True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 188: The Busch Family
Aired: 2021-10-04
Duration: 01:29:48


=== New York City Confessions (14:43) ===

[00:00:00]  Brace.
[00:00:01]  What?
[00:00:01]  Race.
[00:00:02]  Yeah.
[00:00:02]  Ray.
[00:00:03]  Call me Muhammad Ada, baby.
[00:00:05]  No, Brace.
[00:00:06]  Yeah.
[00:00:07]  We're in the same room.
[00:00:08]  Yeah, we're in the same city.
[00:00:10]  We're in the same.
[00:00:12]  Don't tell them what city.
[00:00:13]  Okay.
[00:00:14]  Listeners.
[00:00:15]  I'm going to tell you what city.
[00:00:17]  Just as soon as I think of a suitably white.
[00:00:20]  No, we're in the worst city on earth.
[00:00:22]  What?
[00:00:22]  New York City.
[00:00:24]  Let me tell you, this is, oh, big, tough, New York.
[00:00:29]  Oh, hey, I'm a good fella.
[00:00:32]  I'm a made man.
[00:00:34]  Oh, I'm Puerto Rican.
[00:00:36]  Oh, I'm Jewish.
[00:00:37]  Oh, I'm well racist live here.
[00:00:40]  I'm black.
[00:00:41]  Oh, you know, I'm a lesbian.
[00:00:44]  I'm transgender.
[00:00:46]  What is all the other shit Cuomo said?
[00:00:48]  I'm a fucking, I'm white.
[00:00:53]  You know?
[00:00:54]  Brace is not impressed by New York.
[00:00:57]  Place is a dump.
[00:00:59]  You know, it's, it's, it's, first of all, haven't seen a single rat except for what you might call these people walking around here.
[00:01:06]  Turn on your monitor.
[00:01:08]  Yeah.
[00:01:08]  Okay.
[00:01:08]  I'll turn on my cell phone, call the police, and tell them that you have a gun and are threatening me.
[00:01:13]  And they'll come here in four hours and they won't even shoot you.
[00:01:16]  They're bums.
[00:01:18]  They're all.
[00:01:18]  So what you're saying is there's too much trash and not enough of a police presence.
[00:01:25]  Yes.
[00:01:26]  Yeah.
[00:01:26]  And I was thinking about this last night.
[00:01:28]  And, you know, I've been in New York City for two days.
[00:01:32]  Yeah, you got a real good impression of the city.
[00:01:34]  You've been two neighborhoods.
[00:01:35]  Yes.
[00:01:35]  Well, that's not.
[00:01:36]  All right.
[00:01:38]  What's a borough, first of all?
[00:01:41]  Because that's like a neighborhood.
[00:01:43]  No.
[00:01:45]  Yeah.
[00:01:45]  Okay.
[00:01:46]  What's a burrow then?
[00:01:46]  It's a burr.
[00:01:47]  Yeah.
[00:01:47]  You can't.
[00:01:48]  Yeah.
[00:01:49]  Is that this is.
[00:01:49]  All right.
[00:01:50]  What's a burrow?
[00:01:51]  There's five.
[00:01:53]  Yeah.
[00:01:53]  Well, there's actually a hidden, forgotten sixth one.
[00:01:57]  But I got to tell you, not impressed.
[00:02:00]  Walking around, everyone's like, you know, you'd think like, all right, so I thought until coming here that the main industry was the mafia.
[00:02:08]  It seems like everyone's just out to eat.
[00:02:09]  I think you're reading too many profiles on the Sopranos.
[00:02:12]  No, I've never seen an episode of Sopranos and I never will.
[00:02:15]  You've only read blog posts.
[00:02:16]  I have never read one and I never will.
[00:02:19]  That's fake.
[00:02:20]  Also, isn't that in New Jersey?
[00:02:21]  Why are you getting so angry?
[00:02:23]  Because I hate this place.
[00:02:25]  There is, but there's one organization that I actually read about last night that I kind of was a little impressed by.
[00:02:35]  You know how everybody in the street you see here is like a demon?
[00:02:38]  What?
[00:02:39]  A devil?
[00:02:40]  All the little people walking around.
[00:02:42]  Smiles on their faces.
[00:02:44]  They got to take you to new neighborhoods.
[00:02:45]  Their wide pants with their many pleats.
[00:02:48]  Their cruelty.
[00:02:50]  Bucket hat.
[00:02:52]  Nobody swirls.
[00:02:52]  Everything is swirled.
[00:02:54]  Bob haircuts.
[00:02:57]  You know.
[00:02:58]  Tiny purses.
[00:02:59]  Tiny person.
[00:03:00]  You're so tiny, you can't fit your big phone.
[00:03:02]  Uh-uh, uh-oh, but I can fit it in my little pocket.
[00:03:07]  But, you know, but I read about an organization that was actually trying to clean up this place.
[00:03:11]  Because there's a, I gotta say, there's not a lot of legal crimes here, but there's a lot of social crimes that I think are going on in New York.
[00:03:19]  And the police obviously don't aren't helping whatsoever.
[00:03:23]  Right.
[00:03:24]  So I read about this organization called the Guardian Angels.
[00:03:27]  Oh, my God.
[00:03:28]  And it seems like what they do is they just go around and hassle New Yorkers and like kind of beat them up, push them around, yell at them, are a noxious presence.
[00:03:38]  And I can't think of any better organization to ally with on that.
[00:03:43]  So I am going to, I will be joining the Guardian Angels here.
[00:03:48]  you're my guardian angel hey you can tell i was about to do that You were.
[00:04:16]  I could see.
[00:04:17]  Is this what you do?
[00:04:18]  Okay.
[00:04:18]  Hello, everyone.
[00:04:20]  This is what Bryce does right before he's doing the A voice.
[00:04:23]  He kind of like pauses.
[00:04:25]  He looks down.
[00:04:26]  He's got his little hands.
[00:04:27]  Clasped together.
[00:04:28]  Clasped.
[00:04:29]  Big hands.
[00:04:30]  Clasped.
[00:04:31]  Not like.
[00:04:32]  I got big hands, but a little dick.
[00:04:34]  But then you, you kind of like silently sway.
[00:04:37]  Because I'm trying to get fatter.
[00:04:39]  And then you're like, get, it's like you're building up the momentum to go, my mother.
[00:04:49]  No, we saw someone do that today.
[00:04:51]  We did.
[00:04:52]  Okay.
[00:04:52]  Yeah, we sort of did, but we did see, we did see a bicyclist yell at a guy.
[00:04:56]  Yeah.
[00:04:56]  And he did say, like, hey, I'm bike.
[00:04:58]  Well, he didn't say that, but he we said it was a subtext to what he said.
[00:05:02]  Nobody said, like, use your mirror.
[00:05:04]  And we were like, hey, he's biking here.
[00:05:06]  Like, you know, we were like, look.
[00:05:08]  I did.
[00:05:09]  I chased down a bicycle thief.
[00:05:12]  Last night.
[00:05:12]  Right.
[00:05:13]  Yeah.
[00:05:13]  Even though I hate bicyclists.
[00:05:14]  There's a new sheriff.
[00:05:16]  Exactly.
[00:05:16]  And I followed a guy for maybe 20, 25, but 20 minutes, 20 minutes, I would say.
[00:05:22]  And I didn't.
[00:05:23]  I should have been asleep.
[00:05:24]  It was very late at night.
[00:05:26]  Before I realized I'm like, I'm so good at zero detection, by the way.
[00:05:33]  I follow this guy for so long.
[00:05:35]  You know, I was coming here and I saw, I think, like four, I was walking down 7th Avenue, four spy shops.
[00:05:44]  Really?
[00:05:45]  Still exist.
[00:05:46]  What's 7th Avenue?
[00:05:48]  It's an Avenue.
[00:05:50]  Okay.
[00:05:51]  I'm from Avenue C. That's the extra baby.
[00:05:55]  Yeah, I'm from the village.
[00:05:59]  You know, hello, everyone.
[00:06:01]  Hey, what's up?
[00:06:03]  Yo, what's up?
[00:06:04]  This is Rudy Giuliani.
[00:06:07]  Imagine Rudy Giuliani sounded like that.
[00:06:09]  What does he sound like?
[00:06:10]  Not like that.
[00:06:10]  I don't know.
[00:06:10]  He's always wasted.
[00:06:12]  I just thought that was like a mythical character.
[00:06:15]  I'm Liz.
[00:06:16]  We are joined, of course, by producer Young Chomsky.
[00:06:20]  And welcome to New York.
[00:06:23]  This is True Anony.
[00:06:29]  I don't know why we're telling everyone we're in New York.
[00:06:32]  I know why we're telling everyone we're in New York.
[00:06:34]  Why?
[00:06:35]  I assumed I'd have something to say after I finished that sentence, but it didn't end up working out that way.
[00:06:40]  We're recording in the same room.
[00:06:42]  Young Chomsky is actually not in the same room as us, but I can see him.
[00:06:47]  He's over yonder, but I can't see him.
[00:06:48]  I can see yonder.
[00:06:49]  Classic New York word.
[00:06:51]  I can see him.
[00:06:52]  You can't.
[00:06:53]  You should see what he's doing right now.
[00:06:55]  I don't want to see that.
[00:06:56]  No, you should see this.
[00:06:58]  I didn't, yeah.
[00:06:59]  Well, anyways, I guess this episode is sponsored by Tushi.
[00:07:05]  The portable bidet that people sometimes have.
[00:07:08]  By the way, I'll be real.
[00:07:09]  I turned on your bidet when I went in the fucking bathroom there.
[00:07:13]  Not like on myself.
[00:07:15]  Like I was just like standing over at the toilet and fucking with it.
[00:07:18]  I soaked your toilet and spent a long time wiping it up with things because I was like, these guys are going to think I pissed everywhere in here.
[00:07:26]  That really just happened?
[00:07:27]  Yeah.
[00:07:28]  Yeah.
[00:07:28]  Yes.
[00:07:28]  That literally just happened.
[00:07:30]  Yeah.
[00:07:31]  But yeah, we're in freaking New York recording the same room.
[00:07:34]  Freaking New York.
[00:07:37]  No, check this out.
[00:07:38]  I'm not going to censor myself.
[00:07:40]  I'm in fucking New York.
[00:07:41]  Oh, look at you.
[00:07:42]  I hate it here.
[00:07:43]  I hate it.
[00:07:45]  I hate it.
[00:07:46]  You don't hate it.
[00:07:47]  You don't even know it.
[00:07:48]  There's no wonder everyone does ketamine here.
[00:07:51]  I would want to be disassociated.
[00:07:53]  All the, all the.
[00:07:54]  Okay, you don't know the neighborhoods and you know all the wrong people because I don't, come on.
[00:07:58]  That's not true.
[00:07:59]  I know.
[00:08:00]  First of all, I got Vinny Stigma's number.
[00:08:02]  And we can talk about that after, actually.
[00:08:04]  But listen, I'm a New York hardcore legend.
[00:08:06]  And I am just, it's just crazy to be back here after, you know, last time I was here, it was 82 CBs.
[00:08:12]  CBGBs.
[00:08:14]  Played a great gig.
[00:08:15]  I'm wearing their shirt right now.
[00:08:16]  Trying to fit in.
[00:08:17]  Yeah.
[00:08:18]  Actually, Liz right now is wearing.
[00:08:20]  I can't.
[00:08:22]  I don't know what people in New York wear.
[00:08:24]  Everyone here is.
[00:08:24]  I'm wearing a CBGB shirt.
[00:08:26]  Everyone's like hot at like 8 p.m. and scary looking and then mean and fucked up and gross looking at like 10 p.m.
[00:08:32]  I don't know what happens.
[00:08:34]  I think they go to bars.
[00:08:35]  Liz is wearing a ballroom gown because we're going to the opera later?
[00:08:40]  Broadway later.
[00:08:42]  Let's go to the opera.
[00:08:43]  I'd rather do that than Broadway.
[00:08:44]  No, I've been in the opera.
[00:08:45]  Boring.
[00:08:46]  It's not boring.
[00:08:47]  It's insanely boring.
[00:08:48]  Don't pretend it's not boring.
[00:08:49]  Are you kidding me?
[00:08:49]  I've been to the opera like three times in my life.
[00:08:52]  Once as a child, so okay, I get a past that being boring.
[00:08:55]  Twice as an adult, not great.
[00:08:57]  Well, maybe you saw the wrong opera.
[00:08:59]  Well, we are here.
[00:09:01]  We are here.
[00:09:02]  We are here.
[00:09:04]  I like talking to you.
[00:09:05]  I mean, we should normally interview.
[00:09:06]  This is going to be a long episode.
[00:09:08]  But yeah, we have with us today from what they actually call the New York of Missouri St. Louis.
[00:09:17]  They call it that because it was actually subject to a pretty devastating terrorist attack on September 11, 2001.
[00:09:24]  But people didn't really care about it because most people think Missouri is actually in Canada.
[00:09:28]  But we have with us here Devin O'Shea.
[00:09:31]  Actually, he's not here.
[00:09:32]  Yeah, we're here.
[00:09:34]  We're here.
[00:09:35]  He's not here.
[00:09:35]  Yeah, he's in St. Louis.
[00:09:37]  He's Conan, and we are going to be talking about...
[00:09:42]  Well, if you made it this way, you'll find out.
[00:09:57]  What is that?
[00:09:59]  What up? What up? What is that?
[00:10:04]  Devin, you gotta do it.
[00:10:05]  Do it without laughing.
[00:10:06]  Do it.
[00:10:07]  Come on.
[00:10:08]  It's the most appropriate way to start this.
[00:10:11]  It's just, wazzah!
[00:10:13]  Wazzah! Wazzah!
[00:10:18]  What's up, Dilly-Dilly, my friend?
[00:10:20]  I actually missed the whole Dilly Dilly ad.
[00:10:22]  I just saw it.
[00:10:22]  It's Dilly Dilly.
[00:10:23]  I think they did like a Dilly Dilly kind of thing.
[00:10:25]  You know, none of my business.
[00:10:26]  I don't actually.
[00:10:27]  I don't watch ads.
[00:10:29]  I only watch ads.
[00:10:31]  Yeah, well, that's the difference between man and woman.
[00:10:34]  Women watch TVs for the ads.
[00:10:36]  Guys watch TV for Shit's Creek.
[00:10:39]  We have with us here today, cracking open a cold, actually burning hot clemato.
[00:10:48]  Just boiling.
[00:10:50]  It's so hot.
[00:10:50]  Oh, it's burning his lips.
[00:10:52]  They're all fucked up and chapped looking now, but he still can do the episode.
[00:10:55]  We have with us returning guest, Devin.
[00:11:00]  Oh, Shea.
[00:11:01]  Devin, welcome to the show.
[00:11:03]  Bud.
[00:11:05]  Thank you so much for having me back.
[00:11:08]  Dilly Dilly to all the listeners.
[00:11:10]  Dilly Dilly, listeners.
[00:11:12]  We have brought you here into the brew zone not only to try a little flight of craft beers, maybe top the foam off with one of those things that you sand your fingernails down with, but you have written an article for Protein Magazine about a family, the Bush family.
[00:11:32]  And no, ladies and gentlemen, he's not talking about the other alcoholic Bush family without the C.
[00:11:38]  He is talking about the somehow even more alcoholic.
[00:11:42]  And actually, we can attribute at least one more direct death of a woman to a person because Laura Bush, you know, killed a woman.
[00:11:49]  Absolutely.
[00:11:50]  And HW, I mean, at least three or four.
[00:11:55]  Yeah.
[00:11:56]  And of course, Bush himself, several thousand, just a few short blocks from here.
[00:12:02]  But no, we're talking about the Bush family with a C from St. Louis here.
[00:12:06]  And so, all right, Devin's written this article.
[00:12:10]  We're going to obviously link to it.
[00:12:11]  You can read it after.
[00:12:13]  Don't stop and read it now.
[00:12:14]  It'd be weird.
[00:12:16]  But let's start at the beginning.
[00:12:17]  So this is the Bush, the Budweiser family, the Anheuser-Busch clan.
[00:12:22]  And why are you writing about him?
[00:12:24]  Where does this start?
[00:12:25]  Where does this story start?
[00:12:27]  Who's making bud?
[00:12:28]  I mean, the C to this definitely came out of doing research for writing the Veiled Prophet book a couple years ago.
[00:12:38]  I accidentally then became like a Bush family scholar.
[00:12:44]  But yeah, that's the thing about St. Louis, especially if you ever grew up here, you would notice how much of the Bush families in Anheuser-Busch has like this impression on every street corner and like academic buildings named after them.
[00:13:02]  You know, all the good stuff that we like, the public parks and stuff like that are all funded by like Anheuser-Busch non-profit stuff.
[00:13:13]  And so it pays to look into it a little bit.
[00:13:17]  There's also like three Bush daughters who were Veiled Prophet queens.
[00:13:21]  Naturally.
[00:13:22]  Naturally.
[00:13:25]  Yeah, but this is also heavily based off of William Nodelsder.
[00:13:33]  It's a really hard last name to say.
[00:13:34]  I was last name.
[00:13:37]  Noodlesder, but it's like, it's got a K on it.
[00:13:41]  Oh, I see.
[00:13:41]  Knudsler.
[00:13:42]  Knudsler.
[00:13:44]  Is he a Dutch?
[00:13:45]  Knoodler.
[00:13:47]  That does canoodling.
[00:13:49]  Yeah, I get an air of perfidiousness about it.
[00:13:52]  He's listening.
[00:13:52]  I'm sorry that we're great last name.
[00:13:55]  I heard it's a good book.
[00:13:56]  It's a good book.
[00:13:57]  And also, you know, if I made anything that was slightly libelous in the article, I'll go ahead and blame William because he said all the spicy stuff.
[00:14:08]  But yeah, Bitter Brew is the book that came out sort of like in the aftermath of Anheuser-Busch being bought up by an international corporation called InBev that is half Belgian, half Brazilian now.
[00:14:25]  Yeah, I'm very aware of InBev due to my time in the brewing industry.
[00:14:31]  Yeah, you're a craft brewman.
[00:14:32]  Listen, let's not.
[00:14:33]  A brewman.
[00:14:34]  No, I am not a brewman.
[00:14:36]  First of all, I didn't brew and first and foremost, a brewman.
[00:14:40]  I'll be real with you, Liz.
[00:14:41]  I'm not entirely sure how beer is even made.

