May 12, 2026 • 57 mins
This week Robert begins the three-part story of the former wealthiest man on earth, H.L. Hunt, who also became the first right wing plutocrat to buy his own shitty media empire, creating a model for Elon Musk to follow today.
(3 Part Series)
https://www.oklahomaminerals.com/wildcatter-chronicles-h-l-hunt-pioneer-of-oil-industry
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/h-l-hunt
https://www.nbcnews.com/msnbc/msnbc-podcast/archives-ultra-season-two-episode-eight-ncsl1310380
Hendershot, Heather. What's Fair on the Air?: Cold War Right-Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest (p. 63). The University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.
https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/hunt-haroldson-lafayette
https://archive.org/details/foia_Hunt_H.L.-HQ-2/page/n39/mode/1up
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Oh goodness, Jiminy, Gracious Christmas. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards,
a podcast about the very worst people in all of history,
introduced by one of the very worst introducers in all
of history. Your host me Robert Evans. This week I
have a guest who's better at introducing things, Princess Weeks. Princess,
(00:29):
why don't you introduce yourself because we've seen how I
do it.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
You're fabulous. I disagree with you, that's all just with that.
My name is Princess Weeks. I'm a writer, YouTuber, shit talker,
and I love history, and especially when I get to
listen to Robert tell me about bad people.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Yeah, and I love bad people, especially when I get
to inflict their badness on someone else.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
And this week we've got a guy who kind of
made inflicting his opinions on other people on everyone else
his like life mission and use the vast fortune he
built to do it. We're covering a fella here. He's
the former richest man in the world. This guy was
an oil in his time. He was a millionaire. But
if you you know, fix things to modern money, he
(01:17):
was a billionaire from a fairly early point in like
terms of modern money. And he was kind of the
first of the right wing, like these ultra rich right
wing guys to make pushing his own opinion in politics
by taking control of like or building media organs deliberately
to force his own opinion on public He was the
(01:38):
first of these super rich guys to really do that,
or he was part of the first wave of rich
guys that did that. And he was the biggest, like
of this first wave of generally like post New Deal
super rich you know, multimillionaire billionaire oil guys who are
are funding right wing politics. He was the guy who
(01:59):
was kind of best at it. But he was also
the guy who was only interested in forcing his own
politics on people. Like he didn't want to talk to
any other people on the right, He didn't want to
make friends. He just wanted to create media organizations that
would push his politics on other people. He's a very
weird dude. And his name was H. L. Hunt. Also
some people think he killed jfk hmm. So have you
(02:28):
heard of this guy?
Speaker 3 (02:30):
No, I've never heard of him, but he sounds annoying
and like the patrons say it of podcast bros.
Speaker 4 (02:35):
So like I'm writing sure about it.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
He's got a lot of that energy. He was kind
of like the proto Elon Musk, like what Musk has
done with turning X and Rock into this, like basically
building these companies just to push his own opinions on
everyone else. That's what Hunt was trying to do with
like the radio in the fifties and sixties and television
and stuff. So he's an interesting care character and like
(03:00):
a freak in his own personal life, which is always
fun when one of these guys is just the strangest,
weirdest little guy.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
So does HL stand for great.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
Question, Sophie. That's what we're starting because he has like
one of the most racist old white guy names you
could possibly have, Haroldson Lafayette Hunt Junior. That's this fucker's
full name, Haroldson and a Lafayette in there, Lafayette Junior.
You know you're in for a good time when you've
got all those names together, Hunts, Yeah, all those that's
(03:36):
funny you mentioned that.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
That guy, I'm like, wow, would cover my drink?
Speaker 2 (03:42):
Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, definitely. Haroldson Lafayette Hunt Junior was
born in Carson Township, Fayette County, Illinois, on February seventeenth,
eighteen eighty nine. Most of the articles and bios you'll
find on him kind of breeze right through his childhood
bio on the oil industry friendly website Oklahoma Minerals, which
(04:03):
depicts Hunt as a hero, so you know, kind of
ideologically where this bio is coming from, simply says that
he was quote the youngest of eight children in a
farming family. His early years were marked by a lack
of formal education, as he was homeschooled and never attended
public or private schools. So we're off to a good
start already, right, Like, this is a dude who and
(04:26):
that's not a weird upbringing for the time, really, but
it is kind of weird for him because his other
like brothers and sisters aren't all private schooled. So Hunt
was a pretty prolific writer of letters to the editor
and of ads in the Yellow Pages. So we do
get other bits of his history if you're willing to
dig deeper, that go a little further than that. In
(04:48):
the nineteen sixties, he wrote this in an ad published
by the Tennessee And so this is him trying to
connect with other members of his family. My grandfather was
Waddie Thorpe Hunt, freeing his slaves long before the war began.
Waddy Thorpe Punt migrated to Serchie County, Arkansas, stopping en
route to make a crop near Lookout Mountain. He formed
a company of Confederates in eighteen sixty which included his son.
(05:09):
He was killed in eighteen sixty four by Cantrill's guerrillas.
So that's him talking about like his grandfather, right, Like,
that's the family patron. And I'll tell let you know
right now, he's the only one who says this guy
freed his slaves long before the war began.
Speaker 4 (05:26):
How was gonna ask?
Speaker 3 (05:27):
I was like, he made it sound like, yeah, my
grandfother Freda's slaves before it was cool, before everyone had
to do it.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
But that he started a volunteer Confederate militia for love
of the game.
Speaker 4 (05:38):
You know it.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
Now, Waddy may not owned slaves, but that wasn't uncommon.
Most people who fought in the Confederate Army didn't have
enough money to like own slaves, right, like they but
that's not entirely the point. Some people were racist without
that right, and that seems to have been his grandfather's deal. Now,
what's very funny to be about this ad, which is
I'm like trying to connect with other relatives by talking
(06:02):
about his confederate at grandpa. Is that right after being like, hey,
does anyone know you know my grandpa wants anyone else
related to whom I want to connect, he goes on
to like say, I want to exchange you know, family
history with relatives quote and present them with three of
the HLH alo Vera Cosmetics that's his private cosmetic company,
and a list of stores in the area carrying HLH Cosmetics.
And the remainder of the ad is a plug for
(06:23):
his cosmetics business and his right wing radio show, which
I find I just found very funny that he's like,
I want to connect with my family, but I also
want to use this space in the newspaper to get
people to buy my cosmetics right wing skincare company.
Speaker 4 (06:36):
Yeah right, but also.
Speaker 3 (06:38):
Always agree he said he's the youngest of eight of
eight kids.
Speaker 4 (06:42):
How much more family connections does he need? I ring,
that's the family.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
You gotta have, bro, right, Like, why do you care?
It seems like you get your hands full there.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
Yeah, you don't need any cousins when you have a
basketball team, like, it's fine.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
So that's a good point.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
That was very fun. I fear it was your target audience.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
Damn near too, actually, So the Confederate connection was enough
to convince me that, like, I needed to look more
into this guy's family history, because I was like, well,
there probably means there's something else interesting there. And I
can only find one biography that was written about him,
which was the book Kingdom, and it's actually it was
published after he died, and it's actually a biography of
(07:28):
his whole family written by this hardcore libertarian author named
Jerome to Sill, and I think to Sill was a
fan of Hunt. He certainly wrote a history that I
would argue portrayed Hunt pretty close to how Hunt saw
himself a lot of the time. Although he does he
does include more of the warts than I think would have,
but he clearly like has this degree of like awe
(07:48):
in this man for being such a great businessman. It's
hard for me to tell how like real this biography
is because to Sill, again, he's like a guy with
an ideological bent that he's trying to get across in
his books. And his biography of Hunt includes all of
these verbatim conversations about conversations that would have happened in
(08:08):
like the eighteen hundreds, and this book was written in
the like one hundred years later. And I'm like, who
did you talk to to get the transcripts of these conversations?
