Behind the Bastards - Let's Talk About Thalidomide
Aired: 2021-08-31
Duration: 01:35:11


=== Welcome to Math and Magic (02:21) ===

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=== Global Nazi Medical Experiments (14:45) ===

[00:02:21]  To welcome bastards behind People Bad, About Talk.
[00:02:25]  Evans, Robert, host.
[00:02:28]  Hello.
[00:02:30]  Ah, boy.
[00:02:31]  Sophie, I forgot the order words go into in sentences briefly.
[00:02:36]  That was wonderful.
[00:02:37]  You did.
[00:02:38]  I think people will get the gist of it.
[00:02:39]  I think all you need is to present the proper words and the order.
[00:02:42]  It doesn't really matter.
[00:02:44]  This is like a do-it-yourself podcast.
[00:02:46]  I just, I throw the words at you.
[00:02:48]  You line them up right.
[00:02:50]  Why do you think Yoda is so popular?
[00:02:52]  That's exactly what I was going for, Sophie, is Yoda.
[00:02:55]  And like Yoda, I also train child soldiers.
[00:03:00]  I know.
[00:03:01]  I've met Garrison.
[00:03:03]  Well, their little hands can reach into the hard-to-reach places of a rifle, which makes it a lot easier for them to do maintenance.
[00:03:11]  Look, this isn't a podcast about why child soldiers are such a good idea.
[00:03:14]  This is a podcast about the worst people in all of history.
[00:03:17]  And today, my guess is Francesca Furantini.
[00:03:23]  Yeah.
[00:03:23]  Did I get it right?
[00:03:24]  Yeah.
[00:03:25]  Francesca, I was on your show, which is, which has both a pod and a video component.
[00:03:30]  Yes, and I apologize for that.
[00:03:33]  I like forced you to turn on your camera.
[00:03:35]  But yeah, Robert.
[00:03:38]  It was rough, you know, actually seeing your face.
[00:03:41]  I don't people, I don't know if people are ready for just how like Disney Prince handsome you are.
[00:03:49]  That's a very nice way to say perpetually hungover.
[00:03:54]  So thank you.
[00:03:55]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:03:56]  Like a, you know, in a punk rock like Disney Prince, but punk rock.
[00:04:00]  Um yeah, that was the Bituation ROOM podcast.
[00:04:03]  Everyone should check that out, and Robert was great.
[00:04:05]  It was radio.
[00:04:06]  It was a great podcast.
[00:04:07]  I had a lot of fun on it.
[00:04:09]  Um, and today we're gonna be bituationing about.
[00:04:13]  Well, something else I want to keep.
[00:04:14]  I want to actually keep the the, the exact topic of today's podcast, a secret until the big reveal, because it's gonna be, it's gonna be a good time.
[00:04:23]  Um Francesca, how do you feel about babies?
[00:04:28]  I feel like i've been asking that a lot.
[00:04:31]  I don't know, I don't like where this is going already.
[00:04:34]  All right, all right, let me ask an easier question.
[00:04:36]  How do you feel about Nazis?
[00:04:37]  Oh bad, there you go.
[00:04:39]  Uh, Nazis are bad Nazi doctors.
[00:04:42]  Oh, you know, just cutting edge, maybe a little too much.
[00:04:47]  So yeah, definitely too much cutting, that's fair to say, about Nazi doctors.
[00:04:51]  Um, this is a fun one, because we're talking about Nazi doctors, but the most of what we're talking about occurs in, like the 1960s.
[00:04:59]  So oh, you're gonna, you're gonna have a good time with this one.
[00:05:04]  You're gonna have a really good time with it's almost like they're.
[00:05:07]  They never suffered the full consequences of their crimes against humanity and are able to scatter throughout the world and keep on genociding slowly.
[00:05:18]  That is a big aspect of what we're talking about here now.
[00:05:21]  I mean, I guess you and most of our listeners are broadly familiar with the story of a doctor named Joseph Mengele uh, who was uh, one of the worst, maybe the worst doctor there's ever been.
[00:05:31]  He was the chief physician at Birkenau, which was a subcamp of Auschwitz.
[00:05:35]  Uh, and Mengele carried out selections, which meant he it was part one of his jobs.
[00:05:39]  He was one of a number of doctors who would determine who would go on to do labor at the camp and who would be killed immediately.
[00:05:45]  Um, and he liked doing selections because he also got to pick out people who he thought would be most useful for the medical experiments that he was carrying out, and that mostly meant picking out twins.
[00:05:54]  He had a whole thing for twins.
[00:05:56]  It is weird um, we would talk about Mangela one of these days.
[00:06:00]  This is like a, a grim singled out.
[00:06:03]  Remember that show from the Oh Jesus No yes, like you thought about twins um, I mean, in some instances they did throw twins on there.
[00:06:11]  It was more of a dating game, which I know that that Auschwitz was not about.
[00:06:15]  So no no also unfortunately, if they had just sort of reconfigured it to be about life and love and not, you know death um, you know maybe um, it could have been had something there.
[00:06:28]  I mean, the the horrible thing is that if you look at pictures of dr Mengela from the Holocaust era, he does not look like you would expect.
[00:06:35]  Um he, he absolutely does not look like you know, some of the Nazis have that, have that strong war criminal vibe to them and Mengele looks like aggressively normal, to the point where it's.
[00:06:47]  It's actually deeply unsettling.
[00:06:49]  I do stand-up comedy so i'm surrounded by very very uh, sweet faced boys that are like wait, you showed your junk to whom?
[00:06:57]  Yeah exactly, Mingle would have killed in the La stand-up scene, by which I mean he would have murdered, that like swoop back hair situation.
[00:07:08]  Yeah, you wouldn't call him as Dr. Death.
[00:07:12]  Although maybe you would, because it's always the aggressively normal-looking guys.
[00:07:15]  So, Mengela is particularly famous because the experiments he conducted on twins were so garishly vile.
[00:07:21]  He would amputate like one twin's limb or infect one twin with the disease to see if it would transfer to the other in some way.
[00:07:27]  At one point, he killed 14 twins in a single night by injecting their hearts with chloroform.
[00:07:32]  He would also inject dye into the eye color of one twin to see if it would change the color in the other twin's eyes.
[00:07:38]  Just like Eli Roth style batshit nonsense.
[00:07:41]  Like people talk about, like, well, you'll hear sometimes from people who have not studied the Holocaust enough, like, well, you know, it was horrible, but they did get some like useful medical data out of it.
[00:07:50]  It was like, no, it's almost all nonsense.
[00:07:52]  Like, it was just people doing like, like, like completely bug fuck, pointless shit.
[00:07:58]  Yeah, it's debutizing like a 13-year-old kid with just all the hormones, like, just like trying to hook up a rat to a balloon and seeing how high it goes.
[00:08:07]  And then, yeah, it was like all the kids who someone should have come to them when they were 11 years old and like torturing cats.
[00:08:15]  And instead, you give them like complete control over the life and death of thousands at a work camp.
[00:08:21]  It was pretty bad, is what I'm saying, about the Holocaust.
[00:08:24]  That's awful.
[00:08:25]  And I know you've had Matt Liebon, who is my boyfriend, and he is actually a fraternal twin.
[00:08:33]  And so I wish he was on to talk a little bit about this.
[00:08:36]  But as he says on stage in a joke, you know, he cannot feel his twin sister's orgasms.
[00:08:42]  So no, you can't feel you might, you might, yeah, you're sensitive to your twin, but you can't feel their pain.
[00:08:51]  Yeah, and you could have asked them that as opposed to injecting dye into their eyes to see if that did something.
[00:08:57]  Oh my God.
[00:08:58]  Like, and there's a baby's crying.
[00:09:01]  Yeah, that's what babies do.
[00:09:02]  Also, they're in prison.
[00:09:04]  Yeah.
[00:09:05]  Yeah, you've taken them from their parents, Mengela.
[00:09:07]  This isn't really useful data.
[00:09:08]  So Mengela deserves his infamy, obviously.
[00:09:11]  He's the most famous of the Nazi doctors, but there were actually a shitload of doctors necessary to keep the Third Reich's machinery of death humming along.
[00:09:18]  For one thing, under like the rules the Nazis established for the concentration camps, well, for the death camps, only doctors could actually deploy Zyklon B into the gas chambers.
[00:09:28]  Every time gas was deployed into a chamber, it was done by a physician.
[00:09:33]  That was like one of the rules that they stuck to very diligently.
[00:09:37]  A great number of doctors were also involved in the Holocaust through pharmaceutical giant IG Farben, who are the people who make aspirin.
[00:09:45]  They've turned into, I mean, one of the things they've turned into now is Bayer.
[00:09:48]  And one of the doctors who worked at IG Farben was a fellow named Otto Ambrose.
[00:09:54]  Now, Dr. Ambrose had risen through the ranks of the company during the early Nazi years.
[00:09:58]  And from 1940 to 41, he headed up their search for a site to put in new synthetic rubber and fuel plants.
[00:10:05]  They settled on a Polish town named Oswikaim, which became the site for Auschwitz.
[00:10:09]  Oswikaim, I guess, is the Polish version of the name Auschwitz.
[00:10:13]  So IG Farben liked Auschwitz as a site because the SS was already building a camp there, and the SS agreed to give them slave labor to help run their chemical plants.
[00:10:23]  Construction started in 1941.
[00:10:25]  Otto Ambrose helped oversee this process and manage the factory through the war years.
[00:10:30]  IG Farben would rent Jewish slaves from the SS for three marks per day, four marks if the worker was skilled.
[00:10:36]  In 1941, Dr. Ambrose wrote to the IG Farben board, Our new friendship with the SS is proving very beneficial.
[00:10:42]  So high-ranking.
[00:10:44]  So are we building chemical plants to eventually do bad things to our own people?
[00:10:51]  Like, is it like a number of things?
[00:10:53]  So the plants specifically that Ambrose is working, they're attempting to, because obviously Germany is not great on natural resources, right?
[00:10:59]  That's why all of German history has been the way that it is.
[00:11:02]  So they're trying to get fueled by hate.
[00:11:03]  That's the main thing.
[00:11:04]  Yeah.
[00:11:04]  And JK, obviously, Angola, you're fine.
[00:11:08]  So they're trying to make synthetic rubber because they need rubber, but they don't have access to the actual raw material that makes rubber.
[00:11:15]  Most of that comes from Africa in this period.
[00:11:17]  And they're also trying to make synthetic gasoline because they need to be able to move their vehicles.
[00:11:21]  But Germany does not have a lot of, like in the territory they've conquered, doesn't have a lot of fuel.
[00:11:25]  So that's part of what they're doing, trying to keep the war machine going.
[00:11:28]  Got it.
[00:11:29]  The other thing that the Nazis are trying to make at Auschwitz is sarin nerve gas.
[00:11:34]  And Dr. Ambrose is one member of a team of four that invents sarin nerve gas, which is one of the deadliest nerve gases ever.
[00:11:40]  And that's so they're making a mix of horrible chemical weapons and attempting to make different synthetic chemicals to allow the Nazi war machine to continue there.
[00:11:49]  Amazing.
[00:11:50]  Wow.
[00:11:51]  It's going to go in some surprising directions, though.
[00:11:54]  So high-ranking IG Farben employees at Auschwitz, like Dr. Ambrose, were allowed to purchase clothing that had been stolen from the people who were gassed.
[00:12:01]  And the reason that this was a good deal for them was that Jews and other victims of the Holocaust were generally not told they were headed to a death camp.
[00:12:08]  And they were just told they were being migrating.
[00:12:10]  They were being forcibly migrated.
[00:12:12]  So they would generally wear their finest clothing because obviously you don't know if all of your luggage is going to make it.
[00:12:17]  You're going to wear the best stuff you have so that you at least have it when you arrive at your new home.
[00:12:21]  So a lot of times they're gassed in the finest clothing that they have access to.
[00:12:26]  And then it's taken from their bodies and people like Dr. Ambrose get to pick through it.
[00:12:30]  Now that is the smallest but cruelest detail and the most insignificant part of the Holocaust and death camps, but also such an annoying fuck you.
[00:12:42]  Like, that was my mom's necklace.
[00:12:44]  That was my finest like Chanel whatever jacket.
[00:12:49]  And you're just gonna, that's not okay.
[00:12:51]  No, it's all, I mean, it's the Holocaust.
[00:12:53]  It's all pretty bad.
[00:12:55]  Yeah.
[00:12:55]  Yeah.
[00:12:56]  I guess that's a good point.
[00:12:58]  Yeah, it's a pretty good life, though, working at Auschwitz as an IG Farben manager.
[00:13:02]  Unfortunately, the factory produced basically nothing of value for the Nazi war machine.
[00:13:07]  Again, one of the overwhelming themes here is that like they were bad at a lot of this stuff.
[00:13:12]  Like this is like people overemphasized because the History Channel has done a million documentaries on like crazy Nazi weapons and Nazi science.
[00:13:19]  They fucked up more than they got things right, which is part of why they lost the war.
[00:13:25]  Yeah.
[00:13:26]  Yeah.
[00:13:26]  That's why I think it's so messed up because there is lore.
[00:13:29]  Like I think anyone who's that into Nazi and Nazism and the Third Reich and is like a little bit, a little bit of a fanboy or girl.
[00:13:38]  And I always like that line is so thin and weird, but like over-inflating just how like amazing their medical, you know, like innovations were.
[00:13:49]  It's like, no, they were injecting children with chloro, what chloroform?
[00:13:55]  Chloroform was one of the things they injected children with, yeah.
[00:13:58]  Like and found out nothing.
[00:14:01]  Yeah, they got nothing useful out of that.
[00:14:02]  I mean, and they had like a lot of their fucking their super weapons was just like huge wastes of resources that would have been better spent towards making, I don't know, a not very sexy but incredibly effective medium tank like the T-34 that would have allowed them to, you know, actually have more armor on the back.
[00:14:19]  Like there were like they did it all wrong.
[00:14:21]  I'm a member of a very awkward group of people, which are German military history nerds who also have to repeatedly be like, but I'm not like it that way.
[00:14:32]  So in early 1945, the IG Farben facility at Auschwitz was abandoned after heavy U.S. bombing.
[00:14:37]  And this is actually where Primo Levy, if you know anything about Primo Levy, he survives Auschwitz because he like gets a gig working.
[00:14:45]  He's a lab technician basically, and he gets a gig working in the IG Farben lab and he's able to hide when they flee.
[00:14:52]  Dr. Ambrose, though, escapes the Russian army with the German soldiers who flee Auschwitz.
[00:14:57]  And these soldiers take as many of their remaining prisoners as possible and lead them on a death march through the Polish winter just to try to get rid of the rest of them.
[00:15:04]  When the war ended and the camps were liberated, the role of IG Farben and doctors like Ambrose and Mengele became clearer.
[00:15:11]  In 1945, after Germany sued for peace, the Allied command utterly dismantled German industry and put what remained under its authority.
[00:15:18]  The stated intent was, quote, to render impossible any future threat to Germany's neighbors or to world peace.
[00:15:25]  And I guess broadly you could say that was done.
[00:15:28]  Well, Germany is not a threat.
[00:15:29]  I mean, great podcast, Robert.
[00:15:32]  I've really enjoyed myself.
[00:15:33]  That was the end of war.
[00:15:34]  We did it.
[00:15:35]  And all the bad people face consequences.
[00:15:38]  Anywho, what's this podcast again?
[00:15:40]  Yeah, unfortunately, as soon as they figured out, dealt with that Nazi threat to world peace, a new threat to world peace presented itself, which was that the U.S. and the USSR were just rubbing their dicks in anticipation of getting to kill each other, particularly the U.S. at this point.
[00:15:59]  And hawks within capitalist nations started agitating and preparing for a war against communist Russia as soon as the one against Germany ended.
[00:16:06]  And it was decided by these guys that fully liquidating German industry would be a bad idea since most of that industry lay within the zone of Allied control and they might need to use it for the next war.
[00:16:15]  This is the same reason why a lot of German military leaders don't get punished to the extent that they should is there's this understanding like, well, these guys fought the Soviets.
[00:16:24]  We're about to fight the Soviets.
[00:16:26]  So who cares if they presided over a couple hundred thousand executions in Poland or whatever?
[00:16:31]  You know, we need this guy.
[00:16:34]  I mean, and therein lies the hypocrisy of war.
[00:16:38]  Hey, they're good at mass murder.
[00:16:39]  We might need them for the money.
[00:16:40]  We might need to murder some people.
[00:16:42]  Yeah, one of, I think one of the, I mean, there's a number, and it happens on all sides, not just the United States, like the United States and Russia both, we're going to talk about this a bit, both take a lot of Nazis to use, but like France does it, Britain does it, like fucking Norway does it.
[00:16:56]  Like everybody's, it's like the beanie babies of Nazis moment.
[00:17:00]  Like you got to collect them all and like you have like the doctor and then you get like the mad scientist.