=== Alcohol Prohibition Parallels (09:19) ===

[00:14:44]  I was on there before.
[00:14:46]  I don't know if I know either.
[00:14:48]  Exactly.
[00:14:48]  I mean, I know the basics.
[00:14:50]  But, you know, AB Imbev looms over the industry, as I'm sure we'll talk about, you know, a little later in this episode.
[00:14:57]  And Anheuser-Busch, I mean, that's the A-B part of that.
[00:15:01]  But they were not always part of the globalist.
[00:15:04]  Well, I guess, well, let me rephrase that.
[00:15:07]  They were somewhat less a part of the globalist system for much of their time.
[00:15:12]  And I believe they started and you know, you lay out really interestingly in the article how each of these sort of patriarchs of the Bush clan sort of mirror the time that they're in and mirror sort of the state of the industry as well in some more the first and last more than others.
[00:15:28]  And so let's start at the beginning.
[00:15:30]  Where does this listen?
[00:15:32]  If you know anything about beer, you know, obviously this has got to be started by a German, right?
[00:15:36]  Oh, yeah.
[00:15:37]  I mean, the, yeah, this is, this is a confusing thing.
[00:15:42]  Even though the Bushes all have Roman numerals after their name, you would think it would be easy to keep it all on track.
[00:15:48]  But we can like, we, we got to start with Bush Zero, who literally is a West German immigrant.
[00:15:58]  He's from the Grand Duchy of Hesse.
[00:16:01]  And he immigrates to the United States.
[00:16:04]  And his son is sort of the first Bush of Anheuser-Busch.
[00:16:10]  So this Bush is Bush 1, and he acquires a brewery before Prohibition from a guy named Anheuser.
[00:16:21]  He marries into the family, basically.
[00:16:24]  And then, you know, this is like a weird story that's very familiar to anybody who knows anything about like the drug war or the war on drugs and just how prohibition works in general.
[00:16:36]  But alcohol prohibition happens.
[00:16:38]  And instead of like ridding our society of, you know, sin, it just pushes alcohol consumption and into a black market.
[00:16:49]  And the first Bush is basically able to mothball a huge beer brewing complex in St. Louis and wait out prohibition, partially because his father from the Grand Duchy of Hesse is like a wholesaler who is already providing like wine and spirits sort of services.
[00:17:13]  So the whole point of that is that like Anheuser-Busch will try to tell you that like a normal guy just like had a good idea for beer and then like started a brewery.
[00:17:23]  But in fact that's the story of every single brewery.
[00:17:27]  Right.
[00:17:27]  Right.
[00:17:27]  Big or small.
[00:17:28]  That's what they always say.
[00:17:29]  And distillery.
[00:17:31]  Yeah, it's like the it's the equivalent of doing a startup out of a garage.
[00:17:38]  Yeah, totally.
[00:17:40]  Prohibition is such a weird time in American history.
[00:17:43]  And just also, I mean, obviously what happened with the alcohol industry, I don't actually know as much about with the beer industry as I do with, you know, out in Napa, what happened to the vineyards and what they were kind of running out of there where they were kind of like, you know, they would be sending out, because they could still provide wine to churches and stuff.
[00:18:03]  So they would get around stuff and they would, you know, have all this, the bootlegging that they would kind of like hide from the authorities.
[00:18:10]  And, you know, you pay off local cops and all of that.
[00:18:12]  But with how did they kind of like survive that era?
[00:18:17]  Because they didn't shut down everything, right?
[00:18:20]  No, that was weird.
[00:18:21]  I wonder if there's a similar thing with winemaking where like they were selling homebrew kits.
[00:18:26]  So like that was always a weird irony.
[00:18:29]  Like loophole.
[00:18:30]  Yeah.
[00:18:31]  Yeah.
[00:18:31]  Like I can sell you an amount of wheat and barley and some equipment for your bathtub and you could brew some gin in it.
[00:18:39]  And like maybe it'll make you go blind, but hopefully not.
[00:18:43]  You know, that's crazy because like, you know, you think of prohibition as being super strict, but like back then they don't even ID you for like if you want to buy some like barley and stuff.
[00:18:52]  But now if you just want to buy some like maybe kinds of matches that have chemicals in them or like if you want to buy a certain kind of like medicine at the drugstore, you can only buy one and you have to show your ID in San Francisco, even though it's like maybe you're actually really sick and need to buy 20 boxes.
[00:19:05]  Yeah, sometimes you have to acquire a lot of ivermectin and asshole is carding you.
[00:19:10]  Yeah.
[00:19:11]  You're not a horse.
[00:19:12]  Whatever.
[00:19:14]  So yeah, that was like one of the big ways of getting around it is this like homebrew kits.
[00:19:19]  And then St. Louis crucially is at the intersection of the barge industry on the river and also the railroad industry.
[00:19:28]  And so a big thing is happening at that time also, which is like, what if we had a train with refrigerated carts on it?
[00:19:35]  And sort of right at the end of Prohibition, Gussie is able to, or not Gussie, Gussie is the next one, but Adolphus is able to shoot out of the gate after Prohibition.
[00:19:48]  All of these guys are named Adolphus or Adolph or Coors.
[00:19:54]  Yeah, it just, I don't know, something about that West German.
[00:19:59]  Anyway, so after Prohibition ends, they're able to like triumphantly come out of the gates with a fully functional brewery faster than anyone else can get it together.
[00:20:12]  This is like a big thing in the like hive mind of Anneiser-Busch because they still use the horses in the carriage as like triumphantly returning, you know, to the bars.
[00:20:24]  And honestly, you know, everyone loves beer.
[00:20:26]  It's like the easiest thing to market in the world.
[00:20:29]  Yeah.
[00:20:29]  So it's like a big point of pride.
[00:20:31]  Like the Clydesdales are just a big symbol of St. Louis.
[00:20:35]  And a lot of working class people, you know, you go and hang out in your local bar, and everybody has a sense of pride that at the bottom of every Anheuser-Busch logo is like brewed in St. Louis, Missouri, and it goes all over the world.
[00:20:52]  And that really happened under the next guy, Gussie.
[00:20:55]  But a big thing is just that the rail network allowed for Anheuser-Busch to shoot out into the rest of the country really quickly.
[00:21:03]  Same way that Milwaukee is kind of on the transit network.
[00:21:07]  Right.
[00:21:09]  But so then the fun one comes because the Depression era, Prohibition era Bush ends up shooting himself in the head.
[00:21:18]  Depression era.
[00:21:19]  Yeah, he had depression and mental illness does run in the family.
[00:21:25]  But he was also very sick, I think, was the main thing.
[00:21:29]  It wasn't anything too shady.
[00:21:32]  The next Bush in reaction to that is like the Willy Wonka Bush, and his name is Gussie.
[00:21:39]  He's a pedophile.
[00:21:41]  Exactly.
[00:21:42]  He lures children into the brewery.
[00:21:44]  Bruce says the whole thing about how Willy Wonka is a pedophile because I hate Willy Wonka.
[00:21:48]  That makes no sense.
[00:21:49]  It's really terrible.
[00:21:51]  I mean, I don't know.
[00:21:54]  I love Gene Wilder, so Willy Wonka's funny wilder.
[00:21:57]  Yeah.
[00:21:58]  How do you have a guy named Adolphus and then the kid is named Gussie?
[00:22:02]  Well, the kid, no, the kid's name is Augustus, right?
[00:22:05]  Yes.
[00:22:06]  Yeah.
[00:22:06]  They're all named the same thing, I think.
[00:22:09]  Or something similar.
[00:22:10]  Yeah, that would make sense to me.
[00:22:12]  So he's like a wacky one.
[00:22:15]  Yeah, he like really takes the brewery into Overdrive and he like buys the St. Louis Cardinals and owns it until his death and like opens up Bush Gardens, the theme park aspect, and like Grant's Farm, which is basically like, what if we had a petting zoo where you could get like absolutely hammered?
[00:22:39]  I've always been wondering what that would be like.
[00:22:41]  Is Grant's Farm still around?
[00:22:43]  Yeah.
[00:22:43]  It's still cool.
[00:22:46]  So you can just like, it's like a, like you can touch a goat but drink Budweiser.
[00:22:50]  Yeah, you can have like seven Budweisers and approach a donkey.
[00:22:54]  And, you know, sounds like a recipe for disaster.
[00:22:57]  I gotta say it.
[00:22:58]  It seems okay to me.
[00:22:59]  I don't know.
[00:22:59]  Maybe that's gonna sound so bad.
[00:23:01]  I don't know.
[00:23:02]  It's it seems wholesome-ish in places.
[00:23:06]  But it's like a staple here of just like, oh, it's a fun thing to do on the weekend.
[00:23:12]  And so he's like the fun one who in the post-war era is like selling a ton of Budweiser to the boomers.
[00:23:22]  And like, it's just, it really expands the business beyond all proportions.
[00:23:27]  And then he has a ton of kids, like just tons of them.
[00:23:33]  And the heir to his throne is Bush III, or as he's termed within the company, Three Strokes.
[00:23:46]  Listen.
[00:23:50]  Listen, a lot of people have been called that.
[00:23:54]  And sometimes it's actually like kind of an ironic nickname because it's actually like a lot more than that that they can.