You must have just made that up or you listen
to something that like these people's grandchildren said is how
the conversation went. So you have to take a lot
of this book with a grain of salt. Right, it's
(08:29):
getting like.
Speaker 4 (08:30):
Real person fan fiction.
Speaker 3 (08:31):
Like he is like, yeah, I just put myself into
the character, like what would what would my goats say?
Like what would my heroes say? And he's just like,
all right, I've got it, nailed it.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
I would say, think of it that way. This is
real person fan fiction. That said, it's the only book
we have about this guy's childhood, and it's clearly based
on conversations he had with members of this dude's family,
So you can't discard it because it's like our only source. Right,
that said, I want to We're going to talk a
(09:01):
little more about Tussil in this book too, because he's
kind of a very funny guy. You should know in
terms of evaluating how much can we trust this biography
that he was an early hardcore libertarian activist, although not
entirely the bad kind. He got like politically activated for
the first time in his life because he was disgusted
by the draft in the Vietnam War, and he staged
(09:22):
a walkout protesting the war at the Young Americans for
Freedom Convention in nineteen sixty nine, which is like good, yeah, yeah.
In nineteen seventy one, he published his first book. It
usually begins with iron Rand, A Libertarian Odyssey, which is
a book about how he went from an angry, lapsed
Catholic looking for a new religion to an objectivist libertarian.
(09:42):
Although he also kind of makes fun of iron Rand
in the book too, because she believed a lot of
crazy shit about sex that he does not on board with. Right,
so he's like some about her, but like makes fun
of her too. He wrote of his feelings in the
time for the moment, I considered myself uniq alone and
courageous individual who had found the holy grail after years
(10:03):
of floundering. That's how he reacts to reading iron Rand
for the first time. A lot of guys like that, Unfortunately, like.
Speaker 3 (10:10):
That's like the first time, Like you taught to a
guy who read Dune for the first time, He's like, I.
Speaker 4 (10:13):
Just had no idea.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
All my politics are now Dune, Dune exactly.
Speaker 4 (10:19):
Now.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
That same year, nineteen seventy one, to Sell wrote an
op ed for The New York Times and begged for
conservatives who still care about such things as peace and
justice and racial harmony to vote for candidates who really
be in peace when they say peace, who understand and
intend to promote the politics of decentralization of pollution, control
of economic and judicial reform, and so on all the
way down the line. So he's not like entirely bad.
(10:41):
This is back when the libertarian movement was a little
more complicated than it's going to become in the Trump years,
So that's positive. In nineteen seventy four, to Sell ran
for governor of New York on the Free Libertarian Party ticket.
He only got like thirty thousand votes, and he needed
fifty thousand to get the party a permanent place on
the ballot. The Times notes of his election campaign. On
(11:02):
the campaign trail, he's distributed to sell bills, fake dollar
bills that he assured voters would be soon worth more
than the real thing, given the country's ruinous economic policies.
He arranged for a woman in a beige body stalking
to ride through Central Park like Lady Godiva, on a
horse named Taxpayer. So he would have loved creating. You
would have loved like Jerome to Sill. You would have
(11:24):
loved bitcoin to.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
Sell coin like and he's given you naked ladies too.
He's like, listen, I'm giving you the taxpayers everything they
could want.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
A horse named tax horse name this man would have
had so many NFTs.
Speaker 4 (11:41):
Album can you imagine? Like there?
Speaker 2 (11:47):
And sorry this is in our episode about hl Hunt.
But when I started reading about the guy who wrote
his biography, I was like, this man's fascinating. So anyway,
take quotes that I'm going to read you from the
book Kingdom with a g of Salt. So Tousill's books
has very doesn't mention Watty Hunt Hunt's grandfather freeing his slaves,
(12:09):
so I suspect his grandson made all that up. But
he does talk about the fact that Watty created a
volunteer cavalry militia to support the Confederate cause, which should
tell you all you need to know about the man's politics. However,
there is an interesting discrepancy between what hl Hunt came
to believe and what to Sill Rights. In his biography,
to Still claims that Captain Hunt was quote shot to
(12:31):
death near his farm by Northern Raiders, but in his letter,
Hunt says he was killed by Cantrell's guerrilla fighters, and
Cantrell's Raiders were a pro Confederate partisan group of bushwhackers
that actually this is where Frank and Jesse James get
their start, and Cantrell's Raiders, now it would they definitely
killed a lot of Confederate farmers too, because kind of
by the end of the war they were just raiding,
(12:52):
you know, like they're.
Speaker 3 (12:55):
Like, we just like doing this now, like this is
our new passion, Like we gotta get a skille out
of this.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
When I got into this, it was for the racism,
but now it's just the love of raiding.
Speaker 4 (13:03):
You know.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
I just can't get over how much I like to raid.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
They're tapping into their Viking roots. They're like, this is
what I was meant to do ancestry.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
It's it's like how the Oakland Raiders are ostensibly at
like their fans are extensively there to support a football team,
but it's really about the raiding for the Oakland Raiders
fans too, you know, that's what makes that a great.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
Team, Las Vegas Raiders.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
No, no, no, Sophie, I don't accept that at all.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
That's like me with the net that like, oh, it's
it's the Brooklyn Nets. I'm like that they're from New Jersey.
It's okay. We don't have to make things up because
says it doesn't mean it's not right.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
Yeah. No, I refuse to accept that. So when Captain
Hunt gets murdered by whether it's by Northern Partisans or
Cantrell's Raiders, his son H. L. Hunt, which is the
same name as our HL Hunt, right, and it's his
dad takes control of the family. Now HL goes by
the nickname Hash for reasons lost to history, but are
(13:59):
more like rooted in potatoes than marijuana. He's a fascinating
figure because his life and his son's life kind of
perfectly embody the evolution of American conservatism from the Civil
War up to like the modern era, through like the
political realignment of the mid twentieth century. Because you have
like the Republican Party, which is this like radical progressive
(14:20):
force in the country that then becomes like the Conservative
Party over a period of time. Right and his family
really embodies that very well. In eighteen sixty four, before
the war was over, Hash took like, after his dad
gets killed, he moves up north and he takes an
oath of allegiance to the Union. Per the book Kingdom,
up North was where the money was. Hash told his
(14:42):
family the South as they had known at all their
lives was finished. It would not rise again for fifty
years at least. So you see, this is a family
the number one never gives up on like the racist
things that led them to support the Confederacy. But Hash
is a very pragmatic guy. He's like, the Confederacy's not
winning the and I want to be where the money is. Like,
I'm not going down with the ship. Fuck that my
(15:04):
dad did.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
That seems stupid, exactly, Like the slaves are gone. Let's
go up to the industry and abuse the Irish.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
Right, abuse whoever we can. Because I'm still racist, don't
get me wrong. We can divers So the family winds
up in Illinois, which is where our Ahll Hunt is
going to be born. In eighteen eighty nine, they start farming,
and things are going pretty well for the Hunts for
a while. Hash is a good businessman and a skilled farmer.
In short order, he meets a girl, the daughter of
(15:32):
an Army Union chaplain, and she's named Ella Henderson. This
is going to be ahell hunt. Our Hunt's mom. Tusill's
book claims that she quote was descended from an old
Huguenot line, and she deported herself with a certain aristocratic air,
not unworthy of her birth line. Now that's an interesting,
weird use of the word deported by too soil there
(15:52):
I've never heard. I think he meant to write comported,
because I don't think deported actually works that way. But
it made its way into the final copy of the book.
So they're like, we're just.
Speaker 3 (16:01):
Not Hugoot enough to understand how sophisticated that is.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
You gotta be way more Huguenots to get that word right. Yeah. So,
I don't know if she was had Huguenot blood in
her veins or whatever, but this is very consistent with
what hl Hunt's going to believe about his background and himself,
because he thinks he's special, and part of why he
thinks is special, he's special is because of his blood.
