Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Thomas Kinkade: the Evil-est Painter
Aired: 2024-08-29
Duration: 01:12:02


=== Profiting From Evil Art (15:09) ===

[00:00:01]  Cool zone media.
[00:00:04]  Oh man, welcome back to Behind the Bastards.
[00:00:09]  You know, this is part two of our episodes on Thomas Kincaid with Randy Milholland of Something Positive.
[00:00:15]  And in between recording episodes, we usually do both parts on the same day.
[00:00:19]  And we'll always have a break in between so we can grab a little bit of lunch, you know, just have some minutes without the headset on, you know, recharge.
[00:00:26]  This time, I sat down and I wrote an 8,600-word short story where Hitler and John Wayne Gacy solve a series of murders in 1980s New Orleans.
[00:00:38]  And you know, I'm going to be honest, I'm having some mixed feelings about it.
[00:00:41]  Turned out more erotic than I had initially intended.
[00:00:45]  And I think largely, honestly, Randy, I think I mostly used it as a vehicle to express a lot of my anger at the Federal Reserve.
[00:00:52]  Read it.
[00:00:53]  I think that was all expected from everyone.
[00:00:55]  Like, I'm surprised it's not more erotic.
[00:00:58]  I thought that there would have been like a heaving scene where they talked about manhood and explosions.
[00:01:07]  I had to cut that because Hitler gives a speech about the gold standard at the site of the second murder that I really felt got across something important.
[00:01:15]  I'm going to put it up on my sub stack, Sophie.
[00:01:17]  We'll get it out there for all of the listeners.
[00:01:19]  He's the audience that you've written a thing and then not read it.
[00:01:22]  Sophie, you're not allowed to podcast the opinions I have about the Federal Reserve.
[00:01:27]  They'll come for me.
[00:01:28]  They'll come for all of us.
[00:01:31]  Can I design the cover for this book at least?
[00:01:33]  Please, please.
[00:01:34]  I'm thoroughly enjoying our rollover here where you're trying to save our jobs and I'm trying to provoke you.
[00:01:42]  Sophie, I know you feel the same.
[00:01:44]  That's why we're business partners.
[00:01:46]  You're just as angry at the Fed as I have.
[00:01:48]  You know, you've been voting for Ron Paul for years before he was even in office, you know?
[00:01:53]  And we still write him in every year.
[00:01:55]  Every year.
[00:01:56]  For every position, County Commissioner Ron Paul.
[00:02:02]  But for me, Ron Paul.
[00:02:02]  Ruffle dog catcher, Ron Paul.
[00:02:04]  But for me, Ron Paul isn't a man.
[00:02:06]  He's really just a friendly cat.
[00:02:08]  Well, Ron Paul kind of, I think, exists above and beyond the concept of sexuality, which is why he's so erotic.
[00:02:16]  Anyway, Randy, are you ready to learn more about Thomas Kincaid?
[00:02:19]  Okay.
[00:02:20]  I'm terrified to learn more about Thomas Kincaid.
[00:02:22]  I'll be honest with you.
[00:02:23]  Because I feel like this is going to go downhill real fucking fast.
[00:02:27]  It definitely will.
[00:02:29]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[00:02:32]  Guaranteed human.
[00:02:34]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[00:02:42]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:02:45]  He is not going to get away with this.
[00:02:47]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:02:49]  We always say that: trust your girlfriends.
[00:02:54]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:02:55]  Trust me, babe.
[00:02:56]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:03:06]  Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast Playing Along is back with more of my favorite musicians.
[00:03:11]  Check out my newest episode with Josh Groban.
[00:03:14]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:03:17]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:03:18]  That's so funny.
[00:03:20]  Share each day with me each night, each morning.
[00:03:28]  Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:03:36]  What's up, everyone?
[00:03:37]  I'm Ego Mode.
[00:03:38]  My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
[00:03:42]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:03:45]  He goes, just give it a shot.
[00:03:46]  But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:03:53]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:03:56]  Would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:04:03]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:04:05]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:04:06]  There's a lot of life.
[00:04:08]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:04:18]  We're back.
[00:04:19]  Thomas started becoming a household name in the early to mid-1990s, a time when collectibles were taking off in a big way, as we talked about last episode.
[00:04:29]  This is the decade, again, Pokemon, Magic Gathering.
[00:04:32]  There's this whole new subculture.
[00:04:33]  And Thomas is aware of all this.
[00:04:34]  And he's aware that I think, I think part of what he's aware of is, if you're a Zoomer, you won't remember this, but millennials in the audience will recall every time you had magic or Pokemon or, you know, fucking Masters of the Universe toys, some new collectible craze take off.
[00:04:49]  There'd be a chunk of the Christian right telling everyone that this was the devil, that like this was Satan trying to get his hands on our children.
[00:04:56]  And this was amazing.
[00:04:59]  The fear of Furbies, too, right?
[00:05:01]  And I, D and D, you know, which is less of a collectibles thing, but it still kind of speaks to the mood at the time.
[00:05:08]  And I, this is not something I've heard anyone else write.
[00:05:10]  Maybe I'm wrong about this, but I kind of suspect part of what Thomas is consciously doing here is recognizing, well, for a wide variety of reasons, evangelical Christians cannot or don't feel comfortable buying into these other sort of collectible things, but they're people like anyone else.
[00:05:29]  Whatever thing in the human brain gets ticked by collecting a bunch of shit, they have that too.
[00:05:35]  I just have to provide them with something that's safe, right?
[00:05:39]  And I do kind of suspect that that's what he's doing, especially when he's-absolutely what he's doing.
[00:05:45]  Yeah.
[00:05:46]  Yeah, because it's such the same thing, the artificially restricting the selection, right?
[00:05:50]  The trying to get people to hoard stuff, convincing them these are investment vehicles.
[00:05:55]  And he would also, this is kind of where things get fun.
[00:05:58]  He started spreading insane rumors about the links that he would go to to make sure that his highlighted art pieces were like worth collecting, that nobody was getting a fake, right?
[00:06:07]  That you were getting an original Thomas Kincaid print if you bought a Thomas Kincaid print that a real person had like slapped a little bit of paint on a tree for.
[00:06:16]  Most editions were supposedly signed with ink that contained Thomas's DNA from either his hair or his blood, quote, to prevent fakes, which I love because the insinuation here is that some of the $30,000 millionaires buying his art could afford to have the signature DNA tested somehow if they needed to prove that their Thomas Kincaid was an original.
[00:06:39]  Like, where are people going to get that test done, Thomas?
[00:06:44]  How are they doing this?
[00:06:46]  Oh my God, does Thomas Kinkade have something in common with KISS?
[00:06:51]  Because it was a whole story about them mixing their blood and the ink for their Marvel comic.
[00:06:56]  Yes.
[00:06:56]  And I honestly, I think that more artists should do this, right?
[00:07:01]  Like when you get it, you should be able to listen to not just the normal edition of this podcast, right?
[00:07:07]  That's for poor people.
[00:07:09]  If you're a man of means, you should be able to buy the exclusive edition of this podcast, which comes with a vial of either my blood or my hair, you know?
[00:07:18]  You never know what you're going to get, but something that was once a part of me, you know, and all you have to pay, it's Sophie.
[00:07:24]  It's just $22,000 an episode.
[00:07:26]  That's a bargain.
[00:07:29]  Anyway, it's a collectible, everybody.
[00:07:31]  Guaranteed to appreciate it.
[00:07:32]  You're going to kick them off anyway.
[00:07:34]  Yeah, that's right.
[00:07:35]  That's right.
[00:07:36]  Toenails, earwax.
[00:07:39]  You know what?
[00:07:39]  A special benefit for our online listeners who are crazy rich people with money.
[00:07:43]  Every time you buying an exclusive Behind the Bastards premiere collector's edition episode, you get three minutes of Hitler and John Wayne Gacy solving crimes in 1980s New Orleans.
[00:07:55]  Collect them all to get the whole story.
[00:07:58]  You sickos that heard Robert say things about hair and toenails and thought, ooh, I would want that.
[00:08:03]  Keep that to yourself.
[00:08:05]  I'm going to stay off the subreddit this week.
[00:08:07]  Don't post anything.
[00:08:11]  Bop and Jenny.
[00:08:12]  Stay off the internet.
[00:08:14]  Like my mom always says, keep that on the inside like a winner.
[00:08:17]  Yeah.
[00:08:18]  So let's be honest.
[00:08:20]  Any rich person who's listening to your podcast is probably just getting ideas of what they're going to do with their wealth.
[00:08:25]  Yeah.
[00:08:25]  Yeah.
[00:08:26]  I don't know how many of these $22,000 collector's edition episodes we're going to sell.
[00:08:33]  Critics continue to dog his work, continue to dog his work.
[00:08:37]  Somehow, the whole I put my own blood and my signature on these prints didn't win them back.
[00:08:42]  But as he grew older and richer, he got better at striking back at them, as this segment from an article in Salon makes clear.
[00:08:50]  In nearly every encounter with the press, Kincaid delivered a diatribe against the art world establishment that had shut him out.
[00:08:56]  They were elites touting unfathomable downer junk to hardworking people who needed uplift instead.
[00:09:02]  Art snobs were the aesthetic counterparts of the so-called liberal elites.
[00:09:08]  So he's doing culture war stuff with this too.
[00:09:10]  Like you're which is again, he's he's not unique in this.
[00:09:14]  That's really starting on the right in the 90s to a significant degree.
[00:09:19]  People are finding out how to monetize the culture war, but he's kind of the first guy to mix that with like the collectibles industry, which I find interesting, right?
[00:09:28]  You are participating in a culture war against leftist intellectuals by buying my prints.
[00:09:34]  It's like back to the whole evangelist thing.
[00:09:36]  How many evangelists like you know, the world is against you, but like here I'm with you.
[00:09:40]  Now buy this prayer vial of water.
[00:09:44]  Right.
[00:09:45]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:09:46]  Um, now I should note here that one time Thomas said of Pablo Picasso, he had talent, but didn't use it in a significant way.
[00:09:54]  I'm sorry, what?
[00:09:56]  What a wild man to say that about, yeah, man, Wernicke, not really much, not a lot of talent being used there, right?
[00:10:06]  He kind of half-assed his way through that piece of art, that century-defining piece of art.
[00:10:13]  That's stunning.
[00:10:14]  That is amazing, amazing, amazing.
[00:10:19]  I am.
[00:10:20]  That's that's like Bob Denver knocking down like a oh my god, like some major actor.
[00:10:28]  Oh, God.
[00:10:29]  It's like it's like he's talking about like some jazz musician who put out like one really great album and then like overdosed or something, where it's like, oh, it's a tragedy that he didn't like, you know, master his demons and make more art.
[00:10:40]  But like Pablo Picasso made a lot of very influential art.
[00:10:44]  What are you talking about?
[00:10:47]  Across mediums.
[00:10:49]  Yes.
[00:10:49]  Jesus.
[00:10:50]  I mean, what a what a wild thing to say.
[00:10:53]  I had a great experience like 10, 15 years back at a mobile world congress in Barcelona.
[00:11:00]  Intel and Nokia bought out the Picasso Museum for like a party.
[00:11:05]  And so it was just like you were just kind of like walking through and on the walls are just like these like draw like sketches that he had done too, including a bunch of him like having sex with his girlfriend, which I felt like, oh, well, I don't know.
[00:11:18]  Should this be up on the wall of a, well, like, I don't know.
[00:11:21]  That's not, it's not creepy for you to draw, depict your own relationship with somebody.
[00:11:27]  It's kind of weird as the people running the museum to be like, well, yeah, we should stick this up on the wall.
[00:11:32]  Yeah.
[00:11:32]  It's like, I don't know, man.
[00:11:34]  That's a little private to me.
[00:11:38]  Yeah.
[00:11:39]  Yeah.
[00:11:40]  I don't think I need to see that.
[00:11:42]  Yeah.
[00:11:43]  He, he, he does a good job of depicting what the beard looks like in that situation, if you're really curious.
[00:11:50]  You can learn a lot about Picasso.
[00:11:51]  Pretty good.
[00:11:52]  Pretty good.
[00:11:53]  These were all not thrusting pictures.
[00:11:55]  I'll say that much about them.
[00:11:57]  Anyway, it was a fun time.
[00:11:58]  Oh, he's more of a layer guy.
[00:12:00]  Yeah.
[00:12:01]  You can say that.
[00:12:03]  So in 1994, Kincaid took Lighthouse.
[00:12:07]  I wonder what Kincaid.
[00:12:08]  No, I don't.
[00:12:08]  In 19.
[00:12:09]  No, he's about to.
[00:12:11]  He's going to sexually harass people later in this episode.
[00:12:14]  Oh, God damn it.
[00:12:16]  I was going to say Picasso would never, but Picasso probably did.
[00:12:20]  I'm actually rather sure that he there's some things about him.
[00:12:24]  Yeah, almost certainly.
[00:12:26]  In 1994, Kincaid took Lighthouse Publishing public.
[00:12:30]  It was initially very successful, raking in millions of dollars and shooting up the value of the stock to something like $20 or $25 a share at its height.
[00:12:39]  Kincaid became the only working artist to, in Sue Orleans' words, be a small cap equity issue, right?
[00:12:46]  He is, this is unique.
[00:12:48]  Like, it's not unique for artists to like commercialize, but the way that he does it, he's the only guy doing it this way.
[00:12:55]  Yeah.
[00:12:57]  Later in 1994, he is named Artist of the Year by the National Association of Limited Edition Dealers, evidence that he had been spotted and appreciated by the sort of people who are making a fortune on the burgeoning collectible culture.
[00:13:10]  Business Week named Lighthouse a hot growth company in 1995.
[00:13:14]  And from 1997 to mid-2005, Kincaid earned an eye-watering total of $53 million for his work.
[00:13:22]  This included almost $12 million for these studio proofs that he retouched with highlights.
[00:13:29]  Nice work if you can make it.
[00:13:33]  If you can find the suckers with the money, I mean, I don't know what to say.
[00:13:38]  I see nothing wrong with becoming rich off your work.
[00:13:40]  I see nothing wrong with selling your stuff out there, but I do hate the whole grift part of it.
[00:13:46]  Yeah, there's definitely a degree of evil here.
[00:13:49]  At the same time, if you have a chance to make $53 million painting trees on a canvas, who's not going to be able to do that?
[00:13:56]  That's right.
[00:13:57]  I got a shit.
[00:13:58]  Who wouldn't?
[00:14:02]  I could make a bunch of prints of Popeye and make extra money by just painting the pipe on him afterwards.
[00:14:07]  Yeah.
[00:14:07]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:14:07]  Doing a little dash of brown.
[00:14:10]  Hearst Media, I promise I will not be doing that.
[00:14:13]  Please don't.
[00:14:14]  I might, though, if you want to see me paint some pipes, you know, or paint.
[00:14:19]  Once we get that Hitler Gacy art, you know, I could do a little, I could do a little dollop a color on there.
[00:14:25]  $12 million for print.
[00:14:28]  It'll appreciate Sophie.
[00:14:29]  It's going to make them money.
[00:14:30]  This is a great investment vehicle.
[00:14:32]  Oh, my God.
[00:14:33]  You know, cash out your 401k.
[00:14:35]  We always go.
[00:14:36]  You know, we always go 50-50.
[00:14:38]  Listener.
[00:14:38]  And I'm very pro.
[00:14:40]  Cash out your 401ks and pick up some of our erotic Hitler Gacy art.
[00:14:46]  It's the Bitcoin of the 2020s.
[00:14:49]  God.
[00:14:50]  I feel like people who bought these prints with paint on them are the same people who probably all succidentally buy the Trump dollars or the Trump teddy bears.
[00:14:59]  100% of his customers have since gotten caught up in a scam where they bought $500 Trump bills or they are collecting Iraqi dinars waiting for Trump to get back in and revalue them.