=== Devil's Curve Disaster (12:17) ===

[00:24:03]  How are you going to let yourself have that nickname?
[00:24:06]  If you're the seat, why are you letting people call yourselves three strokes if you're the head?
[00:24:11]  I mean, I don't know what you guys are talking about.
[00:24:14]  That just refers to the Roman numerals.
[00:24:17]  Oh, yeah, strokes of the pen.
[00:24:19]  That's awful.
[00:24:21]  Poor guy.
[00:24:23]  Yeah, he really has a tough time.
[00:24:26]  He's also the exact opposite of Gussie, where there's like, there's this whole thing in the Bush family of like the heirs and the predecessors reflect off of each other as like dark mirrors.
[00:24:38]  That's called the dialectic.
[00:24:40]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:24:41]  And, you know, it got extremely Hegelian because like Three Strokes was extremely uptight and very paranoid, especially about he was really did not want anyone doing any drugs ever.
[00:25:00]  Except for alcohol.
[00:25:02]  Oh, yeah, right.
[00:25:03]  But that's not a drug.
[00:25:04]  That one's, you know, legal, kind of.
[00:25:06]  Yeah, yeah, true.
[00:25:08]  He was just like the most uptight guy ever.
[00:25:12]  And conveniently enough, when he takes over the brewery is in this big mechanation within the brewing industry of light beer.
[00:25:20]  So in the 80s, people start, you know, like you, you can kind of see that cultural remnant in the 80s of just like people start exercising on purpose and there's a demand for super light beer that doesn't taste very good.
[00:25:39]  Bud Light.
[00:25:40]  Bud Light.
[00:25:41]  That's the big one.
[00:25:43]  What did you guys drink in high school as like the cheapest, worst beer?
[00:25:48]  Steel Reserve.
[00:25:49]  Steel Reserve.
[00:25:50]  Oh, yeah.
[00:25:51]  Yeah, I drank mostly Steel Reserve.
[00:25:52]  Oh, my God.
[00:25:53]  Yes.
[00:25:53]  Yeah.
[00:25:54]  That was it.
[00:25:54]  My drinks in high school were Mickey.
[00:25:56]  The first beer I ever had was a Mickey's Hand Grenade in Hunters Point.
[00:26:00]  Oof.
[00:26:00]  Bought for me by Max Raynard.
[00:26:04]  That's right.
[00:26:05]  Whose penis I saw that day.
[00:26:08]  He just kind of got drunk and took his pants off in the middle street.
[00:26:12]  It wasn't like a thing.
[00:26:14]  And then I drank a lot of Steel Reserve because we could shoplift those pretty easy.
[00:26:18]  And then Jim Beam, we would drink a lot.
[00:26:22]  What was yours?
[00:26:23]  We were drinking Natty Lights here.
[00:26:26]  Oh, sure.
[00:26:27]  30 rack of Natty Light.
[00:26:30]  I don't know how that happened, but it was disgusting.
[00:26:34]  Yeah.
[00:26:35]  When I went to college, we drank a lot of yingling.
[00:26:39]  Oh, yeah.
[00:26:40]  That's like my uncles will bring a bag or a case of yangling down and be like, yeah, this is like our craft beer.
[00:26:49]  I guess this was in like the 2010s.
[00:26:52]  I'll be real.
[00:26:53]  I drank a lot of anchor steam growing up, too.
[00:26:55]  That was like a very popular San Francisco.
[00:26:58]  Yeah.
[00:26:58]  And then when I kind of turned like 17, 18, Jim Beam and Sparks.
[00:27:04]  You got a Sparks.
[00:27:04]  Jim Sparks and Jim Beam.
[00:27:07]  That would, that was.
[00:27:08]  Oh, my God.
[00:27:10]  Living in New York, drinking Sparks was a recipe for disaster.
[00:27:14]  Yeah, we used to buy a Kraken Stan on Mission.
[00:27:16]  That was.
[00:27:16]  Oh, God.
[00:27:17]  That place was crazy.
[00:27:19]  It was a great place.
[00:27:20]  That place still exists.
[00:27:21]  Oh, yeah.
[00:27:21]  Oh, my God.
[00:27:22]  Sorry.
[00:27:23]  No, no, no worries.
[00:27:25]  Memories.
[00:27:26]  Memories.
[00:27:27]  Yeah, light beer.
[00:27:29]  Because in the 80s, everyone, I don't know why, but I think that was like the era when people stopped being naturally skinny in America.
[00:27:35]  Because, you know, you look at old pictures of everybody.
[00:27:37]  It's like everybody over 50 is like majestically corpulent, but like everybody under 50 is like kind of in this weird like pugilist shape.
[00:27:48]  You know what I mean?
[00:27:49]  Right.
[00:27:49]  And then like starting in like the late 70s, 80s, like people just ate too many hamburgers or something.
[00:27:54]  Like it just continued to wherever it is today.
[00:27:57]  And so they had to start inventing shit like light beer.
[00:28:00]  Yeah.
[00:28:01]  I mean, yeah, it must be the hamburgers, the cornstarch, something like that.
[00:28:05]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:28:06]  I mean, I'm sure there's like the chemicals they put in the damn food.
[00:28:10]  I mean, that segues perfectly into the next era of Bush, where like three strokes in the 80s era.
[00:28:37]  Why are you guys laughing at me?
[00:28:39]  We saw there's a spider that's making a funny face.
[00:28:42]  Oh, that's okay.
[00:28:45]  So his era is also defined by like beer marketing.
[00:28:49]  Like marketing for beer has always been a big thing, but in the 80s and 90s, it really takes on its own insane sort of it goes from just as a rough sketch, like let's have branded mirrors in the bars to like, let's try to psychologically associate sex with beer in the way that's like the most toxic mechanism possible.
[00:29:15]  My uncle had Budweiser babe posters above his hot tub.
[00:29:19]  Oh, yeah.
[00:29:19]  That's a real uncle move.
[00:29:21]  Yeah, I will say like it was like in a like wooden, I don't know, outside.
[00:29:26]  I don't know what that would be, but it was like in a like, kind of like had a little bit of a, I don't know, like a pergola sort of situation.
[00:29:35]  Yeah.
[00:29:36]  And just like all, I remember looking up, and it was just all papered with Budweiser girls, like those kind that you see, those posters that you find at the liquor store.
[00:29:45]  I think you can think of it like this: like you have Billy D. Williams going from saying, like, works every time with Colt 45 to just being like, to just having the girl that it works every time on in the ad and said, like, no, you don't need Billy anymore.
[00:29:58]  Right.
[00:29:58]  Yeah.
[00:29:59]  You don't need advice.
[00:30:00]  You can just, it's just an image picture.
[00:30:03]  So, yeah, this gets into, I think, the main character of the essay, which is Bush IV, who's the son of Bush III.
[00:30:16]  So Bush, I don't even know where to start with him.
[00:30:20]  This guy is, yeah, this guy's crazy.
[00:30:23]  Incredible character.
[00:30:26]  In the essay, I started with like, so Bush IV goes to, I believe it's the University of Arizona, not Arizona University.
[00:30:35]  Those are different.
[00:30:37]  But he is basically a guy who shows up to college with this entire beer kingdom behind him.
[00:30:46]  He's got a Roman numeral by his name.
[00:30:48]  He has a fake ID at age 19.
[00:30:54]  He's the typical kind of frat guy, but imagine the insane power that would come from going into a bar and saying, everyone have like a round of my family's beer, Budweiser.
[00:31:06]  Exactly.
[00:31:06]  Yeah.
[00:31:08]  Unfathomable power in the college setting.
[00:31:13]  So, but things go quickly wrong for Bush IV.
[00:31:17]  One night he is at Dirtbags and he has, I think, seven Tom Collins drinks.
[00:31:27]  And he and a waitress who works at Dirtbags named Michelle Frederick are going to go to another party with some friends.
[00:31:34]  They get in a car.
[00:31:37]  Their friends are in a different car.
[00:31:39]  They sort of speed off into the night and no one sees them at the party.
[00:31:44]  And then the next morning, the Arizona police show up to Bush IV's apartment where they can hear like music playing inside.
[00:31:56]  And they go in and there's like guns everywhere.
[00:32:00]  And he is like pulled out of bed with like blood all over him.
[00:32:05]  And it turns out that like earlier that morning, there's a report that there's like a flipped sports car in a common place called you know Dead Man's Curve.
[00:32:21]  Let me stop you right there.
[00:32:23]  Sure.
[00:32:24]  How many Dead Man's Curves are there?
[00:32:26]  Every town has a dead man's curve.
[00:32:27]  Everyone's got a dead man's curve.
[00:32:29]  I think the one near Santa Cruz is called like Devil's Curve or something.
[00:32:32]  Well, there's Devil's Slide.
[00:32:32]  Devil's Slide.
[00:32:33]  There's the one that's in between what?
[00:32:35]  What?
[00:32:36]  San Francisco and Pacifica.
[00:32:38]  Yeah.
[00:32:38]  Or Pacifica and Half Moon Bay.
[00:32:40]  I think it's Santa Cruz in San Francisco.
[00:32:41]  I can't remember.
[00:32:42]  Well, no, it goes in between Pacifica or Half Moon Bay, whichever one it is.
[00:32:45]  But there's like too many dead man.
[00:32:47]  I gotta say, if you're like, if you build a curve and people nickname it Dead Man's Curve, do some roadwork.
[00:32:53]  Change the curve.
[00:32:54]  Yeah, that was an engineering flaw, you know?
[00:32:56]  Yeah.
[00:32:57]  That you're trying to paper over with just a name.
[00:33:00]  Exactly.
[00:33:02]  But also, you know, if you know of Dead Man's Curve, it's not like, hey, let's try to drive as fast as we can around Dead Man's Curve.
[00:33:09]  The other thing is that they find Michelle Frederick's body close to the wreck who was left there for the whole night.
[00:33:19]  And there's like Budweiser beer cans around the car.
[00:33:24]  In the car is like a sport coat with the fourth's name stitched into the collar, plus his real ID and his fake ID.
[00:33:34]  And like, I think there's also a gun in there because there's a gun everywhere he goes.
[00:33:39]  Yeah, he's got a lot of guns.
[00:33:40]  He's a big young guy.
[00:33:43]  So the Arizona police naturally, you know, the story seems pretty familiar.
[00:33:51]  But the Anheuser-Busch lawyers basically come into Arizona and just airlift him out of there as soon as possible.
[00:34:00]  And then his story is that he's got like head trauma and that he can't remember what happened.
[00:34:06]  And maybe they were in a car accident.
[00:34:09]  Oh, yeah.
[00:34:10]  How far is it from that place and where he, I mean, he was let asleep in his bed.
[00:34:16]  So yeah, I'm not sure how he got back there if he just like walked.
[00:34:24]  It doesn't seem like that was very close to where he lived.
[00:34:27]  Yeah, it's funny how, you know, this whole thing, you know, these characters have almost become clichés themselves.
[00:34:33]  I don't know if you watch that show Succession, but I was reminded of that, you know, and these kind of, obviously the writers like drew a lot, I think, from the Bush family, you know, with the theme parks and, you know, clearly the kind of fail kid, you know, murdering a young girl in a car accident, drunken car accident.
[00:34:56]  But that it's all kind of reminiscent or it pulls from all these sort of like dinosaur dynasties that have built American industry.
[00:35:06]  Yeah, it's very reminiscent of succession and just the way that like wealthy families can provide enough resources and A bubble for their kids to grow up in where, like, nothing can ever touch them, basically.
[00:35:26]  Because Bush IV then gets lifted out of Arizona back to St. Louis, where he walks into St. Louis University immediately, gets like a prime parking spot because he's worried about like having to walk too far.
[00:35:43]  Uh, and then proceeds to spend the next like two years becoming well known for like doing table long lines of blow.
[00:35:52]  Well, hold on, hold on.
[00:35:54]  How long are these tables?
[00:35:57]  I'm thinking like bar tables, but it sounds like they pushed them together and were like, I don't know.
[00:36:03]  Okay, that's a long line of blow because I'm like, if it's like one of those teeny little tables that people put like succulents and shit on, yeah, you could, that's like that's manageable.
[00:36:15]  Yeah, but yeah, that actual table seems uh, seems, seems expensive, yeah.