=== How Nazis Made My Launch (09:42) ===

[00:17:06]  The guy who's good at running factories.
[00:17:08]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:17:09]  It's like a fucking, it's like a rummage sale at the end of the Third Reich.
[00:17:12]  Like who needs an expert with questionable morality?
[00:17:16]  Everyone, it turns out.
[00:17:18]  That's what states do.
[00:17:20]  I think the most one of the most, probably the most offensive example to me would be Albert Speer, who was like Hitler, Hitler fucking loved this dude.
[00:17:28]  By kind of the end of Hitler's life, Speer was his favorite Nazi.
[00:17:32]  And Albert Speer was an architect, which Hitler always wanted to be.
[00:17:36]  And if he had, it probably could have been a decent architect.
[00:17:38]  A lot of people say if he'd focused on the Instead Art School.
[00:17:40]  But anyway, Hitler fucking loved architecture, loved Albert Speer.
[00:17:43]  Speer would like make all these grand designs for like how the German Reich was going to look after the war.
[00:17:48]  Speer was also the head of war production.
[00:17:51]  And the head, as a result of that, the head of the Nazi like slave labor program.
[00:17:56]  He was the one organizing where the slaves were going to make Nazi war production possible.
[00:18:01]  Committed a lot of crimes against humanity that all got whitewashed and covered up because we decided we wanted Albert Speer's help planning our industrial economy in order to help fight the Soviets.
[00:18:12]  Really hard.
[00:18:13]  The space needle.
[00:18:14]  Yeah, yeah, exactly.
[00:18:15]  Great guy, Albert Speer.
[00:18:17]  I'm assuming.
[00:18:20]  In 1947, the Allied governments began a series of war crimes trials for 24 directors and senior employees of IG Farben.
[00:18:27]  Dr. Ambrose was one of those men.
[00:18:29]  He was sentenced to eight years in prison for mass murder and slavery, which seems light to me.
[00:18:34]  I don't know.
[00:18:34]  Like eight years for mass murder and slavery kind of seems like maybe not enough.
[00:18:40]  Like, I think I know people who got busted with pot who did more than eight years, and I feel like slavery is a worse crime.
[00:18:46]  I don't know.
[00:18:47]  I'm backseat Nirenberging here.
[00:18:50]  You're absolutely right.
[00:18:52]  That's like, you know, we could use him in five and down to four.
[00:18:57]  Well, that's about to get into that.
[00:19:00]  So he was one of 13 IG Farbenmen who were convicted.
[00:19:03]  And by 1951, he was released from prison like four years early.
[00:19:07]  He was the beneficiary of a clemency grant so he could contribute to a buildup of European industry in order to oppose the USSR.
[00:19:14]  And I want to quote from a write-up about this by the International Oncology Network's magazine: quote, The recruitment of these experts was sanctioned by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff who approved the systematic exploitation of scientific and technical knowledge developed in Nazi Germany.
[00:19:27]  In a classified memorandum titled Exploitation of German Scientists in Science and Technology in the United States, they described these men as chosen, rare minds whose continuing intellectual productivity we wish to use.
[00:19:39]  And while the Soviet Union also worked hard in acquiring German expertise, with the emerging Cold War, U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff supported every effort designed to guarantee that intellectual spoils were not to fall into Soviet hands.
[00:19:50]  Hence, after defeating Nazi Germany in 1945, Operation Overcast, later renamed Operation Paperclip, more than 1,600 Nazi Germans were secretly recruited to develop armaments at a feverish and paranoid pace that came to define the Cold War.
[00:20:04]  In addition, America sent hundreds of experts to Germany to guide the transfer of scientific and technical knowledge back to the United States.
[00:20:10]  And with this transfer of scientific and technical knowledge, a large number of chosen Nazi scientists migrated to the United States.
[00:20:16]  Others, however, remained in Germany, where they were ultimately recruited by German companies.
[00:20:21]  You know, sometimes most of us, when we fail, we actually, you know, fail and we have to suffer the consequences.
[00:20:29]  Others just fail up.
[00:20:30]  And I feel like Nazis, man, they really knew how to fail up and other people helped them.
[00:20:35]  Yeah.
[00:20:36]  I think the best known example of this was Werner von Braun, who is probably the single man most responsible for the U.S. moon landing.
[00:20:44]  He was the guy who designed our rockets.
[00:20:46]  He was the head of like a bunch of shit at NASA.
[00:20:49]  He also designed the V-2 rockets that were fired blindly at civilian targets in the UK.
[00:20:55]  Real piece of shit used slave labor to make a lot of rockets under the Germans.
[00:20:59]  There's a great Werner von Braun song against him that includes the line, when the missiles go up, who knows where they come down?
[00:21:04]  That's not my department, says Werner von Braun.
[00:21:07]  Good little song.
[00:21:08]  Real piece of shit.
[00:21:10]  Oh my god.
[00:21:11]  This is, you know, what it reminds me of.
[00:21:12]  Like, there's a song that you learn in grade school called like, Dirt Made My Lunch.
[00:21:16]  Dirt Made My Lunch.
[00:21:19]  Thank you, dirt.
[00:21:20]  Thanks a bunch for my salad and my sandwich and my milk and my lunch.
[00:21:24]  Thank anyway.
[00:21:25]  The point is, I feel like it's like Nazis made my launch.
[00:21:28]  Yep.
[00:21:29]  Nazis made my launch.
[00:21:31]  Thank you, Nazis.
[00:21:32]  You're fucking the worst.
[00:21:34]  But a bunch of technology.
[00:21:36]  I mean, this is, you know what?
[00:21:37]  I'm sorry, not to make this like super like politicize this, but I feel like you kind of see, and I'm not drawing a one-to-one here.
[00:21:46]  And I'm going to get a lot of blowback for this, but you can edit this out.
[00:21:50]  No, but I feel like when you talk about, you know, opposing the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, a lot of people will be like, Israelis have, you know, Israeli technology has done a lot.
[00:22:02]  And you're like, so?
[00:22:04]  Do you know what I mean?
[00:22:05]  Like, these things are like sort of unrelated.
[00:22:10]  They have cool technology and not an ethnic cleansing.
[00:22:13]  Exactly.
[00:22:14]  Exactly.
[00:22:16]  Presumably, those scientists could be doing the same work in a state that was not, I don't know, allowing armed settlers to gun down unarmed Palestinians was one example.
[00:22:26]  But there's a lot of examples.
[00:22:27]  For example, you could have a guy making sweet ass rockets and not using giant slave labor camps in order to build them.
[00:22:33]  All of these things are possible.
[00:22:35]  It's like the United States could have landed a man on the moon without rehabilitating a Nazi war criminal.
[00:22:42]  All sorts of things are possible without doing the terrible things that come with them.
[00:22:46]  We just choose to do the terrible things because it's easier and we're lazy.
[00:22:50]  But also, like, what about locking them up?
[00:22:53]  If they have like great, like if they have incredible skill and knowledge, you can still lock them up.
[00:23:00]  They can work from prison.
[00:23:02]  They can work from there.
[00:23:03]  They'll produce the blueprints, you know, but they are under arrest.
[00:23:07]  Like they are not free.
[00:23:08]  Yeah.
[00:23:09]  Was that never explored?
[00:23:10]  No, You want to keep them happy.
[00:23:14]  I don't know.
[00:23:15]  I think they should have all been shot is kind of my attitude.
[00:23:18]  I'm a big capital punishment for members of the Third Reich kind of guy.
[00:23:24]  So the most enthusiastic of German companies when it came to hiring old Nazi war criminals was Grunenthal.
[00:23:30]  Now, when the International Criminal Court went after IG Farben, Grunenthal was just a baby company.
[00:23:36]  It had been formed in 1946, which technically gave it a clean record vis-a-vis Nazis, right?
[00:23:41]  The war is over.
[00:23:42]  West Germany becomes a thing.
[00:23:44]  Grunenthal is started.
[00:23:46]  And it was a spin-off company from an existing business run by the Wurtz family for the last hundred or so years.
[00:23:52]  The Wurtzes are your standard German pre-war capitalist aristocracy.
[00:23:56]  Their ancestor, Andreas Wurtz, founded the family firm in the 19th century, initially as a soap and perfume business.
[00:24:04]  It quickly became prominent, coming to dominate the local economy of Aachen, a prosperous city in the North Rhine.
[00:24:09]  Though the Wurzes were Catholic, they recognized Hitler for what he was, which is good for business.
[00:24:15]  The family patriarchs joined the party early.
[00:24:18]  They were going to say an evil bloodthirsty killer.
[00:24:19]  No, no, that he was going to make them a lot of money.
[00:24:22]  And he did.
[00:24:23]  Yeah, so they joined the party right away and they benefit right away.
[00:24:26]  So it's important to understand the Nazis were just gangsters and they offered bribes to the German capital holding class in exchange for their support.
[00:24:34]  A lot of these bribes were dispensed via a process called Aryanization, in which Jewish-owned businesses were stolen by the government and handed over to Nazis.
[00:24:43]  The Wurtz family were given two competing perfume companies, one of which made the tobacco perfume range that is still sold by the Wurz firm today.
[00:24:52]  So this company is given a stolen Jewish perfume business.
[00:24:56]  And in 2021, that same family still owns that perfume range and profits from it.
[00:25:03]  It's good shit.
[00:25:04]  When the Nazis broke up IG Farben, the Wurtzes saw opportunity.
[00:25:08]  Since making perfume and making various medicines use a lot of the same equipment, spinning off into a pharmaceutical company made sense.
[00:25:14]  It also made sense to make use of the huge number of recently freed, or never punished at all, Nazi scientists who are now out of work.
[00:25:21]  In 1950.
[00:25:22]  I hope this doesn't end in some kind of Sephora line being problematic.
[00:25:26]  Because, you know, it was really put on the label.
[00:25:29]  Like, it's cruelty-free.
[00:25:31]  When you say that you don't perform any tests on rabbits, I assume you also mean that this did not descend from a line of Nazi cosmetologists.
[00:25:39]  I would say that cruelty-free should also include was never stolen by the Nazis and handed over to someone else.
[00:25:47]  Yeah, I think that does count as well.
[00:25:49]  Somewhere on the label.
[00:25:50]  But anyway, continue.
[00:25:52]  This business was never owned by Nazis.
[00:25:55]  Robert, you know what?
[00:25:56]  Yeah, you would.
[00:25:56]  You know what other businesses are not owned by Nazis unless it's a Volkswagen ad?
[00:26:00]  Unless it's a Volkswagen ad or like a BMW ad or a Mercedes ad or a Bayer ad or an ad for most of the, I mean, not owned by Nazis, but directly supporting the Nazis.
[00:26:12]  Like if it's Shell, for example.
[00:26:15]  Forget about that used.
[00:26:16]  IBM.
[00:26:17]  Oh, yeah.
[00:26:17]  IBM for sure.
[00:26:19]  For goddamn sure.
[00:26:20]  Yes, absolutely.
[00:26:22]  But unless it's any of those companies, definitely guaranteed not ever owned by Nazis, probably, unless it's one like a company that's owned by one of those large like investment firms that had a lot of investments in Nazi Germany, which is pretty likely.
[00:26:39]  But, you know, maybe not.
[00:26:41]  Anyway, ads.