=== The Pooh Peeing Scandal (05:22) ===

[00:15:11]  Like they are all born marks.
[00:15:14]  That is who he profits off of.
[00:15:16]  That's why there's one of these in every 10 houses.
[00:15:22]  Oh, God.
[00:15:23]  We all love gold.
[00:15:24]  I mean, it's, again, a great investment vehicle.
[00:15:26]  Only goes up.
[00:15:28]  Don't look into that.
[00:15:31]  So as the business went on, Kincaid proved himself a savvy innovator.
[00:15:35]  The people he brought on to advise his company once it started making millions of dollars seem to have felt he was walking a tightrope, providing art that looked original and unique, but wasn't original and unique in any sense that mattered.
[00:15:47]  When Thomas told them he wanted to start offering different sizes of print and versions of his prints and limited products like mugs and lazy boy lounge chairs, seriously, they hit lazy boy chairs.
[00:15:58]  Yeah, yeah, cottage painted on them.
[00:16:00]  Yeah, I think like a or or like a uh whatchamacallit, a landscape.
[00:16:05]  Yeah, that sounds like a nightmare.
[00:16:07]  I don't want to wake up surrounded by Thomas Kincaid art.
[00:16:12]  This is reminding me of Kiss again.
[00:16:14]  Like, like, don't forget you get your Thomas Kinkade coffin.
[00:16:18]  These are not ab, they're not very different people in a lot of ways.
[00:16:23]  No, they're not.
[00:16:24]  I think Gene Simmons is a lot more honest.
[00:16:26]  I'll say this: Thomas always pretends to not be the kind of guy he is.
[00:16:30]  Gene Simmons is pretty much the kind of guy he is, right?
[00:16:35]  One thing you can't say when you hear ugly stuff about Gene Simmons, you can't pretend he misled me, right?
[00:16:40]  It's like no, you really can't.
[00:16:42]  I kind of always knew you were a piece of shit, Gene.
[00:16:47]  You feel like it's like oily to be around you.
[00:16:50]  Yeah, yeah, I would have to take a shower shaking your hand.
[00:16:53]  I just know that about you.
[00:16:55]  Um, so anyway, his investors, Kincaid's investors, when he starts putting out lazy boy chairs, are like, Well, this, what if this devalues all the prints you're putting out?
[00:17:03]  These are supposed to be investment vehicles.
[00:17:05]  People are supposed to be serious art.
[00:17:07]  This might make it look cheap.
[00:17:09]  Uh, and Kincaid replied, Fuck you, motherfuckers, and whipped out his dick.
[00:17:13]  Uh, I mean, not like literally, I would respect that, but also he kind of did literally because Thomas Kincaid was the kind of guy who liked to assert his dominance in social situations, particularly business settings, by pissing on stuff.
[00:17:28]  This is a regular thing in his career, so he did kind of whip his dick out on them, right?
[00:17:33]  Yeah, I used to know he seriously he reenacted the bathroom scene from Wolf.
[00:17:39]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:17:41]  I mean, I've seen, I used to know a kind of like mid-level drug lord, uh, lower mid-level drug lord who would do that whenever he showed up at a site is just like whip his dick out and start pissing all over the ground in front of the farm or something.
[00:17:55]  Um, you know, it's just that there's some guys who just have that in them that need to like, this will, this will somehow gain me a benefit in the situation.
[00:18:03]  I prefer the uh, I got this from the old um uh Upright Citizens Brigade, but the ass pennies idea.
[00:18:10]  That one works a lot better.
[00:18:11]  Um, you know, look that one up, kids.
[00:18:13]  Look up the ass penny sketch if you ain't seen it.
[00:18:15]  When my daughter was two, and if I wasn't giving her enough attention, uh, she would just, you know, pull her trainers off and pee on the floor and make sure I saw it.
[00:18:25]  And that's what makes me think of, like, did no one put Kincaid in a corner for a timeout?
[00:18:31]  Maybe it, because you're right.
[00:18:33]  Having spent time around a little kid now, it is one of the like one of the first levers that you learn as a little person you can play.
[00:18:40]  It's like, well, if I am not getting the attention I need, they have to pay attention if I start pissing on something.
[00:18:46]  Sure, dude.
[00:18:47]  Yeah, Thomas Kincaid is just kind of stuck in that two-year-old stage.
[00:18:51]  So, for an example of how this kind of went in the late 1990s, he held a company gathering at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, according to the Huffington Post.
[00:18:59]  Quote, this one's for you, Walt.
[00:19:01]  The artist quipped late one night as he urinated on a Winnie the Pooh figure, said Terry Shepard, a former vice president for Kincaid's company in an interview.
[00:19:10]  Gross, sir.
[00:19:11]  Gross.
[00:19:12]  Of all the things to piss on, Winnie the Pooh.
[00:19:16]  And again, I would like to reiterate: Kincaid's company currently has a license with Disney and does Disney prints, Marvel prints, and Star Wars prints.
[00:19:28]  Yeah.
[00:19:28]  Also, he's called Winnie the Pooh.
[00:19:30]  And he's not Winnie the Peene.
[00:19:31]  Get it right, Thomas.
[00:19:32]  You do have to pay an extra 50% for one of the Winnie the Pooh prints that he pissed on.
[00:19:37]  Those are a dwindling commodity now, trash.
[00:19:43]  Now, this incident, him pissing on the poo, came up in a court case.
[00:19:48]  That's why we know it.
[00:19:50]  So, this vice president had to tell this story under oath.
[00:19:54]  And when Thomas was questioned about it, he told the truth and described that he was, he said that basically, this isn't a thing I did just once.
[00:20:01]  I am drawn to, quote, ritual territory marking.
[00:20:07]  Very funny.
[00:20:08]  So, does he own the 100 acre wood now because he peed on Wayne the Pooh and assert his dominance?
[00:20:12]  Like, I don't know.
[00:20:13]  That's how it works.
[00:20:14]  That's how it works.
[00:20:15]  That's how he got ownership of it from A.A. Gnome.
[00:20:18]  That old fucker just couldn't fight back.
[00:20:20]  Didn't have a strong.
[00:20:21]  His prostate's been swollen up since World War I.
[00:20:23]  So he can't even, he can't even get a good stream.
[00:20:26]  It's hard to fight back when you're a corpse.
[00:20:28]  Well, yeah, that too.
[00:20:29]  Men are gross.
[00:20:30]  That's gross.
[00:20:32]  Yeah, we are.
[00:20:32]  We are.

=== Dominance In 100 Acre Wood (03:00) ===

[00:20:34]  Don't be judgmental.
[00:20:35]  Don't be judgmental, you know?
[00:20:36]  The world needs all kinds.
[00:20:38]  Without people peeing on plants, how will they get enough nitrogen?
[00:20:42]  I think it's nitrogen.
[00:20:43]  Anyway.
[00:20:44]  I don't think that that's good for plants percent.
[00:20:46]  It's good for some stuff.
[00:20:48]  You know.
[00:20:49]  Anyway, here's ads.
[00:20:55]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:20:59]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:21:02]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:21:05]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:21:09]  We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
[00:21:13]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
[00:21:16]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:21:18]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:21:23]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:21:25]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:21:27]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:21:29]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:21:32]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:21:34]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:21:36]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:21:40]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:21:42]  Trust me, babe.
[00:21:43]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:21:53]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:21:59]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:22:06]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
[00:22:12]  From power to parenthood.
[00:22:14]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:22:18]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:22:20]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:22:22]  The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
[00:22:27]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:22:33]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:22:36]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:22:42]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[00:22:44]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:22:47]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:22:55]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:23:01]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:23:05]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:23:11]  Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
[00:23:21]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:23:26]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:23:29]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:23:32]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.