=== Evidence in Wrecked Cars (06:20) ===

[00:36:21]  It's the way that uh Bitterbrew kind of phrases it is like he develops like a little gang of other rich kids, and then they go around to all the bars in St. Louis and sort of like he has a guy who will go into the crowd and pick out a girl for the fourth and be like, hey, do you want to come party with one of the Bush kids?
[00:36:44]  That happened to my friend with Eli Manning.
[00:36:46]  Oh, really?
[00:36:47]  Yeah, someone who I can't say, but yeah, she went to like, she went to a camp with the Mannings when she was a kid.
[00:36:55]  And they were already like pretty famous because of the college, because, you know, Peyton was already a big college star and Eli was a big high school star at the time.
[00:37:03]  And she was like approached and said, oh, the Eli, like Eli Manning of the Mannings wants to talk to you.
[00:37:11]  Oof.
[00:37:11]  Classico rich kid move.
[00:37:13]  Well, and of course, that also, I think I've told this story in the podcast before happened to me and the killers.
[00:37:18]  Well, it didn't happen to me.
[00:37:19]  It happened with some killers.
[00:37:21]  That happened, some girls I was with.
[00:37:23]  I was just the one who went to the killers hotel room.
[00:37:27]  Was somebody told me you had a boyfriend?
[00:37:31]  I want to be clear here.
[00:37:32]  I never had sex with anyone from the killers.
[00:37:34]  I want to make that like really.
[00:37:36]  Why are you giving that?
[00:37:37]  I don't think anyone thought that.
[00:37:38]  Okay, like we've like fucked around and stuff, but like it wasn't like.
[00:37:42]  But yeah, no, that's like a common tactic, which is insane to me.
[00:37:46]  And it's also insane that like this guy is just having his friends do it in college.
[00:37:51]  I mean, it shouldn't be, I guess it shouldn't be a surprise.
[00:37:54]  But yeah, this guy seems like a real, like a scumbag in every, you can just picture him.
[00:37:59]  You don't even have to look up a picture.
[00:38:00]  You can just, you can see him in your head.
[00:38:02]  Yeah, because as the table long lines of blow era is going through, the hospital in Arizona just like, oh, we lost all the evidence from the car wreck.
[00:38:15]  We like send it through a centrifuge on accident.
[00:38:20]  So I hate when I do that accidentally with evidence.
[00:38:24]  I load all the evidence into the evidence destroyer for safekeeping, and then I accidentally hit the go button.
[00:38:31]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:38:36]  What's strange to me is like the evidence in this is his wrecked car.
[00:38:42]  Several cans bearing his family's last name, which okay, it's Budweiser, but a jacket with his full name on it.
[00:38:52]  But I, and a dead woman he left with that night.
[00:38:56]  You know, I'm not, you know, I'm not a lawyer or anything here, but it seems like enough evidence to probably get you somehow.
[00:39:07]  I mean, maybe if you were a son of a lesser beer distributor, maybe that would be enough to at least get you in a little bit of trouble.
[00:39:20]  Or, you know, another thing is like, perhaps if I'm getting airlifted back to St. Louis by the most high-powered lawyers in the country, I would go to an AA meeting.
[00:39:31]  I would maybe try to calm it down a little bit.
[00:39:34]  But instead, the Force develops this habit of in St. Louis, right, right on the river, across the river is East St. Louis, which is like the industrial corridor, which is also where all of the strip clubs are.
[00:39:48]  And so the fourth would and his friends would go out in St. Louis proper, then cross the bridge to go to the strip clubs and then come back at like four o'clock in the morning.
[00:40:02]  And on one of these nights, Bush IV was pulled over in his Corvette by some undercover cops.
[00:40:11]  And when the cops got out of the car, he just floored it and like sped away.
[00:40:18]  And this turned into a high-speed chase throughout the central west end.
[00:40:24]  But the key here is that the cops did not know that they were like pulling over the fourth.
[00:40:29]  They thought it was like a high-powered drug kingpin who was like trying to get away, which like that's ironic if you wanted to be a Reddit guy and be like, actually, you know, alcohol is a drug.
[00:40:40]  That's literally not a Reddit opinion.
[00:40:42]  It actually is a drug.
[00:40:43]  You know, I'm sorry that all you drug addicts think that it's, you know, thing, but let me tell you, once you start realizing it's a drug, you're like, this entire, it should be made illegal again.
[00:40:58]  Yeah, coffee is a drug too.
[00:41:00]  Exactly, which should also be illegal.
[00:41:03]  Yeah.
[00:41:04]  I mean, I agree.
[00:41:06]  And, but also, he probably had enough other drugs on him to get like an intent to distribute charge, like in all likelihood.
[00:41:15]  And instead of like actual drugs, like cocaine, right?
[00:41:18]  Yeah, for sure.
[00:41:19]  I mean, I gather actual drugs, yeah.
[00:41:22]  Yeah, real life drugs.
[00:41:24]  Um, and then because I would think that uh, cop, local cops would know not to chase down a member of the Bush family.
[00:41:34]  Like, if you're a guy who is like, oh, I'm a guy who's also a cop in St. Louis and I want to, you know, get some promotions.
[00:41:44]  I want to do well at my job.
[00:41:46]  That's going to mean not going after the family that basically underwrites the town.
[00:41:51]  Exactly.
[00:41:51]  Yeah.
[00:41:52]  If in literally almost every sense.
[00:41:55]  Yeah.
[00:41:55]  Plus, doing specific things like hiring cops to do off-duty work, like security around the brewery or events or something like that.
[00:42:04]  There's a lot of that going on, too.
[00:42:06]  Yeah, you don't want to fuck up that gravy train for everybody.
[00:42:09]  Especially since these cops ended up having to stop the Force on this high-speed chase by blowing, like shooting out his tires.
[00:42:16]  And so now you open the door to the guys' tires who you just blew out, and you're like, oh, I was shooting at the beer prince.
[00:42:25]  This is not good for my career.
[00:42:27]  Like Bill McClellan, who's the big post-dispatch truth teller, the one guy they allow to say stuff.
[00:42:34]  The one guy at the paper who's allowed to tell the truth sometimes was like, yeah, that's not good for your cop career.

