubeless tires.
[01:03:28]  So that's neat.
[01:03:29]  To what?
[01:03:30]  Quick repair tubeless tires.
[01:03:32]  That's pretty cool.
[01:03:33]  Yeah, it's pretty neat.
[01:03:35]  It's a weird thing to be.
[01:03:36]  So I guess if you got tires, you're funding the Nazis too.
[01:03:38]  I don't know.
[01:03:39]  I don't know how tires work.
[01:03:40]  Maybe we moved on.
[01:03:42]  Yeah.
[01:03:43]  Now, in the late 1970s and early 1900s, the late 1970s and early 1980s was a time of growing activity and extremism from the fascist right.
[01:03:52]  In 1979, the KKK attempted to kick a bunch of Vietnamese refugees out of the town of Seadrift on the grounds that they were too good at crab fishing.
[01:03:59]  Hundreds of Klansmen from around the country rallied in Seadrift.
[01:04:02]  You got a problem with that, Billy?
[01:04:04]  That's the reason they gave?
[01:04:05]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:04:06]  You guys are too good at fishing?
[01:04:08]  Turns out they were not fans of the free market.
[01:04:13]  But could you understand how insane that complaint is?
[01:04:16]  Like, we're the superior race.
[01:04:18]  You guys are too good at this thing.
[01:04:25]  You're like, I'm, okay, I don't even know where to start.
[01:04:29]  We're just going to go keep crab fishing, okay?
[01:04:33]  So hundreds of Klansmen from around the country rallied in Seadrift.
[01:04:36]  Boats were burned.
[01:04:37]  People were attacked.
[01:04:38]  Uniformed KKK members patrolled the coast with rifles.
[01:04:41]  All this came a matter of weeks after the Greensboro massacre, in which Klansmen murdered five communist activists in North Carolina and got off essentially scot-free.

=== Funding Armored Car Robberies (14:43) ===

[01:04:49]  That same year, Harold von Braunhut, inventor of sea monkeys, was arrested on an illegal weapons charge in LaGuardia Airport.
[01:04:56]  The cause of the arrest was a device he had patented earlier that year, a spring whip defense mechanism.
[01:05:02]  He marketed as the Kyoga Agent M5.
[01:05:06]  It was essentially a telescoping baton for beating people with.
[01:05:10]  Now, the ads for the Kyoga.
[01:05:12]  I invented it.
[01:05:15]  I thought about hitting people with a stick, but it wasn't a stick at first.
[01:05:19]  Well, it was hard, and he was like, sham.
[01:05:24]  And now I made it.
[01:05:26]  I do live in the woods.
[01:05:28]  Why?
[01:05:37]  Now, the ads for the Kyoga Agent M5 started with this text.
[01:05:41]  When your capital letters, worst nightmare, becomes capital letters real!
[01:05:46]  And suddenly you are face to face with a mugger, capital letters, you don't need a gun!
[01:05:51]  No self-defense device that you can get without a license can make you safer or give you more protection.
[01:05:56]  Strike down any attacker regardless of size or strength with capital letters, Kyoga, the steel cobra.
[01:06:03]  Hell yeah.
[01:06:05]  He knew his audio.
[01:06:06]  Yeah.
[01:06:07]  Yeah.
[01:06:08]  I'm not mad at him for that.
[01:06:09]  Billy Wayne, I got it.
[01:06:11]  People that want a Cobra want a magic stick like that.
[01:06:14]  I'm going to show you the ad for the kid.
[01:06:16]  Why don't you describe to me what that is?
[01:06:19]  It's, I mean, it just looks like the B-movie cover from the 70s.
[01:06:26]  It's like a Richard Branson, not Richard, Richard Bronson.
[01:06:30]  I would say the guy in the center looks a little bit like Ringo, but yeah, maybe Bronson's a better pick.
[01:06:34]  Yeah, I mean, I think that's who they're trying to go.
[01:06:36]  But it does, yeah, it does look like a Beetle version of him.
[01:06:41]  And then there's like a mummy.
[01:06:44]  And then there's a guy.
[01:06:45]  There's like a woman, like a sexy woman just about to knock the shit out of a dude.
[01:06:50]  And then there's like a nerd.
[01:06:51]  People with sticks are conspicuously white, and all of the muggers are indeterminate.
[01:06:57]  They have been in the sun longer.
[01:07:03]  It is very, yeah, it is very clear.
[01:07:06]  There's a no-risk, though, 90-day free trial.
[01:07:08]  And the big text on the ad.
[01:07:11]  Just walk around and whack some people, and if you don't like it, send it back.
[01:07:15]  Like a quarter of the page is just the all-caps, high-font words, you don't need a gun.
[01:07:22]  Which I can think of very few things that are good that start that way.
[01:07:27]  You don't need a gun.
[01:07:28]  You don't need a gun.
[01:07:29]  We don't need a game.
[01:07:32]  But under here, it's so effective, it's almost too good to be true.
[01:07:43]  A thunderbolt of life-saving power at your command.
[01:07:54]  Fucking.
[01:07:56]  It's remarkable.
[01:07:57]  It's remarkable.
[01:07:58]  I mean, just advertisers today are just lazy.
[01:08:01]  You guys get your shit out there.
[01:08:03]  They're just garbage.
[01:08:05]  There's some links at the bottom.
[01:08:06]  You're getting no more.
[01:08:06]  You don't need a gun.
[01:08:07]  Yeah.
[01:08:08]  Disney World.
[01:08:13]  Hold on.
[01:08:14]  Go on.
[01:08:17]  Now, the Kyoga Agent telescoping beatstick was a product almost tailor-made for American neo-Nazis, many of whom had pre-existing criminal records and were unable to legally purchase firearms.
[01:08:28]  The actual ad advised the weapon as a purchase for people who might need a gun but can't get a license.
[01:08:35]  Are you too much of a criminal for a pistol?
[01:08:39]  Did the government find out what a piece of shit you are?
[01:08:50]  We'll sell you a second.
[01:08:51]  I got you something in my trunk right now.
[01:08:56]  Jesus Christ.
[01:08:58]  It's not dumb.
[01:08:59]  It's just evil, is what it is.
[01:09:01]  Yeah, no, it is.
[01:09:02]  It is.
[01:09:03]  Now, the Kyoga M5 was sold, among other places, in Spotlight Magazine, a Holocaust denial publication started by Willis Cartow, founder of the Liberty Lobby, and basically our great nation's first Richard Spencer.
[01:09:16]  We'll come back to this in a little bit.
[01:09:18]  So, police at LaGuardia arrested Von Braunhunt for carrying six Kyogas through the airport.
[01:09:24]  In court, his lawyer successfully defended him by arguing that this telescoping baton was, quote, not a bludgeon and thus did not meet the definition of a banned weapon.
[01:09:33]  The actual ad promised it's Hornet's Nest of Piano Wire Steel Springs inflicted excruciating agony, but apparently that did not qualify it as a bludgeon.
[01:09:44]  He didn't say bludgeon.
[01:09:46]  What?
[01:09:47]  He didn't say bludgeon.
[01:09:48]  I didn't say it.
[01:09:49]  What agony can be anything?
[01:09:51]  Heartbreak can cause you agony.
[01:09:55]  Yeah, you lose this thing.
[01:09:56]  It's so sad.
[01:10:00]  Now, Harold may have actually been saved by his complete incompetence as an inventor.
[01:10:04]  During the court case, his lawyers staged a demonstration where they hit somebody with the baton to prove that it was actually a really shitty weapon.
[01:10:12]  So part of his defense was literally, like, I did such a bad job that this doesn't count as a weapon.
[01:10:21]  Hit me.
[01:10:23]  You know what?
[01:10:23]  Hit him with it.
[01:10:27]  He's like that guy who promised to drink the, what was it, that Roundup fertilizer or something?
[01:10:32]  Oh, no, no, it was the, yeah.
[01:10:34]  Huh?
[01:10:36]  Someone had the name.
[01:10:38]  Glycophosphate.
[01:10:39]  That's the fucking thing.
[01:10:40]  But with a little bit more follow-through.
[01:10:42]  Not much more.
[01:10:43]  A little bit more.