=== Derangement At Yosemite (15:33) ===

[00:23:34]  That's so funny.
[00:23:35]  Mary stay with me each night, each morning.
[00:23:44]  Say you love me, you know.
[00:23:48]  So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:23:58]  Ah, we're back.
[00:24:00]  We're thinking about peeing on things.
[00:24:02]  No, always a good time.
[00:24:04]  You are.
[00:24:05]  That's you.
[00:24:05]  That's yours.
[00:24:07]  I'm going to go out into the woods today and pee on some stuff, Sophie.
[00:24:10]  So for a while, the times were good, at least for Kincaid and his close and his closest allies, but their fortune was entirely reliant upon having a healthy garden of marks to keep funneling the money up.
[00:24:21]  Because again, this is basically an MLM or a pyramid scheme.
[00:24:24]  Now, I'm not talking about most of his customers here.
[00:24:27]  Most of them are misled by the sales pitch, as is the case with multi-level marketing, though.
[00:24:32]  The big money for Kincaid isn't in individual sales, it's in convincing people who have startup capital to go in and invest in starting a gallery to sell your shit, right?
[00:24:44]  That's the part of this that really does look most like a pyramid scheme, right?
[00:24:48]  Because while Lighthouse is a public company, each Kincaid signature gallery is a business owned by private operators, much like a McDonald's.
[00:24:55]  Much of Thomas's work outside of painting was selling himself to the people who wanted to own galleries.
[00:25:00]  One of these people, last name Spinello, later claimed in court that Kincaid's personal life story was a big part of the sales pitch.
[00:25:07]  Quote, we were told success story after success story, and of course, the Tom story and his Christian views and the way he runs his life.
[00:25:13]  So these are like old retirees who have banked a few million and are being told, like, oh, this nice Christian man is giving us a chance to really increase our wealth.
[00:25:22]  He wouldn't lie to us.
[00:25:23]  Look at what a good Christian he is.
[00:25:25]  Now, of course, like any man with this much money, Thomas was not living the chaste and sober life of a monk.
[00:25:31]  From an article in the LA Times, quote, in testimony and interviews with The Times, Shepard and other former employees said they often went with Kincaid to strip clubs and bars where he frequently became intoxicated and out of control.
[00:25:43]  John Dandoy, Media Arts Group's senior director of retail operations from 1995 to 1999, testified in a hearing that the artist was a sort of Jekyll and Hyde character whose behavior worsened as the alcohol flowed.
[00:25:55]  Tom would be fine.
[00:25:56]  He would be drinking, and then all of a sudden you couldn't tell where the boundary was.
[00:25:59]  And then he became very incoherent and he would start cussing and doing a lot of weird stuff.
[00:26:04]  Dan Doy, who left the company to become chief executive of a group of galleries owned by Kincaid's brother, recounted that about six years ago, the artist was so intoxicated during a performance by Siegfried and Roy in Las Vegas that people seated nearby moved away from him.
[00:26:19]  I think it was Roy or Siegfried or whatever had a cod piece on his leotard, Stan Doy testified.
[00:26:24]  And so when the show started, Tom just started yelling, COD peace, God peace, and had to be quieted by his mother and wife.
[00:26:31]  Wow.
[00:26:33]  Yeah.
[00:26:35]  He's like that uncle everyone has.
[00:26:38]  Yeah, he's your drunkle.
[00:26:39]  He's heckling Siegfried and Roy, you know.
[00:26:43]  That one's more or less: look, have I heckled floor shows in Las Vegas while too drunk to be controlled?
[00:26:50]  Yes.
[00:26:50]  Do I do it every time I go to Las Vegas?
[00:26:53]  Absolutely.
[00:26:54]  You know, would I have done that to Siegfried and Roy?
[00:26:58]  Possibly.
[00:26:59]  You know, that's not why we're angry.
[00:27:00]  I just thought it was a funny story.
[00:27:04]  I'm amazed.
[00:27:04]  Also, there are women out there who can say they gave lap dances to Thomas Kincaid, to the painter of light, which is a trademark, by the way.
[00:27:15]  You can't call yourself the painter of light.
[00:27:17]  Only him.
[00:27:19]  I want to see a Thomas Kinkade painting where it's a beautiful country landscape, that nice mist in the morning and the sun breaking through like the orange and red clouds on a strip club.
[00:27:33]  Just like a side of the road going from the inside nowhere strip club with like a little Thomas Kincaid out front smoking a cigarette and thinking about how his life went so wrong.
[00:27:45]  Yeah, why his wife won't return his phone calls.
[00:27:48]  That's the art we need.
[00:27:51]  So for a while, his wife Nanette was able to exercise partial control over Tom when they were together.
[00:27:56]  But as the years went on, Thomas traveled constantly for business.
[00:27:59]  His galleries sold unevenly most of the year, but they always received huge bursts of sales, sometimes hundreds in a day with lines out the block when he showed up to give a talk and personally highlight pieces.
[00:28:10]  So he would have to travel around to galleries in order to keep sales going.
[00:28:15]  And, you know, this leads to him being away from his wife and being away from any kind of like moderating aspects on his behavior, which leads to him partying constantly and this company culture where the employees who work for Thomas directly, like the master highlighters and his business managers and marketing people, come to view Thomas as something of a god.
[00:28:34]  And his backstory is like this sacred text because he's he's worshipped whenever he shows up at one of these places.
[00:28:40]  He has fans lining up out the door.
[00:28:43]  So you can't really think of him as this normal person.
[00:28:46]  There's almost this like derangement that goes on for the people working beneath him.
[00:28:51]  And there's this kind of cultic belief system that springs up within the Kincaid company itself, which is embodied by one of his business managers talking to The Guardian here and saying, quote, there's over 40 walls in the average American home.
[00:29:04]  And Tom says our job is to figure out how to populate every single wall and every single home and every business throughout the world with his paintings.
[00:29:12]  Which is a deranged thing to say and want, but it does, it does.
[00:29:16]  Thomas Kincaid walked so that AI fucking image generators could run, right?
[00:29:22]  Also, this is something like L. Ron Hubbard shit.
[00:29:25]  It is, right?
[00:29:26]  That like there's something, this is a big part of the narrative, too, that like there's something healing about our paintings.
[00:29:33]  People need them.
[00:29:34]  And so, you know, the fact that Thomas himself is this messy drunk who does not live the actual life he pretends to live, the fact that we're charging an arm and a leg for these is justified because these are making the world better.
[00:29:47]  One company.
[00:29:48]  You have a prints that you dribbled one dot of paint on.
[00:29:51]  Yes, yes, yes.
[00:29:53]  These are part of healing the planet and bringing it back to God.
[00:29:57]  As one line from a company brochure noted, in the often hurried, unsympathetic, and complex world we live in, the images Thomas Kincaid paints offer a place of refuge, a place where the transient things of life give away to the things that matter most.
[00:30:10]  Faith and family, a loving home, and the people who know and love us.
[00:30:14]  Now, this all sounds patently silly, just an obvious soulless grift, but Kincaid's work really touched a huge number of people.
[00:30:24]  The fact that I think they were wrong to be touched by what was a patent soulless grift by a man who did not believe the things he pretended to say to them didn't matter, right?
[00:30:36]  And I got to say, one of the few people who try to grapple with this and do a really good job of it was Joan Didion, who wrote this about Thomas Kincaid.
[00:30:46]  The passion with which buyers approached these Kincaid images was hard to define.
[00:30:51]  The manager of one California gallery that handled them told me that it was not unusual to sell six or seven at a clip to buyers who already owned 10 or 20, and that the buyers with whom he dealt brought the viewing of the images a sizable emotional weight.
[00:31:04]  Right?
[00:31:06]  These are early super fans.
[00:31:08]  And there's a degree of what you're going to see in Trumpism where once it comes out, the kind of lifestyle he really lives, it doesn't affect his fan base at all.
[00:31:18]  They don't care because what they need is not the reality of Thomas Kincaid.
[00:31:22]  They need this like fantasy of who and what he is and what his art represents.
[00:31:26]  And he's not a necessary part of that past a certain point.