=== Bill McClellan's Drunk Tank Incident (06:33) ===

[00:42:42]  He was saying this in the headlines afterwards.
[00:42:45]  And so they had him in the drunk tank for a little while.
[00:42:48]  He comes and gets picked up.
[00:42:49]  And that's kind of like the end.
[00:42:53]  That's like the end of a little era in the Force domain.
[00:42:58]  And after that, he does kind of calm down and start to get prepped to be the CEO of the, you know, Empire, having, you know, tested his mettle against the police.
[00:43:13]  Something every heir to the Bush family must do, which is get drunk and try to evade the police.
[00:43:19]  That would be legitimately cool.
[00:43:22]  Yeah.
[00:43:22]  Yeah.
[00:43:23]  So he does end up taking over, doesn't he?
[00:43:27]  Yeah.
[00:43:28]  And he has a bit of a mini reign at the company.
[00:43:32]  Although it's like unclear how much, I mean, he takes credit for a lot of things, but it's unclear if he's actually, you know, really did very much.
[00:43:41]  Yeah.
[00:43:42]  Like the Forbes writes an article about how he's going to get ready to be the beer scion.
[00:43:48]  And they use, it's after the Budweiser Toads advertisements.
[00:43:54]  Sure.
[00:43:56]  Miner.
[00:43:58]  You know, which is like, it's hard to describe that.
[00:44:02]  I think like Matt Chrisman has said it before, but like there was one meme per year and it happened during Super Bowl ads.
[00:44:09]  And that was the one meme for the year.
[00:44:12]  Yeah.
[00:44:12]  Was just like, what if toads said a beer name?
[00:44:15]  Wait, check this out.
[00:44:17]  Bud Wise Zur.
[00:44:20]  There we go.
[00:44:21]  Look at that.
[00:44:21]  There we go.
[00:44:22]  I like that.
[00:44:23]  Yeah, vintage right there.
[00:44:24]  Like a Molson's.
[00:44:26]  I remember thinking that it was pretty cool.
[00:44:28]  Yeah, I'd be like, damn, those frogs can talk?
[00:44:30]  What kind of shit did they come up with next?
[00:44:32]  It is.
[00:44:33]  It's like definitely part of the weird marketing birth.
[00:44:37]  Yeah.
[00:44:38]  And like, yeah, very strange.
[00:44:41]  Also, the fourth did not come up with it.
[00:44:43]  It was from two interns from Fleshman Hillard, which is like an ad agency here.
[00:44:49]  But he certainly took credit for it.
[00:44:51]  Oh, absolutely.
[00:44:53]  Meanwhile, there's like a large section in Bitterbrew that is just about the fourth in all of his escapades during this period of like going on vacation a lot.
[00:45:04]  Sort of go into these resort island areas that we're as not me, but William Nodals Ender says, like, reports upon somebody working at a hotel who says, like, yeah, we would help acquire like girls for him to like party with.
[00:45:28]  And they would be like, you know, Budweiser sort of models or like dancers.
[00:45:34]  And he had like really weird sexual stuff going on, like stuff that was way outside the quote says the normal person.
[00:45:44]  Like a McAfee situation?
[00:45:46]  It sounds like that.
[00:45:48]  Yeah.
[00:45:48]  That's, I mean, unless you're getting even more far out there, that's about usually.
[00:45:52]  You can get further out than McAfee.
[00:45:54]  Kill him and have sex with them or something.
[00:45:56]  I don't know.
[00:45:57]  That's further out, I feel like.
[00:46:00]  He also could have done that.
[00:46:01]  The thing is, too, and this is a this is, I think, an important part of the Bush 4 story.
[00:46:06]  The man tweaks.
[00:46:08]  And once you start introducing chem sex into things, no disrespect to a statistically significant portion of our listenership.
[00:46:21]  Things can start to get a little funky with that, too.
[00:46:24]  And so who, God knows what he was up to there.
[00:46:28]  That's, yeah, I don't like that term.
[00:46:30]  That's really dark.
[00:46:33]  Yeah.
[00:46:33]  Well, chem sex is also when you get drunk and have sex.
[00:46:35]  I just want you guys to know that too, because alcohol is also a chemical.
[00:46:38]  Yeah, if you have a couple of things.
[00:46:39]  What about sugar?
[00:46:41]  Yeah, sometimes people drink a lot of sugar and have sex really excitedly.
[00:46:45]  Just wondering what's also chem sex.
[00:46:48]  Yeah, much to think about.
[00:46:49]  It's also weird how this is, like, a McAfee thing of, like, guns, too, of just having a lot of guns and just loving it.
[00:47:15]  So the end of the book, or I guess another point of Butter Brew also that I had a bone to pick with is that the narrative in St. Louis and advanced by most of the business press is that the fourth is the one that ruined the company.
[00:47:29]  Yeah.
[00:47:29]  And was unable to stand trial in front of the shareholders.
[00:47:32]  And that's why the St. Louis gem was bought up by InBEV.
[00:47:41]  There's, like, a crucial shareholders meeting where the fourth, like, can't stand up straight when he's giving a speech, and that's basically it.
[00:47:50]  So the man likes the product too much.
[00:47:54]  He's too much.
[00:47:54]  It's a testament to how good it is.
[00:47:57]  Honestly, it's that good.
[00:48:01]  Imagine how many Budweisers you would have to go through to achieve that state.
[00:48:06]  It's a lot.
[00:48:07]  45, 35?
[00:48:09]  Around there.
[00:48:11]  It's so disgusting.
[00:48:15]  Yeah, so then I just remember in this period in St. Louis, like I knew a lot of families who literally worked at the bottling plant or drove the trucks or worked in the corporate office doing the marketing.
[00:48:29]  And the corporate office is completely liquidated after the 2008 sell-off.
[00:48:35]  And all the bottling works and all that stuff is still there.
[00:48:39]  It's unionized.
[00:48:41]  It's a good job.
[00:48:42]  But there was, as I point out in the piece, there was never even like a hint of an idea that this thing that is in St. Louis could just go back to belonging to the workers who actually make the product, who actually create the value for the thing.
[00:48:58]  And like the, it's just a real shame because I think, as we'll probably talk about, like the distribution network is kind of like the most important aspect.
[00:49:08]  So then Bush IV ends up in his like country cabin after this, sort of in hiding.

=== Spiral Into Chaos (05:10) ===

[00:49:15]  And then there's some goings on in the paper where his wife named Adrian Martin.
[00:49:25]  Adrienne is a Budweiser model, swimsuit model, which is a common theme here.
[00:49:33]  And her son, one of the housekeepers reports that her son is allowed to walk around the house that is covered with guns and like weird stuff going on in all the rooms.
[00:49:46]  And he has social services called on him.
[00:49:49]  Eventually the cops like break into his house to see what's going on.
[00:49:52]  There's like a big raid about it.
[00:49:56]  And then later, not long after that, Adrienne Martin is reported dead in the house of a drug overdose.
[00:50:04]  Oh, Jesus.
[00:50:06]  Yeah.
[00:50:07]  So it's another dead woman in the periphery of Bush IV's life.
[00:50:15]  Then in 2017, the most recent thing that happened after Bitterbrew came out is that one Monday afternoon in a busy office park, Bush IV landed his helicopter in front of like a rural king in the parking lot that's full of like lampposts that could easily eat a propeller and was like too high to fly it away which the cops really wanted him to do.
[00:50:45]  Like they really wanted like get out of Swansea.
[00:50:47]  We don't want like the beer prince here.
[00:50:51]  But he they like breathalized him.
[00:50:54]  He had zero, but he had a bunch of guns and prescription pills on him that he galliantly tried to pin on the his new wife, Donna Wood.
[00:51:10]  And so he got basically put back in the headlines as the folklore thing I heard about this was just like, yeah, he got too high and tried to fly himself to the hospital to get treatment for being too high.
[00:51:25]  That's self-airlift.
[00:51:26]  Right.
[00:51:27]  That's like, wow.
[00:51:29]  Do you know how expensive an ambulance ride is?
[00:51:32]  So he's trying to actually save the city some money there.
[00:51:36]  Uh-huh.
[00:51:37]  Oh, smart guy.
[00:51:38]  Yeah.
[00:51:41]  So that's kind of the end of the Bush IV story.
[00:51:44]  But also, as we'll talk about, then in 2020, the Bush family brood gets greenlit by MTV as a fun Bush family reality show.
[00:51:59]  Except this doesn't have anything to do with the main Bushes.
[00:52:02]  It's all about the Billy Bush Jr., who is a cousin.
[00:52:10]  I think he's a cousin of Three Strokes.
[00:52:14]  So he's like one removed.
[00:52:19]  What?
[00:52:20]  I just can't take that guy, that nickname seriously.
[00:52:24]  It just makes me laugh.
[00:52:26]  Yeah, I will say when I looked this up yesterday, no one who appeared on the show has a Wikipedia.
[00:52:32]  So like, I don't think we're dealing with like the actual Titans of industry here, just sort of like some people that some money rained down on.
[00:52:39]  Well, it's a really interesting family because like you said, it's, you know, at the beginning, your piece really does like track these sort of, you know, kind of different decades of, you know, how this family kind of reflects the changes in, you know, American industry.
[00:52:54]  And as it, you know, reaches this, as the family is like basically dissolving into, I don't know, just like a drug helicopter airlift spiral or whatever.
[00:53:06]  Like shoot out at the Ozarks, whatever this guy is doing.
[00:53:10]  You know, the world economy is crashing and the company gets sold off to, you know, the into the multinational company that it is now that owns it.
[00:53:21]  And the Bush family, what's left of it, or the kind of remnants of it, are kind of like refracted out into these like ancillary cousins who now trade on it, on the name,
[00:53:33]  And the kind of whatever relationship that name still has to this sort of you know vision of a bygone you know industry, how that was tied to this like idea of America, the you know the Budweiser, like uh, Plant And Fortune And Family that they then trade on on like some MTV reality show that literally no one even knew existed until we read about it in your article.
[00:54:00]  It's a remark.
[00:54:01]  It's remarkable how it kind of all tracks these sort of larger shifts and changes in you know the underlying political economy of the country.
[00:54:12]  It is, it's very strange and I took a bullet for everybody by watching every single episode.
[00:54:18]  Okay, and uh, it's so boring.
[00:54:21]  It's like not even a good kind of boring, but it's just, these are bland kind of kids.

=== Boring Rich Kids Reality Show (03:17) ===

[00:54:26]  It's.
[00:54:26]  It's like if the rich kids at your high school made a reality show about their life.
[00:54:30]  Are you kidding me?
[00:54:31]  How could you?
[00:54:32]  How could you not like episodes with titles like Jake's Makeover, The Sex Talk, Texas Size Drama, which I actually watched, a portion of uh, Gussie's 23rd birthday not, of course, the there's an, there's a new Gussie, a tiny Gussie.
[00:54:47]  The next step and groundbreaking.
[00:54:50]  We start off with 0.4 456 000 viewers for the first episode and we end with half of that.
[00:54:58]  Um, that is not great ratings right there.
[00:55:01]  Let me tell you that yeah, I checked out their instagrams, which are very weird.
[00:55:06]  The Billy Billy Bush Jr, that's the main right.
[00:55:09]  Yeah, he has a monkey, and I have to say that when you see a rich guy with a monkey, that's not a good sign.
[00:55:18]  Not a good sign.
[00:55:18]  Trouble will follow.
[00:55:19]  They're not supposed to be pets no no, they're equals.
[00:55:24]  Instagram really is the place where they're trying to trade this currency though, like the girls, Girls are trying to become like equestrian influencers.
[00:55:34]  Oh, kind of.
[00:55:36]  Yeah.
[00:55:37]  And then Gussie, Billy Bush Jr. doesn't seem to want to be in the public eye anymore.
[00:55:43]  He moved to California and is like surfing or something.
[00:55:48]  Yeah.
[00:55:50]  And the one who, or then the littler one, the blonde one, Gussie, and Haley have a spin-off right-wing talk show on the local FM station.
[00:56:07]  And they named this the name of their show is Behind the Bush.
[00:56:17]  So this is like a brother and sister duo.
[00:56:20]  This is something you would tell an analyst.
[00:56:22]  Why would you say?
[00:56:23]  I don't understand where you even get behind the bush.
[00:56:25]  Well, you get to the vagina.
[00:56:27]  No, but that's why would you, the saying is around the bush, not behind the bush.
[00:56:32]  Well, they're not beating.
[00:56:34]  Yeah, there's no beating.
[00:56:35]  But why would you, but it's not even a saying.
[00:56:37]  It's not a thing to make.
[00:56:38]  There's no pun to like.
[00:56:40]  It's just like a suggestive thing that makes no sense.
[00:56:42]  And it's not like about their lives because that would make sense.
[00:56:44]  Like, here's what it's like to be a cousin of a former owner of a very fancy, like a not fancy, excuse me, but very wealthy family.
[00:56:53]  But instead, it's like them talking about politics.
[00:56:58]  That's a hard question to answer because it's like almost impossible to listen to this radio show.
[00:57:05]  People said that about this one, too.
[00:57:06]  So it's, you know, it's.
[00:57:08]  I mean, this one is on multiple platforms.
[00:57:10]  To listen to Behind the Bush, you have to listen in on your FM radio at nine o'clock at night on a Saturday in St. Louis.
[00:57:19]  Oh.
[00:57:20]  Oh, it's terrestrial radio.
[00:57:22]  Yeah.
[00:57:22]  And it doesn't seem like they're uploading.
[00:57:24]  I think there's one episode that they uploaded to the website that, and the radio station is really cool too, because they're like on right after a guy who's like kill him Dan in the shootout hour.
[00:57:39]  Kill him Dan?
[00:57:40]  Man, St. Louis rocks.