=== Economic Thriving in Communities (03:31) ===

[00:26:49]  I went and sat on the little Ottoman in front of him.
[00:26:52]  Hi, Dad.
[00:26:54]  And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
[00:27:01]  This is badass convict.
[00:27:03]  Right.
[00:27:04]  Just finished five years.
[00:27:06]  I'm going to have cookies and milk.
[00:27:08]  Yeah, mom.
[00:27:08]  Yeah.
[00:27:10]  On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversations about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
[00:27:18]  On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
[00:27:26]  The entire season two is now available to binge, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
[00:27:35]  I'm an alcoholic.
[00:27:37]  Look, this program, I'm a guide.
[00:27:41]  Open your free iHeartRadio app.
[00:27:43]  Search the Ceno Show and listen now.
[00:27:49]  I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really start making money.
[00:27:54]  It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
[00:28:02]  This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum-Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
[00:28:11]  If I'm outside with my parents and they're seeing all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what?
[00:28:16]  Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
[00:28:20]  They believe everything, but at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
[00:28:24]  There's an economic component to communities thriving.
[00:28:27]  If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
[00:28:31]  And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
[00:28:34]  They cannot feed their kids.
[00:28:35]  They do not have homes.
[00:28:36]  Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
[00:28:39]  Listen to Eating While Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:28:48]  Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic, Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
[00:28:57]  Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
[00:29:03]  I'm talking to leaders from the entertainment industry to finance and everywhere in between.
[00:29:08]  This season on Math and Magic, I'm talking to CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario, financier and public health advocate Mike Milken, take-to interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick.
[00:29:18]  If you're unable to take meaningful creative risk and therefore run the risk of making horrible creative mistakes, then you can't play in this business.
[00:29:27]  Sesame Street CEO Sherry Weston and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.
[00:29:32]  Making consumers see the value of the human voice and to have that guaranteed human promise behind it really makes it rise to the top.
[00:29:42]  Listen to Math and Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:29:49]  On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budgetista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
[00:30:00]  What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
[00:30:06]  We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
[00:30:16]  Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.