[01:10:44]  I'll do it.
[01:10:45]  Yeah, I'll do it.
[01:10:46]  I'll have him do it.
[01:10:47]  I'll have this guy my lawyer hired do it.
[01:10:49]  Do it.
[01:10:52]  Now, in September of 1983, a white supremacist terror group called the Order was formed during a meeting of the Aryan Nations in Hayden Lake.
[01:11:00]  This group would go on to commit several murders and rob more than $4 million, some of which was spent on heavy weaponry for the KKK and neo-Nazi groups.
[01:11:09]  Armored cars and shit.
[01:11:10]  Oh, sea monkeys.
[01:11:12]  They got Mr. Smith.
[01:11:12]  I think that's what funded them before the armored car robberies.
[01:11:16]  Yeah.
[01:11:17]  Now, in September of 1984, when the order was, you know, rolling right along, the Aryan Nations hosted another conference.
[01:11:25]  The pamphlets from that time listed a number of outstanding Aryan nationalist leaders for praise.
[01:11:30]  One of them was Harold von Braunhut, inventor of sea monkeys.
[01:11:34]  Since the Aryan Nations was a gathering of different fascist groups and all the different leaders singled out were listed as belonging to separate organizations, Harold was noted as the leader of the Imperial Order of the Black Eagle.
[01:11:47]  I mean, yeah, my son makes up a lot of weird names too.
[01:11:51]  That's what it is.
[01:11:53]  Also, was this like a group of neo-Nazi people?
[01:11:58]  Thank you, John.
[01:12:03]  So this is like a meeting of different ones?
[01:12:05]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:12:06]  It's like a bunch of different ones.
[01:12:07]  So they're all kind of the same.
[01:12:09]  I mean, oh, I understand that.
[01:12:11]  But do you think at one point during that meeting, they're like, are you a sea monkey guy?
[01:12:16]  That's my favorite hate sea monkeys.
[01:12:20]  Hell yeah.
[01:12:22]  Just because they're not, they're those type of dudes, you know?
[01:12:25]  There are a lot of backwoods dudes.
[01:12:27]  Like, he's a millionaire made sea monkey.
[01:12:30]  See people's pussy with his fucking eyes.
[01:12:34]  Just that kind of conversation went on.
[01:12:37]  Do you know what I mean?
[01:12:38]  You know what, though, to recognize them, these guys would have had to have read a comic book.
[01:12:44]  Well.
[01:12:46]  Touche.
[01:12:47]  Douche.
[01:12:49]  Now, the Imperial Order of the Black Eagle met in New York City in the early 1980s in a place called the Estonian House in Manhattan.
[01:12:58]  Speakers they hired included Robert Miles, a Christian identity theologist who in 1971 was convicted of a bomb plot to stop the integration of public schools in Michigan.
[01:13:07]  1971.
[01:13:08]  In the early 1980s, Miles became the chief patron of a philosophy known as the Northwest Imperative, which is the idea that, since the Pacific Northwest is the whitest part of America, Nazis ought to just move there en masse and take it over.
[01:13:25]  Now, an Imperial Order newsletter written by Von Brownhood described Robert Miles as a famous opponent of the communist Zionist conspiracy, who is nationally known in rightist political movements that reflect the highest aims and ideals of the white race.
[01:13:39]  He was a big, big fan of Robert Miles.
[01:13:42]  Now, in February 1985, shortly after the order dissolved in a series of gunfights and betrayals, Harold von Braunhood spoke on behalf of Reverend Butler at an Aryan Nations meeting at a Washington Sheraton.
[01:13:54]  That's where you want to do that fucking meeting as a Sheridan.
[01:13:56]  There's like one family on vacation at that Sheridan.
[01:14:02]  They're like, this is a weird Sheridan.
[01:14:05]  Hey, honey, you notice how many guys with weird haircuts?
[01:14:09]  I don't remember Nazis existing anymore.
[01:14:13]  But this whole Sheridan has a lot of Nazis.
[01:14:18]  One of them hit me with a stick, but it didn't really hurt all that much.
[01:14:22]  It didn't hurt at all.
[01:14:24]  Not sure if he was.
[01:14:25]  He just ran off and he said the agony.
[01:14:34]  That's my favorite part of some of this antiquated, like the way they think.
[01:14:37]  And then we'll go to Sheridan.
[01:14:38]  I like it.
[01:14:39]  It's nice.
[01:14:40]  It's nice.
[01:14:41]  You know that what they do is they do a good job of getting the coffee out on time.
[01:14:45]  I like that.
[01:14:46]  And then the sheets are soft and white.
[01:14:48]  I also appreciate it.
[01:14:49]  You're good for staling in my other group I'm a part of.
[01:14:55]  Now, the cause of the day at this Sheraton meeting was the repeal of the 14th Amendment, which made black people equal citizens with equal protection under the law.
[01:15:04]  At the meeting, one white supremacist attendee recalled von Brownhutt as a guy who didn't want too much exposure.
[01:15:11]  He was kind of a mysterious guy.
[01:15:13]  He made his statement in favor of the separation of races, and he got out.
[01:15:18]  Keep them apart.
[01:15:19]  I gotta go later in 1985.
[01:15:25]  Von Brownhutt wound up in legal proceedings again, this time as part of the indictment of an Ohio Klansman, Grand Dragon Paul R. Reuch, who was charged with violating federal gun laws.
[01:15:36]  Von Braunhut was not actually charged in this for reasons I can't explain, but he was accused of giving Reuch $11,954 of sea monkey money, which Reutsch used to purchase 83 semi-automatic pistols and rifles.
[01:15:55]  I like that he probably shipped them the same way he did the crabs.
[01:16:00]  He just knocked on a door and ran.
[01:16:04]  It said four pistols, is what it says.
[01:16:11]  According to the Washington Post, quote, Assistant U.S. attorney Thomas M. Bauer, who prosecuted Reuts, said the defendant and von Braunhut were friends.
[01:16:20]  He said von Braunhut was prepared to testify at the trial that he had lent Reutsch the money for the purchase and then took possession of the guns to secure the loan.
[01:16:27]  The trial was called off after Reutsch pleaded guilty to one count of illegally transporting firearms across state lines.
[01:16:33]  Von Braunhut was very cooperative and pleasant with us, Bauer said.
[01:16:37]  He brought some of his toys along, including the sea monkeys.
[01:16:41]  Why wouldn't you?
[01:16:44]  Check them out.
[01:16:47]  This guy bought $12,000 in guns for a Nazi.
[01:16:51]  But look at these little guys.
[01:16:54]  They'll dance if you poke them.
[01:16:57]  Amazing.
[01:16:58]  You want to see ladies' panties?
[01:17:02]  Again, that was the assistant U.S. attorney.
[01:17:08]  By 1988, Harold Von Brownhutt was well the fuck into his support of the American fascist movement.
[01:17:14]  88?
[01:17:15]  88?
[01:17:16]  Still going.
[01:17:17]  Still going strong, man.
[01:17:19]  Now, that year, his homie, Richard Butler, wound up dealing with a lawsuit as a result of the fact that he headed up a violent hate movement that murdered people.
[01:17:26]  The sea monkey inventor decided to help his friend by dedicating a chunk of the profits from the sale of his Kyoga agent M5 telescoping baton to Butler's legal defense.
[01:17:36]  In a newspaper to his followers, Butler noted that the manufacturer has made a pledge of $25 to my defense fund for each one sold to Aryan Nation supporters.
[01:17:46]  He advises people to write AN in small letters in the order form in order to ensure the funds were properly located.
[01:17:52]  So that's good, right?
[01:17:53]  It's nice helping a buddy out.
[01:17:56]  Hey, man, hey, you know I don't like asking for favors.
[01:18:02]  But you know how I'm trying to start a race war.
[01:18:09]  People are riled up at me about that.
[01:18:13]  Government.
[01:18:14]  Government.
[01:18:15]  Could I have some of that money you have?
[01:18:19]  The beating money.
[01:18:22]  And the monkey money.
[01:18:23]  I'll take some.
[01:18:25]  I ain't above taking the monkey money, I'll be honest.
[01:18:30]  In the brochure, Butler called the Kyoga a fine article for self-protection.