=== Craft Beer Reaction Against Big Breweries (07:42) ===

[00:57:43]  It's dope.
[00:57:44]  Everyone likes it here.
[00:57:47]  Yeah.
[00:57:48]  So they're trying to become, I mean, Gussie Bush's favorite thing is like Don Jr.
[00:57:53]  He thinks that that's like the smartest, coolest guy you could be.
[00:57:57]  Yeah, the part I watched of that reality show, there was a lot.
[00:58:00]  It was basically like a family of Don Jrs.
[00:58:04]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:58:07]  And they, you know, you shouldn't feel bad for them because they spread like an anti-vax stuff and they're just, you know.
[00:58:15]  The thing is, like, like Liz and Lusane, like he's kind of saying the article, it is sort of astounding how these, like, the generations sort of mirror exactly like what the zeitgeist, I guess.
[00:58:29]  I hate to use that word, even though it's just a reference to my favorite movie of America because, you know, especially these sort of last, I guess all of them, but like, you know, you had, you know, Gussie, who is so like, you know, had this sort of like, you know, like basically adults in the like 40s were basically children, right?
[00:58:50]  Like they just were like, they were like, they thought Coca-Cola was like the greatest invention in the world and stuff like that.
[00:58:54]  You know, like they had childlike, they're like all like wanted pies and stuff.
[00:58:59]  And, you know, then you get to this sort of like dour businessman kind of guy.
[00:59:04]  And then you get to this like ad agency, like, oh, we're going to do things a little wacky.
[00:59:08]  Also, I'm on cocaine kind of guy.
[00:59:10]  And then you sell it off to InBEV in 2008.
[00:59:13]  And that's the InBEV thing I wanted.
[00:59:15]  And then, of course, then you have like just other random members of the family who are trying to be influencers and then radio show hosts, political radio show hosts, which are basically podcasters.
[00:59:28]  And I think that the InBEV stuff is really, I mean, I sort of know the most about that.
[00:59:35]  And that, that really, like, having worked in the beer industry, as, you know, there's no difference between me and people who sell cocaine.
[00:59:45]  I'll be honest with you, because both are harmful products that kill people every day.
[00:59:49]  In fact, I would probably say that beer kills more people than other drugs, including heroin, which, unlike beer, comes from the earth.
[00:59:57]  Wait, wouldn't it be people who make cocaine?
[01:00:01]  Yes.
[01:00:01]  I'm like a person who makes cocaine paste.
[01:00:05]  But, you know, it's, Dave Infante has a really good article up that I read.
[01:00:11]  I remember when we were doing like the Anchor Steam stuff.
[01:00:15]  AB is like, so the whole thing with the craft beer movement, I'm sure considering this is a podcast, 99.9% of our listeners are IPA guys.
[01:00:28]  You know, stop drinking that stuff.
[01:00:30]  I don't be honest with you.
[01:00:32]  I don't know what the fuck.
[01:00:33]  I know what it stands for.
[01:00:35]  Couldn't tell you what I'm saying.
[01:00:35]  What does it stand for?
[01:00:36]  India Pale Ale.
[01:00:37]  Oh, that's right.
[01:00:38]  Of course.
[01:00:38]  Yeah.
[01:00:39]  Never liked beer.
[01:00:40]  Pale ale.
[01:00:41]  Yeah.
[01:00:41]  I like liquor.
[01:00:42]  Just, you know, learn about wine.
[01:00:45]  Yeah.
[01:00:45]  In fact, you can just work at a brewery for several years and never figure out what an IPA is.
[01:00:49]  That's no one's going to make you learn.
[01:00:52]  But, you know, working, working in that industry, it's like a big thing that I learned about was like AB InBev's total power over it, right?
[01:01:00]  Like, so InBEV is the like Belgian-Brazilian firm that's itself a combination of Belgian-Brazilian, like, you know, brewing conglomerates that bought Anheuser-Busch in, I think, 2008 and proceeded to totally dominate the, not only the beer, like market in general, but the craft beer market too.
[01:01:26]  AB owned or AB InBev owned craft beers sell more than independent craft beers.
[01:01:32]  So like just craft breweries owned by AB Inbev sell the most out of like everyone else combined.
[01:01:38]  Yeah, makes sense because of distribution stuff too.
[01:01:41]  Well, the thing is, and like, you know, craft beer sort of started as a reaction against big beer or whatever.
[01:01:45]  You know, we were talking about this before we started recording.
[01:01:47]  It's like this very 90s kind of adbustery way of like, we're going to stick it to the man by making our own.
[01:01:53]  We're in Portland.
[01:01:55]  I'm not like other girls.
[01:01:56]  I'm like a cool girl.
[01:01:57]  I make beer kind, you know.
[01:01:58]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:02:00]  Absolutely.
[01:02:02]  I mean, they even mentioned in that article that they went out to Anchor to see what was going on in like 1994.
[01:02:10]  And they came back and said, oh, yeah, the thing that's going to happen is craft beer is going to be cool and it's going to overtake AB.
[01:02:17]  And it's kind of like this was the move that the fourth could have done if he was, you know, ready for duty.
[01:02:25]  It's the same thing of like the invention of light beer or the end of Prohibition.
[01:02:30]  It was like the event that could have happened.
[01:02:32]  It was the new market that was popping up.
[01:02:34]  Yeah.
[01:02:35]  And, you know, they did buy a few craft breweries or at least invested in them while the fourth was in there, but like not to any significant degree.
[01:02:43]  It's only after InBev buys them that they start snatching up fucking everything.
[01:02:48]  I think Goose Island was like their first big one.
[01:02:51]  Yeah, that was a big one.
[01:02:52]  Well, that's the big move of like these private equity.
[01:02:54]  I mean, it's basically private equity, these big, massive multinationals that are governed by just like different kinds of capital centers.
[01:03:02]  The only thing they can do is buy up different entities and grow and grow and grow that way.
[01:03:07]  They're not making investments into like production.
[01:03:11]  They're just buying up properties that then they either strip of substance to turn into intellectual properties.
[01:03:18]  And there's lots of, you know, value, brand value for certain things in that mode, or, you know, they just amp up the distribution, change the manufacturing.
[01:03:28]  And, you know, something like Goose Island or, I mean, didn't, when was Anchor was bought by Sapporo.
[01:03:34]  Yeah, Sapporo.
[01:03:35]  That's a big one, right?
[01:03:36]  Yeah, we're their only.
[01:03:36]  Well, yeah, Sapporo is much smaller.
[01:03:40]  Asahi, I forget what.
[01:03:42]  That's a different kind of beer.
[01:03:43]  No, I know.
[01:03:44]  I'm trying to remember which are like the big Asahi and Sapporo.
[01:03:47]  Yeah, the two big ones.
[01:03:49]  But yeah, Sapporo, I think we're the only, or I don't work there anymore, but I was the only U.S. beer that Sapporo owned, but they own Sleemans up in Canada.
[01:04:01]  But, you know, something like AB InBEV not only makes, you know, they have the capacity to like, you know, they bought Goose Island or, you know, I mean, dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of other craft breweries.
[01:04:12]  They, what they do is they go in there, they see the top-selling beers, and they just, they're like, you make these now.
[01:04:19]  Like, this is, this is what you make.
[01:04:21]  And what they'll do is they have this incredible distribution network.
[01:04:25]  I mean, that's like what they're renowned for.
[01:04:27]  And so they can take your craft beer and like get it everywhere.
[01:04:32]  I mean, you're sort of selling your soul or whatever.
[01:04:35]  I'm putting quotes around that in exchange for that.
[01:04:38]  But what they do is they muscle out like all the other craft beer.
[01:04:40]  So like they basically will take up so much shelf space at grocery stores, liquor stores, and stuff like that, that there isn't actually room for non-AB MBEV craft beers.
[01:04:50]  And they don't advertise the fact that they own a lot of these breweries, you know, like you can find out if you look it up or whatever.
[01:04:56]  But like yeah, it doesn't say it on there.
[01:04:59]  No, like it's, it's continues.
[01:05:00]  And so it's like this like countercultural thing is literally like more than half owned by one of the, I think, I think ABMBEV has like 20% of worldwide market share of beer.
[01:05:13]  Yeah, it's the same thing.
[01:05:14]  I mean, you know, don't look at who owns all of the alternative energy companies.
[01:05:21]  Yeah.
[01:05:21]  Yeah.
[01:05:22]  Spoiler, it's a lot of the gas companies.

=== Maytag's Corporate Ownership Mystery (05:23) ===

[01:05:25]  Damn.
[01:05:26]  Yeah.
[01:05:27]  And as you were saying earlier, Brace, like the, this is now like a machine that is like run by very competent people.
[01:05:37]  And it's not, so you kind of get rid of this beer dynasty monarchy that keeps inbreeding into, you know, bad heirs to a multifaceted machine that just seems unstoppable.
[01:05:53]  Yeah, you compare it in the piece to the kind of like, you know, waning, I don't know, waning European aristocracy.
[01:06:00]  And it has that kind of feel of the like, you know, horrible bourgeois bankers coming in and killing what's left of the aristocrats that are like stewarding the, you know, I don't know, wheat or barley, whatever.
[01:06:16]  I don't know what beers made of.
[01:06:18]  I'm sorry.
[01:06:18]  I know nothing about beers.
[01:06:22]  That's about right.
[01:06:23]  Hops or something.
[01:06:25]  That's like, that was from a Doug Henwood article that's also very good.
[01:06:29]  That's just about like the part of that aristocracy was very insistent upon stewarding the property that I'm going to bequeath you as like, you know, the patriarch passing my wealth down in a single file line.
[01:06:44]  And that like, that's just something that in this corporatized era, we really don't have.
[01:06:50]  And like, I don't know.
[01:06:53]  I also tried to make the point in the piece that like this should be very upsetting to the children of the rich right now.
[01:06:59]  Like it's impossible to speak to them politically, basically.
[01:07:03]  But it's like, well, your life is going to be worse because of climate change, even if you're able to pay your way out of it.
[01:07:10]  It's going to be worse because of the stage of capital we're moving into or that we've been accelerating through.
[01:07:18]  And you should be mad at your parents, even though they gave you a trust fund.
[01:07:24]  That's it, Trust Fan.
[01:07:26]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:07:27]  Just goes to show that generations do not a class make no, and what's pretty astounding about all this too is that like it's not astounding.
[01:07:37]  Actually, it's very much not astounding, but it's like, you know, Budweiser is still like this American brand, right?
[01:07:43]  Like, I mean, Budweiser has the American flag cans.
[01:07:46]  Yeah.
[01:07:46]  And like, but there's like, there's this like sort of Bush family without a Bush, you know, like or without an Anheuser-Busch.
[01:07:55]  I mean, I'm sure some of them maybe have some like bullshit jobs at the company.
[01:08:00]  I don't know, but like they're not certainly not in charge of it anymore.
[01:08:04]  And yeah, it's, I don't know.
[01:08:07]  Yeah, it's like this hollowed out empty can.
[01:08:11]  Like it still might be made in St. Louis, but like you're saying, yeah.
[01:08:14]  You know, I'm thinking sometimes you call it a term we describe some people as dented cans, which I've always like, yeah, I'll tell you what it means after.
[01:08:27]  But it's, it's a sobriety thing.
[01:08:30]  You, you drug addicts wouldn't understand about it.
[01:08:34]  But yeah, I mean, it's, it's, I mean, even at Anchor, right?
[01:08:38]  Like Anchor, the first craft brewery.
[01:08:41]  It's not the first small brewery, but it's like the first brewery that like started like the craft beer kind of trend going.
[01:08:48]  That was, I mean, it was started, you know, in 1896, I think, by like a, I'm sure, a German immigrant, I can't remember.
[01:08:56]  And it was bought by Fritz Maytag of the Maytag appliance family in 1965.
[01:09:02]  And he ran it in this like really patriarchal way that like he like was the steward of it, right?
[01:09:09]  And I'm not saying that in like a way that's like even bad.
[01:09:12]  Like it was a good place to work.
[01:09:13]  He paid people really good because he didn't want a union.
[01:09:16]  And like people had a lot of loyalty to him.
[01:09:18]  I mean, that does not seem to necessarily be the case with the Bush family.
[01:09:22]  But like, you know, just as an example of this kind of stuff, you know, he sells it.
[01:09:26]  He retired or like he goes to, I can't remember exactly what year, but, you know, like sometime in the past decade, he sells it and then goes and like focuses on his wineries, sells it to these two like kind of like tech broy guys.
[01:09:38]  They fuck it up.
[01:09:39]  I think their plan was to like kind of strip it and sell it, but they were like too shitty to do that.
[01:09:44]  So they just end up selling it at a loss to Sapporo.
[01:09:48]  And, you know, now it's like we were part of like this, you know, we're the first first part, but we were part of Sapporo's North American strategy to buy breweries and like get more tapped in with the North American market.
[01:10:00]  Tapped in.
[01:10:00]  Tapped in, exactly.
[01:10:02]  That's my podcast about craft brewing, tapped in.
[01:10:06]  But yeah, it was, you know, and it was, it was, it was, and you, you know, you heard, I mean, of course, the, the two guys who, you know, sort of had it between Maytag and Sapporo fired a lot of the old timers.
[01:10:19]  But the guys that were still there and making like a lot of money per hour, which was fantastic, you know, they these guys had a lot of loyalty to Maytag and like they knew their boss.
[01:10:31]  And now it's like, you know, they don't even, you don't even have that, right?
[01:10:35]  Like there's not even a guy you know.
[01:10:37]  Like, I couldn't tell you who owns Sapporo.
[01:10:39]  You know, I mean, I probably could a couple of years ago, but I can't tell you right now.
[01:10:43]  It's like you don't even have like the, they don't even have the decency to like have a name or a face or whatever.