=== War Criminals Making Medicine (15:37) ===

[00:30:20]  That's great.
[00:30:21]  It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
[00:30:31]  If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
[00:30:37]  Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:30:50]  Oh, we're back.
[00:30:52]  So in 1951, Grunenthal hired Dr. Ambrose, our friend who developed Sarin Nervegas and helped organize the death factories at Auschwitz.
[00:31:02]  Four years in prison, right?
[00:31:04]  Yeah, he did.
[00:31:04]  He did his time.
[00:31:05]  You know?
[00:31:07]  That's just a year for every other guy he worked on the Sarin Nerfgas project with.
[00:31:13]  So they didn't mind that he'd worked at Auschwitz, and they were very impressed by his other professional credentials.
[00:31:18]  He quickly became chairman of the company's advisory committee.
[00:31:21]  It's a good guy to have advising your company.
[00:31:24]  The dude who advised the SS on how to make a death factory.
[00:31:27]  Dr. Ambrose was quickly joined by a number of other old party comrades.
[00:31:30]  And I'm going to quote from the book Silent Shock by Michael Magazinek.
[00:31:34]  Quote, Dr. Heinz Baumcotter was a notorious SS doctor at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp outside Berlin.
[00:31:41]  In addition to overseeing executions and selecting prisoners for the gas chamber, he conducted experiments with injections, explosives, and chemicals.
[00:31:48]  One such experiment saw prisoners strapped down and burned with phosphorus so that Baumcotter could test an experimental salve.
[00:31:54]  Baumcotter was arrested after the war, charged with murder, and tried by the Soviets in Berlin in 1947.
[00:31:59]  He was convicted after a short trial, not a surprising outcome given his appalling record and the efficient Soviet approach to war crimes justice.
[00:32:06]  Baumcotter was sentenced to life imprisonment, but served only eight years before the Soviets returned him to Germany.
[00:32:12]  The exact point at which Grunenthal employed him is unclear, but Baumcotter was certainly working as a salesman in Grunenthal's Münster office in 1960 and 61.
[00:32:20]  By this time, he was facing another round of war crimes charges in a German court.
[00:32:24]  In 1962, after a trial in Münster, Baumcotter was convicted of being an accessory to murder and of depraved indifference and sentenced once more to eight years jail, the time he had already served in the Soviet Union.
[00:32:35]  Another eight years.
[00:32:37]  Take that Nazi.
[00:32:39]  Not really, because the time he already served in the USSR was taken into account, and so he never went to jail again.
[00:32:46]  He got time served for genocide.
[00:32:49]  Oh, it's good shit.
[00:32:50]  You know, I once thought that American police officers got off with murder very easily.
[00:32:56]  And turns out Nazi war criminals.
[00:32:59]  Not nearly as easy as Nazis.
[00:33:01]  It's an easy one.
[00:33:02]  What's really fun is looking at how many Einsets Groupen there were.
[00:33:05]  Those were the guys who played skeet shooting with literal babies and how many of them survived the war and how many of the ones that survived the war suffered any kind of legal penalties at all.
[00:33:15]  As a spoiler, not most of them.
[00:33:17]  Now, by which I mean thousands of them lived the rest of their lives as free men.
[00:33:22]  This is this is though, okay, I know you believe in capital punishment for Nazis, and I sure do.
[00:33:27]  I'm with you, but I feel as though I'm coming off of, I just watched the Epstein docs on Netflix.
[00:33:34]  Anyway, another bastard.
[00:33:36]  And I'm like, death is way too easy.
[00:33:39]  Like, this is unfair.
[00:33:41]  Death is unfair if you're that big of a piece of shit.
[00:33:45]  There's nothing fair if you're that, but here's why I think just immediate execution.
[00:33:49]  Democracy means some right-wing shitholes are always going to get elected, and they are always going to want to use the Nazis rather than punish them, which is you get a lot of these guys get nasty punishments and then get pardoned a couple of years later.
[00:34:00]  Yes.
[00:34:01]  So I think you just shoot them immediately when everybody's pissed off.
[00:34:04]  No time for resuscitation.
[00:34:05]  We don't have to like.
[00:34:07]  Yeah.
[00:34:07]  We don't have to see all their paintings, i.e. George W. Bush, and hear his opinions on Afghanistan.
[00:34:13]  Exactly.
[00:34:13]  I mean, I feel the same about George W. Bush, but that's a story for another episode that we're going to be.
[00:34:17]  Robert and I are on the same page here.
[00:34:20]  Okay, let's keep going before, you know, the cops are at my door.
[00:34:25]  So I know you're thinking, wow, two Nazi war criminals, one of whom was on war crimes trials while working as a salesman for Grunenthal.
[00:34:33]  That's a lot of Nazis at the company, but we're just getting started.
[00:34:36]  Martin Stamler was another Grunenthal hire.
[00:34:39]  As a prominent pathologist during the Third Reich, he wrote articles and published studies proving the racial superiority of the German race.
[00:34:46]  He was a popular proponent of the Nazi racial hygiene program, which ultimately resulted in the Holocaust.
[00:34:51]  After Germany invaded Poland, he advised the SS on their population policy, which means it was his job to decide which chunks of Polish society to exterminate.
[00:35:00]  Grunenthal put Martin Stamler in charge of their pathology department from 1960 to 1974.
[00:35:06]  Grunenthal also hired Hans Berger Prince, who worked with Hitler's personal doctor Karl Brandt.
[00:35:12]  Now, if you're a Nazi knower, Brandt was the Hitler doctor who didn't give him a lot of methamphetamine.
[00:35:16]  He wound up as the lead defendant for the doctor's trial at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, and he was executed for his involvement in medical experiments on prisoners and civilians.
[00:35:25]  Berger Prinz escaped any punishment for his role in working with Dr. Brandt, and he went on to defend the Grunenthal company as an expert witness in court.
[00:35:33]  The most famous Nazi hire of the Grunenthal company was Dr. Ernst Günter Schenk.
[00:35:38]  You can see him in the movie Downfall, played by Christian Berkel, which means he was in the bunker with Hitler at the very end.
[00:35:44]  Schenk was the only member of Grunenthal who was a member of the SS.
[00:35:48]  Several of them advised the SS.
[00:35:50]  Schenk was in the SS, and he was, in fact, the official SS nutritional inspector.
[00:35:56]  During the war, he developed an experimental protein sausage that was tested on 370 concentration camp prisoners, killing dozens of them because apparently Schenk was pretty bad at making sausage.
[00:36:07]  He was actually captured by the Soviets and managed to survive 10 years in their prisons.
[00:36:11]  When he returned to West Germany, he was barred from working again as a doctor.
[00:36:15]  But Grunenthal didn't care.
[00:36:17]  They hired him anyway.
[00:36:19]  And then there's a-I need to learn more about the sausage.
[00:36:25]  I feel like this is some Hannibal shit, you know, where it's like actually made out of their loved ones' brains and they're like, eat it, you know?
[00:36:33]  And they're like, oh.
[00:36:34]  I think it's more boring.
[00:36:35]  They were just trying to like make better military rations out of like synthetic shit.
[00:36:40]  I don't know as much about the sausage as I should, but it was a bad sausage.
[00:36:44]  Rubber and twin babies.
[00:36:46]  Yeah, I get it.
[00:36:47]  We've all been, we've all had a bad sausage, but this one sounds like it was designed.
[00:36:52]  Ironically, I've never had a bad sausage in Germany.
[00:36:54]  Now, other parts of the world, that's been a different case.
[00:36:58]  So, and then there's the guy who's going to be the main Nazi for our story today, Heinrich Muchter.
[00:37:04]  Here's Newsweek.
[00:37:05]  Quote, during the war, his expertise had been anti-typhus work.
[00:37:09]  Outbreaks of the disease in the army made finding a vaccination a high priority.
[00:37:13]  Because typhus cultures cannot live outside a body, it was kept alive by injecting it into prisoners.
[00:37:18]  Once injected with the disease, the prisoners could then be used to try out the vaccines to see if they worked.
[00:37:23]  And Muchter's experiments were purportedly carried out in Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Grodno, as well as at Krakow.
[00:37:29]  Now, Buchenwald was the main experimental center for Muchter's typhus tests.
[00:37:33]  One particular part of the camp, Block 46, was used by Nazi scientists to test treatments for not just typhus, but yellow fever, smallpox, cholera, and diphtheria.
[00:37:42]  One Nuremberg witness recalled dreadful horror at the thought of Block 46.
[00:37:47]  Every person who, quote, went to Block 46 as an experimental person did not only have to expect death and under certain circumstances, a very long, drawn out and frightful death, but also torture and the complete removal of the last remnants of personal freedom.
[00:38:01]  This is what I'm saying about capital punishment.
[00:38:03]  Exactly.
[00:38:03]  For Nazis, it is a little bit too easy, but I hear you.
[00:38:07]  Yeah, we need to, like, what would happen?
[00:38:10]  I agree.
[00:38:11]  Better things to have done to them, but I'm just a fan of getting it done.
[00:38:16]  So, because again, one of the things here, like, and people who are big fans of the Soviet Union will point out rightfully that the Soviet Union killed a lot more Nazis who were captured, but most of the ones they killed were like normal soldiers who they starved to death.
[00:38:30]  Because if you're going to be a piece of shit, be a talented.
[00:38:33]  Be a prominent piece of shit because you'll be.
[00:38:35]  You're so prominent that, yeah, you're uncancelable, unkillable.
[00:38:40]  We have so far in the story two prisoners who did time in Soviet prisons, two doctors, and then got out and went back to the West and did horrible things.
[00:38:50]  The main guy is this guy.
[00:38:52]  Yeah, Mukter.
[00:38:53]  Mukhter.
[00:38:54]  Yeah.
[00:38:54]  Now, all prisoners who were part of Mukter's typhus tests were given a particularly virulent strain of the disease, of typhus.
[00:39:01]  Half were injected with an experimental treatment, and the other half were given no treatment at all.
[00:39:05]  Quote, there were cases of raving madness, delirium.
[00:39:08]  People would refuse to eat, and a large percentage of them would die.
[00:39:11]  Those who experienced the disease in a milder form, perhaps because their constitutions were stronger or because the vaccine was effective, were forced continuously to observe the death struggles of others.
[00:39:22]  So that's what Mukter does.
[00:39:23]  He was part of a horrible engine of unfathomable human misery.
[00:39:26]  But a key word there is part.
[00:39:28]  He wasn't a big face like Mengele.
[00:39:30]  He wasn't the guy directly killing a bunch of people.
[00:39:32]  He was one of a number of doctors organizing this horrific set of trials.
[00:39:36]  And as a result, he got off nearly scot-free.
[00:39:39]  Polish authorities were only able to effectively charge him with mistreating prisoners and stealing scientific equivalent.
[00:39:45]  And he was able to flee back to Germany across the Iron Curtain before he could face any kind of consequence for his work.
[00:39:51]  And in 1946, he became one of Grunenthal's first employees.
[00:39:55]  Now, kind of by default, a lot of German companies in the post-war era wound up hiring former Nazis.
[00:40:01]  It was kind of unavoidable in many cases because an awful lot of people joined the party.
[00:40:05]  But Grunenthal was different.
[00:40:07]  You know, timeout.
[00:40:09]  Does anyone say timeout?
[00:40:10]  This is me saying, calling timeout on Robert Evans.
[00:40:13]  Did he discover anything after torturing that many people?
[00:40:18]  I don't think they figured out a typhus vaccine.
[00:40:21]  There we go.
[00:40:21]  Yeah.
[00:40:22]  I think German soldiers were still dying of typhus by the end of the war.
[00:40:26]  I mean, not that it's any consolation.
[00:40:27]  I guess if I or any of my relatives were in that, like, were performed on like rabbits in cages and injected with all kinds of horrible things, I feel like the last thing I would want is for them to go on and save German soldiers' lives.
[00:40:43]  I'd be like, no, I don't want this helping them.
[00:40:48]  I don't have any advancements to come out of this shit at all.
[00:40:50]  Well, I guess the good news is that it did not work at all because the first typhus vaccine was developed in the 70s.
[00:40:59]  There you go.
[00:40:59]  So this did not work.
[00:41:02]  But they did figure some other shit out, which we're going to talk about in a little bit.
[00:41:06]  By the way, Block 46, 36 or 46?
[00:41:09]  46.
[00:41:09]  Block 46 is like what every COVID anti-vaxxer thinks that like the vaccine is doing.
[00:41:17]  Have you heard of Mukter?
[00:41:19]  You're like, I think it's very different.
[00:41:21]  It is, it is very different.
[00:41:24]  Especially since a lot of, anyway, we don't need to talk about how other fringe sort of spiritual beliefs wind up dovetailing into Nazism today.
[00:41:32]  We talk about that a lot anyway.
[00:41:34]  So again, a lot of German companies hire former Nazis.
[00:41:36]  And hey, I should note, if you're a former Nazi in this period, obviously it means you made a horrible moral compromise.
[00:41:44]  It doesn't mean you were a part of the of the direct part of the engineering of extermination.
[00:41:48]  A lot of people just joined it to like get a promotion at like whatever bullshit gig they did in like the local government or because they were a teacher or something.
[00:41:56]  Not a good thing, but not the same as organizing a series of tortures, tortures, medical experiments at Auschwitz.
[00:42:02]  So obviously you were going to have a lot of former Nazis being hired in 1946, 47 because there's millions of them.
[00:42:09]  But Grunenthal was different.
[00:42:10]  Not only did Grunenthal hire way more former Nazis than any other pharmaceutical company, but they had a weird tendency to hire former Nazis who had been directly involved with forced labor and concentration camps.
[00:42:22]  One German historian, looking at a short list of Grunenthal staff in the 1960s, said, it's absolutely astonishing that a small company should have such a concentration of convicted war criminals on its staff.
[00:42:33]  Unusual even by the standards of post-war Germany.
[00:42:36]  So, a German historian is like, by the standards of everyone else in Germany, these guys hired a lot of fucking war criminals.
[00:42:43]  Unprecedented amounts.
[00:42:44]  Grunenthal is like the worst in that field.
[00:42:48]  Now, with their staff of war criminals in place, Grunenthal set to the important business of making medicine.
[00:42:53]  One of their first products was a penicillin derivative, which proved to be massively toxic and was quickly pulled.
[00:42:58]  They also marketed a tuberculosis cure that was completely ineffective.
[00:43:02]  There were some eventual successes, and eventually they become get rich off of painkillers.
[00:43:06]  But as the 1950s hit, Grunenthal was still on the lookout for a big product hit, something they could make a lot of money on.
[00:43:13]  Oh, all of these patients, they keep on dying.
[00:43:16]  What?
[00:43:17]  What are we doing wrong?
[00:43:18]  Like, is it the staff of the world?
[00:43:25]  I don't know what kind of accent I'm doing.
[00:43:26]  It started out German.
[00:43:27]  I don't know what it is anymore.
[00:43:29]  I have to say, Matt does a better accent.
[00:43:31]  He does.
[00:43:31]  He does a very good accent.
[00:43:32]  But, like, you might look at the people you just hired, bro.
[00:43:38]  They who love to watch death and create death.
[00:43:42]  And you're trying to make what?
[00:43:43]  Medicine?
[00:43:44]  Vaccines?
[00:43:45]  Yep.
[00:43:46]  Something is not right.
[00:43:47]  Yeah.
[00:43:49]  It's, yeah, they're not great at the start.
[00:43:51]  But they're looking for their big hit and they decide that synthetic drugs are probably the wave of the future.
[00:43:56]  Dr. Heinrich Muchter put two of his staff doctors on the task of developing new synthetic antibiotics.
[00:44:02]  Now, one of these guys, Dr. Wilhelm Kuntz, heated a commercially available chemical as part of his experimentation and created a brand new substance, infetalial glutamic acid imide.
[00:44:14]  It would soon become better known by the name thalidomide.
[00:44:17]  You heard of thalidomide?
[00:44:19]  No, but is that what's in mascara?
[00:44:20]  Because I just wanted to.
[00:44:21]  Oh, no.
[00:44:22]  Oh, it's much worse than that.
[00:44:24]  A number of people will be going, ah, shit, at this point.
[00:44:26]  Thalidomide is very famous.
[00:44:29]  It's in Billy Jill's.
[00:44:30]  We didn't start the fire, among other things.
[00:44:32]  Real famous drug.
[00:44:33]  Did it start the fire?
[00:44:34]  It started something.
[00:44:35]  Okay.
[00:44:36]  Now, Dr. Koons' partner is said to have believed the new compound was a structural analog or a near copy of the kind of barbituates that were commonly sold as sleeping pills.
[00:44:46]  Based on this logic, the story goes, Grunenthal decided to carry out tests on rats to determine if thalidomide might be something the company could market as a sleeping aid.
[00:44:55]  Now, I say the story goes because this part is heavily debated.
[00:44:58]  You may notice that it's kind of weird that doctors trying to make a new antibiotic would make a synthetic barbituate analog and then immediately try to test it as a sleeping pill.
[00:45:07]  Now, stuff like this does happen in medical development.
[00:45:09]  Viagra started as like a heart medication, but it also does stuff that could be useful as a heart medication.
[00:45:14]  It's a blood thinner.
[00:45:16]  But there are doctors who will note that it doesn't really seem like thalidomide started as a result of antibiotic research, and that that's a weird claim to make.
[00:45:23]  There are other suspicious things about the drug's origin.
[00:45:26]  That first rat study on thalidomide, the first study that Grunenthal does on thalidomide when they find it, was based around what's called a jiggle cage, which is a special cage that tries to measure the amount of movement in drugged or undrugged rats to determine whether or not a substance sedates them.
[00:45:42]  Basically, you're giving them the drug and then you're shaking a cage, and like the amount that they get agitated is like, okay, either the sedative is working and they don't notice it or not, right?
[00:45:52]  Jiggle cage sounds like a strip club.
[00:45:54]  It does.
[00:45:55]  The jiggle cage is a great strip club name, actually.