[01:18:34]  And all whites are going to need all the protection they can get in the near future.
[01:18:39]  Yeah, they are.
[01:18:41]  That same year, Harold von Brownhutt conducted an interview with the Seattle Times where I guess to his credit, he spoke honestly about his racist beliefs.
[01:18:49]  He described his hatred of inscrutable, slanty Korean eyes and said, you know what side I'm on.
[01:18:55]  I don't make any bones about it.
[01:18:57]  Fucking didn't.
[01:18:58]  He did not make any bones about it.
[01:18:59]  He doesn't make any goddamn bones about it.
[01:19:01]  You can't sell bones.
[01:19:04]  You can't sell bones to children.
[01:19:05]  They won't buy them.
[01:19:08]  You sell them pre-bones.
[01:19:09]  You sell them bones, it'll grow.
[01:19:14]  Now, as you might expect, the fact that the inventor of x-ray specs and sea monkeys was buying arms and fundraising for literal neo-Nazis did not escape the notice of the mainstream press.
[01:19:24]  The Washington Post, who in that day cared a little bit more about cantering fascism, put together an utterly damning article about the toy inventor's Nazi connections.

=== Harold Was Jewish (03:22) ===

[01:19:33]  But that was not the most damning aspect of their coverage of Harold's life.
[01:19:37]  To his eternal shame, the Post revealed for the very first time that Harold von Braunhood was Jewish.
[01:19:47]  Yeah.
[01:19:48]  Ain't that fucked up?
[01:19:50]  Yeah, it's fucking wild, right?
[01:19:54]  Now, there are a wide variety of things you would not want to be as a Nazi, but Jewish is probably top of the list.
[01:20:04]  Yeah, hard to pick a one above that.
[01:20:08]  It is tough.
[01:20:10]  I can't really think of anything.
[01:20:14]  Now, the Washington Post coverage first revealed the truth behind Harold's parentage and ethnicity.
[01:20:20]  It also included an interview with Erwin Swall, a director for the Anti-Defamation League, who said, We've long been monitoring Harold von Brownhood.
[01:20:27]  He's linked to some of the most extreme racist and anti-Semitic organizations in the country.
[01:20:31]  He has a reputation of being a generous contributor.
[01:20:36]  So, that's cool.
[01:20:38]  And we're going to talk about.
[01:20:39]  Do you think he was a generous contributor because he feels guilty?
[01:20:44]  He's like, oh, you guys, once you find out something, you're going to be so mad at me.
[01:20:48]  I think he was buying his way into the cool kids' clubs.
[01:20:52]  Oh, man.
[01:20:53]  When this comes out, you guys are.
[01:20:56]  You're going to hate me, really.
[01:20:58]  I know for a fact you're going to hate me.
[01:21:00]  Remember me for the weapons I bought.
[01:21:04]  And not for the religion of my parents.
[01:21:06]  No.
[01:21:08]  You're going to hear something.
[01:21:12]  Think about it.
[01:21:14]  Now, we're going to hear how this all shook out once the news broke.
[01:21:18]  But you know what we've got to shake right now?
[01:21:21]  We're going to hit some fucking bagels and some fucking knives.
[01:21:24]  What if I just pulled my dick out?
[01:21:27]  You're wrong.
[01:21:28]  It's about to get weird as hell.
[01:21:31]  It's Portland.
[01:21:32]  Everybody's just going to be like, finally, and they just take their clothes off.
[01:21:38]  I thought this was an orgy.
[01:21:39]  They just been talking for two hours.
[01:21:41]  This stage is normally dicks from left to right.
[01:21:43]  Yeah.
[01:21:46]  Now.
[01:21:48]  No, you don't tell us how to live.
[01:21:50]  That's obscene.
[01:21:51]  That is obscene.
[01:21:54]  You throw packaged bagels like a decent Christian.
[01:21:57]  Yes.
[01:21:59]  Okay.
[01:22:03]  All right.
[01:22:03]  All right.
[01:22:04]  These are the pumpkin spice ones.
[01:22:05]  Well, no, but how are you going to serve back if you don't have a machete in your hand?
[01:22:08]  What if I do it well?
[01:22:09]  You're not going to.
[01:22:12]  We've done this enough.
[01:22:13]  I know what's going to happen.
[01:22:15]  Yeah.
[01:22:16]  Nobody's good at this game.
[01:22:17]  No, this is not a.
[01:22:19]  Yeah.
[01:22:20]  Oh.
[01:22:20]  Oh, see, that one went into the crowd.
[01:22:23]  Grab another, or I'll grab another.
[01:22:25]  Okay.
[01:22:26]  You can keep those.
[01:22:28]  I don't want them.
[01:22:30]  I don't like that pumpkin spice.
[01:22:32]  Don't.
[01:22:32]  Okay, here we go, Ann Shannon.
[01:22:34]  The way you throw it a little.
[01:22:38]  He's not a pitcher.
[01:22:40]  He's not a pitcher.
[01:22:41]  There's equipment.
[01:22:46]  Also, it looks dirty, but you know stuff.
[01:22:49]  Well, I mean, someone's got to be angry at me every time we do this.
[01:22:52]  And since Sophie's not here, it's your job to be frustrated.

=== Super Fucking Racist (16:26) ===

[01:22:56]  It is.
[01:22:56]  It comes natural.
[01:22:57]  You have a.
[01:22:58]  Thank you.
[01:22:58]  Thank you.
[01:23:00]  Is that a stool?
[01:23:02]  No.
[01:23:02]  That's not it.
[01:23:03]  I don't know where the fuck they went, dude.
[01:23:05]  I don't know either.
[01:23:06]  Like, I don't think about where things go.
[01:23:08]  Oh, there's a hole under there.
[01:23:10]  Okay, thank you.
[01:23:11]  Or hit them.
[01:23:12]  You're a roadie?
[01:23:13]  You came out of nowhere.
[01:23:14]  That was awesome.
[01:23:15]  All right.
[01:23:15]  He's wearing a black shirt, and he's just like, here, I gotta go.
[01:23:19]  And do this like, what's a baseball guy?
[01:23:22]  Mickey Man.
[01:23:22]  Baseball guy.
[01:23:23]  I'm gonna Mickey Mammoth.
[01:23:24]  You say Jose Conseco.
[01:23:26]  You've done more drugs than him.
[01:23:28]  That's a fit guy.
[01:23:29]  Barely.
[01:23:31]  Oh!
[01:23:35]  Yes.
[01:23:38]  That was cool.
[01:23:39]  I gotta say, that is by far the best that's ever gone.
[01:23:43]  Yeah, that was cool.
[01:23:45]  We've hit a lot of bagels on this podcast.
[01:23:47]  It's never that cool.
[01:23:48]  It's never worked.
[01:23:49]  It's always like, oh, that was a letdown.
[01:23:52]  That time it was like, we did it.
[01:23:54]  Like, 80% of the shtick is that it's never very good.
[01:23:58]  Like, it's always a big bummer that we build up for hours.
[01:24:01]  That was actually cool.
[01:24:02]  That was cool.
[01:24:03]  Yeah.
[01:24:04]  Glad that happened on the live show.
[01:24:07]  I bet it didn't get recorded.
[01:24:09]  No, under no way.
[01:24:10]  No way, no way, no.
[01:24:12]  This is a beautiful memory that no one else will share.
[01:24:16]  So.
[01:24:18]  Back to the Nazis.
[01:24:23]  While the Kyoga Baton fundraiser is what first drew mainstream attention to Harold, the reality is that he was almost certainly funneling tens of thousands of dollars, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, of his sea monkey profits into the Aryan nations for years.
[01:24:38]  This continued throughout the 1980s and up until at least 1995.
[01:24:43]  If you paid for sea monkeys or any of Harold's other inventions up to this point, you may have contributed to the growth of the Aryan nations.
[01:24:50]  Isn't the world?
[01:24:51]  Or other AKK groups?
[01:24:52]  You might have bought those $12,000 of Klan guns.
[01:24:55]  There's no way to know.
[01:24:56]  Isn't the world awesome?
[01:24:58]  It's great.
[01:24:59]  Nobody would have guessed that.
[01:25:01]  If everyone's thinking of...