From eighteen seventy three to eighteen eighty nine, the Hunts
(16:27):
have eight children, the last of whom is our boy,
Haroldson la Fayette. Given that he has the same name
as his father, Hash, he was nicknamed Junior and the
family soon took to calling him June or Juni. So
as a boy, he goes by June or Juni because
he's got the same name as his dad, who goes
by Hash. Now, the Hunt's five hundred acre farm was
(16:47):
productive and supports the family well, but how well it
supports them is kind of hard for me to say
to sell rights that they quote just managed to scrub
out a meager living. But we also know that by
the time Hash dies, he gives his all eight of
his kids pretty significant inheritances. That suggests they're actually doing
very well. Now, maybe I don't know how long it
takes them to be doing very well, but certainly by
(17:10):
later in his life they're like upper middle class, right,
if not rich. It's a little hard for me to
tell that.
Speaker 3 (17:16):
Do we know the breakdown of like the genders of
the sibling was it like more girls than boys because
you can outsource the girls they get they can go
somewhere else.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
I think it's a pretty a pretty good split. But
he's got at least a couple of sisters. Okay. That said,
I think it's also Hunt kind of talks up his
family having a harder time when he was a kid
than they really did, because all conservatives who wind up
crazy rich like to pretend they were poorer than they were. Yeah,
at any rate. In eighteen ninety four, when JUNI was
(17:46):
like five or so, his dad Hash gets elected sheriff
of Fayette County. He ran as a Republican, which is
a major shift for the son of a Confederate volunteer
who'd fought against the Union himself. Hash becomes the first
Republican sheriff of Fayette, although not the last. He settled
into a pattern of spending a week or so in Vandalia,
the county seat, and then heading home for a few
(18:07):
days to tend his farm, which was now primarily maintained
by his wife and older sons. If Tusill's book gives
an accurate account, hl Hunt or Hash was not a
pleasant man to have as your dad. Quote Hash Hunt
would storm through the house sipping a bit of his
own homemade corn whiskey from a jar and thundering to
anyone with an earshot. His views on the world, on
the hard times that had spread through the nation like
(18:28):
a Pestilen's, on the politicians who had brought these conditions about,
and on the bare living he was able to scratch
out from his farm and his share of salary. So
they've got kind of right wing talk radio in the
form of their dad. He's just like a drunk rush
Limbaugh complaining about how hard things are while he makes
a lot of money.
Speaker 4 (18:45):
I'm so glad he has the authority to arrest people.
Speaker 3 (18:49):
Just drug like you. You there, do you know what
you're doing to the actage?
Speaker 2 (18:55):
No law about how drunk you can be as a
sheriff in Illinois in the eighteen hundreds, I feel confidence
saying that, Thank God for that, Thank God for that.
We used to be a proper country, Princess, we used
to be a proper country. Exactly So, as I noted earlier,
most casual bias of Hunt will point out that he
was homeschooled. Now, depending on the source I've seen, arguments
that his education was pretty minimal and lacking, and that
(19:18):
his mom did a really good job. Whatever the case,
he was brilliant from a young age. Hunt purportedly learned
to read before he was three years old, and as
one writer phrased, it, was clever with numbers from a
very early age. Now I suspect these claims are a
mix of the truth and some myth making. Hunt is,
as an adult going to be an almost supernaturally gifted
(19:38):
card counter. He is, legitimately, and there's enough evidence that
we know this isn't myth making. When he sits down
to play poker, he wins. Right, He's got like a superpower,
like he's he's incredible at it. And he's also just
His business career shows he's really good with money. He's
good at like counting up sort of risk analyzing risk
versus like the odds of profit and loss in his head,
(20:00):
making snap decisions that wind up being very accurate. So
I don't doubt that he's a math genius. I kind
of doubt he was full on reading before the age
of three, uh, but he probably was precocious. His sisters
adored him, and in general, the women and his family
paid close and doting attention to the boy. Hunt would
later complain of his family's poverty in those years, but
the Hunt family were an objectively better shape than their neighbors.
(20:22):
The eighteen eighties played host to one of our nation's
many regular back before the Great Depression and then afterwards,
when they like changed the way the banking system worked
in significant ways. We used to have depressions a lot
more regularly. Right.
Speaker 3 (20:37):
It's it's like a diagnose of depression. It's like you're
gonna have it every couple. You're gonna have a high
low day.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
The national economy was dysthymic. Yeah, exactly. They didn't have
prozac yet to really regulate invented money prozac, which is
the the FDI. See. I guess h, I guess.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
So the eighteen eighties played host to one of our
nations one of these depressions, and most of their neighbors
lose everything or almost everything during this time. Now the
Hunts don't, but Hash is still unhappy to still describes
him as a man driven to rage by his failure
to make more of a success of himself, and one
who took his frustrations out on his wife and children.
(21:17):
This creates a miserable situation for Ella, and she tries
to distract herself by obsessively caring for her youngest son, Juni.
Per the book Kingdom, Juny was her pet, her baby,
and he looked to her for refuge against this strange,
violent man who filled him with terror every time he
entered the house.
Speaker 4 (21:34):
He was almost a serial killer. He was almost a killer.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
That was like, he's got he gets a few of
those vibes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Now you know who else
is constantly filled with a terrifying violent rage. Robert the
sponsors of this podcast, and we're back talking about the
(22:01):
uncontrollable anger that drives our beautiful sponsors. That's what makes
them great. So things with his dad and the fact
that his mom is kind of dealing with being in
a terrible marriage by obsessing over her youngest son. This
comes to a head with Junie, who again is the
future richest man in the world, was seven years old.
Hash came back early from a trip out sheriffing or something,
(22:23):
and he stumbles on to what had become something of
a secret between Juni, his mother, and the world. Quote.
Standing on a milk box in front of her as
she worked the dough, the seven year old Juni had
his face upturned as he suckled her naked breast. Now,
Hash had heard stories from James, the oldest boy still
at home who was working the family farm, that Ella
Rose was nursing juny longer than was natural. Hash dis
(22:45):
missed those stories at the time, having preferred abolishing the
thought to facing something that seems shameful and repugnant to him.
So that's a bit odd. Seven's late, it's giving.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
It's like a bad kid from Game of Throws. It's
like he gotta get off the kitty in that point.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
Seven's a bit much. I don't want to like shame
people for nursing, but seven's a bit late. No, we
can we can agree, swee Rob.
Speaker 4 (23:12):
And you gotta get off your mom's tit like that
is diabolical.
Speaker 2 (23:17):
Yeah, So to say that Hash doesn't take finding this
out well would be putting it mindly mildly. He starts screaming.
He goes into a rage. The book doesn't say he's violent,
so I hope he wasn't, but I don't know. But
at the very least, he screams at his wife and
demands that she explained what the hell is going on?
(23:38):
And this is where we get one of the first
instances of Dusill's book, presenting us with an incredibly detailed
conversation from a moment he absolutely could not know about
in any real detail.
Speaker 4 (23:48):
Yeah, this is his head cannon. He's like.
Speaker 3 (23:49):
He's like, if I get put myself into the mind
of my of my hero baby Hash, baby Judy, what
is he thinking wiping the milk off his mouth listening
to this conversation.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
This has to just be based on what Hunt remembered
seventy years later and told his sons maybe about this happening. Uh,
but yeah, he claims that. Ella begs her husband not
to don't make more of this than it is. Hash
and Hash starts yelling even more after this, to which
she begs, not in front of Junie. Hash, Please, you'll
regret your words later on. I'll regret nothing except not
(24:22):
listening to my own instincts. I've been blind for years,
too busy to put my foot down when it mattered most.
Let this be the end of it, you hear, I'll
listen to no pale excuses. This has to end at once.