=== Suspicious Origins of Thalidomide (15:01) ===

[00:45:57]  Yeah.
[00:45:59]  Now, this particular study is very odd.
[00:46:01]  One pediatrician who analyzed it, Dr. Wittukind Lin, described the experiment as having so little scientific value that it should not have been published.
[00:46:09]  Quote, the authors claim to have shown a sleep-inducing effect, though no sleep was observed.
[00:46:15]  Other pharmaceutical companies later tried and failed to replicate thalidomide's sedative property on animals, and they failed.
[00:46:21]  Some suspect the rat study was fabricated in order to provide clean scientific evidence that thalidomide had promise as a sedative.
[00:46:29]  But it is an extremely effective sedative for human beings.
[00:46:32]  It just doesn't sedate rats.
[00:46:34]  So why is it a big deal that this rat study showed it worked as a sedative in rats when it doesn't, if it does work as a sedative in human beings?
[00:46:41]  What is the issue here?
[00:46:43]  Well, the issue is that a lot of people suspect Dr. Mukter and Grunenthal faked the rat study data because they already knew before Grunenthal was founded that thalidomide was an effective sedative.
[00:46:54]  They just couldn't say why they knew because thalidomide had been initially developed during the Nazi era via experiments on concentration camp inmates.
[00:47:02]  So they tested it on people, but they couldn't say that.
[00:47:05]  So they needed to fabricate an animal study to be like, no, we should test this on humans.
[00:47:09]  Look, it puts rats to sleep.
[00:47:10]  Yeah.
[00:47:11]  You can't say that the cage jiggled a lot.
[00:47:14]  You know, when the humans, I mean, rats were trying to get out.
[00:47:18]  I mean, having a good sleeping.
[00:47:20]  Sleeping.
[00:47:20]  Sleep sleeping.
[00:47:22]  Now, this is debated still.
[00:47:24]  This is not a guarantee that it happened this way.
[00:47:26]  There's a lot of argument as to whether or not thalidomide started as a Nazi project.
[00:47:31]  And before I read what I'm about to read, you should know that the jury is still out as to the origins of thalidomide.
[00:47:37]  That said, I'm now going to quote from a write-up by OncoZine, the magazine of the International Oncology Network as part of the Physicians Weekly magazine network.
[00:47:47]  Quote, in his book, Hitler's Laboratories, the Argentinian writer Carlos DiNapoli states that he has discovered documents dated November 1944 from IG Farben, which refer to a chemical agent with the same chemical formula as thalidomide.
[00:48:01]  According to DiNapoli, IG Farben's director, Fritz Termier, sent a memo to Carl Brandt, the SS general who ran Hitler's euthanasia program, explaining that a drug with number 4589 with the same characteristics as thalidomide had been tested and was ready for use.
[00:48:16]  According to documents discovered after World War II, Muchter and Ambrose worked under the supervision of Joseph Mengele, referred to compound 4589 being tested on female prisoners in Auschwitz.
[00:48:28]  In these Auschwitz files, researchers discovered correspondence between the camp commander and Bayer Liverkusen, a part of IG Farben.
[00:48:35]  The correspondence dealt with the sale of 150 female prisoners for experimental uses.
[00:48:40]  With a view to the planned experiments of a new sleep-inducing drug, we would appreciate it if you could place a number of prisoners at our disposal.
[00:48:47]  So, there's real, real compelling evidence that thalidomide was first experimented during the war on female slaves as a sleeping pill, and that Dr. Mukter and Dr. Ambrose were a part of those tests working under Joseph Mengele.
[00:49:02]  Why were they women?
[00:49:03]  Anything that's like women who then go to sleep around men, especially Nazis, I don't like any of that.
[00:49:12]  I mean, there was a decent amount of rape in these places.
[00:49:14]  I think it might also have, there's also a fact of like men are potentially more dangerous to keep as prisoners, so you might want to just kill the men immediately, or you're working them in.
[00:49:23]  It's a labor camp, so you have the men doing physical labor.
[00:49:26]  The women, you either kill them or you use their bodies for experiments.
[00:49:30]  And that was up to dipshit number nine or whatever.
[00:49:32]  Yeah, it was up to Mengele.
[00:49:34]  Yeah, Mengele, yeah.
[00:49:35]  Sorry.
[00:49:35]  I mean, all of the Mengele, Ambrose, Mukter are probably all taking turns doing this.
[00:49:42]  It's a thing doctors do.
[00:49:43]  Like, it's doctors making the selections in a lot of cases.
[00:49:46]  Again, the complicity of physicians in the Third Reich is like an actually incredibly important story because most of them just like agree to be part of the machinery of death.
[00:49:56]  It's a real problem in medical ethics.
[00:49:59]  Now, so there's a lot of reasons to believe, like, obviously, if you're Grunenthal, you don't want to say, we know this is a great sedative because the doctors we hired tested it on enslaved Jewish women at Auschwitz.
[00:50:11]  You don't want to be saying that.
[00:50:13]  That's not a good advertising campaign.
[00:50:17]  So you want to lie and say, oh, it works on rats.
[00:50:19]  Let's test it on humans for totally the first time.
[00:50:22]  This is the first time it's ever been tried on people.
[00:50:26]  Now, there's other reasons to doubt Grunenthal's official story about the development of thalidomide.
[00:50:31]  One thing, their initial patent application in 1954 mentioned that the drug had already been tested on humans before official tests began.
[00:50:39]  Historical documents show that the company purchased the trade name that thalidomide was sold under, Contragan, and presumably the drug itself from Sanofi, a French pharmaceutical company that was controlled by the Nazis during World War II.
[00:50:52]  Quote: Grunenthal also claimed to have done multiple independent animal experiments showing absolutely no mutagenic effects and no birth abnormalities.
[00:51:00]  However, in the late 1960s, Grunenthal's documents regarding the history and development of thalidophilidomide were subpoenaed for the civil actions against the company.
[00:51:08]  It was reported that virtually all documents that showed where and when animal research, as well as clinical studies on humans, were conducted, had been lost.
[00:51:16]  So, a lot of reasons to suspect that this was developed in concentration camps and then its origin was hidden.
[00:51:24]  But that might not be the worst part of thalidomide, which we're about to get to the worst part of thalidomide.
[00:51:29]  So, yeah, anyway.
[00:51:30]  It's not bad enough.
[00:51:30]  I'm just like, I'm not triggered.
[00:51:32]  And yet, you know, we started off with, you know, killing babies and I was kind of triggered.
[00:51:37]  And I just, I don't know, I feel like you need to level up.
[00:51:40]  Yeah, we'll get the trigger.
[00:51:42]  It's important to know, though, that there's a really good chance that Dr. Mukter, who worked under Joseph Mengele, had tested this drug initially in concentration camps.
[00:51:50]  And once he got Grunenthal to start testing the drug for widespread approval, he also had a vested interest in making sure it got approved and sold.
[00:51:57]  Part of Dr. Mukter's agreement with the company gave him a share in the profits of every drug sold that he helped to develop.
[00:52:03]  Whatever the truth of its origin, Grunenthal decided thalidomide held a lot of promise as an alternative to barbituits.
[00:52:09]  And barbituits are your traditional sleeping pills in this era, and they're really bad.
[00:52:14]  Not that they don't have any, like they do, obviously they have medical uses, but they can kill your ass.
[00:52:18]  Like people die from sleeping pills all the time, especially in this period.
[00:52:21]  Like we've gotten a bit better at it now, but like barbituates, number one, can be very addictive and again, can fucking kill you.
[00:52:27]  So, and that's starting to be known in the 50s and early 60s that like, oh, there's some real downsides to these sleeping pills.
[00:52:34]  And so if you can make a sleeping pill that can't kill people, that's you make a fuckload of money off that shit.
[00:52:41]  And Dr. Mukter basically was convinced Grunenthal, hey, we can sell sleeping pills that don't have dangerous side effects.
[00:52:47]  And to make the case.
[00:52:48]  Which is a big order for a Nazi to be like, hey, Nazi to try not to kill people.
[00:52:55]  They're like, but I want to.
[00:52:56]  And they're like, no, no, just pull back on that.
[00:52:59]  Almost kill them.
[00:53:00]  Don't kill them.
[00:53:01]  Don't worry.
[00:53:01]  He kills a lot more people.
[00:53:03]  So to make the case that thalidomide was safe, Dr. Mukter's team fed increasingly absurd amounts of thalidomide to a variety of animals in an attempt to establish its LD50.
[00:53:13]  And the LD50 is the dose at which a drug will kill 50% of test animals, right?
[00:53:18]  It's generally just referred to as like this is the potential fatal dose of a drug.
[00:53:21]  Didn't know that?
[00:53:22]  Very cruel.
[00:53:22]  Keep going.
[00:53:23]  Yeah.
[00:53:24]  I mean, you need to know it, right?
[00:53:25]  It is, it's a horrible thing, but like you have to know what is a lethal dose of a substance you're giving people.
[00:53:31]  You know, you do need to have an idea of that.
[00:53:33]  Yeah, no, of course.
[00:53:34]  But 50 of them, or at least, or half of them.
[00:53:37]  At least 50%.
[00:53:38]  Yeah.
[00:53:38]  Because obviously everyone, like one person can take a dose of cyanide that will kill them.
[00:53:43]  And another person like with medical treatment could survive.
[00:53:45]  There's never 100% with this kind of shit.
[00:53:48]  It's like the same thing.
[00:53:49]  Some people get bitten by rattlesnakes and recover.
[00:53:51]  Some people die very quickly for a variety of reasons.
[00:53:55]  Now, so yeah, Grunenthal testers try to find an LD50 for thalidomide and they say we can't find it.
[00:54:01]  It's impossible to kill animals with this stuff.
[00:54:04]  There's a lot of debate as to whether or not those studies were valid, but that's what they say.
[00:54:08]  So I just, we really need humans.
[00:54:12]  I mean, these rats and rabbits, they're great, but you know what would be really great?
[00:54:16]  Humans.
[00:54:17]  Well, they're more saying we can't kill animals with this so people can take this and they won't OD.
[00:54:23]  Yeah.
[00:54:23]  Yep.
[00:54:24]  There's no way to overdose on thalidomide, so we can sell it as like you can't die on this stuff, like all these other people are dying on barbituits.
[00:54:32]  So, Grunenthal, when they've got this kind of establishment for how they're going to market thalidomide, proceeds to what was the second round of human trials, probably, assuming they'd done human trials in concentration camp inmates.
[00:54:43]  And this round of human studies was comparatively a lot more ethical.
[00:54:46]  But it was still very problematic, perhaps due to the fact that Grunenthal's research division was run by Nazis.
[00:54:52]  In Bonn, one doctor treated 40 children, many of whom were brain damaged, with huge doses of thalidomide over extended periods of time.
[00:55:00]  Some kids received 20 times the recommended dose.
[00:55:03]  None of the children's parents were informed of the study.
[00:55:06]  The test showed that thalidomide was a very effective sedative.
[00:55:09]  And by effective, I mean it killed two babies.
[00:55:12]  One of the babies had a congenital heart defect, and one, a three-month-old, suffered heart failure.
[00:55:16]  In addition, one other child went temporarily blind.
[00:55:19]  The doctor conducting this study decided these side effects had nothing to do with thalidomide and gave an endorsement to Grunenthal that it was safe.
[00:55:27]  That doesn't seem like good science to me, but I'm not a doctor.
[00:55:30]  Seems like killing two out of 40 children is actually a pretty high death rate for a pill.
[00:55:34]  I don't is it not?
[00:55:35]  It's not half, though.
[00:55:37]  It is not half.
[00:55:38]  So it's safe.
[00:55:39]  I guess it's okay.
[00:55:40]  There were, of course, a lot of positive tests of the drugs.
[00:55:43]  A number of testers, particularly adults it was tested on, did rave about its efficacy as a sleep aid.
[00:55:48]  It does, it's an effective sedative, and the fact that it had no hangover or other side effects.
[00:55:53]  Some people say this, and a number of doctors back it up.
[00:55:56]  And in adults, it did seem to be pretty effective.
[00:55:58]  But as this segment from the book Silent Shock makes clear, there were problems from the beginning.
[00:56:03]  One doctor reported that he had dropped the drug because of absolute intolerability.
[00:56:08]  Among the side effects he noted was slight paresthesia or tingling or burning sensation, often caused by nerve damage.
[00:56:14]  Responding to this report, Grunenthal's Heinrich Muchter conceded in a letter on 3rd April 1956 that thalidomide seemed a very strong sedative, which, if used in high doses over a long period, could cause disturbance in the nervous system.
[00:56:27]  Such information was pushed under the rug or explained away.
[00:56:30]  Dr. Mukter did such a good job of manufacturing consent that other doctors in Grunenthal thought thalidomide was safe.
[00:56:37]  Some of his own staff members tried it, and one gave it to his pregnant wife.
[00:56:41]  The first of what would be tens of thousands of thalidomide babies was born on Christmas Day, 1956, without ears.
[00:56:48]  In early 1957, the drug went on sale across Europe under the name Contorgan.
[00:56:55]  Yeah.
[00:56:56]  It went on sale after babies were born without ears.
[00:57:00]  One baby could have been anything.
[00:57:02]  Sometimes babies don't have ears.
[00:57:04]  Look.
[00:57:04]  Who's to say?
[00:57:06]  Who's to say?
[00:57:07]  It's God's will.
[00:57:09]  It's God's will or a Nazis' will.
[00:57:11]  But you know, either way, let's put it on the market.
[00:57:13]  Now, you're saying also that Mookzer is getting us a percentage of everything.
[00:57:18]  Oh, yeah.
[00:57:18]  He gets a cut, baby.
[00:57:20]  Mm-hmm.
[00:57:21]  So economic incentive, totally not a problem in the pharma industry at all.
[00:57:26]  No.
[00:57:26]  To rush things out the door?
[00:57:29]  No, it was not a problem then, and it's not a problem now.
[00:57:33]  Get vaccinated.
[00:57:34]  Okay.
[00:57:35]  Contergan, aka thalidomide, became a bestseller.
[00:57:39]  It was helped along by a recent string of deaths and life-altering injuries caused by barbituate sleeping pills.
[00:57:44]  Grunenthal's marketing campaign was based entirely around the fact that thalidomide, unlike those competing pills, was totally safe.
[00:57:51]  It soon spread across the world.
[00:57:53]  Michael McGasnick writes, It was this emphasis on complete and unprecedented safety that allowed thalidomide to prosper in a crowded marketplace.
[00:58:00]  The full-page ads for Distaval, which was its name in Australia, placed by Distillers, which was the company that sold it there, in the Medical Journal of Australia, at a time a key information source for doctors, illustrates the marketing line.
[00:58:12]  A small child is standing on a stool, raiding the family medicine cabinet.
[00:58:16]  The child has opened an unidentified bottle, and the reader correctly surmises that an enormous, potentially fatal overdose is about to occur.
[00:58:23]  Thankfully, though, the advertisement can offer a happier ending.
[00:58:26]  If the unnamed medicine is distaval, there will be no tragedy.
[00:58:29]  The child's life may depend on the safety of distaval, an advertisement shouts.
[00:58:33]  Consider the possible outcome in a case such as this.
[00:58:36]  Had the bottle contained conventional barbituate, doctors were urged.
[00:58:40]  Year by year, the barbituates claim a mounting toll of childhood victims.
[00:58:43]  Yet today, it is simple to prescribe a sedative and hypnotic that is both highly effective and outstandingly safe.
[00:58:48]  Distaval thalidomide has been prescribed for over three years in Great Britain, where the accidental poisonings rate is notoriously high.
[00:58:54]  But there is no case on record in which even gross overdoses with distaval has had harmful results.
[00:59:00]  Put your mind at rest.
[00:59:01]  Depend on the safety of distaval.
[00:59:02]  They're literally advertising it by saying, like, hey, your kids are gonna get into your medicine cabinet.
[00:59:07]  If they eat your barbituate sleeping pills, they're gonna die.
[00:59:09]  But they can take as much thalidomide as they want.
[00:59:12]  Harmless thalidomide.
[00:59:16]  You can give it to kids like candy.
[00:59:17]  Yeah, you know, why don't you put them next to the candy?
[00:59:20]  Just put them next to the throw it in the candy bowl.
[00:59:23]  It's thalidomide.
[00:59:24]  It's safe.
[00:59:25]  Look, put it, stuff it in their teddy bears.
[00:59:27]  They'll snuggle with it num-num-num through the night.
[00:59:30]  Yeah.
[00:59:30]  Put it in their bottle.
[00:59:32]  Don't give them breast milk.
[00:59:33]  Give them thalidomide.
[00:59:34]  It's got everything a baby needs.
[00:59:38]  Harmless thalidomide.
[00:59:40]  So Grunenthal wasted no time in reaching out to thousands of doctors around the world.
[00:59:44]  In the first year, or in 1958, so it goes on sale in 1957.
[00:59:48]  In 1958, they placed 50 ads in medical journals and sent out more than 200,000 letters to doctors, plus 50,000 mailers to doctors and pharmacists.
[00:59:56]  By early 1960, thalidomide was the best-selling sleeping pill in Germany.
[01:00:01]  Mass use led to more problems, of course.
[01:00:03]  It became very clear that thalidomide could cause a particularly horrible form of neuropathy or nerve pain.
[01:00:08]  There was no treatment for it, and the damage could linger for months after the last dose of thalidomide.
[01:00:13]  Some people never recovered.
[01:00:14]  Tens of thousands of Germans alone suffered long-term nerve damage from thalidomide.
[01:00:19]  This caused some doctors to suggest that the drug should be pulled from the cell shelves.
[01:00:23]  These were serious injuries, and no over-the-counter sleeping pill, which thalidomide was, was worth that kind of risk.
[01:00:28]  You could just buy this shit.
[01:00:30]  Oh shit, bro.
[01:00:31]  Yeah.
[01:00:32]  In response, Grunenthal did Nazi shit.
[01:00:35]  They hired private detectives to spy on detractors, including doctors who complained about the drug.
[01:00:39]  They bribed and threatened lawsuits to suppress bad press, and of course, they lied like a cheap rug.
[01:00:44]  At no point did they consider doing anything but going full speed ahead with sales.
[01:00:48]  How many pens did they have to buy off these doctors?
[01:00:51]  How many free pens, you know, lunches?
[01:00:55]  Like, I've seen that today, but back then.