[00:31:30]  Well, it's like that with most like conservative Christian groups.
[00:31:34]  Like look Jerry Falwell, you know, happen and he still had people.
[00:31:39]  Yeah.
[00:31:39]  Jim Baker still has a career.
[00:31:42]  He went to prison.
[00:31:44]  He literally went to prison.
[00:31:46]  And it's, I mean, I like Didian's criticism because she actually, she actually looks into what's going on.
[00:31:55]  Like what is the actual meaning being transmitted beyond kind of the surface with his paintings in a way that is not like the snooty high art criticisms of his work.
[00:32:05]  Diddian drills down into some of the reasons his art is upsetting better than anyone else I can really think of.
[00:32:11]  And when she's doing this, she kind of, one of the things she brings up is this 2000 year 2000 post on Kincaid's website where he writes about a trip to the Yosemite Valley.
[00:32:21]  Quote, when my family wandered through the National Park Center, I discovered a key to my fantasy, a recreation of a Miwok Indian village.
[00:32:28]  When I returned to my studio, I began to work on The Mountains Declare His Glory, a poetic expression of what I felt at that transforming moment of inspiration.
[00:32:36]  As a final touch, I even added a Miwok Indian camp across the river as an affirmation that man has its place, even in his place, even in a setting touched by God's glory.
[00:32:47]  Now, before we get into real thrill to be included in his history in this Thomas Kincaid painting, before we get into Joan's breakdown of why this is fucked up, first here's the painting itself, right?
[00:32:58]  You see, you get the mountains, sunset, a lot of light playing through them.
[00:33:02]  It looks like maybe an early fall image.
[00:33:04]  You've got a couple of very stereotypical looking teepees there.
[00:33:08]  Oh, God.
[00:33:09]  Yeah.
[00:33:09]  Now, I got to say, I did look into this.
[00:33:12]  It's, you know, it's an idyllic image, right?
[00:33:16]  Inoffensive on its face, but I will say the structures that he puts, you know, in the hands of the Miwok is not entirely wrong.
[00:33:23]  He seems to have based this on an actual display at Yosemite.
[00:33:27]  So he doesn't get this totally, you know, incorrect.
[00:33:30]  It is true.
[00:33:31]  It is worth pointing out the more common shelters used by the Miwok were what they called Umotka, which is a conical bark house lined with pine needles and layered outside with earth.
[00:33:42]  And the Kocha, which is a semi-subterranean dwelling.
[00:33:44]  And a lot of their, the sun shelters that were kind of more temporary were rectangular and flat-topped, but they did have shelters that looked kind of like this.
[00:33:52]  So I will say his depiction is not like, like, it's not super, he didn't just like draw a random teepee, you know, and this is not a tribe that used anything like that.
[00:34:02]  I think he based it off of a Milwaukee.
[00:34:05]  Base research, at least.
[00:34:06]  So.
[00:34:07]  Yeah, I think he was just inspired by a thing that had done some base research, and that probably explains it.
[00:34:12]  But I did look into it because I wanted to know, like, did he just throw a teepee on there?
[00:34:15]  Because, you know, and no, that apparently is not wrong.
[00:34:19]  So good on good.
[00:34:21]  There's one mark there, right?
[00:34:22]  But Joan does a really good job of explaining what is messed up here.
[00:34:26]  Affirming that man has his place in the Sierra Nevada by reproducing the Yosemite National Park Visitor Center's recreation of a Miwok Indian village is identifiable as a doubtful enterprise on many levels, not the least of which being that the Yosemite Miwok were forcibly run onto a reservation near Fresno during the Gold Rush and allowed to return to Yosemite only in 1855.
[00:34:46]  In other words, Kincaid is commercialized a moment from the past in the same way that this land was commercialized at a different point with, you know, in a much more violent way and is kind of only capable of commercializing this moment that ignores the complexity and the pain in that history, right?
[00:35:06]  Because there's no room for complexity or pain in his art, right?
[00:35:09]  We just have this kind of idyllic portrayal of a village that he's stuck on something that's supposed to go on some boomer's wall in their, in their like retirement home in Scottsdale, right?
[00:35:19]  It's a further kind of commodification of that.
[00:35:22]  That's like seeing a painting of this gorgeous field in a pack.
[00:35:25]  Like, oh, that's the Trail of Tears.
[00:35:28]  What the fuck?
[00:35:28]  Yeah.
[00:35:29]  And you're kind of, it's just kind of like ignoring what is more, I don't know, it's a very Kincaid thing to do, is fair to say.
[00:35:37]  Now, the best criticism I found of his work came from a blog.
[00:35:41]  Here's What's Left from 2005.
[00:35:43]  The writer identified as Michael is someone with a passing interest in art history who I think might have come from the evangelical background.
[00:35:50]  And he compares this piece by Kincaid that we started the episode with, right?
[00:35:54]  You've got the cross up on the hill.
[00:35:56]  You've got that big bright sunlight, you know, illuminating it with the painting that lightly inspired it by 19th century German painter Caspar David Friedrich.
[00:36:06]  It's called The Cross on the Mountain.
[00:36:09]  Now, you can just see right there, yes, these are very different artworks in their quality.
[00:36:14]  There's even as someone who's not aware of that, that has like some anguish to it, like the crowds.
[00:36:19]  You can make the argument that that's the blood of Christ.
[00:36:21]  I mean, going back to my evangelical childhood, you actually have Jesus on the cross.
[00:36:27]  Right.
[00:36:27]  Like the silhouette of the suffering.
[00:36:29]  Whereas the cross.
[00:36:31]  Yeah.
[00:36:33]  I think those are all really good notes.
[00:36:35]  And it's worth noting that that like actually putting Christ on the cross is a thing that Caspar does in another similar work of art, the cross and the cathedral in the mountains.
[00:36:44]  And I think Kincaid's work is kind of a hybrid of these two, right?
[00:36:47]  But you can see down there, the cross and the cathedral in the mountains, where you've got kind of these, you've got like basically this forest and there's a, you can see a cathedral kind of coming up out of the forest in a way that almost makes it look like it's grown out of the forest.
[00:37:02]  And again, you could look at this as another artist who, like Kincaid, painted the same shit over and over again.
[00:37:07]  Well, he does a lot of crosses in the woods, right?
[00:37:10]  But I don't really think that's what's happening here.
[00:37:12]  Caspar has something to say.
[00:37:14]  He is showing Christianity, and this is something that was relevant to the kind of politics within Christianity at the time, as an outgrowth of the natural world, right?
[00:37:23]  Michael, in his write-up, quotes an art expert named Christina von Pruyen who says of the first painting by Caspar, the cross stands at the brink of the evening horizon, which signifies the disappearance of God from the lives of the modern world during the Enlightenment, yet the burgeoning of evergreens near the cross also indicates that a new religion is emerging.
[00:37:42]  Colin Eisler has more to say about the second painting.
[00:37:45]  Protestantism, conveyed by the vehicle of the visual arts, tended to see nature more as pagan mother than God's work, too close to pantheism for comfort.
[00:37:53]  Friedrich presents an exception.
[00:37:54]  His anti-classical emphasis upon experience, its reception and communication, stress the personal.
[00:38:01]  And I'm not quoting that because I am as like, I'm not religious.
[00:38:06]  I don't believe in any of this stuff.
[00:38:08]  But I'm quoting it because it's worth noting that with these pictures that clearly inspired Thomas's by Caspar, there's a lot to say.
[00:38:17]  There's a lot to analyze.
[00:38:19]  There's history wrapped up in that.
[00:38:22]  You can see pieces of the history of movements of huge numbers of people and what they believe represented in his art.
[00:38:29]  And there is none of that, right?
[00:38:31]  The point Michael makes in his criticism is no one will ever have this much to say about the meaning held within a Kincaid work, right?
[00:38:37]  Yeah, no, you're right.
[00:38:39]  It's weird because like you look at the Kincaid painting next to those, like, you know, the Kaspar paintings, there's just, again, a vocative emotion, use of color to like to convey how you're supposed to feel, how he feels about what's going on.
[00:38:53]  And it's not necessarily bright and cheery, but he also like let's talk about what's, you know, this feeling of Christianity, the suffering of Christ, et cetera, or even, like you said, the church growing out of nature.