Hash's word was final. Ella Rose never exposed her bosom
to her youngest son again, whether out of fear of
her husband or out of her own shame was never
explained to young June. The boy came to hate and
resent his father all the more for taking from him
(24:44):
what was the most important thing he had known so far,
his intimacy with his mother. Hash tried to assume a
more active role in family affairs from that day on,
but the effort was a hollow one. His heart simply
was not in it. So young Ahl is not going
to pick up any good lessons about this. Number one,
This is kind of like a weird intimacy that's probably
bordering on unhealthy, if not has crossed the line into unhealthy.
(25:07):
But the fact that his dad then screams at him
and takes it away is even worse and makes like
this guy is gonna have so much miny family related issues,
and one thing he's going to learn is that families
are better off without husbands.
Speaker 3 (25:21):
Yeah, he's a Freudian dream like it's and it's full
blown oedipal complex like you get.
Speaker 4 (25:27):
He gets caught like almost like cuckholding his own father,
you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
That's obviously not how he sees it as a seven
year old, but his dad sure sees it that way.
Speaker 4 (25:37):
Absolutely and I guess, And just.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
The visual of him needing to be on top of
a crate to reach the bosom, it's like it's too much,
Like I'm not I'm not team hash, but I.
Speaker 4 (25:47):
Definitely think you need to put the kebash on that,
Like that is not okay.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
Yeah, it's it's good stuff. So whenever I'm starting my
research into a new bastard, I don't know a lot
about going into the project. There's this period of anxiety
where I'm like sinking research time into a guy, but
I don't know if they're interesting enough to like work
as an episode yet. And when I hit this story
was the moment I stopped worrying about hl Hunt. I
was like, oh, thank god, Okay, Okay, there's something to
(26:12):
sink cartoon into with this motherfucker. We're gonna get You
don't tend to see this story mentioned in most other
articles on the Guy, with a notable exception of one
of my major sources for this, which was a chapter
from Heather Hindershot's great book What's Fair on the Air,
which is about Cold War era right wing broadcasting. She
devotes a chapter to Hunt, and she writes this that
(26:35):
he had nursed at his mother's breast until the age
of seven, was a point of pride, further evidence of
his innate specialness. Normal rules didn't apply to him, he reasoned.
So that's based on He would talk about this moment
like journalists and to his kids, and he was proud
of it because again he develops pride in being different
from everybody else, right, not subject to the rules. That's
(26:55):
also a very important I'm the eldest boy.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
Yeah, yeah, early, sweet boy, I can suck up my
mom's hit as long as.
Speaker 2 (27:03):
I want, boy. Yeah. Now, yeah, there's a lot to
say about, like how good because kids need to feel
like they matter and like they're special, but not in
certain ways. Also like you need to feel like you
matter and you're special because everyone matters and a special
which is like what mister Rogers tried to get across
(27:25):
as opposed to No, no, I'm special as opposed to
everyone else.
Speaker 4 (27:32):
And that's why they want to defund PBS everyone. They
want you to be reliant to the breast milk.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
Only the breast milk. That's big breast milk is behind
all of this, Princess. I've been saying that for years.
Speaker 4 (27:43):
That's true.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
Yeah, the breast milk industrial complex is what really runs
this country, good lord. So the feeling of specialness and
young h l Hunt was stoked by the way his
sisters treated him. While his older brother James and his
dad both bullied him, his mom and the girls mothered
him with attention. In his biography, to Sill writes that
June's sisters teased him often enough about being Ella Rose's favorite,
(28:06):
but the teasing was good natured and playful, unlike James's
sneering and resentful taunting. The girls regarded Junie as their
own special pet as well as Ella Rose's. Right, so
that's probably not bad. You know, your sister's kind of
babying the youngest kid. But again, this is all going
to sort of feed into his I am a special
person complex, which isn't gonna be ideal for everyone. Hunt
(28:29):
also enjoyed a close relationship with his older brother Leonard,
who he idolized and who loved him back. Tusill is
one of the people who will argue that this homes
that his homeschooling education was quite good. Ella Rose teaches
her youngest son Greek, Latin, French, and German, and when
he starts reading at age three. It said that she
gives him issues of the newspaper so that he could
learn what was going on in the world. Now, again,
(28:50):
some of this has got to be myth making, but
to still claims that Hunt quote gained a reputation throughout
the region as a child genius, despite the fact that
he never attended the local school. Now what's odd about
this to me is the fact that Tusylvin adds his
entire education was received from his mother and from his
sister's readers, which he devoured when they came home from school.
So again, his sisters and brothers get to go to school. Yeah,
(29:14):
and it sounds like he doesn't because he's too smart
and his mom wants to homeschool him. Is at which
is really weird and different and also is going to
make him feel very special. I did look through Hunt's
FBI report which claims that and that there's a reason
why he's got an FBI report, and it includes claims
that Hunt was known in the areas being able to
(29:35):
memorize a page of pros in two readings by the
time he was in the fifth grade, and that that
was the end of his schooling. So that kind of
suggests he does go to a public school for a while,
but everyone else says he didn't. So I don't know
what the truth is.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
Weird is the truth?
Speaker 2 (29:52):
Weird is the truth? I think there might be because
a lot of the people who write about the end
he never went to school, he was homeschooled are like
weird right wing and libertaire sources because this guy becomes
a weird right wing billionaire. That may be the because
it doesn't sound as good to their kind of narrative
of like, well, he went to school until he was
in the fifth grade, at which point he was homeschooled
the rest.
Speaker 3 (30:11):
Of the way, right right, or adding that he was
homeschooled by his mother who continuously put her breast in
his face, right right?
Speaker 2 (30:19):
Yes, good, it makes less of a good case for homeschooling.
Speaker 4 (30:23):
Yeah, not not the triadwife ideal. I'm sure that they
want to promote.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
A mouth Yeah, home schooling. So the first way that
June exhibited his intellect in a major way to the
world was by getting really, really unbeatably good at card
games and other games of chance. This is kind of
the earliest happiness that he experiences and probably remembers which
is beating the piss out of his sisters and brothers
at various card games and being praised for it. So
(30:48):
this is going to teach him an important lesson. He's
never going to get over loving gambling. However, the fact
that he's so smart is not without its downsides. Per
the book, Kingdom, hash Hunt was not nearly so impressed
with his names mental agility as others were, and right
from the beginning, Young June had problems with James. You
think you're better than the rest of us, don't you,
James badgered him incessantly when they were alone. You think
(31:09):
you're smarter than we are. Now again to still relates
like a page long argument between him and his brother
that sounds more like a cheesy screenplay dialogue than a
real conversation. There's even a part where his big brother says,
you're a mama's pet. That's all you'll ever be. Just
like you just write that in you if you're a
hack screenwriter, And then you transition immediately to him like
as a young adult trying to get his foot in
(31:31):
the door at his first business or something right right,
It's like he.
Speaker 4 (31:34):
Would have loved young Sheldon.
Speaker 2 (31:36):
He would have loved young Sheldon. So as he grows
up in this account, he does everything he can to
be the opposite of a mama's boy. First off, he
gets swollen. He starts working out. I mean mainly he's
just doing like hard labor outdoors, but he gets really jacked.
He's a big guy. He's tall, and he is like
a bit large, muscular dude. Everyone seems to agree about that.
(31:58):
He becomes a skilled or wrider, even bareback, and a
skilled outdoorsman. He works with his brother in the family
business on the farm, and he proves his worth by
using his skill with numbers to benefit everybody and improve
the family business. After summarizing all this, too, So gives
us another absolutely made up claim. He was growing into
a handsome young man, the best looking of all of
(32:19):
his brothers. And he's still's gonna say a lot of
weird stuff about how sexy this guy is. We'll talk
about later. That's kind of a through line in his
other biographies. I don't know why it's a stand. To me,
he's a stand. He's the ultimate stan.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
He's like, he's so hot.