[01:25:03]  Yeah, well, yeah, exactly.
[01:25:05]  But that, you guess.
[01:25:05]  You guess that.
[01:25:06]  You're like, oh, yeah, I'm paying for bombs to be dropped on random people.
[01:25:09]  You never guessed the money I spent on those sea monkeys.
[01:25:11]  Bought Nazi machine guns.
[01:25:14]  Nobody calls that shit.
[01:25:17]  Yeah.
[01:25:20]  Where'd you get that toy?
[01:25:24]  Oh, that's Nazi toys.
[01:25:26]  Yeah.
[01:25:29]  Out in the woods somewhere.
[01:25:30]  There's some hippie guy who was just like, all I'm buying is x-ray specs and sea monkeys.
[01:25:34]  And that's going to keep me pure.
[01:25:36]  Poor son of a bitch.
[01:25:40]  Now.
[01:25:41]  It's the only two things I really believe in in this world.
[01:25:50]  Now, when Richard Butler, head of the Aryan Nations, was questioned about one of his major backers being potentially Jewish and thus a direct descendant of the devil according to his theology.
[01:26:02]  Now, we have a question.
[01:26:06]  Mr. Butler, how do you quickly feel inside?
[01:26:14]  He cited Von Brownhutt as a close friend and a member of the Aryan race who has supported us quite a few years.
[01:26:22]  So that's interesting.
[01:26:25]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:26:26]  Yeah.
[01:26:26]  And then he said something dumb, like something crazy, like, and if he was Jewish, I could have smelled it.
[01:26:34]  We basically wind up there at the end.
[01:26:36]  That's what I think.
[01:26:36]  It's always something.
[01:26:37]  Yeah, where it's always something like I could see his horns if he you know you're just like what so the lesson here is that you can kind of buy your way into being a Nazi Yeah, yeah, it works apparently.
[01:26:49]  Yeah, they're not good people.
[01:26:50]  They're not they're not they're not ideologically consistent people They're not as consistent as you would have them as they would have you believe yeah So I guess say what you will about the tenets of national socialism.
[01:27:01]  It's not always an ethos like when enough money comes onto the table people, It's just more.
[01:27:07]  I just want to hit stuff.
[01:27:11]  So now, in that article on Harold Von Braunhut, the Washington POST pointed out that he was far from the only Jewish man to ever go full Nazi quote in 1965.
[01:27:21]  The NEW YORK Times, tough spot to be in.
[01:27:24]  It's a rough one, man.
[01:27:25]  It's a tough with this.
[01:27:26]  Like hear me out, I ain't the first motherfucker to do this.
[01:27:31]  This has been going on.
[01:27:33]  You're like, ah, you don't want to be in that position?
[01:27:35]  I don't think.
[01:27:37]  In 1965, the NEW YORK Times disclosed the Jewish identity of Daniel Burrows, a high-ranking Klansman and former American NAZI Party member, who then shot himself to death.
[01:27:46]  In 1978, Chicago Nazis rallied under the leadership of Frank Collin, the son of a Jewish concentration camp survivor.
[01:27:52]  His family name had been Cohen.
[01:27:54]  I know, fucking wild right, like what do you even say to that shit?
[01:27:57]  It's fucking crazy.
[01:27:58]  Yeah, but my dad was a dick when I was a teenager.
[01:28:03]  Sometimes I had to be home at 1030 and I was like, fuck this guy.
[01:28:08]  I rebelled.
[01:28:11]  Now, it's probably worth noting, could have tried to fight him or something I don't know.
[01:28:17]  You took it so far, dude.
[01:28:22]  It's worth mentioning that Milo Iiannopoulos, a prominent fascist who has a lengthy, documented history of conspiring with Neo-Nazis to push propaganda, often defends himself from allegations of being a Nazi by pointing out that he is gay and Jewish.
[01:28:37]  And, as confusing as this seems, neither of those factors precludes one from being a Nazi.
[01:28:43]  Anyone can be a Nazi.
[01:28:44]  That's the beauty.
[01:28:45]  Beauty's the wrong word, but that's Nazism.
[01:28:50]  You just have to have Nazi in your heart.
[01:28:52]  You got it in your heart, yeah.
[01:28:55]  Are you hateful for no reason?
[01:28:58]  Or you wake up in the morning like there's a lot of hate in here.
[01:29:03]  We got a.
[01:29:03]  We got a spot for you.
[01:29:05]  Are you pissed and like flags?
[01:29:10]  We got a thing for you to be.
[01:29:13]  Come on down to the flea market now.
[01:29:19]  Uh, in 1983, Harold Von Braunhut became ordained, on the advice of a friend, in what he called a small, ancient church without a local congregation.
[01:29:28]  He described himself as a priest at large.
[01:29:32]  Yeah yeah, there's a lot of those still just that large right now.
[01:29:39]  I don't know what kind of church this was.
[01:29:41]  I'm guessing either some weird Christian identity congregation or maybe like some weird, like he said, ancient pagan thing, like it's hard to say ancient right, ancient.
[01:29:50]  It's like they found a building in the woods.
[01:29:52]  This was an ancient church.
[01:29:53]  And he's like, and I am the preacher here.
[01:29:59]  What we do know for sure is that years before the Washington Post article, the anti-defamation league had caught wind of rumors about von Braunhoot's Jewish ancestry.
[01:30:08]  It had been a topic of discussion and suspicion among the far right, largely due to his prominent nose.
[01:30:13]  But, according, that's the Nazis talking.
[01:30:17]  That's the Nazis talking.
[01:30:18]  Robert.
[01:30:21]  According to a representative of the ADL, they felt he was a solid, dependable, extreme right-winger, regardless.
[01:30:28]  That he was one of them and can be trusted.
[01:30:30]  Because all the money he's well, he gives us money.
[01:30:33]  He gives us money.
[01:30:35]  We need guns.
[01:30:36]  None of us can work jobs with swastikas in the face.
[01:30:45]  He says the felonies, but I have a feeling it's all the face swastikas is what's getting us not hired.
[01:30:54]  Now, it does seem to be true that whatever his ancestry, Harold von Braunhood was a committed Nazi, as committed a Nazi as any who ever goose-stepped across the pages of history.
[01:31:06]  And he had continued to attend the Area Nations gatherings on at least a yearly basis throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s.
[01:31:13]  He was a featured speaker on several occasions.
[01:31:16]  More than once, the inventor of sea monkeys lit the burning cross that signified the height of festivities.
[01:31:26]  Floyd Cochran, an Area Nation spokesman until he reformed in the early 90s, described Brownhood as having he said he had a big nose, and that he'd give and that this is the fun part.
[01:31:36]  He'd give long speeches about numerology and he'd make references to the pyramids.
[01:31:40]  It just didn't play very well.
[01:31:42]  So it was not his personality that made him popular with the Nazis.
[01:31:46]  He's weird.
[01:31:48]  He talks to the pyramids all day.
[01:31:49]  Yeah, even the woods people are like, ah, I got it.
[01:31:52]  I mean.
[01:31:53]  I mean, he was from Memphis.
[01:31:54]  He gave us money, but he's weird, man.
[01:31:57]  He's always talking about like 33.
[01:31:59]  Have you seen that?
[01:32:00]  Have you seen that Jim Carrey movie?
[01:32:02]  23?
[01:32:05]  Now, Harold also started a racist think tank.
[01:32:08]  The National Anti-Zionist Institute.
[01:32:11]  That's just, that sounds like an oxymoron.
[01:32:13]  It does.
[01:32:14]  It's like a racist think tank.
[01:32:16]  What do you think?
[01:32:16]  Hey?
[01:32:17]  Yeah.
[01:32:19]  Thinking mad right now.
[01:32:20]  That's what I'm thinking.
[01:32:22]  You won't get him?
[01:32:23]  That's what I'm thinking.
[01:32:24]  Get him.
[01:32:26]  So he started the National Anti-Zionist Institute in the late 1980s.
[01:32:30]  There he authored a regular newsletter under the pseudonym Hendrik von Braun, which was barely a pseudonym.
[01:32:36]  Like, not even really a pseudonym.