=== Doctors Tricked into Giving Drugs (04:32) ===

[01:00:59]  They are doing that.
[01:01:00]  They're also, there's a lot of doctors that get tricked into doing giving them set, like giving their own families thalidomide.
[01:01:06]  And a lot of doctors who work at Grunenthal, a lot of junior researchers at Grunenthal, give thalidomide to their wives, and there's birth defects.
[01:01:13]  Like it's actually Grunenthal employees suffer horribly as a result of thalidomide.
[01:01:18]  In 1958, a German doctor published a study on thalidomide use among breastfeeding women.
[01:01:24]  He concluded that it was safe for them to use, although this doctor was very clear that this was only for breastfeeding women, not pregnant women, as quote, it is my fundamental outlook never to give mothers to be sleeping drugs or sedatives.
[01:01:38]  It is an old fact of experience in medicine that fundamentally, mothers to be are not to be given barbituates, opiates, sedatives, or hypnotics because these substances can affect fetuses.
[01:01:47]  So this doctor is just being like, hey, breastfeeding women sometimes have trouble sleeping.
[01:01:51]  Is this safe for breastfeeding women?
[01:01:53]  It is.
[01:01:54]  And then he includes a long disclaimer saying, not for pregnant women.
[01:01:57]  Don't give this to pregnant women.
[01:01:58]  Don't give any of this kind of shit to pregnant women.
[01:02:00]  So sus, especially that, like, humans, small humans, are still gestating.
[01:02:06]  We're just like, that's all we're doing for like two years is still gestating.
[01:02:10]  He's, I mean, I don't know that his research was wrong on that.
[01:02:13]  I haven't heard that it was bad for breastfeeding kids.
[01:02:16]  It may not have crossed in that way, but that said, he was very clear that this is just for breastfeeding women.
[01:02:21]  Grunenthal, though, sees this study and they read it as a green light to sell thalidomide to pregnant women.
[01:02:28]  In August of 1958, even though he went out of his way to say, do not fucking give this to pregnant women, in August of 1958, they send out extracts of the study, which don't include that warning, to more than 40,000 German doctors, arguing that this proves the drug is, quote, harmless to mother and baby.
[01:02:47]  So they cut out his warning and just throw in the parts of it that they can say, no, it's great for babies that are great for fetuses.
[01:02:54]  Give it to all the pregnant mothers you possibly can.
[01:02:57]  Now, since many expectant mothers have difficulty sleeping, a lot of doctors started recommending this new pregnancy-safe sleep aid to their patients.
[01:03:05]  Tens of thousands of pregnant women in some 46 countries began taking thalidomide.
[01:03:10]  Meanwhile, evidence of the drug's danger continued to mount.
[01:03:13]  In early 1959, a doctor became pregnant and asked another doctor who worked for Grunenthal whether or not thalidomide thalidomide was safe for her to take.
[01:03:21]  The other doctor answered, of course it is.
[01:03:23]  And in January of 1960, the pregnant doctor gave birth to a child with malformations of the nose, lips, ears, hands, and feet.
[01:03:31]  From Silent Shock, quote, another doctor's wife had a baby with shortened arms after her husband was told by Grunenthal that the medication would be perfectly safe if taken during pregnancy.
[01:03:40]  Later, the woman pressed for a divorce, accusing her doctor-husband of having been too gullible.
[01:03:45]  In Munich, Mrs. H fell pregnant in October 1960, and her husband, a general physician, asked a Grunenthal sales rep if he could safely give his wife Contragan.
[01:03:54]  Their response was boiler prayed.
[01:03:56]  Contourgan is totally non-dangerous and frequently prescribed, especially during pregnancies.
[01:04:01]  In July 1961, Mrs. H gave birth to a severely malformed baby.
[01:04:06]  Her general practitioner husband believed Contragan was to blame.
[01:04:09]  When he spoke with the prosecutor in 1963, he said he had thought he made his suspicions clear to a Grunenthal sales rep after the July 1961 birth, but could not recall the rep's name.
[01:04:18]  So they're getting reports about this, and they're not doing anything about it.
[01:04:22]  Don't take Nazi meds.
[01:04:24]  Yeah, I mean, it is hard not to do that in Germany in this period.
[01:04:28]  No, exactly.
[01:04:30]  But yeah, the, I mean, it's interesting because it is all just like, oh, many pharmaceutical companies are, like, operate in a very like, yeah, we're just going to push the hell out of this and, you know, a few malformations, a few babies without ears, and we're going to sweep that under the rug and keep on rolling.
[01:04:53]  Some of the babies aren't going to come out right.
[01:04:55]  That's just the way it goes.
[01:04:57]  But you're going to sleep like a malformed baby.
[01:05:00]  I'm so sorry.
[01:05:02]  You also, can we just say this is really resuscitating ambien in my mind?
[01:05:07]  Yep.
[01:05:08]  Like, so on, you go on a rant about, you know, I don't know.
[01:05:12]  So what, your kids born without lungs, you know?
[01:05:15]  Like, yeah.
[01:05:17]  This makes ambien just come out swinging.
[01:05:20]  Yeah, ambien sounds a lot better than thalidomide, doesn't it?
[01:05:23]  Yeah.
[01:05:24]  You know what is also better than thalidomide.
[01:05:29]  I don't know where you're.

=== Serious Nerve Damage Risks (04:33) ===

[01:05:31]  God.
[01:05:31]  The products and services that support this podcast.
[01:05:34]  Better than thalidomide.
[01:05:36]  All of them.
[01:05:36]  You know, it'll put you to sleep like a baby?
[01:05:38]  These products and services, as opposed to having you be born without lungs like a thalidomide baby, which is not as desirable.
[01:05:47]  Generally, you want kids to have lungs.
[01:05:49]  I'm not an expert.
[01:05:54]  I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
[01:05:58]  Hi, Dad.
[01:05:59]  And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
[01:06:06]  This is badass convict.
[01:06:09]  Right.
[01:06:09]  Just finished five years.
[01:06:11]  I'm going to have cookies and milk tomorrow.
[01:06:15]  On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversations about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
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[01:07:00]  It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
[01:07:08]  This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
[01:07:17]  If I'm outside with my parents and they see all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what?
[01:07:22]  Today, now, obviously, it's like 100% they believe everything, but at first it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
[01:07:29]  There's an economic component to communities thriving.
[01:07:33]  If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
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[01:07:41]  Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
[01:07:45]  Listen to Eating Wall Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[01:07:54]  Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
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[01:09:21]  Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
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[01:09:55]  Ah, we're back and we're talking about.
[01:09:58]  Okay, so how many years are we talking about here that it's been on the market?
[01:10:02]  It comes on the market in 57.