Speaker 4 (32:34):
Look at Yeah, this dude.
Speaker 2 (32:36):
Could have fucked.
Speaker 4 (32:39):
Now.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
None of you have photos of this person.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
Yeah, yeah, we've got some. You can look at some up,
So if wy, don't you try to find us a
younger one. I only found some. I should have included one.
Speaker 4 (32:49):
Yeah, let's see this.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
Hot I've only the photos. I've only seen her of
him when he's older.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
Yeah, I only found older ones. But I didn't look
as hard as I should have. I'll try to find Yeah.
None of this work earns him his father's approval, and
his older brother keeps hating him because once Juny proves himself,
James resents him for being the better businessman. Eventually, June's
constant frustration is alleviated by a miracle. The US declares
(33:16):
war on Spain in eighteen ninety eight and Jameson lists,
which gets his ass out of the home and gives
June some breathing room for the first time in his
young life. Well, the future richest man on Earth nears adolescence.
His father uses the by now considerable wealth and clout
that he'd amassed to start a small local bank, the
People State Bank. Weirdly, his oldest son, Robert, who had
(33:37):
moved out of the house by this point, starts a
separate bank to compete with his dad's bank, which says
a lot about the family dynamics that isn't spelled out
in this book. But you don't do that if you
have a good relationship with your dad, create a spite bank.
A spite bank, a bank just despite your father.
Speaker 3 (33:56):
It's so Kendall roy coated. It's like I just giving
a succession. I'm just kind of like he's like, I'm
the eldest boy. I'm going to make my own bank. Dad.
Speaker 2 (34:06):
It's a really petty succession because the town these banks
only serve the town they're in, and the town they're in,
Ramsey has six hundred people, and every member counts and
every way, Yeah, every member counts in the Spike bank. Yeah,
it's it's very funny to sell includes this quote. Hash
(34:26):
haat Little appreciated this unique form of incestuous capitalism, but
it was a great source of merriment among the neighbors.
Everyone's laughing about the spiite bank that his oldest made.
Speaker 3 (34:35):
Right.
Speaker 4 (34:36):
They're like, if you have a problem with one bank,
just like and I will go over to yourself.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
To your brothers, your son's shitty bank. Yeah. So not
long after this, his older brothers move out of the
house too, and favorite brother Leonard, heads out to the
Pacific Northwest to work as a logger. This seems to
have ignited a wanderlust and young hl Hunt a desire
to go out into the world and make something of himself. Previously,
he'd been content living at home and being doted on
(35:00):
by his sisters, But at age twelve, he runs away
from home for the first time, and he doesn't go far,
and the way that Tusil describes it, he's motivated less
to escape forever than just he wants to get away
for a couple of days and see a little bit
of the world before he comes back. He just kind
of wants to ramble. And you could kind of do
that as a twelve There's not like a CPS going
around to make sure everyone's twelve year olds aren't running
(35:21):
around right in the rails, like nobody cares in the
government at this point in time.
Speaker 3 (35:27):
And there's eight of them, so really you don't even
like if you lose one, you got seven other.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
You lose one, you got plenty of kids left. Yeah,
he's away a couple of nights, but he comes back
changed and from this point on, over the next four years.
He's going to leave home regularly every couple of months
to explore, and he lives a very peter Pan style existence.
In those days two Sill Rights, he had discovered that
many other young vagabonds were on the road, boys and
girls alike whose families were too poor to feed them
(35:52):
properly at home. On occasion, he had hooked up with
a gang of them and slept in teenage hobojungles around
open campfires.
Speaker 4 (36:00):
That does sound kind of awesome. I would read about that.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
That sounds pretty cool and also kind of like a
special hell. But you know, it could be either. I'm
imagining it as being exactly like the movie Hook, though,
I'll be honest with you, like right down to that
brightly colored imaginary food stuff that they throw at each other.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
I have found a young a young hl image.
Speaker 2 (36:21):
Oh good, good, good. You think about that, I'm gonna
think about Rufio getting stabbed.
Speaker 4 (36:26):
I was literally like, what if he looks like young
Jacob ALRDI not as.
Speaker 2 (36:31):
Not as much, but yeah, he's a big guy. You
could see he's like very broad shoulders. Yeah, you know,
he's an eighth.
Speaker 4 (36:38):
The looks Maxers would approve of him.
Speaker 2 (36:39):
I think, h Yeah, he's a reasonably good looking guy. Yeah,
certainly not a bad looking guy. Nice. Chan just kind
of looks like a big white guy.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
Gotta be honest, he just looks like a guy.
Speaker 2 (36:51):
He looks like a big white guy. He's not like
a movie star for sure, but he's real big.
Speaker 3 (36:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:57):
In those days, if you were huge, it just said like, wow,
you're malnourished and dying. Let's make kids.
Speaker 4 (37:02):
You know. It's like George Washington, like, of course he
was going to be president. He was six four.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
He was six four. Not a lot of people got
to be that big back then. He had to be
eating a lot of milk and meat when you were
a kid. Yeah. So when he's sixteen, June leaves the
house for good. He is six feet tall now, and
as we just saw in the picture, pretty big. He's
big enough nobody questions that he's like not old enough
(37:29):
to be doing whatever he's doing. By the time he's sixteen,
he looks enough like an adult that people treat him
like one. He leaves in the spring of nineteen oh five,
and he first hit Saint Louis, where he gets a
job on a railroad. He takes odd jobs to get
from Kansas to Colorado, and then he heads up towards Utah,
where he gets a gig watching a car load of
sheep on a train ride to California. As soon as
he gets to California, he falls in love with it,
(37:51):
like all sensible people do. Although being a libertarian, to
still has to write this in the grossest way that
he can. He found California much to his liking, especially
the lust blonde beauties who appeared as plentiful as the
succulent fruit that grew in this golden, sun soaked land.
And no, I gotta tell you this is based on
(38:11):
what Tusill thought of California in the eighties. In nineteen
oh five, California isn't like the center of like a massive,
world renowned entertainment industry. It's like a place some people
live in are farming and stuff.
Speaker 3 (38:26):
Like.
Speaker 2 (38:26):
The weather's famously good, but it's not famous for its
blonde beauties. It's just famous as there's when the dust
bowl hits in a few decades, it doesn't get hurt
as badly as everywhere else. Like people are thinking of
California and nineteen oh five in those terms, that's that's
that's some shit that Tusill is thinking about. Also, I
(38:48):
got to read these next couple of sentences to you.
This is this is too Sol describing Hunt after he
gets to California.
Speaker 4 (38:53):
Spoiler alert, Oh gosh.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
With his good height and his hard solid body, his
deep set blue eyes and rugged looks, he had little
trouble in attracting more than his share of young females.
His sexuality was strong and developing, and he exuded an
aura of raw animal magnetism.
Speaker 1 (39:13):
Okay, with his good height in his hard solid body.
Speaker 2 (39:18):
Who told you that, Jerome to sil, who told you
about his hard, hot body and his animal magnetism? Where'd
you get that? Jerome is raw?
Speaker 4 (39:28):
Did you?
Speaker 2 (39:30):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (39:30):
It's the home is just like just just just blow it. Okay.
Speaker 2 (39:35):
He was dead by this point.
Speaker 4 (39:37):
So, but I mean, don't let that limit you.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
Clearly don't Wow, Wow, Princess Weeks. Don't let that limit you.
Speaker 4 (39:43):
That's a dream, dream big, dream.
Speaker 2 (39:46):
Big, dream big and weird. So I should probably say
a little more about too Sill here in the late
nineteen seventies, after writing that book about iron Rand and
failing to become the mayor or the governor, I forget
which he grew dissolute with libertarianism as a political tendency.