[01:32:39]  It's like me calling myself Rob Evans and like being like, nobody's going to fucking put this caper together.
[01:32:47]  Yeah.
[01:32:53]  There's so many machetes here.
[01:32:56]  And you call me the Biden name?
[01:33:00]  Are my eyes filled with blood?
[01:33:03]  Because my dentures are in.
[01:33:04]  I can feel that part.
[01:33:08]  Now, I'm going to quote the Washington Post again, writing about Hendrik von Braun.
[01:33:12]  Great pseudonym.
[01:33:14]  In the world of jewels and precious metals, only that which is pure, rare, and unalloyed is of the highest value, begins a newsletter dated 1993.
[01:33:22]  For a full two pages, readers are urged to unite against Wogs and mud people, even if that means giving up their own lives.
[01:33:29]  No one, except Jesus Christ himself, has ever managed to live forever, von Braun writes.
[01:33:34]  Even if you could, what a bore it would be to hang around for a few hundred years, not doing much of anything except watching the racial slur, make basketballs and sneakers out of racial slur for Jewish people's skins.
[01:33:48]  Now, it's super fucking racist.
[01:33:51]  This is the Sea Monkeys guy.
[01:33:52]  He's amped it up.
[01:33:53]  Yeah.
[01:33:54]  He's amped up the...
[01:33:55]  He's amped it up.
[01:33:57]  The address.
[01:33:58]  The address for this newsletter was P.O. Box809 Bryans Road, Maryland.
[01:34:04]  And if any of you sent off for Sea Monkeys, that's the same address you mapped your money to.
[01:34:12]  Hey.
[01:34:13]  Hey, you don't keep a bunch of money opening a bunch of P.O. boxes everywhere.
[01:34:22]  No, you pick one.
[01:34:24]  You pick one and you keep it.
[01:34:25]  For the Nazi stuff, I keep it rich.
[01:34:28]  And the liar shrimp.
[01:34:37]  So at this point.
[01:34:38]  You ever get him confused?
[01:34:42]  I sent that kid a swastika flag.
[01:34:53]  Oh, God.
[01:34:54]  If some kid had just ordered it himself and his dad got it and it's addressed to him.
[01:34:58]  Son, did you buy a Lucre?
[01:35:00]  Did you?
[01:35:03]  Did you buy a swastika flag?
[01:35:07]  Put it in water.
[01:35:08]  It's supposed to turn into a monkey, dad.
[01:35:16]  Holy shit.
[01:35:17]  That's amazing.
[01:35:18]  This is a world we all live in.
[01:35:20]  All of us.
[01:35:21]  It's crazy.
[01:35:21]  It's in this world.
[01:35:23]  Now, at this point, I wonder what some of you are wondering, at least.
[01:35:26]  Did being exposed as a Nazi harm Harold's career as a toy salesman in any way?
[01:35:35]  The answer is slightly.
[01:35:38]  But not all that much.
[01:35:39]  Not as much as you'd think.
[01:35:40]  Not as much as you'd think for buying arms for terrorists.
[01:35:45]  In 1994, Von Braunhut sold the marketing rights to sea monkeys to a new company, Basic Fun.
[01:35:52]  ISIS.
[01:35:54]  No, no, no.
[01:35:55]  By the way, that's the Hobby Lobby podcast.
[01:35:58]  And that's going to be a good one, too.
[01:36:08]  So the president of Basic Fun, Alan Dorfman, questioned Von Braunhut about the rumors of his Nazi past.
[01:36:16]  Harold assured him these were all lies made up by a neighbor with whom he was fighting a property dispute.
[01:36:25]  God, he's great.
[01:36:27]  I mean, he's a terrible human being, obviously, but also, like, some of his lies are pretty fun.
[01:36:32]  We're just fighting over Pedro Lynn.
[01:36:34]  It's a funny lie.
[01:36:35]  Like, look, there's an apple tree we're fighting over.
[01:36:39]  So he told a bunch of neo-Nazis I was a Jew.
[01:36:43]  And I was like, dude.
[01:36:46]  Not cool.
[01:36:50]  But we're letting a judge decide about that tree.
[01:36:54]  Shortly after the sale of sea monkeys to basic fun, Harold attended the July 1995 Aryan Nations Congress as a featured speaker.
[01:37:03]  He went on stage right after Richard Butler called Jewish people the bacillus of decomposition in our society.
[01:37:09]  Also speaking that day was Louis Beam, a KKK leader, the inventor of the term leaderless resistance and one of the top minds behind white supremacist terrorism in the last half century.
[01:37:20]  Piece of shit.
[01:37:22]  That's what top minds of Aryan Nation means.
[01:37:25]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:37:27]  Katya Lane was in attendance as well.
[01:37:29]  She's the wife of jailed order member David Lane, the man who coined the 14 words, which you'll see tattooed on some hands if you wind up at a protest in this town.
[01:37:39]  Cool.
[01:37:40]  One side.
[01:37:41]  One sound.
[01:37:42]  There you go.
[01:37:43]  Why doesn't why doesn't why didn't Fred Armison do sketches about that part?
[01:37:52]  They missed that aspect, though.
[01:37:53]  They're like, uh, Portland's adorable, like some of it.
[01:37:57]  Yeah.
[01:37:59]  They could have added that to the put a bird on it sketch, but it's one of those Nazi eagles on a guy's back.
[01:38:07]  That's so good.
[01:38:16]  Yeah.
[01:38:16]  Someone's just like, I have the needle thread.
[01:38:18]  I have it.
[01:38:20]  I have the skills.
[01:38:21]  I'm in the co-op.
[01:38:24]  Now, Dorfman found out about this, his visit to the Aryan nations.
[01:38:28]  And being Jewish himself, Dorfman immediately ended the professional relationship between Von Braunhook and Basic Fun.
[01:38:35]  But this was not the end of Sea Monkeys.
[01:38:37]  A new generation of parents who'd grown up with Sea Monkey Kits in the 70s were now raising young children.
[01:38:42]  There was money to be made in rebranding the living animal male order toy sensation and cashing in on nostalgia.
[01:38:48]  Before long, Harold found another company to market his monkeys, one that did not care about his Nazi past and present.
[01:38:56]  In November 1995, he signed a new contract with Educational Insights.
[01:39:00]  Their plan was to rebrand Sea Monkeys to capture the attention of 90s kids.
[01:39:05]  Rather than portraying them as chubby, chimpanzee-looking sea critters, Educational Insights hired illustrators to draw muscular, superhero-looking sea monkeys that could appeal to the extreme kids of the mid-1990s.
[01:39:17]  My sea monkeys fuck.

=== Rebranding For Nostalgia (13:22) ===

[01:39:22]  They're not starting families, they're just fucking.
[01:39:26]  But they only fuck within their race.
[01:39:29]  That's fucking kids.
[01:39:30]  Sea monkeys.
[01:39:31]  They're not heathens.
[01:39:34]  Now, the most significant change was that sea monkeys would no longer be illustrated as naked.
[01:39:40]  As one company executive told the LA Times, I'm fucking, you got to hear this.
[01:39:45]  Having been involved in the marketing to kids, you don't want to introduce that as an area of controversy.
[01:39:54]  We'll fucking Nazism, but not nudism.
[01:39:57]  But don't show them penises.
[01:39:59]  Don't show them penises.
[01:40:00]  They have those.
[01:40:03]  They don't need to see them.
[01:40:04]  No.
[01:40:05]  They already have.
[01:40:05]  Oh, he's buying arms for the Klan?
[01:40:07]  Well, that's his private business.
[01:40:08]  That is.
[01:40:09]  But if there's a nipple on one of those fake monkeys.
[01:40:15]  That really is America in a goddamn nutshell.
[01:40:21]  He's like, hey, hey, move that naked lady and get him a gun.
[01:40:26]  Give him a gun.
[01:40:27]  Put a swastika right on that pectoral right over the nipple.
[01:40:33]  Now, one month after inking a deal with Educational Insights, Harold Von Braunhut officiated the funeral of Betty Butler.
[01:40:42]  Richard Butler's wife, a reporter with the Los Angeles Times, actually spent a significant amount of time digging into this story.
[01:40:48]  And I'm going to quote from him now.