=== Ideology Behind The Paintings (05:53) ===

[00:39:07]  And then Kincaid's like, wow, he painted a lens flare.
[00:39:11]  Yeah, he put a lens flare on a cabin.
[00:39:14]  And there's also, you can see in these two different works made at different times, they're clearly the same man, but like who has grown and changed over time, right?
[00:39:24]  Like they're, they look different as opposed to every Kincaid painting could have been made at the same time, right?
[00:39:29]  Like it's kind of impossible to even even mark out is it an early period or a late period?
[00:39:36]  I'm sure there's some weird Kincaid historians, but the rest of us aren't going to do that, right?
[00:39:42]  Yeah.
[00:39:43]  And I guess the point I'm making here, and I think the point that these critics are making that Joan makes is that Kincaid, it's not that what he was doing in his art is he's not like purposefully being like racist against Native Americans,
[00:39:58]  but the inability of his work to ever deal in anything that touches on sadness kind of means that he's always going, there's a shallowness, a one-sidedness to it that is kind of gross and commercial when you are touching on something where there's a darker history there, right?
[00:40:17]  But Kincaid's whole life, all he's doing is he's selling emotional morphine, right?
[00:40:22]  There must have been some creative drive in this man at some point.
[00:40:25]  There's certainly pain in his childhood.
[00:40:26]  I mean, he's a more than competent artist.
[00:40:28]  And he did what he was doing.
[00:40:31]  Yeah.
[00:40:31]  And like, I don't think that, again, there's nothing wrong with like, I just want to make art that makes people happy.
[00:40:35]  Yeah.
[00:40:36]  But there's just some things that are kind of hard to like.
[00:40:40]  Yeah.
[00:40:40]  And there's an it's not just that he wants to make them happy.
[00:40:44]  There's an ideology behind what he believes will make people happy.
[00:40:48]  Right.
[00:40:49]  And that ideology is social conservatism.
[00:40:51]  Laura Miller makes this very clear in an article she wrote for Salon, Thomas Kincaid, The George W. Bush of Art.
[00:40:57]  And that title isn't just her being kind of like shitty.
[00:41:01]  Quote, Herman Brock maintained that someone who chooses to make kitsch is ethically depraved, a criminal willing radical evil.
[00:41:08]  The novelist Milan Kundera believes kitsch to be the natural expression of totalitarianism.
[00:41:12]  That's a lot of moral weight to place on a bunch of garish cottage paintings.
[00:41:16]  But Kincaid was always the first to present his work as a form of ideology.
[00:41:20]  Kundera defined kitsch as the absolute denial of shit, meaning it offers an airbrushed, sterilized, sentimentalized view of the world.
[00:41:28]  From that, it doesn't necessarily follow that art wallows in shit, but art doesn't exist for the primary purpose of denying it either.
[00:41:35]  Kitsch is, first and foremost, a lie.
[00:41:37]  Its very existence is founded on bad faith.
[00:41:40]  And the best example of that is the fact that Kincaid is an official member of the George W. Bush presidential prayer team, from whom he received an award, right?
[00:41:49]  He is a friend of George W. Bush.
[00:41:51]  He met him a number of times.
[00:41:53]  And he's this, it's this flattening of American culture during this period where we are taking a very dark turn, where we are invading two countries where there are huge numbers of deaths overseas as a result of American action.
[00:42:10]  And Kincaid sees his goal, not just to pray for the guy behind a lot of it, but to sell people during this time when they're scared and upset about the violence that they are a part of to calm them down with these anesthetizing pieces of art, right?
[00:42:27]  He really does see his goal as that, right?
[00:42:30]  Like, keep pulling the lever and voting for Republicans.
[00:42:33]  Here's a nice picture of a cabin.
[00:42:35]  Now you can feel comfortable as you like slide off into senility, right?
[00:42:39]  That is what Thomas Kincaid is doing.
[00:42:41]  And while he's doing this and portraying himself as this upright Christian pinnacle of like, you know, what the evangelical spirit can achieve, he is spending all of his free time at strip clubs drinking and abusing prescription drugs.
[00:42:56]  He's pissing on shit to show.
[00:42:57]  I didn't know about that.
[00:42:58]  Oh, God.
[00:42:59]  Oh, yeah.
[00:42:59]  Yeah.
[00:42:59]  He's also doing, he's fucking, he's mixing like hard liquor and Valium a lot.
[00:43:05]  And he's also sexually harassing and assaulting his employees.
[00:43:09]  In the court cases that we've been building to and have quoted from earlier in this, witnesses testify to seeing Thomas at one of the many signing parties for his paintings.
[00:43:17]  He got so drunk he fell off a barstool and per the Huffington Post, palmed a startled woman's breast.
[00:43:24]  Then when the wife of a former employee tried to help him out, he cursed her out.
[00:43:28]  Now, that's an ugly story, but much worse is the tale of a company party at a motel in South Bend, where Thomas met with a group of signature gallery owners to sign a bunch of their prints.
[00:43:39]  This meeting came about because Thomas had convinced all these men and women to invest their savings into starting galleries for his art.
[00:43:45]  He'd promised them sales and ever-escalating profits.
[00:43:48]  And by August of 2002, those profits had started to stall.
[00:43:52]  So the event was a goodwill gesture, but later in the night, there was an open bar, and Thomas got very drunk.
[00:43:58]  Next, per the Huffington Post, at one point, according to testimony and interviews with three others who were there, Kincaid polled the men in the room about their preferences in women's anatomies.
[00:44:08]  He was having a conversation with the men in the room about whether they liked breast or butts, said Lori Kopeck, Coat's director of gallery operations, who also testified about the party.
[00:44:17]  There were only two women in the room, and I was very uncomfortable at that point.
[00:44:20]  It was during that bouti discussion, according to arbitration records, that Kincaid turned his attention to the other woman.
[00:44:26]  He approached her and palmed her breasts, and he said, These are great tits, Ernie Dodson, another Coat employee, told The Times, adding that he drank no alcohol that night.
[00:44:34]  I was just standing there in the corner in amazement.
[00:44:36]  It was like, holy cow.
[00:44:37]  And man, Dodson, I'm not really impressed that you didn't drink.
[00:44:40]  You didn't like stop him.
[00:44:41]  You didn't do anything.
[00:44:42]  You didn't say like, wow, boss.
[00:44:43]  That's like fucked.
[00:44:44]  Like, you're not fondling someone.
[00:44:47]  There's a fucking limit.
[00:44:48]  Yeah.
[00:44:49]  This is really a step-in moment, brother.
[00:44:51]  I'm not impressed that you didn't drink.
[00:44:53]  I'd be more impressed if you were drunk too and you had the moral presence to just hit the guy, right?
[00:44:59]  At least push him off.