He'd also long since broken with iron Rand over a
number of things that he disagreed with her about. He
(40:07):
gives up political rabble rousing and becomes a stockbroker and
eventually a financial writer. In the nineteen eighties he started
writing books on investing, and then he launched a series
of biographies. Kingdom is one of them. Another, written in
nineteen eighty five, was Trump, The Saga of America's most
powerful real estate baron. This is the first published biography
of our current president that track I didn't know that
(40:30):
that makes sense heard of the New York I'm going
to quote from the New York Times here denied access
to his subject, members of his family, and most of
his associates. Mister Tussill relied heavily on newspaper and magazine
accounts to produce what Michael Stern, writing in The New
York Times Book Review, called a g whizzard of a
biography that points a key to mister Trump's career his
ability to turn political friendships, tax abatements, and government loans
(40:53):
into opportunities for profit, Which does sound like an accurate
descriptive kind of how he made his money. But also
it shows like that's kind of his sources. He found
some newspapers and magazine accounts. Maybe he talked to a
couple guys about Hunt who knew him. But a lot
of this is just him kind of filling into blanks
to make this exciting. And I know I'm spending way
(41:14):
longer in these episodes about Hunt talking about his biographer
than I should. But everything I find out about Jerome
Tussol kind of drives me crazy. His other I look
to do his bibliography and his other books. His most
famous book, one of them is he wrote a history
of black soldiers in the Spanish American War. That's like
super anti Teddy Roosevelt, and it's apparently a pretty good book.
He's not like a crypto fascist or anything. But when
(41:37):
I saw that he made a Trump biography, I got this,
like I decided to look into that a little bit,
and I just started doing some word surges because I
was like, does he is this weird? Him calling a
Hunt hod a lot? Is that like a pattern in
his books. I'm going to read you, yes, Yes, Princess,
it is. Here's a paragraph from his book on Trump.
(41:59):
Fred Trump was still tall, and that's our president's dad.
Fred Trump was still tall and slim at sixty seven,
with a full head of dark, graying hair, handsome in
a nineteen forties movie star way, sporting a swept back
pompadour and a dark, pencil thin mustache. Indeed, he looked
as though he might have stepped out of an old
movie starring Barbara Stanwicker Joan Crawford, the mysterious charmer, faintly dangerous.
(42:21):
Donald as tall as Fred, both men standing a couple
of inches over six feet, handsome, clean shaven, with only
a hint of a poudy sneer crossing his lips.
Speaker 1 (42:30):
I've seen what this man looked like in many phases
of his life.
Speaker 4 (42:33):
He is none of that.
Speaker 3 (42:35):
I know.
Speaker 2 (42:35):
He is not going to show you a picture of
these two next to each other from this time. He's
the t F. He's d F DTF Trump's dad, And
here's Trump's dad in nineteen sixty nine. He does not
look like a sexy movie star, but he does want.
Speaker 4 (42:51):
The Eiffel Tower. That Trump Tower guys.
Speaker 2 (42:54):
He dan it does, and he kind of he looks
sort of like if Walt Disney had projeer Rha, like
his face is not smooth, looking like, he's not handsome.
It's weird way to describe Fred Trump. Yeah, a lot
of forehead, forehead, a lot of forehead, very red.
Speaker 4 (43:16):
Very red.
Speaker 3 (43:16):
Yeah, he loves I think he just loves money so
much that it makes whatever man around him like the
hottest guy.
Speaker 1 (43:23):
Not that that is not what we call a Babraham Lincoln.
Speaker 3 (43:27):
That is.
Speaker 2 (43:28):
I have to read a lot of biographies, very and
even autobiographies, you know, for these this this show I do.
I've never run into a guy who talks about how
hot his subjects are this often. It's really, it's really, yeah,
it's truly.
Speaker 3 (43:43):
Now what that's Olivia Newsy's like in Spoboor She's like,
that's the text.
Speaker 2 (43:48):
Yeah, she's there. It's great reference. So I did. I
kept digging because I wanted to see how far down
the rabbit hole this went. I found an archived copy
of two Sells biography of Rupert Murdoch from nineteen eighty nine,
because of course he wrote the Murdox biography that said,
I didn't find any returns for handsome or any related terms.
I didn't read through the book, so maybe he just
(44:09):
used different words to talk about murder being hot anyway,
This is a pointless diversion, but I had to do it.
Sorry you.
Speaker 3 (44:17):
It's now I'm imagining like him doing biographies of like Elizabeth.
Speaker 4 (44:22):
Holmes, and.
Speaker 2 (44:24):
There's a lot of a lot of pages talking about
how Turtleneck fed her Jerome. Do we need to edit
maybe some of this down.
Speaker 4 (44:32):
That's what the people want. They're here, they're here for
my thirst straps.
Speaker 2 (44:35):
You know who else has a crush on Elizabeth Holmes
those products this podcast? Sorry, that's right, that's right, that's right.
We're back. So let's talk about La hl Hunt.
Speaker 1 (44:54):
Some more about myself for that one.
Speaker 4 (44:57):
I'm so sorry.
Speaker 2 (44:59):
Yeah you should. Sorry, Sophie. I'm not happy. No one's happy.
Speaker 4 (45:04):
I'm sorry, No one's happy.
Speaker 2 (45:06):
Accept the subject of our episodes, hl Hunt, who is
happy because he's moved to San Francisco by this point
in the story of the early nineteen hundreds, and he
falls into a happy life gambling with sailors and prostitutes
and other assorted people living on the margins of the world.
He finds out that he's really good at poker and
that he can win money basically every time he plays
(45:27):
to Sill chalks U up to his photographic memory. In essence,
Hunt is someone whose brain just automatically starts card counting,
like he doesn't even know what he's doing, right, but
that's just how he his head works, and so he
just always wins when he's playing poker. Hunt is able
to live comfortably in a fleabag motel. Is a card shark.
And you know, after some period of months of this,
(45:49):
to Sill treats us to another deeply uncomfortable paragraph about Hunt,
like he invites this prostitute into his room and he's
so good at sex that she falls in love with him,
Like he wins the heart of a prostitute for being
really good at fucking.
Speaker 4 (46:05):
Lord, yeah, stop, it.
Speaker 2 (46:07):
Is great. According to this account, this prostitute that he's
with finds out that the hotel he's staying in he
tells her, and she's like, oh no, they drug young
men there and like shanghai them to force them to
work on boats somewhere, which is the thing that happened
in that period of time. And he's like, and they're
about to do it tomorrow night or something like that,
so we have to flee town. And he winds up
(46:28):
like leaving fucking San Francisco for Reno, and he tries
out for a minor league baseball team but that doesn't
pan out. But while he's away, there's a horrible quake
in San Francisco and the hotel that he'd been staying
and collapses. So June becomes convinced as a result of
this that he's someone special and that the universe has
marked him out for a purpose. All of this is
just really reinforced that he is the special boy of history, right,
(46:51):
That's how this man grows up feeling.
Speaker 1 (46:53):
Yeah, and you know, like I said, he didn't have
the making of a.
Speaker 2 (46:58):
Varsity ye, yeah, not have the makings of a varsity athlete.
Speaker 4 (47:02):
No, Princess and I are just.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
Referencing every single HBO show.
Speaker 4 (47:07):
Exactly or just like we're just throwing out there.
Speaker 1 (47:11):
It's good also, audience, Robert's never seen the Sopranos, and
I'm very upset about it.
Speaker 2 (47:16):
Yeah, that's not my Yeah, I don't know. The anti
Italian discrimination, Sophie, that's my issue with the Sopranos. You know,
my people didn't work a very very hard to become
famous for making hand gestures and running buca to Beppo
for you to bring us down by associating us with
the mafia. And yes, I did have multiple family members
who were involved in organized crime, but that's still a
(47:39):
bad stereotype, even though a lot of Italians do have
a family history in Baltimore.
Speaker 1 (47:46):
Wow, I think you would fucking love this.
Speaker 4 (47:49):
It's an amazing show.