[01:40:50]  The specter of sea monkey dollars funding hate groups seems to be less controversial.
[01:40:54]  When I broach this topic with Fine and Atamian, two of the guys who worked at Educational Insights, Atamian confirms that all the higher-ups at Educational Insights know about Von Braunhut's past.
[01:41:04]  He says that everyone in the toy industry knows about him, that people had sent them the articles, but that the sea monkey shouldn't be tainted by their inventor.
[01:41:11]  Is this any different from the U.S. government having normal relations with Germany three, four, five, six years after World War II?
[01:41:18]  It's really different.
[01:41:19]  It is because that made laws.
[01:41:20]  Because they killed those guys.
[01:41:23]  And then they said, hey, we're not.
[01:41:25]  You can't do that anymore.
[01:41:27]  And then we were like, okay, cool.
[01:41:29]  That's cool that you guys realize that was bad.
[01:41:31]  I hate to say.
[01:41:33]  Hey, you guys have some guys in your country that are doing what we used to do.
[01:41:40]  The quote goes on.
[01:41:43]  We're doing business with him on a business basis with a wonderful product called Sea Monkeys, and we don't see where it's relevant.
[01:41:50]  I've never seen evidence of his alleged past behavior.
[01:41:53]  Says fine.
[01:41:55]  This has absolutely nothing to do with Harold as a person.
[01:41:57]  It's more to do with who Sea Monkeys are and what they can mean in terms of fun and fantasy for kids and adults of all ages.
[01:42:04]  Oh, cool.
[01:42:05]  So I'm just talking to a sociopath.
[01:42:06]  Okay, I gotta go.
[01:42:07]  Another member of the Educational Insights team agreed.
[01:42:11]  This one's great.
[01:42:12]  Do you listen to Wagner?
[01:42:16]  The Israelis wouldn't listen to his music for all those years, but now they do.
[01:42:26]  If your response is closing.
[01:42:30]  Yeah.
[01:42:31]  If your response to a question about funding Nazi hate groups starts with, do you listen to Wagner?
[01:42:38]  You're going in the wrong direction.
[01:42:41]  Hear me out.
[01:42:45]  Now, that's all I got.
[01:42:49]  The article I just quoted from was written in 2000.
[01:42:52]  For most of the rest of his life, Harold would.
[01:42:55]  2000.
[01:42:55]  2000.
[01:42:57]  Come on.
[01:42:58]  Yeah.
[01:42:59]  For the most of the rest of his life, Harold.
[01:43:01]  At the end, we're like, and he's here tonight.
[01:43:04]  We're bringing him out.
[01:43:06]  He's just throwing full of sea monkeys.
[01:43:08]  He's like, ah, you guys.
[01:43:11]  Now, they're only $9.95 each, and there is a truck full of Klansmen who need guns, so please give generous.
[01:43:18]  This is sad clownsman.
[01:43:26]  Now, for the rest of his life, after the 2000, or after 2000, Harold von Brownhood would clam up and refuse to answer when pressed about his Nazi connections and the undefined but significant amount of money he poured into funding American fascism.
[01:43:40]  He told the LA Times, I don't have to defend myself to you or anyone else.
[01:43:45]  I'm hanging up.
[01:43:46]  In an earlier interview with the Seattle Times.
[01:43:48]  You don't have to tell people you're hanging up.
[01:43:51]  You just do it.
[01:43:52]  You just do it.
[01:43:52]  They got it.
[01:43:54]  In an earlier interview with the Seattle Times, he gave a longer answer.
[01:43:58]  I love the United States.
[01:43:59]  I support the Constitution.
[01:44:01]  I'm a very viable individual.
[01:44:03]  I'm not sinister at all.
[01:44:08]  That's fucking awesome.
[01:44:11]  You're in a good spot in your life when you're like, I'm not sinister at all.
[01:44:16]  You're like, nah.
[01:44:18]  What'd you do?
[01:44:21]  Nothing.
[01:44:22]  I'm hanging up now.
[01:44:26]  I mean, we're all laughing at that, but our president ended a letter yesterday with, I'll call you later.
[01:44:34]  I'll call you later is what that motherfucker said.
[01:44:37]  What's wild is that in 300 years, when kids are like reading the condensed textbooks of this period, which will still suck like textbooks today, they're going to read oranges and you're like, we took a bad turn.
[01:44:49]  They're going to read about that letter three paragraphs down from their read about Congress talking about boofing.
[01:44:56]  Like that's going to be the same fucking page.
[01:44:59]  Like fucking wild.
[01:45:01]  And at the end, it'll say, and Putin died of laughing.
[01:45:07]  And then the teacher will say, put up your books.
[01:45:09]  It's time to boof.
[01:45:11]  That's in the future.
[01:45:16]  Now, Harold von Brownhoe spent his last years running a wildlife conservatory on his own land in Maryland.
[01:45:22]  He had a great love of animals.
[01:45:23]  And reporters who visited him during this time reported that he was very specific.
[01:45:26]  Used Albano ones, though.
[01:45:28]  Yeah, very specific animals.
[01:45:31]  He just liked white tigers and white squirrels.
[01:45:35]  He liked cats, but not most of them.
[01:45:44]  Reporters who visited him during this time reported that he was very careful to make sure he did not feed his geese any bread that might contain mold.
[01:45:51]  He really cared.
[01:45:52]  He's a nice guy.
[01:45:53]  He's a nice guy.
[01:45:54]  When the Maryland Independent interviewed him and asked about his past, he told them, I'm not burning any crosses on my front lawn.
[01:46:00]  I'm not holding any secret black eagle meetings or racial meetings or KKK rallies.
[01:46:05]  I'm not bringing any ideology to the area.
[01:46:08]  That's fine.
[01:46:08]  That's fine.
[01:46:09]  I wanted to move on.
[01:46:10]  We all want to move on.
[01:46:11]  I have stuff I want to move on from.
[01:46:13]  Let's move on from that.
[01:46:14]  Now, Harold's last bout of public activism was in opposing the Riviera Development Project, which was a project to develop a Riviera near him, obviously, I assume.
[01:46:25]  On the grounds that it would harm wildlife and the natural environment in his adopted home, he became the committee spokesman of Sward, which is an acronym that stands for Save Wildlife, Oppose Riviera Development.
[01:46:37]  Not a bad acronym.
[01:46:38]  You gotta give it a good one.
[01:46:40]  Fine.
[01:46:41]  It's fine.
[01:46:41]  He's good with words.
[01:46:42]  Yeah, he's good with words.
[01:46:43]  He sold those sea monkeys.
[01:46:44]  Yeah.
[01:46:45]  Instant life.
[01:46:46]  Now, even in this ostensibly decent endeavor, he found ways to inject racism, peppering local newspaper ads for Sward with references to the Judas Goat business experts responsible for the project.
[01:47:00]  Subtle.
[01:47:01]  Yeah, subtle.
[01:47:03]  Subtle.
[01:47:04]  And asking his neighbors to join our struggle for God, country, and our American heritage of self-determination.
[01:47:11]  Yeah, nice.
[01:47:13]  Now, I found a fun article near the end of researching this on a little website called National Vanguard.
[01:47:20]  Which do I need to say it's a Nazi website?
[01:47:22]  It's a fucking Nazi website.
[01:47:24]  I thought they reviewed independent music.
[01:47:29]  What do you listen to, Billy?
[01:47:33]  Okay, there's a side story to this.
[01:47:36]  I opened for Sturgil Simpson a couple years ago, and we went through Spokane and about I didn't know.
[01:47:45]  And I do this.
[01:47:48]  I lived in Seattle for six years, so I just like rip Seattle and the Northwest apart about like, you know, like, oh, we're so progressive.
[01:47:55]  I'm like, well, where the fuck is all the black people?
[01:47:58]  And then you go to Tacoma and you're like, oh, there they are.
[01:48:03]  You guys can't do that anymore.
[01:48:04]  You can't just be like, no, no, no, you can't.
[01:48:07]  And that's what I was doing that stuff.
[01:48:08]  And then, like, a month later, Sturgil sent me this thing that his people had sent him.
[01:48:13]  He's like, look at this review.
[01:48:14]  And it was from like a white nationalist website.