=== Groping At Company Gatherings (03:45) ===

[00:45:00]  It's like, dude, don't do that.
[00:45:02]  Yeah.
[00:45:03]  That's a bare minimum.
[00:45:04]  Hey, stop.
[00:45:06]  Yeah, that's gross, man.
[00:45:08]  This is a fucking company gathering and you are grabbing someone's tits.
[00:45:12]  What the fuck?
[00:45:13]  Anyway, when this came out, Kincaid denied the allegation.
[00:45:17]  He said this in a deposition.
[00:45:18]  You've got to remember, I'm the idol to these women who were there.
[00:45:22]  They sell my work every day, you know.
[00:45:24]  They're enamored with any attention I would give them.
[00:45:27]  I don't know what kind of flirting they were trying to do with me.
[00:45:29]  I don't recall what was going on that night.
[00:45:32]  Hey, buddy.
[00:45:33]  Quick tip here.
[00:45:34]  I was too blacked out to know what kind of quote-unquote flirting led to me groping someone.
[00:45:40]  Not an offense.
[00:45:41]  Anyway.
[00:45:42]  You're disgusting.
[00:45:43]  You're disgusting.
[00:45:44]  Ew, You know what's not disgusting, though, Sophie?
[00:45:49]  You know what makes me feel good?
[00:45:51]  What makes everyone feel good?
[00:45:52]  What groping needs?
[00:45:55]  Yeah, well, we maybe don't say groping.
[00:45:58]  But we do in a emotionally, in the same way that John Wayne gave there's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:46:11]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:46:14]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:46:17]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:46:21]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:46:25]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:46:30]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:46:35]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:46:37]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:46:39]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:46:41]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:46:44]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:46:46]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:46:48]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:46:52]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:46:54]  Trust me, babe.
[00:46:55]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:47:05]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:47:11]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:47:18]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
[00:47:24]  From power to parenthood.
[00:47:26]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:47:30]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:47:32]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:47:34]  The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
[00:47:39]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:47:45]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:47:48]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:47:54]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[00:47:56]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:47:59]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:48:07]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:48:13]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:48:17]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:48:23]  Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
[00:48:33]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:48:38]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:48:41]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:48:44]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.

=== Deliberately Tanking The Stock (04:45) ===

[00:48:46]  That's so funny.
[00:48:47]  Share each day with me each night, each morning.
[00:48:56]  Say you love me.
[00:48:58]  You know I.
[00:49:00]  So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:49:11]  We're back, and I've just had a word with our own HR department.
[00:49:16]  I apologize.
[00:49:18]  I have deleted roughly a third of my short story.
[00:49:22]  That's it?
[00:49:23]  Yeah.
[00:49:24]  Yeah.
[00:49:24]  I mean, again, Sophie, it is mostly about the Federal Reserve.
[00:49:28]  In fairness, I'm going to rewrite it later.
[00:49:30]  Yeah.
[00:49:30]  Okay.
[00:49:30]  Thank you.
[00:49:31]  Thank you.
[00:49:31]  That'll fix it up some.
[00:49:35]  What would John Blake Casey's persona be?
[00:49:39]  Oh, oh, God.
[00:49:40]  It's got to be like a big Garfield style cat.
[00:49:42]  I feel like.
[00:49:43]  See, I was thinking of one of those monkeys that's kind of colorful face with clown makeup.
[00:49:48]  Yeah, that's a good one because that'd be really scary to get murdered by, too.
[00:49:52]  This is good.
[00:49:52]  This is useful stuff.
[00:49:54]  So the company messaging to prospective gallery owners painted a very different picture of Thomas.
[00:50:01]  Lighthouse used terms like partner, trust, Christian, and God, arguing that not only was a Kincaid gallery a good investment, it helped you serve a higher calling, i.e., God wants you to get rich selling Thomas's paintings.
[00:50:13]  Oh, he's always the prosperity gospel now, huh?
[00:50:15]  Yes, yes, very much so.
[00:50:17]  And Thomas would always deny to the press that he marketed specifically to Christians, but his limited edition prints each had Christian fish symbols printed on them along with Bible verses.
[00:50:26]  His favorite being Matthew 5.16, let your light shine before men.
[00:50:31]  One of the people who fell for this was Jim Coate.
[00:50:34]  Coate opened his first signature gallery in 1996 and claims that at the start, sales were great because Tom at that point was very popular and there were limited outlets to buy his art.
[00:50:44]  But as the years went on, the situation deteriorated, as the LA Times reports.
[00:50:48]  Coat alleges Media Arts Group, which is what the company becomes known as, pushed him to open more galleries, threatening to set up its own outlets in his territory.
[00:50:56]  Coat eventually had three stores, all of which failed.
[00:50:59]  This is not bread and milk, he said.
[00:51:01]  You can't have galleries on every corner.
[00:51:03]  Coate said his net worth was of more than $3 million, had been erased.
[00:51:06]  Gone are his marriage, his house, and most of his possessions.
[00:51:09]  He doesn't blame his divorce entirely on his gallery's failure, but it certainly didn't help.
[00:51:14]  He shut his last door in December and has filed for bankruptcy protection.
[00:51:17]  At this point, I've got a dog in an apartment, and that's it.
[00:51:20]  This is not where I thought I'd be at 56.
[00:51:22]  Doesn't deserve a dog.
[00:51:24]  No, I mean, I'm sure he sucks too, but it is interesting the way this con goes, right?
[00:51:28]  Where he's like, okay, you've bought one wolf.
[00:51:30]  You don't set up another like a block away.
[00:51:33]  Otherwise, we're going to set up one and run you out of business by undercutting.
[00:51:36]  Isn't that how Subway does their franchises, though?
[00:51:39]  Yeah, they just had a meeting about how they're circling the drain, too.
[00:51:44]  But yes, I think you are correct.
[00:51:45]  And you have to, like, there's no way that they didn't understand that this was going to destroy him because they know that they're just trying to see money out of these people.
[00:51:54]  Yeah.
[00:51:55]  Yeah.
[00:51:55]  Like, this is like a long-term investment.
[00:51:58]  This is just get this guy's money.
[00:52:00]  Our problem is solved.
[00:52:02]  Yeah.
[00:52:02]  Whatever.
[00:52:02]  Well, it's even worse than that because he's not just screwing these people to suck money out of them.
[00:52:07]  He's screwing these people to crash the stock value of the company.
[00:52:11]  Because Kincaid makes a bunch of calls in the early 2000s that a lot of people will argue and has been argued successfully in court were deliberately made to tank the stock from a high of almost $25 to a less than $3 a share.
[00:52:26]  And then once the value of the stock had collapsed, he bought his company back and took it private.
[00:52:31]  This is what causes that court case, which concludes in 2006 and found that Kincaid's company had deliberately misrepresented itself to prospective gallery owners.
[00:52:41]  Per the LA Times, the arbitration panel found that the company and Barnett, who ran a training program for prospective gallery owners known as Thomas Kincaid University, painted an unrealistic and misleading picture of the prospects for success and never warned potential investors of the inherent risks.
[00:52:57]  We were told success story after success story, and of course, the Tom story and his Christian views and the way he ran his life, one of the gallery owners told the arbitration panel.
[00:53:06]  Now, this panel ultimately rules in favor of two gallery owners from Virginia who had sued him, awarding them almost $900,000 in damages.
[00:53:15]  These people, all of whom had had money to burn when they started talking with Kincaid's people, are the least sympathetic of his victims because a lot of regular, not rich people got scammed into buying crappy prints as an investment too.
[00:53:28]  In the early 2000s, Kincaid's company started publishing books.

=== Boston's Urine Smell Legend (02:14) ===

[00:53:32]  A write-up I found in Salon describes them all as being made by a semi-industrial process, just like his highlighted paintings.
[00:53:39]  In short, he would write an introduction and presumably a proven outline, and then someone else would write the novel.
[00:53:45]  Now, you can compare this to his old friend whose dinotopia books were labors of love, whatever else you might say about them.
[00:53:52]  He actually cares about that stuff.
[00:53:54]  It's clearly the yeah, it's clearly the work of someone who cares deeply about telling a dinosaur story.
[00:53:59]  Having fun, really, having a good time with it.
[00:54:02]  Yeah, yeah, I remember them very fondly.
[00:54:04]  I haven't picked them back up since I was like 12, but I remember them fondly.
[00:54:08]  I remember there was a diamond video game that had puppets.
[00:54:11]  See, now that I didn't play.
[00:54:13]  Shit, that sounds awesome.
[00:54:15]  So, all these books, as best as I can tell, are about quaint small towns.
[00:54:19]  Generally, there will be a woman who comes from the big city with a big job that's stressing her out.
[00:54:24]  And she comes to a small town and she gets swept off her feet by some like farmer who convinces her the real joy in life is having a bunch of kids and no longer voting.
[00:54:34]  So they're Hallmark movies.
[00:54:35]  They're all Harmark movies.
[00:54:37]  A lot of them focus on how sinful Boston is compared to the countryside, which I do approve of.
[00:54:42]  I mean, that's, I don't disagree.
[00:54:46]  Now, what I find.
[00:54:47]  I think he loved Boston because everyone peas and everything there.
[00:54:49]  Yeah, I mean, it is the city of piss.
[00:54:53]  That's what we all say about Boston.
[00:54:55]  Yeah.
[00:54:56]  The city of piss.
[00:54:58]  Look, Los Angeles, a lot of good piss.
[00:55:01]  New York, great piss town, you know, but Boston, of all the towns that smell like urine, definitely, well, maybe Philadelphia.
[00:55:08]  Anyway, there's actually a lot of towns that smell like piss, but Boston's top of the pack.
[00:55:12]  I'll give it that.
[00:55:13]  The day I moved to Boston, I was walking through Cambridge, like Harvard Square, and I turned a corner and a woman was holding her like five-year-old kid over like a potted pamper on the street and just shitting in it.
[00:55:24]  I'm like, it was a very weird day from Texas where it's like, got a five-wall bathroom at like Boston.
[00:55:30]  Just go shit over there.
[00:55:32]  In public, right off the red line.
[00:55:35]  It's the Boston city motto.
[00:55:37]  Boston, just go shit over there.
[00:55:42]  Have fun with all the comments you're going to get from your Bostonian fans.
[00:55:45]  Yeah, it's okay.