Speaker 3 (47:51):
Like, Okay, the amount of racism that I have that,
I'm like, but I love Tony Soprano.
Speaker 4 (47:55):
I was like, listen, I get it. It's fine. I
forgive him because he wants.
Speaker 2 (47:59):
To fight the f Yeah, by the FBI. He wants
to Hey, so so did one of my cousins. It
didn't then well for him. The gun that killed him
sold at auction a few years ago for like fifty
grand or something. Nice. Yeah, yeah, I feel like I
should own that. Actually kind of bumped me out.
Speaker 4 (48:21):
You're just.
Speaker 2 (48:22):
Killed my cousin.
Speaker 1 (48:23):
Yeah, I do too, But I wouldn't approve of you
spending that much on a family heirloom.
Speaker 2 (48:28):
No, no, no, no, it's that's why I didn't you
put it on the auction. But I was, I was like,
it's fucked up for anyone else to own the gun
that killed my cousin. It's fucked up to sell a
gun and be like, this is the gun that killed
this guy, but fifty is wild. Yeah, that's all happening
at around this time. I forget how exactly how much
it's sold for. It was a crazy amount. So anyway,
(48:51):
I don't know how much credence to give the whole
I was so good at sex that like a magical
prostitute saved my life by helping me escape an earthquake.
Thing that's not I can believe that, Like he left
a hotel in San Francisco and not long after there
was an earthquake, because that earthquake did happen, and a
lot of stuff was destroyed by it, and a lot
of people had the experience of a week or two earlier,
(49:13):
I was in the hotel that collapsed. Tons of people
would have had a story like that. So it's very possible.
And it's just a thing that happened to hundreds and
hundreds of people because that's how hotels work. And he
takes from this, I am special and marked out for greatness. Right,
So one of the other things that we see in Hunt,
you know, in the early days, he has this growing
(49:34):
belief that he's special, and he also has a fundamental
distrust of his fellow man. Not long after all of
this Brujaja with San Francisco and trying out for baseball
and Reno, he's like, Gozies, I think he's in Arizona.
He's in the Southwest. He's working like with a bunch
of day laborers, and there's like white day laborers, and
there's a group of Mexican day laborers and they have
separate camps because it's the nineteen it's like nineteen o
(49:57):
six or something that's a little seven. And he he
goes over along with some of the other white workers
to play cards with the Mexican laborers one night, and
Hunt just wins everything. He takes all of these Mexican
guys money, which winds up to like four grand everything
they have in the world. And so the other white dudes.
The longer he wins, they start leaving to go back
(50:18):
to their camp because they're like, hey, hey man, or
hey Hunt, maybe you want to go. You probably don't
want to take all these guys' money. This seems like
it could get dangerous, so they leave, but Hunt does it.
He can't stop playing cards when he's playing cards, so
he doesn't stop until he's taken all of their money,
at which point he realizes all of his friends are
gone and he gets like scared, and he basically takes
(50:39):
the money and runs off into the bushes because he
feels like he has to hide from the Mexicans, even
though as far as we know, they never go after
him or try to hurt him. All of the evidence
suggests they took their loss fine and they didn't like
threaten him. He just is sure that because they're Mexicans,
they're going to try to kill him to get their
money back, So he like hides in the bushes, and
then he tries to, like, in the middle of the
(51:00):
night hike back to the camp with his friends. But
when he gets back there, he's like, wait a second,
how well do I really know these guys. They're definitely
going to rob me. They know I have all this money,
they might kill me. So he has a panic attack
and he like hides and camps out in the woods
that night, and then like goes just leaves quits the
job and hikes off into another town, basically because he
(51:20):
doesn't want to be near where anyone knows that he's
won this money. Quote from Tusill's book, how could he
trust these brawny strangers who knew he had made a
killing that night? What was to stop two or three
of them from jumping him in his bunk, leaving him
with a knife between his ribs, and slipping off with
his winnings. So you've heard of being the most special boy, right,
there's this deep distrust of other people that again, at
(51:44):
no point, and he so just writes this like, of
course he was reasonable to fear that these Mexicans were
going to kill him, But at no point is there
any evidence that they threaten his life at all. I
do want to emphasize that this is all entirely something
he decides. So he makes his way to South Dakota,
where he meets who, to Sill's book, describes this as
(52:04):
the best friend he's going to have in his entire life,
A dude named Steve, no last name provided now to
still insists that this is the best, the c closest.
Speaker 4 (52:17):
Man.
Speaker 1 (52:17):
We don't even need.
Speaker 2 (52:18):
Last day if we're that close.
Speaker 4 (52:20):
That is a cliche of like boy friendships of life?
Was his last name?
Speaker 1 (52:23):
I don't know Steve one name he thinks he's fucking
Zendaya or some shit.
Speaker 2 (52:28):
What's happening right, fucking Steve, see I kind of sink.
Steve Hunt probably tells his kids later in life that
this guy was his best friend ever, because I don't
know otherwise why t still would insist it. But they
only know each other for like a few days, maybe
a few weeks, and the main thing, the only story
we get about their marvelous friendship is that one night
Hunt beats Steve at cards and takes all of his money,
(52:50):
which is like two hundred and sixty bucks, and he
feels bad about it, so he's like, hey, man, you
don't have to pay me back, and Steve is like, no,
you know, I made a promise. You know, this is
a this is a bond I owe you, and I'm
gonna pay you. You know, don't think anything about it.
And then Steve sits down and has like the fucking
ben Affleck conversation with his friend where he's like, you
need to leave here. You got to go to college.
You're too smart to keep you know, working like this, right,
(53:13):
And so Hunt is like, you know what, You're right, Steve,
and he leaves off to go to college. And they
never see each other again. And that is the greatest
friendship of his entire life.
Speaker 4 (53:23):
God, he invented a father figure just so he could
go to school.
Speaker 2 (53:26):
A man insisted on paying him and then did a
goodwill Hunting to him his best friend Steve. They knew
each other for days, friend Steve never met again.
Speaker 1 (53:40):
Steve.
Speaker 2 (53:42):
Yeah. So now age seventeen, Steve or not Steve Hunt
briefly attends college. Yeah, yeah, he's seventeen. He goes to Valpereiso,
which is known as the poor Man's Harvard, and he
robs his fellow students they're blind at card games, and
then dips after like a s. He never gets a degree.
He just kind of takes everyone's money and then leaves.
(54:05):
He goes home. He's around eighteen now when he finally
makes his way back home for the first time since
he'd left, and he stays at home for a while,
but then he sets out again with his brother Leonard.
This time they go out to like work in the
Northwest together and make money. But Lynyard gets sick with tuberculosis,
you know, and pretty soon he can't friend of the
(54:26):
pod tuberculosis and he can't keep up with his brother,
and he has another. He still has another, like heartfelt car,
you know, Leonard is liked his brother. Look, you got
to go on without me. I'm too slow. Don't let
me stop you from achieving greatness, basically, And so Hunt
goes up to Canada, right, And he's working in Canada
in nineteen ten when he gets a telegram that his
(54:47):
brother is has just died. Lenyard has died, you know,
of his tuberculosis. So Hunt heads home for the funeral,
and he stays at home for a few months. And
while he's there, his dad dies too. Right, So point
hl Hunt is like eighteen nineteen, you know, he's no
longer going by junior. And after his dad dies, he
inherits five thousand dollars. He doesn't get the land. Someone
(55:09):
else gets the land because he's not living at home.
But he gets like a nest egg of money and
he takes this and he adds it to the money
that he's saved up it from working as a card shark,
and he decides, I'm gonna stop wandering. I'm gonna make
real money. And in order to do that, I need
to like invest in something, and I want to start
a farm. Right, His Dad had always talked about how
(55:29):
much better the soil was down in the South, and
how oh, if only we lived in Arkansas then we'd
really be doing well, you know as farmers. So Hunt
moves down south to Arkansas near the end of nineteen eleven,
and he's gonna buy a farm and he's going to
invest in, you know, the set next part of his life,
and we will get to that and what happens later
(55:49):
and how he becomes the richest man on earth in
part two, Princess, how you feeling?