[01:48:18]  And the guy was a huge fan of Sturgil's.
[01:48:20]  But when I came out and started doing my jokes, at first he was like, this is my guy because I've got blonde hair and blue eyes.
[01:48:29]  And I have this accent.
[01:48:30]  So he's like, oh, he's been chosen to come here.
[01:48:35]  And then I start saying the shit I say.
[01:48:40]  And the guy was like, what the fuck is this?
[01:48:44]  And he went back and had to re-listen to Sturgil, and he's like, well, that motherfucker ain't who I thought he was either.
[01:48:52]  This made me laugh so hard.
[01:48:54]  This is the best review I've ever gotten.
[01:48:59]  There was a barrage of blasphemy and anti-whiteness.
[01:49:03]  And I was like, he got what I was doing.
[01:49:11]  I'll tweet that review out soon.
[01:49:14]  I get excited to read that.
[01:49:17]  So good.
[01:49:18]  It's well written.
[01:49:19]  He's not it.
[01:49:19]  Oh, that's good.
[01:49:20]  He's educated.
[01:49:21]  He's just misguided.
[01:49:22]  We're about to read a not well-written piece of Nazi literature here.
[01:49:27]  So, as I said, I found a fun article on National Vanguard about Harold, and it gives us some idea of how he was viewed by the neo-Nazis that he didn't give tens of thousands of dollars to.
[01:49:37]  That article cites a quote from a little guy y'all might have heard of, Tom Metzger.
[01:49:42]  Leader, yeah, Tom has a history in this town, and it's not a good one.
[01:49:47]  Leader of a group called White Aryan Resistance, aka War, essentially a murderer, but with a couple of extra steps.
[01:49:55]  Do you think they're a war?
[01:49:57]  Good God.
[01:49:57]  And they're like, hey, we can't sing that.
[01:49:59]  We can't sing that.
[01:49:59]  Yeah, that is not going to go down below.
[01:50:02]  Damn it, but it goes with our things so good.
[01:50:07]  So here's what Tom Metzger had to say about Harold von Braunhut.
[01:50:11]  Harold von Braunhut, a self-made multi-millionaire from Maryland, has been an Aryan nations contributor for years.
[01:50:16]  I met the man at a meeting at Robert Miles's in Michigan.
[01:50:19]  He was wearing a priest's collar when I first met him.
[01:50:22]  He was a small man with decidedly Semitic features.
[01:50:25]  I commented to several people at the time that this individual was a long way from an Aryan.
[01:50:29]  Then a Washington Post story broke a few years later, saying that von Braunhut was a Bar Mitzvah Jew.
[01:50:34]  It was also said that he was the state leader for Aryan Nations.
[01:50:38]  This, of course, puzzled me greatly, especially the way Christian identity hurt.
[01:50:45]  I made my findings known to the Aryan nations, but received, I think his findings were he read the Washington Post article, but received no answer.
[01:50:53]  I then repeated the findings on this update a few years ago.
[01:50:56]  Still no change.
[01:50:57]  It seems von Braunhut was some kind of self-hating Jew, but a steady contributor to AN.
[01:51:01]  Oh well, I had belled the cat, but I heard nothing about it from the identity camp.
[01:51:05]  Today I received an article that was printed in the Los Angeles Times, a thorough and complete history of the activities of Mr. Von Braunhut.
[01:51:12]  The thing that appalled me through and through was one comment made by the writer that Von Braunhut officiated at the funeral of Miss Betty Butler, the devoted wife of Richard Butler.
[01:51:20]  That is very hard to swallow.
[01:51:23]  So that's nice.
[01:51:24]  It bummed out Tom Metzger.
[01:51:26]  Like, what?
[01:51:26]  What do you want?
[01:51:27]  What do you want in a happy ending of this podcast?
[01:51:29]  Tom Metzger's sad.
[01:51:30]  That's as good as it's going to get.
[01:51:35]  Now, well, he looked like a Jew in the paper saying he's a Jew.
[01:51:44]  Speaking of happy ending, Harold von Braunhut stroked out and died in 2003.
[01:51:50]  Yeah, there we go.
[01:51:52]  Fuck him.
[01:51:53]  He's a piece of shit.
[01:51:54]  Yeah.
[01:51:54]  Your clafter just funded more Nazis.
[01:51:58]  He's good.
[01:52:00]  Now, the most his fellow fascists at the National Vanguard were willing to say about him was, apparently Brownhutt's racial beliefs were sincere, and I noticed they didn't give him the Vaughan.
[01:52:10]  That's interesting to me.
[01:52:11]  Now, Harold's longtime wife, Yolanda, sold the rights to sea monkeys after his death to a company called Big Time Toys for several million dollars.
[01:52:20]  They apparently screwed her out of quite a lot of this money, and she sued them in 2013.
[01:52:25]  I'm not going to get into the details of the lawsuit, but it was still ongoing as of 2016.
[01:52:30]  The New York Times wrote an article about the story and pressed Yolanda gently on her husband's years of fascist activism.
[01:52:36]  She insisted that she and her husband never talked about politics.

=== Sincere Racial Beliefs (10:35) ===

[01:52:45]  Listen, he had so much sea monkey money, and he had so much knowledge about sea monkeys.
[01:52:52]  We just didn't have time to talk about anything else.
[01:52:55]  That was all that was going on.
[01:52:57]  And most of the time, I was just trying to get him to take those glasses off because it's like, come on, man, don't.
[01:53:06]  Not all the time.
[01:53:09]  Now, Billy Wayne, normally, around about here, the end of the podcast, we would plug our pluggables.
[01:53:17]  And I suppose we can still do that.
[01:53:18]  But first.
[01:53:19]  I'll be in Portland October 17th.
[01:53:21]  There you go.
[01:53:26]  That's near today.
[01:53:27]  That is soon.
[01:53:28]  That is very close to now.
[01:53:30]  Sold out too late.
[01:53:32]  I feel like before we go, there's two intact bags of bagels, and we should attempt, well, one intact and one.
[01:53:40]  You did good.
[01:53:41]  Partly intact.
[01:53:42]  We should at least try to unintact that one of bagels.
[01:53:45]  Okay.
[01:53:45]  All right, let's do it.
[01:53:50]  Thank you all for coming, by the way.
[01:53:52]  This is.
[01:53:54]  Thank you all for coming.
[01:53:56]  A last-minute idea.
[01:53:59]  We're all in Pool Comment.
[01:54:00]  You guys are like, yeah, we'll be there.
[01:54:02]  Now, what I want to do.
[01:54:03]  And even today, I was like, I don't think they're coming.
[01:54:08]  What I really appreciate about a Portland audience is that y'all are willing to let two strangers brandish large knives at you for two hours.
[01:54:16]  And you're all used to it because this is Portland.
[01:54:19]  And oddly enough, the only illegal thing about all these machetes I brought in here is that I kept them in a bag.
[01:54:26]  If I'd been waving them drunkenly around the street, that's fine.
[01:54:29]  It's Oregon, baby.
[01:54:32]  It's a great thing.
[01:54:32]  It's a weird rule.
[01:54:33]  It's like you can't hide them.
[01:54:35]  You're like, well, what if we hit them and you can't find them?
[01:54:42]  Okay.
[01:54:43]  All right.
[01:54:44]  No, you know what, Billy?
[01:54:45]  I should throw it first.
[01:54:46]  I got to hit the.
[01:54:47]  Get that.
[01:54:48]  Okay.
[01:54:49]  I saw a guy wearing your hat today, Zorro.
[01:54:54]  That's a machete pocket.
[01:54:57]  That's what a robe's made for.
[01:54:58]  Yeah, it is what a robe's made for.
[01:55:00]  All right, Billy.
[01:55:01]  Here we go.
[01:55:01]  Are you ready?
[01:55:03]  Love serving love, probably.
[01:55:05]  Yeah!
[01:55:07]  All right, all right, all right.
[01:55:09]  It feels better to hit it.
[01:55:10]  It does.
[01:55:11]  All right, you did some damage.
[01:55:12]  I'm going to do it one more time.
[01:55:13]  I want to see it.
[01:55:14]  Do it one more time.
[01:55:15]  You know what, Billy?