=== Horrible Days After Disgrace (16:15) ===

[00:55:46]  It's okay.
[00:55:47]  You know, I live in Portland, the city of also shitting all over the place.
[00:55:51]  It's fine.
[00:55:53]  Look, you want to talk about shit?
[00:55:55]  Go back to the idealized like 1920s these people imagined back when there were horses all over everything.
[00:56:01]  Oh, God.
[00:56:01]  That's a lot of shit.
[00:56:02]  You know, we barely shit in our cities compared to how much shit there is.
[00:56:06]  Downtown Savannah, Georgia in springtime.
[00:56:08]  It just smells like horse urine everywhere.
[00:56:12]  So what I find most interesting about this salon article about Thomas's shitty Kincaid novels is how the writer describes the reaction of Kincaid's fans to a negative review of the first book in the series.
[00:56:25]  Oh, no.
[00:56:26]  Well, no, actually, this is a little different because this comes out after he's kind of been started to be disgraced.
[00:56:31]  I began to receive emails from people who had sunk their life savings in Thomas Kincaid's signature galleries, essentially mall and shopping district outlets for his prints, and been fleeced.
[00:56:41]  I didn't really understand how the financial architecture of Kincaid's gallery empire worked, and I sure didn't share their taste in wall art, but these people struck me as decent and sincere.
[00:56:50]  They believed in Thomas Kincaid, not just in the man or the company, but in the ethos supposedly represented by his art, one in which, to quote Kincaid's introduction to Cape Light, people have the time to savor life's simple pleasures and lead deep, satisfying lives.
[00:57:05]  It's not hard to find accounts like these of people who purchased Kincaid Prince's investments and feel ripped off.
[00:57:12]  I found one letter in a Medium post by Charles Baudelaire, who apparently takes art questions from fans.
[00:57:17]  Dear Charles, I have four original oil paintings by Thomas Kincaid.
[00:57:21]  I bought them about 25 years ago and paid $6,000 for each of them.
[00:57:25]  I love them, and it gives me great pleasure to look at them.
[00:57:28]  But because I am moving to an assisted living facility and will have no room for these paintings, I need to sell them.
[00:57:33]  I thought I'd at least get my money back and was shocked when the best offers I received were between $300 and $400 each.
[00:57:39]  I cried for days.
[00:57:41]  How could these beautiful works of art sell for such a pittance?
[00:57:44]  It's because they just printed them out, man.
[00:57:46]  That is hard work.
[00:57:47]  Sorry.
[00:57:47]  I don't want to make an old man feel bad about paintings that bring him happiness in his twilight years, but like that is what happened.
[00:57:54]  You got ripped off.
[00:57:55]  I'm sorry.
[00:57:56]  Like, maybe one thing if they said, hey, buy these paintings, aren't they pretty?
[00:57:59]  You'll just enjoy looking at them every day.
[00:58:01]  Cool, great.
[00:58:02]  Yeah.
[00:58:02]  But you was told it was invest it was going to appreciate.
[00:58:06]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:58:07]  If someone wants to pay thousands of dollars for a painting that looks pretty, like, I don't, that's not a scam unless you're making them think that this is something that will make their money appreciate.
[00:58:18]  You know?
[00:58:21]  Yeah, that's a bummer.
[00:58:22]  He really is the trump of the art world, isn't he?
[00:58:24]  He's the trump of the art world.
[00:58:25]  That's exactly.
[00:58:26]  Yeah, I may steal that from you for the title, and then you can take me to court.
[00:58:30]  Go for it.
[00:58:31]  We're going to spend the rest of the 2020s litigating it.
[00:58:33]  Everything I'm hearing about is people who believed him.
[00:58:36]  I mean, there was a fucking Kincaid University.
[00:58:39]  Yes, yes.
[00:58:41]  For teaching his gallery owners how to get fleeced.
[00:58:44]  As the early 2000s faded into the aughts, Kincaid was still a big business, although the number of galleries devoted to his work had plunged from a high of 350 to something like half that.
[00:58:56]  So he's still a big business.
[00:58:57]  That's a whole lot of galleries that Kincaid shit.
[00:59:00]  Yes, that's not a, that's, that's bigger than, I mean, there's no other single artist you can say that about, really anywhere.
[00:59:06]  I don't think there's any artist on earth like that.
[00:59:09]  Yeah.
[00:59:10]  Now, uh, that just may be Disney being actually caring about having a sustainable business, right?
[00:59:16]  Now, somewhere around 2008 or 2009, his marriage fell apart and he and Nanette separated.
[00:59:22]  Kincaid does seem to have loved her despite his cheating and included constant references to her and their marriage in his work.
[00:59:28]  He would like put their the date of their anniversary in paintings after they had split up.
[00:59:33]  Um, and he seems to have spiraled increasingly once she left.
[00:59:37]  His drug use and drinking grew more severe.
[00:59:39]  The Daily Beast describes one December 2010 event that shows his mood well.
[00:59:44]  Quote, fans in Denver had been promised a 30-minute inspirational presentation.
[00:59:48]  What they got was an ungroomed, underdressed speaker who was none too pleased with the media's coverage of his recent arrest for drunk driving.
[00:59:55]  I sneeze in public and I make a headline, he sneered.
[00:59:59]  Then he complained about the media's lack of attention to his charitable works.
[01:00:02]  America's most known, most beloved artist shows up at an Orange County hospital.
[01:00:06]  We threw in all day kids of it.
[01:00:07]  We hosted art contests.
[01:00:09]  We gave art packages to all the kids.
[01:00:11]  I talked to them about journaling their life, about creating something every day that makes a statement.
[01:00:15]  And we sent word out to every newspaper: come down, see this day of joy, this day of celebration.
[01:00:20]  No one showed, but make one wrong step in public and they put it on the front page.
[01:00:24]  Yeah, man.
[01:00:26]  Thomas Kincaid gives kitschy fucking journals to sick kids is not an art story in the way that rich artists caught drunk driving is.
[01:00:34]  Maybe that's wrong, but it's just obvious.
[01:00:37]  You remember that sentence episode, Camp Krusty, where like Krusty shows up, like yelling in the drills, Elisha, where were you when I did farmade?
[01:00:45]  Yeah.
[01:00:46]  So when he finishes, Kincaid asks the organizers to make sure that his room is alcohol-free.
[01:00:52]  And then he keeps the owner of the Colorado Kincaid Gallery up until like the early hours of the morning talking about his ex-wife.
[01:01:00]  Just a perfect picture of a man spiraling.
[01:01:04]  And Thomas.
[01:01:07]  This is definitely the terminal part of the spiral.
[01:01:10]  A month after that event, he spends 10 days in jail on his DUI charge.
[01:01:15]  He tries to get sober after that, but he just keeps relapsing, falling back into drugs and alcohol.
[01:01:20]  A little over a year later, he is found unconscious.
[01:01:24]  He spends several days in a coma.
[01:01:26]  And when he wakes up, the doctors say basically, hey, man, you have to sober up now or die.
[01:01:31]  You don't get more chances, right?
[01:01:33]  This isn't the kind of thing where like you can dry out for a while and then get back to the drinking and drugs.
[01:01:39]  This is it.
[01:01:40]  If you fuck around anymore, you're dead.
[01:01:43]  And as is often the case, he does not take this warning.
[01:01:46]  Two months later, on April 6th, 2012, he overdoses and dies.
[01:01:51]  Thomas Kincaid was 54.
[01:01:53]  Reporting after his death revealed that he was actively under federal investigation for securities fraud.
[01:01:59]  So there is some suspicion that maybe this was suicide.
[01:02:03]  You know, it's possible, right?
[01:02:06]  He apparently was, again, a lot of crimes associated with this, the painter of light.
[01:02:13]  Trump of art world.
[01:02:14]  The Trump of the art world.
[01:02:16]  The immediate wake of his death saw a huge surge in sales.
[01:02:20]  Fans gathered at 50-some galleries around the country in a public wake.
[01:02:24]  And then the autopsy report came out, which showed that he had died of acute alcohol and Valium intoxication.
[01:02:31]  I think most of his followers, some of them are surprised, but it doesn't really reduce the amount of love for his work.
[01:02:38]  I actually find some of the writing on this gross where they're like, ha ha, this man, like, like, like, look, now everyone's going to stop liking him because he OD'd.
[01:02:46]  And it's like, I don't know, man.
[01:02:47]  A lot of artists, people love, kill themselves with drugs.
[01:02:51]  That's kind of the norm for artists that people love.
[01:02:54]  Yeah.
[01:02:55]  That also paints addiction as a personal failing and addiction is a disease.
[01:02:59]  Like, I'm not cool with that.
[01:03:00]  Like, you can hate someone, but also be sad that they fell down addiction.