=== Major Lawsuit and Profits (15:19) ===

[01:10:04]  In 1961, Grunenthal receives, and they have started receiving information about birth deformations.
[01:10:10]  And they're also, the separate issue is nerve damage.
[01:10:14]  Babies, you know, are being affected by this because their pregnant moms are taking it, but also people taking it, adults, are suffering serious nerve damage.
[01:10:23]  One thalidomide victim, it was reported in 1961, had to be sent to a psychiatric hospital because they were just like driven out of their mind by severe nerve damage.
[01:10:31]  Grunenthal began to suspect that rival drug companies were collecting case studies of thalidomide problems in order to damage sales.
[01:10:39]  They hired a private detective to investigate and he began spying on critics of the drug.
[01:10:43]  He became convinced that Merck was behind the whole thing.
[01:10:47]  That same year, 1961, Grunenthal sent executives to East Berlin to try and arrange for thalidomide to be sold in communist East Germany.
[01:10:54]  Thankfully, the East German health authorities had their shit more on the ball than their capitalist cousins.
[01:10:59]  They declared the drug way too dangerous and refused to import it, which is great.
[01:11:03]  So the communists are like, no, this seems like a really horrible medicine.
[01:11:07]  Seems like it's doing a lot of bad shit and we should not allow it to be able to do it.
[01:11:10]  We kept some Nazis, but we killed the.
[01:11:12]  We also killed more than y'all.
[01:11:14]  So.
[01:11:15]  Yeah, yeah, we are.
[01:11:16]  We do not want your Nazi death pills.
[01:11:19]  Oddly enough, and this is one of the only times in history this will be the case, the United States of America makes the same call as communist Germany.
[01:11:28]  We don't allow this.
[01:11:29]  There are some thalidomide babies in the U.S. Some of this stuff gets over as like in as testing pills, basically, but it is never sold widely in the United States.
[01:11:37]  And we owe this to an FDA official named Frances Kelsey.
[01:11:41]  She was an extremely accomplished doctor who'd worked as an editor for the Journal of the American Medical Association before being hired by the FDA.
[01:11:48]  One month after starting the job, a salesman from a company affiliated with Grunenthal came to her door with marvelous stories of a super safe, absolutely can't kill you sleep drug called thalidomide.
[01:11:59]  Now, at this point, in 1960, West Germans were consuming 1 million doses of thalidomide per day.
[01:12:05]  Grunenthal, yeah, Grunenthal and the American company they licensed with were looking at a fortune in potential profits if they could sell this in the United States.
[01:12:14]  With so much money at stake and such widespread adoption overseas, U.S. approval was seen as a formality.
[01:12:20]  Obviously, they're going to let us sell this over there.
[01:12:22]  And it would have been a formality if not for Francis Kelsey.
[01:12:26]  Quote from the University of Chicago: Kelsey insisted on hard evidence to back the salesman's claims for the drug's safety and refused to be browbeaten.
[01:12:34]  After the initial in the initial application, Kelsey noted the reliance on anecdotal testimony in place of clinical data.
[01:12:39]  She ran it by her husband, who then worked as a pharmacologist at the National Institutes of Health.
[01:12:44]  One section of the submission he branded an interesting collection of meaningless pseudoscientific jargon apparently intended to impress chemically unsophisticated readers.
[01:12:52]  Elsewhere, he noted the very unusual claim that thalidomide has no lethal dose.
[01:12:56]  No other substance can make that claim, he wrote.
[01:12:59]  Kelsey's concerns escalated when, in February 1961, she saw a letter from a physician in the British Medical Journal reporting cases of peripheral neuritis, nerve damage in the hands and feet among patients he'd treated with thalidomide.
[01:13:12]  She insisted that the burden of proof was on Grunenthal to show their drug was safe and refused to approve the drug unless they could do that.
[01:13:19]  The sales rep, enraged, called Kelsey's boss, Ralph Smith, and said that he considered the denial letter she'd sent him libellous.
[01:13:27]  Like, this is libel for her to say that thalidomide isn't safe.
[01:13:30]  Yeah, haven't you seen our ads?
[01:13:32]  Did you see the child?
[01:13:34]  That kid got into all kinds of thalidomide.
[01:13:37]  And look at the smile.
[01:13:38]  Look at the smile.
[01:13:39]  Look how happy he is.
[01:13:41]  Now, the thalidomide rep asks the F asks Dr. Kelsey's boss at the FDA, Are you really going to back what this woman says and not let us sell thalidomide?
[01:13:51]  And to his credit, her boss is like, Yes, of course I am.
[01:13:54]  She's a very accomplished doctor, and she's right.
[01:13:57]  Can you imagine he hadn't, though?
[01:13:59]  It's just so scary that, like, history and the lives of so many children in the like born in the 60s would have been at risk had like, yeah, some boss been like, you know, sort of, yeah, baited into that.
[01:14:12]  Like, oh, she's just a chick.
[01:14:14]  Like, eh, you're right, man.
[01:14:15]  Let's go forward.
[01:14:16]  And I think in like the 80s, she gets a major national award for saving the country from thalidomide.
[01:14:21]  Like, no, she's at, she like, it really did come down to this one woman being like, seems like everything you're saying is a lie, and this is extremely dangerous.
[01:14:30]  No, thank you.
[01:14:31]  And I don't know as much about the story in East Germany, but clearly there were people like her over there being like, no, this seems like a horrible thing to allow into our she's like, okay, the literature and the things you provided all are really sus.
[01:14:46]  And so you have to wonder, like, just how like fawning and glorious they were.
[01:14:51]  Like, it will make the strong stronger and the weak, well, it'll kill them, but it's fine.
[01:14:56]  You know, they deserved it anyway.
[01:14:57]  If you can't survive, you know, like, like, what kind of weird, overzealous, you know, trial language were they using?
[01:15:07]  I mean, they're literally saying there's no fatal dose of this stuff, which Dr. Kelsey's husband is like, well, that's not true of anything.
[01:15:14]  Everything has a fatal dose.
[01:15:15]  Like, they clearly did not do proper research if they're saying shit like that.
[01:15:21]  So, the company, the U.S. company that partners with Grunenthal in this keeps trying to get FDA approval for thalidomide, but Dr. Kelsey successfully stymies every effort.
[01:15:30]  And it's a good thing she did.
[01:15:32]  In February of 1961, a scientist at a U.S. firm partnered with Grunenthal had the brilliant idea that since thalidomide was a sedative, it might stop women from miscarrying their babies.
[01:15:42]  Now, there's a lot of sexism based into why he thought this.
[01:15:46]  He believed that miscarriages were caused by women, quote, becoming emotional about their pregnancies and that, quote, habitual abortors could benefit from thalidomide.
[01:15:54]  So that's an idea of how it would have been sold in the U.S.
[01:15:57]  It's like, this will stop you from having spontaneous miscarriages.
[01:16:00]  Take all the thalidomide you can.
[01:16:02]  It'll make sure your babies come out good.
[01:16:04]  Like, you know, that's sort of like when you immediately said that it started being prescribed to pregnant women who couldn't who had trouble sleeping.
[01:16:11]  It's like, okay, well, you've got a lot of sexist doctors walking them down that primrose path of like, oh, you're having you.
[01:16:18]  Listen, little lady, you've got a little too many questions about gestating a life inside of you.
[01:16:24]  You're going to need to go night-night.
[01:16:26]  Yeah, you're going to need to, why don't you just sleep through the next couple of months?
[01:16:29]  Here's a drug with no consequences.
[01:16:31]  By late 1961, the news had filled with hundreds of stories of infants born with severe deformations.
[01:16:37]  Some had flippers for hands, others were missing their legs and pelvis entirely.
[01:16:40]  And some of these, like, honestly, like the pictures that people freak out over are these kids with like flipper hands.
[01:16:46]  That's the best case because a lot of those kids are able to grow up and live normal lives, right?
[01:16:50]  They have to do some accommodations.
[01:16:51]  But there's kids born without legs and pelvises, just no bottom half.
[01:16:55]  There's kids born missing eyes and born without major internal malformations that make them that either kill them outright or make it impossible.
[01:17:02]  Like the best case scenario is that like, yeah, your hands come out a little bit different, but you're able to exist and like grow and live as a person.
[01:17:10]  A lot of kids are born without, again, without like organs that they need to survive.
[01:17:16]  Tell me that Grunenthal went on and like marketed prosthetics.
[01:17:21]  Hey, we've got ears.
[01:17:22]  No, it's thankfully not that story.
[01:17:26]  But it is that sad.
[01:17:27]  So the reports had started to flood in by late 1960, and we know that Dr. Mukter personally was aware of at least 150 cases by that date.
[01:17:35]  When one British distributor of the drug complained to him, he responded, Hey, chill out.
[01:17:40]  You're making money.
[01:17:41]  Like, don't worry that some kids are coming out without lungs.
[01:17:44]  Worry about how much money you're about to make.
[01:17:46]  Of course.
[01:17:47]  The first doctor to publicly expose thalidomide and get through Grunenthal's spies and PR flax was an Australian doctor named William McBride.
[01:17:54]  In 1961, he published a letter in The Lancet laying out a clear connection between thalidomide and birth defects.
[01:18:00]  This led to massive public outcry, which was helped along by the thousands of children with birth defects that started popping up on the front page of newspapers.
[01:18:08]  Grunenthal withdrew the drug on November 26, 1961.
[01:18:12]  We don't know how many babies were born with thalidomide damage.
[01:18:16]  Untold numbers, some estimates say 50,000 of women aborted their fetuses when the news broke.
[01:18:20]  They were just like, well, I've been taking thalidomide.
[01:18:22]  I don't want to arrest you.
[01:18:24]  We know at least 2,000 babies died, as in were born and couldn't survive because they didn't have things that people need as a result of thalidomide.
[01:18:35]  At least 2,000.
[01:18:36]  And another 10,000 worldwide were born with birth defects.
[01:18:40]  The real numbers for both may be much higher.
[01:18:42]  It was sold in some places for years after it got pulled out of others, including like Argentina, kept selling it.
[01:18:46]  I think until like the 90s.
[01:18:48]  There was, of course, a massive lawsuit.
[01:18:50]  Nine Grunenthal employees, and there are some uses for it.
[01:18:54]  Like thalidomide is prescribed today in very specific cases.
[01:18:56]  It has some medicinal uses, but not like it.
[01:18:59]  It's not like a sleep aid.
[01:19:01]  How did it?
[01:19:01]  How did it get to the point?
[01:19:02]  How did we get to Billy Joel here, though?
[01:19:03]  Oh, there's just a line in one of his songs about children of thalidomide.
[01:19:08]  It's a big story.
[01:19:09]  All of these pictures of babies with different, you know, very like people consider there to be gruesome deformations.
[01:19:16]  These pictures are just on the front page of newspapers for months.
[01:19:18]  Like it's a huge stuff that like the National Inquirer just like has on file.
[01:19:24]  Like, let's put another deformed baby on the coach if we need it.
[01:19:27]  Exactly.
[01:19:28]  There's a lot of exploitative aspects to this, but obviously it is a massive story.
[01:19:33]  And there was a major lawsuit.
[01:19:35]  Nine Grunenthal employees were charged with intent to commit bodily harm and voluntary manslaughter.
[01:19:41]  The prosecution gathered huge amounts of data, more than 5,000 case histories that took six years to analyze.
[01:19:47]  Hundreds of witnesses and 70,000 pages of evidence were gathered.
[01:19:50]  Among other things, the prosecution found a Grunenthal doctor who testified that he'd seen mock-up packaging for the drug with warning not-for-pregnant women labels that executives at the company had nixed so that they could sell more thalidomide to pregnant women.
[01:20:04]  One of the Grunenthal lawyers was a fellow named Dr. Joseph Neuberger.
[01:20:08]  In November of 1966, which is a couple of years into the whole trial process, he was made minister of justice for the German state where the trial took place.
[01:20:16]  Three days before he took office, he wrote to the prosecutors, I would be personally obliged for a rapid execution, i.e., I would appreciate it if you would end the trial before we actually have to go to court over this thing.
[01:20:28]  So they're doing like discovery and whatnot.
[01:20:30]  He doesn't want there to be a real trial.
[01:20:31]  Quote from The Guardian: The last thing he did in the afternoon of the day he was sworn in was meet with the prosecution in Aachen.
[01:20:37]  Again, he asked them to stop action against Wertz.
[01:20:40]  He told them he was resigning as a solicitor for Wurz on becoming minister of justice, but then he discussed the case again and repeated his claims.
[01:20:46]  His personal interest in defending Wurtz and the company persisted, as did his company's representation.
[01:20:51]  In the end, prosecutors met with defense lawyers, the Grunenthal Corporate Board, and no representatives of thalidomide victims.
[01:20:58]  They worked out an agreement whereby the company paid what worked out to a couple thousand dollars per victim, and all victims agreed never to sue again.
[01:21:05]  And the state agreed that no Grunenthal employees would be charged with anything.
[01:21:09]  They could have had Aaron Brockovich on this.
[01:21:12]  Where was the German rock?
[01:21:14]  And the judges are angry about this.
[01:21:16]  They write in their decision that had this gone all the way through trial, multiple Grunenthal employees, including Dr. Muckter, would have been sent to prison.
[01:21:25]  That like they were guilty.
[01:21:27]  This agreement that was consented to families is kind of fucking rock.
[01:21:34]  Yeah.
[01:21:37]  I'm saying, like, we just needed some like, you know, like mouthy redhead and a bussie to come in and be like, your family deserves justice.
[01:21:47]  And people have been like, wow, she's hot.
[01:21:51]  And right.
[01:21:52]  Yeah.
[01:21:52]  Anyway.
[01:21:53]  Alas, that is not what goes down.
[01:21:56]  Instead, they get off pretty much scot-free.
[01:21:59]  It is worth noting what an outrageous profit former Nazi Heinrich Muchter made on thalidomide.
[01:22:04]  Between 1952 and 1961, his salary was only 14,400 marks per year.
[01:22:10]  In 1957, the earth thalidomide went on sale.
[01:22:12]  He received a bonus based on his share of sales of 160,000 marks.
[01:22:17]  In 1959, he received a 200,000 mark bonus.
[01:22:20]  In 1961, his bonus was 325,000 marks.
[01:22:24]  Grunenthal is still a very profitable company today.
[01:22:28]  They were eventually shamed into throwing another pittance at thalidomide victims in like 2020.
[01:22:33]  Really?
[01:22:33]  That same year.
[01:22:34]  Okay.
[01:22:34]  Yeah.
[01:22:35]  That same year, they made a public apology to the victims of their drug.
[01:22:39]  And the CEO unveiled a bronze statue of a limbless child in front of theirs.
[01:22:45]  No.
[01:22:46]  I know.
[01:22:46]  That's like the most fucked up part of it.
[01:22:48]  Like, why would you think that would help?
[01:22:51]  We took all those heinous photos and we just enshrined it and gold.
[01:22:57]  And it's there forever.
[01:22:59]  There's like Flipper Kid.
[01:23:00]  That's like, that is.
[01:23:02]  This will make it right.
[01:23:03]  It's like, it's so funny.
[01:23:04]  It's like a weird like attempt at becoming woke for a pharma company to like lean into the birth defects that they cause.
[01:23:13]  Like, no, dude, you're not like, yay, disability rights.
[01:23:17]  Motherfucker, you did this.
[01:23:19]  You can't just champion children who don't have ears now.
[01:23:24]  It's awesome.
[01:23:25]  And it's, I need to read you an excerpt from his apology because it's we've heard a lot of bad apologies the last couple of years.
[01:23:34]  This might be the worst.
[01:23:36]  This might be the worst apology.
[01:23:38]  Was it on Apple Notes?
[01:23:39]  We ask for forgiveness that for nearly 50 years we didn't find a way of reaching out to you from human being to human beings.
[01:23:47]  We ask that you regard our long silence as a sign of the shock that your fate caused in us.
[01:23:53]  We wish that the thalidomide tragedy had never.
[01:23:56]  We didn't get we.
[01:23:57]  We denied you money and fought to make it illegal for you to sue us because we were so shocked at how badly we'd fucked you up.
[01:24:04]  That's all it was.
[01:24:05]  We were so scared of what we did to you that we couldn't do anything right to make it right.
[01:24:10]  Traumatized by the trauma.
[01:24:11]  We're victims too.
[01:24:13]  We're victims by how scary you look because of the things we did, because you're like so gross, amazing apology, incredible apology.
[01:24:22]  Um, took us at least a piece of shit.
[01:24:26]  Pull our jaws off the ground once we saw what you looked like.
[01:24:31]  Um, like 60 years actually, oh my god okay, so was there a lot of money are we talking about?
[01:24:40]  The company should be dissolved for the amount.
[01:24:43]  I mean it.
[01:24:44]  I agree.
[01:24:45]  I, i'm a big believer that um, when companies do stuff like this and this should be, this should have been the case for cigarette companies, you know, when it was found that they'd done all the fucked up shit.
[01:24:54]  It should be the case for Exxon Mobile and Shell and BP Coffee FIND yeah Monsanto, well yeah, and um fucking uh Sackler, the Sackler Pharmaceuticals.
[01:25:05]  That the actual right punishment, in addition to charges against the individuals.
[01:25:09]  You, you charge the company, since corporations are human beings.
[01:25:12]  You charge them with murder and you execute them um and, and that means You like literally dissolve and destroy the people.
[01:25:19]  If there's one benefit to corporations being human beings, why not?