[01:55:16]  Try the real chopper.
[01:55:17]  Okay.
[01:55:17]  This is the some bitch.
[01:55:18]  This is the CRKT or CKRT.
[01:55:20]  This is one you use to chop deep into wood.
[01:55:22]  It's shitty steel, but it's got a real deep edge.
[01:55:25]  Yeah.
[01:55:26]  It's good for batoning and bagels.
[01:55:28]  Okay.
[01:55:30]  Yeah!
[01:55:32]  That was amazing.
[01:55:36]  I'm so in Portland.
[01:55:37]  Like, this is just a piece of bread.
[01:55:39]  I was like, there's a joint in there.
[01:55:45]  I was like, that's so awesome.
[01:55:47]  Oh, it's just bread.
[01:55:49]  Now, we didn't do any ad plugs for this, but Columbia River Knife Company, or whatever CRKT is, they make a fine bagel slicer.
[01:55:58]  Yeah, they do.
[01:55:58]  It is.
[01:55:59]  And that's slowly.
[01:56:00]  They haven't given me a dime.
[01:56:01]  You all saw it work.
[01:56:03]  Now we know where he's getting this money from.
[01:56:06]  That was aggressive, the way he said that.
[01:56:10]  Billy Wayne.
[01:56:11]  Yes.
[01:56:11]  You got some pluggables to plug?
[01:56:13]  You should do that.
[01:56:14]  Yeah, just by my record.
[01:56:17]  If you Google my name, all that shit comes up.
[01:56:20]  You'll find it.
[01:56:24]  I don't.
[01:56:24]  That's why you don't know who I am because I'm so bad at like I'm good at the comedy part, but the rest of it, I'm like, I don't give a fuck.
[01:56:33]  I like making people laugh and people are like, you should tell people when you're doing it.
[01:56:39]  I'm like, I know, but I don't care.
[01:56:43]  But if you go, I do tell people now because I have kids and they're like, we want to eat.
[01:56:48]  I'm like, so help Billy's greedy kids.
[01:56:54]  I wish that was a joke, and that's how that wasn't what motivated me to market myself.
[01:56:59]  But it really, like, for a long time, I was just like, I just like doing comedy.
[01:57:02]  It's fun.
[01:57:03]  And I have kids, and I'm like, I should tell people I'm doing it.
[01:57:09]  So just Google Billy Wayne Davis.
[01:57:11]  Google Billy Wayne Davis.
[01:57:12]  I'm pretty lazy about it.
[01:57:14]  You know what?
[01:57:15]  Google bomb Billy Wayne Davis Illuminati and just see what happens.
[01:57:20]  See what happens a year or two from now when that percolates.
[01:57:24]  Just Google the shit out of that over and over again.
[01:57:27]  Just keep doing it.
[01:57:27]  I want to get invited to an Illuminati party.
[01:57:31]  They'll be like, hey, people keep thinking you're part of this because we saw Google sends us stuff.
[01:57:37]  Anyway.
[01:57:38]  Come to a meeting, and I'm like, can I bring him a shitty?
[01:57:42]  Jeff Bezos is going to be there.
[01:57:43]  He's got tons of them.
[01:57:45]  They wouldn't let me in.
[01:57:47]  No.
[01:57:48]  Because I would tell.
[01:57:49]  Yeah.
[01:57:51]  Like, I would leave him like, you wouldn't believe who's in it.
[01:57:55]  It's not who you think.
[01:57:57]  Carrot Top.
[01:57:59]  Yeah.
[01:58:00]  He's so much smarter than people give him credit for.
[01:58:04]  Carrot Top did not live.
[01:58:09]  I heard you're like, what do you say?
[01:58:13]  Don't repeat what I said.
[01:58:15]  It was dumb.
[01:58:16]  This is dumb.
[01:58:17]  But I'll be in Salem tomorrow night doing stand-up.
[01:58:19]  Yeah.
[01:58:20]  And then Gene on Saturday, and then I'm coming back up.
[01:58:24]  I'll be in Seattle the November 1st and 2nd on Capitol Hill.
[01:58:28]  I'm going in there and getting the fuck out as fast as I can.
[01:58:32]  This is a negative fucking place up there.
[01:58:35]  People are just saying, meh.
[01:58:38]  So see Billy Wayne Davis in most of those places, but if you venture up into Seattle, if you hate Seattle, you should come to my shows because I just rip it fucking apart.
[01:58:50]  Yeah.
[01:58:51]  Bring your fucking bolt cutters.
[01:58:52]  You are going to need him to get through those streets.
[01:58:57]  The lanyard, I think, is all you need.
[01:59:04]  Anyway, we didn't talk about how to end this.
[01:59:06]  No, this has been the podcast.
[01:59:09]  Oh, I should plug.
[01:59:10]  I have a podcast called Behind the Bastards.
[01:59:16]  If you want to listen to it, you might enjoy it.
[01:59:23]  You, the guy in the Ryu Wallenberg shirt, you might be interested.
[01:59:27]  Yeah, have that bagel.
[01:59:28]  What's that?
[01:59:29]  Oh, that's a joint.
[01:59:31]  Okay.
[01:59:32]  Oh, shit.
[01:59:33]  Yeah.
[01:59:35]  Portland fucking holds it down.
[01:59:37]  Have a bagel.
[01:59:41]  All right.
[01:59:41]  Yeah.
[01:59:42]  All right.
[01:59:43]  All right.
[01:59:43]  This is the fucking episode.
[01:59:45]  Get the fuck out of here.
[01:59:45]  Thank you, guys.
[01:59:47]  Thank you.
[01:59:47]  Thank you.
[01:59:48]  Real quick, real quick.
[01:59:50]  I'm going to have a suitcase just sitting up with my first CD.
[01:59:53]  I just have like a bunch left, and I'm just going to give them away.
[01:59:56]  Yeah.
[01:59:57]  So it's my first record.
[01:59:59]  There's a lot of good jokes.
[02:00:01]  There's some holes that I don't care for, but whatever.
[02:00:03]  You guys are, I'm really proud of it.
[02:00:04]  I listened to it a couple weeks ago and I was like, this isn't bad at all.
[02:00:09]  So it's, and I'm also like 30, 40 pounds heavier than I am now.
[02:00:13]  So you're going to be like, who's this fat fucker?
[02:00:15]  He was fun.
[02:00:16]  That guy was fun as fuck.
[02:00:18]  I got one last thing to say.
[02:00:20]  There's a fellow in the audience named Alan who built the website for thewaroneveryone.com and who without his help, that would have taken like fucking a month and a half more to produce.
[02:00:30]  And I would never have accomplished it as competently.
[02:00:32]  Because the only thing I can do is write 11 pages on shitty people and then drunkenly read them to comedians.
[02:00:39]  So thank you very much.
[02:00:41]  Thank you guys.
[02:00:46]  That's our fucking podcast.
[02:00:47]  We're done.
[02:00:56]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[02:01:05]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[02:01:07]  He is not going to get away with this.
[02:01:09]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[02:01:11]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[02:01:16]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[02:01:17]  Trust me, babe.
[02:01:18]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[02:01:28]  Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
[02:01:33]  Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin.
[02:01:36]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[02:01:39]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[02:01:41]  That's so funny.
[02:01:42]  Share, stay with me each night, each morning.
[02:01:50]  Listen to Nora Jones's Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[02:01:58]  What's up, everyone?
[02:01:59]  I'm Ego Modem.
[02:02:00]  My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
[02:02:04]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[02:02:07]  He goes, just give it a shot.
[02:02:09]  But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[02:02:15]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[02:02:18]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
[02:02:25]  Yeah, it would not be.
[02:02:27]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[02:02:28]  There's a lot of life.
[02:02:30]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[02:02:37]  In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
[02:02:44]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[02:02:48]  I doctored the test once.
[02:02:50]  It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
[02:02:54]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[02:02:57]  Ray Gillespie and Michael Manchini.
[02:02:59]  My mind was blown.
[02:03:00]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[02:03:02]  This is Love Trapped.
[02:03:03]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[02:03:05]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[02:03:09]  Listen to Love Trapped Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[02:03:16]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[02:03:18]  Guaranteed human.