=== Why We Left Maytag (09:10) ===

[01:10:49]  Yeah.
[01:10:49]  You know, they're just entities that are owned by other entities that are owned by other entities.
[01:10:54]  Exactly.
[01:10:56]  Yeah.
[01:10:57]  It's it's they also rebranded the anchor steam bottle and it looks oh, yeah, that's a that's really it looks really bad.
[01:11:05]  Yeah.
[01:11:05]  You can't change a classic.
[01:11:06]  You can't change a classic.
[01:11:08]  Damn.
[01:11:09]  Yeah, it does all remind me of succession a lot.
[01:11:15]  Yeah, the Bush family is definitely one of those.
[01:11:18]  Well, it's just, I keep wanting to say Bush, Bush, like extra pronounce the C in the C S H or whatever.
[01:11:27]  But the Bush family is definitely one of the kind of prime, I don't know, yeah, fallen, fallen dynasties.
[01:11:39]  Yeah.
[01:11:40]  Extinct animals, giants.
[01:11:45]  Should be a lesson for all those rich families that think they're unbreakable.
[01:11:51]  Only takes one generation, you know?
[01:11:53]  Yeah, yeah, I know.
[01:11:55]  And a shit ton of cocaine.
[01:11:56]  Yes.
[01:11:57]  A lot.
[01:11:57]  And a helicopter with guns in it.
[01:12:10]  So to close us out here, you had mentioned that you've done a little more, you've got a little more veiled profit stuff.
[01:12:18]  Oh, yeah.
[01:12:19]  Can we, we can run through the recap on the veiled prophet for the year?
[01:12:23]  Absolutely.
[01:12:25]  I mean, everyone's wearing a freaking mask.
[01:12:27]  Who's veiled?
[01:12:28]  Who's not, right?
[01:12:30]  That's so true.
[01:12:30]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:12:32]  That's so true.
[01:12:34]  Yeah.
[01:12:35]  I mean, the big news is that we have a new mayor in St. Louis, Tashara Jones, who's like the first female black mayor in St. Louis history and is way more progressive than any other St. Louis mayor, even though she's kind of like a Warren Democrat.
[01:12:55]  But that changeover in power basically like got the Veiled Prophet kicked out of the 4th of July parade.
[01:13:04]  So he's like not invited to be in public anymore.
[01:13:10]  It's not, I mean, it could come back.
[01:13:13]  It could happen next year.
[01:13:14]  Maybe they're just waiting for the heat to die down.
[01:13:18]  But they replaced the veiled prophet with a new mascot who is a furry, like an eagle, kind of dressed like Uncle Sam, named Archie.
[01:13:28]  What?
[01:13:28]  I'm sorry.
[01:13:29]  So they just got a worse thing?
[01:13:31]  Yeah.
[01:13:32]  They got a giant eagle with a Uncle Sam hat and a scepter.
[01:13:38]  And at one point, the scepter had a VP on it.
[01:13:41]  And then the graphic designer had to take that off.
[01:13:44]  And there was like a bunch of back and forth, weird stuff.
[01:13:46]  They should have just veiled the new one and been like, no, no, we swear it's actually like this furry guy underneath.
[01:13:52]  Don't worry.
[01:13:53]  Well, he is veiled, technically.
[01:13:55]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:13:56]  Dude, don't worry.
[01:13:57]  The mascot is a veil by another name.
[01:13:59]  He's, he's the, he's.
[01:14:00]  All right.
[01:14:01]  Yes, I understand he looks like the veiled prophet, but the guy who is the veiled prophet is a furry.
[01:14:06]  What if they just made the actual veiled prophet guy dress up as the mascot?
[01:14:11]  And it was like, well, now we're humiliating you by putting you in this, you know, really stupid looking costume.
[01:14:17]  That makes sense to me.
[01:14:17]  That'd be tough.
[01:14:18]  You know, now jokes on you.
[01:14:20]  Exactly.
[01:14:21]  I mean, I can still harbor suspicions that like Archie is a white supremacist and no one can prove me wrong yet.
[01:14:28]  But I'll keep tabs on it for now.
[01:14:34]  If it comes back, that would be really bad.
[01:14:36]  We shouldn't do that.
[01:14:39]  There was also this weird thing that happened where a guy was like, a guy emailed me out of the blue and was just like, hey, Devin, you're the Veiled Prophet guy, aren't you?
[01:14:51]  And I just got divorced.
[01:14:55]  And I signed the divorce papers.
[01:14:56]  And I swear, Devin, one week later, my wife, she married a veiled prophet.
[01:15:02]  So now I'm on your side and I'm here to help take down this organization with you.
[01:15:08]  What?
[01:15:08]  You got to join.
[01:15:09]  I'm sorry.
[01:15:10]  You got to join forces with this guy.
[01:15:12]  Oh, no, yeah.
[01:15:12]  We need like the divorced dad power that he brings to the table.
[01:15:19]  Yeah.
[01:15:20]  It's like Captain Planet, but the ring that he has is divorced dad.
[01:15:23]  Well, actually, he actually doesn't wear it.
[01:15:25]  No, he still wears it because he's like, I'll get her back.
[01:15:27]  Yeah.
[01:15:27]  Right.
[01:15:28]  He has to pawn it for an alimony panel.
[01:15:30]  Yeah.
[01:15:31]  He's wearing like one of those like, like, like black bands that like, I don't know.
[01:15:37]  You probably don't see these, but like every Instagram ad I get is for like your daily loadout.
[01:15:43]  And these guys always have like these black bands instead of a wedding ring on.
[01:15:47]  We can change the subject.
[01:15:49]  I want to hear more about your Instagram ads, Britney.
[01:15:52]  I don't, I already told you about the last one.
[01:15:54]  We don't have to.
[01:15:54]  We can just keep moving with this.
[01:15:56]  I mean, all power to the divorced guy.
[01:15:59]  I like him.
[01:16:00]  He did send me a lot of names of people who are probably in this situation and a couple stories that are unverified.
[01:16:07]  But we'll keep an eye out.
[01:16:10]  Yeah, this seems like some good leads for you to follow up on.
[01:16:14]  Yeah.
[01:16:15]  And then there's, of course, Mark McClowski, who is still running for Senate.
[01:16:23]  In Missouri, our choices for senator are a Democrat who shot a commercial where he was like had a gun because he was in the military and he was going to shoot it at something.
[01:16:36]  And then he goes, I wouldn't do that because I'm not a Republican and like doesn't fire the gun.
[01:16:41]  Yeah.
[01:16:42]  Wait, sorry, he's in the army in this commercial and he's going to shoot something and then he refuses.
[01:16:49]  Yes, this is Lucas Kuntz who.
[01:16:52]  Sorry.
[01:16:52]  I'm sorry.
[01:16:53]  What?
[01:16:53]  Maybe you should have led with that.
[01:16:55]  Sorry.
[01:16:55]  Can we get it?
[01:16:57]  Guys, I don't want to be vulgar on the radio.
[01:17:00]  Wait, you just say his name.
[01:17:03]  It's K-U-N-C-E Kuntz.
[01:17:07]  Dude.
[01:17:08]  This is the best that the Missouri Democratic Party can muster.
[01:17:12]  Here's the thing.
[01:17:13]  I don't advise anyone voting Democrat ever, except for in this case, because we need a Senator Kuntz.
[01:17:20]  We need a Senator Kuntz.
[01:17:21]  We need it.
[01:17:22]  Yeah.
[01:17:23]  For feminism.
[01:17:24]  Well, it's also like, finally, we get the answer.
[01:17:26]  What's behind the bush?
[01:17:28]  Oh, there you go.
[01:17:29]  Look at that.
[01:17:30]  Look at that.
[01:17:32]  And that's why we call him the broom.
[01:17:34]  Nope.
[01:17:35]  They don't.
[01:17:35]  They do not call me that.
[01:17:36]  Mark McCloskey is, of course, the man armed with a military style assault rifle famously pictured outside of his St. Louis state.
[01:17:48]  Yeah.
[01:17:48]  One of the funny things about that.
[01:17:50]  So Lucas is running against Mark.
[01:17:53]  And then the other choice is Eric Grichtons, who was famously removed from office when it came out that he tied up a woman he was having an affair with and took pictures of her and threatened to blackmail her with those pictures.
[01:18:08]  And then that all came out.
[01:18:10]  So the choices are bad.
[01:18:13]  But Mark is funny because things don't seem to be going well for the campaign.
[01:18:18]  He had to have this whole thing where he got sued by all the photographers from that day of the protest because he tried to use the protester photographers images.
[01:18:29]  And so he had to restage the entire thing with his wife.
[01:18:33]  No.
[01:18:34]  Are those pictures out?
[01:18:36]  Yeah, they're out, because he went and got Christmas cards printed using it's just a, it's a whole thing of just like copyright infringement stuff, and so they restaged it where um, and this time he shot the protest no, i'm just kidding and he shot the photographer.
[01:18:57]  Uh, they do have better trigger pro discipline in the staged photographs.
[01:19:02]  Yeah, i'm looking at it.
[01:19:02]  Now he's got a proven record of defending Missouri, fighting for Trump.
[01:19:06]  Number two, stop critical race theory, which is just a picture of two black men shaking hands I'm not, and they're wearing suits.
[01:19:15]  Take on China and balance the budget pro life, taking on big tech, break them up.
[01:19:20]  Okay.
[01:19:23]  Fighting cancel culture.
[01:19:25]  And then that's that rock.
[01:19:27]  This guy.
[01:19:28]  Yeah.
[01:19:29]  Can't compete against a guy named Kuntz, though.
[01:19:32]  Yeah.
[01:19:33]  I mean, Kuntz who won't shoot his gun.
[01:19:36]  Yeah.
[01:19:37]  Won't shoot his gun because he's dignified.
[01:19:41]  Yeah, Mark is strange too, because he's also, he's like, you know, famous picture outside the mansion with the guns.
[01:19:48]  Other campaign picture, what if I was in a flannel on a farm?
[01:19:52]  Like, do you believe me?
[01:19:53]  Like, I'm both.
[01:19:55]  I'm both mansion owner and farmer.
[01:19:57]  They call that town and country where I'm from.