[01:03:06]  And I would say the fact that he, after splitting up with his wife, fell to addiction is not contradictory to the Christian values in the same way that the fact that he is sexually assaulting people and committing securities fraud is.
[01:03:19]  That is all way more upsetting to him.
[01:03:21]  Yeah.
[01:03:22]  The death is a little sad.
[01:03:23]  It's like, oh, no, everything else is disgusting.
[01:03:27]  Yeah, right.
[01:03:28]  So what did more damage to his memory was the fact that there's this horrible legal fight afterwards between his ex-wife and his new girlfriend, who claimed to have letters that he wrote her while drunk, promising her a bunch of his assets.
[01:03:41]  The matter is eventually settled out of court, but it made it kind of impossible to hide the unsavory elements of Kincaid's legacy.
[01:03:49]  Now, if you have paid attention at all to how evangelical Christians responded to Trump's many foibles and immoral acts, you're not surprised that a lot of people continued to love Kincaid after all this came out.
[01:04:01]  His company is still around.
[01:04:02]  It's opened up to new artists and even branded content.
[01:04:05]  So obviously they've seen the need to expand since his death, but by all accounts, he is still an exceedingly profitable artist.
[01:04:12]  Thomas, though, now has to rest in the eternal hell that awaits all artists.
[01:04:17]  Because if your work is notable enough to be discussed in any fashion, any fashion, some critic is always going to get the last word, right?
[01:04:26]  If your work is worth talking about, it's always going to be a critic who gets the last word because you're going to die someday.
[01:04:31]  And in Thomas's case, some of those critics were scholars from the British Journal of Aesthetics who conducted a study to see if they could quantify how bad his art was.
[01:04:43]  This study, Mere Exposure to Bad Art, tested whether or not repeated exposure to Kincaid's work would cause someone to like it more or less.
[01:04:51]  And they paired Kincaid, the control group, was a better artist, right?
[01:04:55]  Somebody who had like a general level of critical, you know, acclaim.
[01:04:59]  And after repeated viewings, participants reported no change in their appreciation of the good art.
[01:05:05]  Quote, but repeated viewings of the painter of light prompted strong negative emotions, with participants saying they liked his stuff less each time it popped up in front of their eyes.
[01:05:15]  Now, here are those reactions in graph form taken from an earlier unpublished form of the research.
[01:05:21]  And yeah, it's, you know, there's a theory that this may be because exposure to Kincaid over time makes the flaws in his work glaringly obvious.
[01:05:30]  And so people come to hate it the more they look at it.
[01:05:33]  This is clearly not true to his many fans, but it does lend some comfort to the rest of us, right?
[01:05:39]  If you are like, I find this guess, this guy like more upsetting every piece of art that you've shown of his, there's scientific backing for that.
[01:05:47]  You are in the norm.
[01:05:48]  So good news there.
[01:05:49]  And that wasn't petty bitch shit.
[01:05:52]  It is really, it is incredibly petty for a dead man who like died in a very sad fashion alone of an overdose to be like, let's see if we can scientifically prove he sucked.
[01:06:04]  It's so my disdain for critics in general because there is such a, I need to prove why it's not opinion, it's fact.
[01:06:14]  Here I'm proving it.
[01:06:15]  No, dude.
[01:06:16]  Oh my God.
[01:06:18]  It's the pettiest thing I've ever heard of.
[01:06:21]  And I respect, there's a degree to which you have to respect that level of petty.
[01:06:25]  Oh, no, it's impressive.
[01:06:26]  You spent some time on that.
[01:06:28]  You really put in the effort to hate this guy's paintings.
[01:06:33]  And I guess I just wrote 8,500 words about why I don't like his art.
[01:06:37]  So I'm not that petty, but I'm certainly in the upper level of the world.
[01:06:40]  You kind of ask people why you don't like him.
[01:06:42]  I think that's a difference.
[01:06:44]  I do not.
[01:06:45]  That is fair.
[01:06:48]  I believe, I felt this for a long time.
[01:06:50]  The only real valid artistic expression in our society is reprinted t-shirts of Bart Simpson during the Gulf War.
[01:06:59]  You know, that's that's all great art is just some kind of reprinted Bart Simpson t-shirt made in order to generate enthusiasts.
[01:07:10]  Yes, of course, of course.
[01:07:11]  Yes.
[01:07:12]  Any early 90s illegal Bart Simpson merchandise is art and nothing else is.
[01:07:20]  Anyway, that's going to be my new plug your art.
[01:07:27]  Wow.
[01:07:29]  So you can see my mean-spirited comic at somethingpositive.net or at mousetrapped.blog is another thing I do.
[01:07:39]  I also draw the Sunday Popeyes at comicskingdom.com slash Popeye.
[01:07:45]  And if you go to comicsking.com slash, I believe it's, hold on, I'm not prepared because why would I be?
[01:07:52]  I'm still winded by, I did not expect this to have sexual assault.
[01:07:58]  Comicskingdom.com slash all of hyphen Popeye.
[01:08:02]  Tuesdays and Thursdays, there's new strips there.
[01:08:05]  I do the Thursday strips.
[01:08:08]  Wow.
[01:08:08]  That did not go where I thought it was going to go.
[01:08:11]  No, no.
[01:08:12]  Well, you know, I'm always happy to hear that, Randy.
[01:08:17]  And I'll like it.
[01:08:18]  I still feel like I have gotten off luckier than compared to most of your guests.
[01:08:22]  Oh, yeah.
[01:08:23]  Fairly low.
[01:08:24]  This is one of our more low stakes bastards for sure.
[01:08:27]  There's no dead children in this episode that I'm aware of.
[01:08:30]  Yeah, no dead kids.
[01:08:32]  You know, some old people lose their savings.
[01:08:35]  Definitely a sexual assault or two.
[01:08:37]  Yeah, that sucks.
[01:08:38]  That was upsetting.
[01:08:39]  But not our worst.
[01:08:41]  Not our worst.
[01:08:42]  But, you know, tune in next time we have Randy on and I finally reveal the dark truth behind the person who does high and lowest.
[01:08:51]  I'm just going to say...
[01:08:52]  That's okay, Petrocomic.
[01:08:56]  Look, there's literally a National Cartoon Society meeting next week.
[01:08:59]  I'm supposed to go to the next one.
[01:09:00]  The word war crimes gets thrown a lot around a lot these days, but it should be thrown around here.
[01:09:07]  Yeah.
[01:09:08]  That's going to make a real awkward meeting next week.
[01:09:11]  We'll wait until I publish my investigation and we get the high and lowest person up in front of the Hague.
[01:09:18]  Which one is it?
[01:09:18]  The ICC.
[01:09:20]  Is there a couple?
[01:09:21]  I don't know much about high and lowest.
[01:09:22]  I'm going to be honest.
[01:09:23]  High and Lois is technically a spin-off of Beetle Bailey.
[01:09:26]  I believe Mort Walker.
[01:09:28]  And I believe it's the kids.
[01:09:32]  And I believe the kids behind the creator of Hagar the Horrible started it.
[01:09:38]  Oh, well, you know, Haggar the Horrible.
[01:09:42]  We'll see how horrible he was next time.
[01:09:44]  Randy, thank you.
[01:09:47]  Thank you so much for having me.
[01:09:48]  It's always a pleasure.
[01:09:50]  Yes.
[01:09:50]  Thanks for being around.
[01:09:52]  All right, everybody.
[01:09:53]  That's the episode.
[01:09:55]  Go to hell.
[01:09:56]  I love you.
[01:09:57]  Bye.
[01:10:01]  Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
[01:10:04]  For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[01:10:18]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[01:10:26]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[01:10:28]  He is not going to get away with this.
[01:10:30]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[01:10:32]  We always say that.
[01:10:34]  Trust your girlfriends.
[01:10:37]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[01:10:38]  Trust me, babe.
[01:10:39]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:10:49]  Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
[01:10:54]  Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin.
[01:10:57]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[01:11:00]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[01:11:02]  That's so funny.
[01:11:03]  Shari stay with me each night, each morning.
[01:11:11]  Listen to Nora Jones's Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:11:19]  What's up, everyone?
[01:11:20]  I'm Ego Modem.
[01:11:21]  My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
[01:11:25]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[01:11:28]  He goes, just give it a shot.
[01:11:30]  But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[01:11:36]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[01:11:39]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[01:11:46]  Yeah, it would not be.
[01:11:48]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[01:11:49]  There's a lot of life.
[01:11:51]  Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:11:58]  This is an iHeart Podcast.
[01:12:00]  Guaranteed human.