=== Retribution Against Nazi Profiteers (07:45) ===

[01:25:24]  It's that they can be executed.
[01:25:25]  I 100% agree.
[01:25:27]  I think the Grunenthal Corporation should have been dragged out behind a shed and shot with a bolt gun.
[01:25:34]  It's hard for me to believe that this was the only medicine they marketed under false pretenses that killed people or led to horrible birth defects.
[01:25:43]  I mean, I think there's other complaints about the company, but yeah, it's hard to be up on the same level as thalidomide, which is considered to be like one of the great, up until fucking Oxy was like the number one pharmaceutical disaster in history, pretty much.
[01:25:57]  It's good shit.
[01:25:59]  That's rich.
[01:26:00]  Anyway, brought to you by Ambien.
[01:26:02]  Look, Ambien, it's not thalidomide.
[01:26:07]  You will go on a sleepwalking rage about, I don't know, wizard people, but look, it's not thalidomide.
[01:26:16]  Ambien.
[01:26:17]  It'll be funny for your friends.
[01:26:21]  That's the terrible thing, isn't it?
[01:26:24]  So no one saw any more four-year sentences?
[01:26:27]  No.
[01:26:28]  No, nobody, nobody went to prison as a result of this.
[01:26:31]  Dr. Mukter retired wealthy, as are the rest of the Nazis who worked there.
[01:26:36]  The good die young.
[01:26:38]  The old, the bad die very, very old.
[01:26:40]  Yeah, the good die young because they're born without fucking crucial organs as a result of thalidomide poisoning.
[01:26:48]  The full circle on Nazis killing babies is, I mean, yeah, it's incredible in this story.
[01:26:57]  You just do.
[01:26:58]  Yep.
[01:26:59]  Classic Nazis.
[01:27:00]  Well, Francesca, that's going to do it for us here at Behind the Bastards today.
[01:27:04]  Thank you so much, Robert.
[01:27:05]  Now I'm going to go Google these images of children and cremate.
[01:27:12]  I mean, it's not great.
[01:27:14]  I never, I mean, because like a lot, to be quite frank, the, I don't know, the birth defects or whatever that go viral, like people who don't have thalidomide get stuff like that as well.
[01:27:25]  The thing that's particularly, number one, that's horrible is that these wouldn't have happened without thalidomide, as opposed to it just being some quirk of genetics that makes it happen.
[01:27:32]  But the other thing is that like a lot of kids aren't able to live because they're born without things that they need to live.
[01:27:37]  It's like one thing is like, yeah, your hands are different.
[01:27:39]  We can figure out ways to make that work.
[01:27:41]  Or like you don't have, you know, you don't have all of your legs.
[01:27:44]  We can figure out ways for you to live a full life.
[01:27:47]  If you're born without like lungs and shit, it's more difficult.
[01:27:52]  There's not really like an easy way to deal with that.
[01:27:55]  Like, and that's, in addition to the fact that thalidomide, there was just a shitload of kids who would not have been born with any sort of differences or difficulties if they had.
[01:28:03]  This whole story is very like, it is like, if you give a mouse a cookie, but it's more like if you hire a Nazi scientist.
[01:28:10]  Yeah, if you hire Nazi scientists, they will do Nazi shit.
[01:28:14]  He's probably going to do Nazi shit.
[01:28:16]  And then sort of.
[01:28:17]  Because they are.
[01:28:18]  I mean, look.
[01:28:21]  Yeah.
[01:28:22]  What did you expect?
[01:28:23]  Ba-da-ba-ba-da-ba.
[01:28:26]  Yeah, that's exactly the musical sting for thalidomide.
[01:28:33]  We should.
[01:28:34]  I mean, it should be like, this is definitely the next chapter of like understanding the holocaust is also understanding what happens when you hire the people that did the holocaust to do other things.
[01:28:44]  Which is why they all should have been tossed into a mass grave after being shot in the face.
[01:28:49]  Oh, you worked for the, you worked with the SS in any capacity?
[01:28:52]  Off you go.
[01:28:53]  Time to kill you.
[01:28:54]  Unless you're like one of the nine SS guys who were secretly helping concentration camp inmates.
[01:28:59]  There were a few of those dudes.
[01:29:00]  Their stories are important.
[01:29:02]  But unless you're one of those, like, again, like nine dudes, off you go.
[01:29:06]  Put a bullet in your head.
[01:29:07]  This is exactly right.
[01:29:08]  It's like, if you're going to be part of a murderous regime, work your way up, bro.
[01:29:13]  Because, you know, if you're successful enough, again, you're going to land on your feet.
[01:29:18]  I mean, the lesson here is you want to be mid-level.
[01:29:22]  When you're part of an organization that commits unprecedented war crimes, you want to be in the middle.
[01:29:27]  You want to be like the nougat center in the Snickers of Crimes Against Humanity.
[01:29:32]  Because then you don't get it.
[01:29:33]  Everyone knows the Mengel.
[01:29:35]  Peanuts are out.
[01:29:36]  Like, Mengele is a peanut.
[01:29:37]  You're like, you're definitely going to get it.
[01:29:39]  Mengel is a peanut.
[01:29:40]  Yeah.
[01:29:40]  Yeah.
[01:29:40]  Fucking Eichmann is a peanut, right?
[01:29:43]  The fuck Israel went after him lately.
[01:29:45]  They spent so much money catching Eichmann.
[01:29:47]  Nobody's going after Dr. Mukter because he's, again, nicely mid-level.
[01:29:52]  That's where you want to be, baby.
[01:29:54]  Evil nougat.
[01:29:56]  Yeah.
[01:29:57]  Yeah.
[01:29:58]  Again, some advice to our listeners who are considering taking part in a genocidal death regime.
[01:30:05]  Stick to the middle, baby.
[01:30:07]  That's the safe place.
[01:30:11]  The squeaky reel occasionally gets hung after a war crimes tribunal.
[01:30:16]  That's the lesson here.
[01:30:17]  Or occasionally.
[01:30:19]  Honestly, not that often.
[01:30:22]  You're probably fine if you're at the top of it either.
[01:30:25]  We do not, as a species, like punishing war criminals.
[01:30:28]  So that's good.
[01:30:29]  That is good.
[01:30:30]  This has been fascinating.
[01:30:31]  I've learned a lot.
[01:30:32]  I got to sing at Children's Well, thank you, Robert.
[01:30:34]  You did.
[01:30:35]  You did.
[01:30:36]  So, yeah.
[01:30:36]  Oh, my God.
[01:30:37]  What are you going to plug?
[01:30:38]  Let's plug the Obituation Room podcast for a weekly little rundown of the news with some jokes.
[01:30:44]  And somehow is less dark than this podcast.
[01:30:49]  Lobar.
[01:30:50]  Yeah.
[01:30:51]  That's true of most podcasts.
[01:30:53]  Yeah.
[01:30:54]  I'm such a fan, Robert, and it was so good to be on, though, man.
[01:30:58]  Someone's got to do this.
[01:30:59]  Thank you for coming on.
[01:31:01]  We have done a lot of horrible crimes against babies episodes recently.
[01:31:06]  So, child soldiers, arm a baby, y'all.
[01:31:10]  Well, okay.
[01:31:12]  Look, you have kids, right?
[01:31:14]  They're going to find a way to have like a toy gun.
[01:31:16]  Kids are going to be able to get them.
[01:31:17]  They're going to find a way into your gun.
[01:31:18]  Give them real guns and have them fight your wars.
[01:31:20]  Yeah.
[01:31:21]  Make use of it.
[01:31:22]  All I'm saying, right?
[01:31:24]  You're leaving money on the table if you're not weaponizing your children.
[01:31:29]  That's all I'm saying.
[01:31:30]  I think the far right already has caught on to that.
[01:31:33]  I know.
[01:31:33]  I know.
[01:31:34]  Half of the people outside abortion clinics with bloody fetus signs are actual fetuses themselves.
[01:31:40]  They are babies doing their parents' work.
[01:31:44]  Yes.
[01:31:45]  I more mean like an army of babies to do like retribution on Nazis and Nazi profiteers.
[01:31:51]  Yeah, if you could train a baby to kill, they could get into like they could crawl through crawl spaces really easily.
[01:31:57]  They can get into areas full-size adults can't, and they're harder to hit if you're shooting back at them.
[01:32:03]  I think there's a lot of untapped potential in Sophie's like, we got to edit a lot of people.
[01:32:09]  Child soldiers.
[01:32:10]  Look, yeah, we should probably call it for the week.
[01:32:14]  But if you have, if you're a billionaire listening to this and you want to invest in my private military contracting corporation that only hires children under the age of nine, hit me up at Blackwater Types.
[01:32:28]  That's what we're calling it.
[01:32:30]  Lil Blackwater.
[01:32:36]  Blackwater, but cute.
[01:32:37]  Yeah, Lil Halliburton.
[01:32:39]  Yeah.
[01:32:39]  Why not just Lil versions of all the Lil Raytheon babe theonym?
[01:32:45]  Yes.
[01:32:45]  We'll work it out.
[01:32:46]  We'll work it out.
[01:32:47]  All right.
[01:32:48]  This has been Behind the Bastards.
[01:32:49]  Thank you, Francesca.
[01:32:50]  Check out the Abituation Room.
[01:32:52]  Check out my novel at ATRBook.com.
[01:32:55]  It's free.
[01:32:56]  Yeah, my kittens are crying in the background.
[01:32:58]  Yeah, well, they're not going to get it because I'm bad.
[01:33:05]  And scene.

=== Building Your Financial Future (02:02) ===

[01:33:09]  Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic, Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
[01:33:17]  Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
[01:33:24]  Coming up this season on Math and Magic, CEO of Liquid Death Mike Cesario.
[01:33:29]  People think that creative ideas are like these light bulb moments that happen when you're in the shower, where it's really like a stone sculpture.
[01:33:37]  You're constantly just chipping away and refining.
[01:33:39]  Take to interactive CEO Strauss Selnick and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.
[01:33:44]  Listen to Math and Magic on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[01:33:49]  This is Amy Roebach, alongside TJ Holmes from the Amy and TJ podcast.
[01:33:53]  And there is so much news, information, commentary coming at you all day and from all over the place.
[01:34:00]  What's fact, what's fake, and sometimes what the F.
[01:34:04]  So let's cut the crap, okay?
[01:34:06]  Follow the Amy and TJ Podcast, a one-stop news and pop culture shop to get you caught up and on with your day.
[01:34:13]  And listen to Amy and TJ on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
[01:34:20]  It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating While Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
[01:34:28]  This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum-Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
[01:34:37]  There's an economic component to community thriving.
[01:34:41]  If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they've failed.
[01:34:45]  Listen to Eating While Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[01:34:53]  Saturday, May 2nd, country's biggest stars will be in Austin, Texas at our 2026 iHeart Country Festival presented by Capital One.
[01:35:01]  Tickets are on sale now.
[01:35:03]  Get yours before they sell out at TicketMaster.com.
[01:35:06]  That's TicketMaster.com.
[01:35:08]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[01:35:10]  Guaranteed human.