=== Alicia's Hope Song (09:10) ===

[01:19:59]  Oh, yeah.
[01:20:00]  And it's going to work.
[01:20:01]  And he's going to be my senator and it's going to rock.
[01:20:05]  Jesus Christ.
[01:20:06]  Well, it seems like I got to be real.
[01:20:11]  You guys need another.
[01:20:12]  I mean, Jack Dorsey's from St. Louis, right?
[01:20:14]  Maybe you get him to move back there and you get like a kind of like a yoga type city.
[01:20:19]  Yeah.
[01:20:19]  I mean, we'll take yoga investment whenever you can get it.
[01:20:25]  We do have Corey Bush.
[01:20:26]  I mean, we got to stick out for like, you know, one of the most progressive congresswomen.
[01:20:32]  Unfortunately, also a member of the Bush family, though.
[01:20:35]  Yeah, that's.
[01:20:36]  But the other one, the George Bush family.
[01:20:39]  Exactly.
[01:20:39]  Yeah.
[01:20:40]  Yeah.
[01:20:41]  Well, Devin, it was a pleasure.
[01:20:43]  Anything else you want to plug or get out of here?
[01:20:46]  Oh, sure.
[01:20:47]  Thank you so much for having me on.
[01:20:49]  It's been amazing.
[01:20:51]  I still have the Veiled Prophet novel.
[01:20:54]  Unfortunately, unless your mom works at Penguin Random House, it's very hard to get a novel published.
[01:21:00]  But it's still got that and it's very good.
[01:21:04]  And then I have a short story and a small essay up on a little project called DoNotResearch.net that, yeah, I'm very proud of.
[01:21:15]  The other work that's up there in the edition is extremely good.
[01:21:21]  Unfortunately, I usually take direction, so I will not be researching.
[01:21:26]  No.
[01:21:27]  Damn, I'm just kidding.
[01:21:29]  No, we'll link to all that in the show notes and the new piece on the Bush family, which is fantastic.
[01:21:34]  Thank you so much.
[01:21:35]  Well, Devin, it is a pleasure.
[01:21:38]  And we now officially have a St. Louis correspondent.
[01:21:41]  So that is between me and Michael Judge.
[01:21:45]  Oh, fuck.
[01:21:46]  Yeah, but we never talk about St. Louis with them.
[01:21:49]  Come on.
[01:21:50]  Yeah.
[01:21:51]  Yeah, we got to go.
[01:21:52]  Well, we got to go for that thing that I want to do.
[01:21:54]  Yeah, Liz wants to drive a helicopter through the something to the arch.
[01:22:01]  He thinks he can do to the arch.
[01:22:03]  He can't do that.
[01:22:03]  He's going to do something terrible to the arch.
[01:22:05]  No, Liz is a riverboat gambler.
[01:22:07]  And so she's trying to rob several blackjack games that are going on there.
[01:22:13]  This town is for you then.
[01:22:14]  Oh, yeah, absolutely.
[01:22:15]  Well, technically, it's not this town.
[01:22:16]  It's the Mississippi River.
[01:22:18]  If it was this town, it wouldn't be.
[01:22:19]  International water.
[01:22:20]  Yeah.
[01:22:21]  Well, Devin, thank you so much.
[01:22:23]  And yeah, we'll hope to talk to you.
[01:22:26]  Hopefully, actually, I hope to never talk to you again.
[01:22:27]  Hope nothing weird happens in St. Louis ever again.
[01:22:30]  But I have a feeling that will not be the case.
[01:22:33]  I don't think so.
[01:22:35]  Thanks for having me.
[01:23:02]  I can't remember.
[01:23:02]  Remember that?
[01:23:04]  What is it?
[01:23:06]  It was like the Jay-Z song.
[01:23:09]  Oh, yeah.
[01:23:09]  With Alicia Keys?
[01:23:11]  No, I don't know that song.
[01:23:14]  Oh, I love that song.
[01:23:16]  What are you talking about?
[01:23:17]  You listen to Alicia Keys all the time.
[01:23:19]  I listen to Alicia Keys, Alicia Alicia Keys constantly.
[01:23:24]  Now, here's my question: Is Alicia and Alicia are different names?
[01:23:29]  Or are those just named Alicia?
[01:23:32]  Yeah.
[01:23:33]  Some people go by Alicia.
[01:23:36]  Well, I guess it's a sort of self-answering question.
[01:23:38]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:23:39]  I've never met anyone.
[01:23:41]  I have.
[01:23:41]  I met a lot of people with some funky, freak-ass names.
[01:23:44]  Yeah, that's not a funky, freak-ass name.
[01:23:45]  Well, it's just Alicia said fucked up.
[01:23:49]  You said that you can pronounce a name anyway.
[01:23:51]  That's true.
[01:23:52]  You can, but I'm saying no one does it.
[01:23:53]  You can pronounce a way.
[01:23:55]  People do.
[01:23:55]  People named Alicia.
[01:23:56]  Okay.
[01:23:57]  Well, Alicia Silverstone.
[01:23:58]  Alicia Silverstone.
[01:23:59]  Yeah.
[01:23:59]  Thank you.
[01:24:00]  You have heard it.
[01:24:01]  That's spelled with liar.
[01:24:02]  That's spelled with that A that's like a combo thing.
[01:24:05]  No, the little mousetrap.
[01:24:07]  It's not little.
[01:24:08]  A regular size mousetrap.
[01:24:10]  It's actually the global average size of a mousetrap.
[01:24:14]  First way, before we goof off too much, because I'm going to forget if we don't, I have to shout out some fellow breweries that have recently unionized.
[01:24:25]  Of course, ILWU with Anchor in San Francisco.
[01:24:30]  But over there in the Twin Cities in the Midwest, my boy Anders over at Fair State Brewing Cooperative, which was not a cooperative.
[01:24:40]  It was just named that.
[01:24:41]  People always name shit like that.
[01:24:43]  And then there is Great Lakes Brewing in Ohio.
[01:24:47]  And so those are the other two craft breweries that have unionized besides Anchor in the U.S. Although I know for a fact that there's many others in the works.
[01:24:58]  But unfortunately, that means that unions are now Reddit and soy.
[01:25:06]  I will be opening.
[01:25:07]  Actually, you know what?
[01:25:08]  I'm just going to hire some people here and then treat them like shit.
[01:25:11]  Wait, what?
[01:25:11]  We need some employees.
[01:25:14]  No.
[01:25:15]  Yeah, because you know, we got this mic stand right now.
[01:25:17]  What if there was just a guy holding it from me?
[01:25:19]  No.
[01:25:19]  That'd be sick.
[01:25:20]  Why?
[01:25:21]  I don't want to manage anyone.
[01:25:22]  I already got to manage you, and that's too much on my plate.
[01:25:26]  Maybe I should.
[01:25:27]  Maybe I should maybe make some claims against you.
[01:25:30]  Wait.
[01:25:30]  If you're managing me, you're doing a bad job.
[01:25:33]  I'm crazy here in New York.
[01:25:35]  It's crazy.
[01:25:37]  You're like chasing people down in the middle of the night.
[01:25:39]  I did do.
[01:25:40]  I didn't chase him.
[01:25:41]  Well, I did chase him and got off the bike.
[01:25:44]  Yeah.
[01:25:45]  No, dude.
[01:25:47]  I was having a little bit of a...
[01:25:54]  I was having a thing.
[01:25:56]  A little bit of a thing.
[01:25:59]  Anyways, I'm here.
[01:26:01]  You know, I got to New York.
[01:26:02]  I'm at Tish.
[01:26:04]  Tish?
[01:26:06]  Is that a school?
[01:26:07]  Yeah, I'm here to come to Tish.
[01:26:09]  Is that fashion?
[01:26:11]  Rhode Island?
[01:26:12]  No, that's for theater.
[01:26:13]  Okay.
[01:26:14]  But I'm in the fat.
[01:26:14]  I'm like costume.
[01:26:15]  That's Parsons.
[01:26:16]  I'm here at Parsons.
[01:26:18]  Or Pratt.
[01:26:20]  I'm here at Pratt.
[01:26:22]  I'm 19.
[01:26:23]  Who's honking?
[01:26:26]  That's what you got to say when you hear a who's honking?
[01:26:29]  He's sexually harassing you.
[01:26:31]  It's a guy down there.
[01:26:32]  You can't see me.
[01:26:33]  I know, but that's he can't see you, so he can't yell at you.
[01:26:36]  But if he honked, you can hear it.
[01:26:37]  Oh, I see.
[01:26:38]  He's sexually harassed.
[01:26:40]  I don't know.
[01:26:40]  Aren't you going to?
[01:26:41]  Yeah, tip of my hat.
[01:26:42]  Okay, yeah, there you go.
[01:26:43]  That's what.
[01:26:44]  That's all that.
[01:26:45]  Because if I'm cat calling you, just tip your hat at me.
[01:26:47]  Yeah, and if you don't have a hat, do what I'm doing.
[01:26:49]  Just pretend you have pantomime.
[01:26:51]  Tip of the hat.
[01:26:53]  You know, it's crazy, though.
[01:26:54]  A guy did come up to me last night, and I don't know if this is like maybe this happens to a lot of people and just no one takes it, but he told me that he had they're selling the Brooklyn Bridge.
[01:27:04]  No, they're not.
[01:27:05]  Yeah, the guy is like, I can, he, I bought it from him for like $500,000.
[01:27:13]  And I, yeah, I own it now.
[01:27:14]  That doesn't mean anything.
[01:27:15]  He said he's sending me the thing in the mail.
[01:27:17]  It's crazy.
[01:27:18]  I mean, this is the greatest city in the world.
[01:27:20]  They're probably selling it in part of the infrastructure bill.
[01:27:25]  I am so glad that I met you through the Pratt School of Design podcasting department.
[01:27:31]  Liz, you are a graduate of Pratt College, right?
[01:27:34]  I heard you actually graduated summa cum laude.
[01:27:38]  I'm sorry, what?
[01:27:40]  Summa summa cum laude.
[01:27:41]  Oh, baby brace.
[01:27:45]  Sorry, am I actually saying that wrong?
[01:27:46]  Yeah, summa cum laude.
[01:27:54]  Summa cum laude.
[01:27:56]  I don't know.
[01:27:56]  It's crazy.
[01:27:56]  I just make like loud ass grunts.
[01:27:59]  We're just going.
[01:28:00]  This is going to be a long episode.
[01:28:01]  I'm so hot and sweaty right now.
[01:28:02]  We need to stop going.
[01:28:04]  Okay, let's end the episode.
[01:28:06]  You know why?
[01:28:06]  Because it's so nice to talk to you in person.
[01:28:10]  Which, guess what?
[01:28:11]  We're going to be doing for some time now.
[01:28:13]  I'll be real though.
[01:28:14]  Once we stop recording, actually, we can just keep talking and they actually don't even have to hear it.
[01:28:18]  Well, yeah, but I'm just telling you know that I'm still making my mind up about that.
[01:28:24]  No, okay, you've convinced me with that smile that I can see.
[01:28:27]  Uh, because I don't, I'm not just watching a movie while we're recording like we usually do when we do it online.
[01:28:34]  Uh, my name, my name is Aaron Rodgers.
[01:28:39]  Uh, I am joined, yeah.
[01:28:40]  I'm joined here by you don't watch football.
[01:28:44]  That's not that's my you know, that's my real name, right?
[01:28:48]  Don't bring up Aaron Rodgers to me.
[01:28:49]  I'm mad.
[01:28:50]  I don't know who that is.
[01:28:51]  I'm Bryce.
[01:28:52]  Oh my god, he's like the biggest football player in America.
[01:28:54]  Well, Tom Brady, okay.
[01:28:55]  I'm Liz.
[01:28:56]  We are joined, of course, by producer Young Chomsky, the smallest football player in America.
[01:29:01]  And the podcast is a production of Pratt School of Design's podcasting department, room 301.

=== Truanon: Working Title (00:38) ===

[01:29:09]  We'd like to thank the Pratt studios for allowing us to use their facilities.
[01:29:14]  And it's called Truanon, working title.
[01:29:16]  But once the dissertation is all together and we kind of have this group project going, believe me, I will see you all at the Bowery.
[01:29:25]  We'll see you next time.
[01:29:27]  Bye-bye.
[01:29:47]  Come out.