Speaker 3 (55:55):
I am excited to find out about this man whose
family was like, let's move to the north.
Speaker 4 (56:00):
Oh wait, actually I regret that.
Speaker 2 (56:01):
Let's go back yep, Princess.
Speaker 1 (56:04):
Do you have anything you want to plug real quick? Oh?
Speaker 3 (56:08):
Yeah, I have a YouTube channel, Princess Weeks. I talk
about pop culture, sci fi, all the good stuff. And yeah,
I'm just happy to be here. This is really interesting.
I love this really really hot millionaire in training.
Speaker 2 (56:25):
Yes, sexy millionaire narcissist. Yeah, so hot.
Speaker 4 (56:29):
His brother's like, no, you're just keep going, just keep going, don't.
Speaker 2 (56:33):
Keep going, keep going. You're too hot. Don't don't be
slowed down by my my Conveniently narratively convenient. Yeah wow, uh.
Speaker 1 (56:44):
Will be back with part two.
Speaker 2 (56:49):
All right, everybody go to help. I love you, Bye bye.
Speaker 1 (56:57):
Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media.
From more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (57:05):
App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1 (57:09):
Full video episodes that Behind the Bastards are now streaming
on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Kit remind me
of Netflix. You don't miss an episode. For clips in
our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube
channel YouTube dot com slash at Behind the Bastards. We
love about forty percent of you, statistically speaking,
Also media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Oh goodness, Jiminy, Gracious Christmas. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards,
a podcast about the very worst people in all of history,
introduced by one of the very worst introducers in all
of history. Your host me Robert Evans. This week I
have a guest who's better at introducing things, Princess Weeks. Princess,
(00:29):
why don't you introduce yourself because we've seen how I
do it.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
You're fabulous. I disagree with you, that's all just with that.
My name is Princess Weeks. I'm a writer, YouTuber, shit talker,
and I love history, and especially when I get to
listen to Robert tell me about bad people.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Yeah, and I love bad people, especially when I get
to inflict their badness on someone else.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
And this week we've got a guy who kind of
made inflicting his opinions on other people on everyone else
his like life mission and use the vast fortune he
built to do it. We're covering a fella here. He's
the former richest man in the world. This guy was
an oil in his time. He was a millionaire. But
if you you know, fix things to modern money, he
(01:17):
was a billionaire from a fairly early point in like
terms of modern money. And he was kind of the
first of the right wing, like these ultra rich right
wing guys to make pushing his own opinion in politics
by taking control of like or building media organs deliberately
to force his own opinion on public He was the
(01:38):
first of these super rich guys to really do that,
or he was part of the first wave of rich
guys that did that. And he was the biggest, like
of this first wave of generally like post New Deal
super rich you know, multimillionaire billionaire oil guys who are
are funding right wing politics. He was the guy who
(01:59):
was kind of best at it. But he was also
the guy who was only interested in forcing his own
politics on people. Like he didn't want to talk to
any other people on the right, He didn't want to
make friends. He just wanted to create media organizations that
would push his politics on other people. He's a very
weird dude. And his name was H. L. Hunt. Also
some people think he killed jfk hmm. So have you
(02:28):
heard of this guy?
Speaker 3 (02:30):
No, I've never heard of him, but he sounds annoying
and like the patrons say it of podcast bros.
Speaker 4 (02:35):
So like I'm writing sure about it.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
He's got a lot of that energy. He was kind
of like the proto Elon Musk, like what Musk has
done with turning X and Rock into this, like basically
building these companies just to push his own opinions on
everyone else. That's what Hunt was trying to do with
like the radio in the fifties and sixties and television
and stuff. So he's an interesting care character and like
(03:00):
a freak in his own personal life, which is always
fun when one of these guys is just the strangest,
weirdest little guy.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
So does HL stand for great.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
Question, Sophie. That's what we're starting because he has like
one of the most racist old white guy names you
could possibly have, Haroldson Lafayette Hunt Junior. That's this fucker's
full name, Haroldson and a Lafayette in there, Lafayette Junior.
You know you're in for a good time when you've
got all those names together, Hunts, Yeah, all those that's
(03:36):
funny you mentioned that.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
That guy, I'm like, wow, would cover my drink?
Speaker 2 (03:42):
Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, definitely. Haroldson Lafayette Hunt Junior was
born in Carson Township, Fayette County, Illinois, on February seventeenth,
eighteen eighty nine. Most of the articles and bios you'll
find on him kind of breeze right through his childhood
bio on the oil industry friendly website Oklahoma Minerals, which
(04:03):
depicts Hunt as a hero, so you know, kind of
ideologically where this bio is coming from, simply says that
he was quote the youngest of eight children in a
farming family. His early years were marked by a lack
of formal education, as he was homeschooled and never attended
public or private schools. So we're off to a good
start already, right, Like, this is a dude who and
(04:26):
that's not a weird upbringing for the time, really, but
it is kind of weird for him because his other
like brothers and sisters aren't all private schooled. So Hunt
was a pretty prolific writer of letters to the editor
and of ads in the Yellow Pages. So we do
get other bits of his history if you're willing to
dig deeper, that go a little further than that. In
(04:48):
the nineteen sixties, he wrote this in an ad published
by the Tennessee And so this is him trying to
connect with other members of his family. My grandfather was
Waddie Thorpe Hunt, freeing his slaves long before the war began.
Waddy Thorpe Punt migrated to Serchie County, Arkansas, stopping en
route to make a crop near Lookout Mountain. He formed
a company of Confederates in eighteen sixty which included his son.
(05:09):
He was killed in eighteen sixty four by Cantrill's guerrillas.
So that's him talking about like his grandfather, right, Like,
that's the family patron. And I'll tell let you know
right now, he's the only one who says this guy
freed his slaves long before the war began.
Speaker 4 (05:26):
How was gonna ask?
Speaker 3 (05:27):
I was like, he made it sound like, yeah, my
grandfother Freda's slaves before it was cool, before everyone had
to do it.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
But that he started a volunteer Confederate militia for love
of the game.
Speaker 4 (05:38):
You know it.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
Now, Waddy may not owned slaves, but that wasn't uncommon.
Most people who fought in the Confederate Army didn't have
enough money to like own slaves, right, like they but
that's not entirely the point. Some people were racist without
that right, and that seems to have been his grandfather's deal. Now,
what's very funny to be about this ad, which is
I'm like trying to connect with other relatives by talking
(06:02):
about his confederate at grandpa. Is that right after being like, hey,
does anyone know you know my grandpa wants anyone else
related to whom I want to connect, he goes on
to like say, I want to exchange you know, family
history with relatives quote and present them with three of
the HLH alo Vera Cosmetics that's his private cosmetic company,
and a list of stores in the area carrying HLH Cosmetics.
And the remainder of the ad is a plug for
(06:23):
his cosmetics business and his right wing radio show, which
I find I just found very funny that he's like,
I want to connect with my family, but I also
want to use this space in the newspaper to get
people to buy my cosmetics right wing skincare company.
Speaker 4 (06:36):
Yeah right, but also.
Speaker 3 (06:38):
Always agree he said he's the youngest of eight of
eight kids.
Speaker 4 (06:42):
How much more family connections does he need? I ring,
that's the family.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
You gotta have, bro, right, Like, why do you care?
It seems like you get your hands full there.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
Yeah, you don't need any cousins when you have a
basketball team, like, it's fine.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
So that's a good point.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
That was very fun. I fear it was your target audience.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
Damn near too, actually, So the Confederate connection was enough
to convince me that, like, I needed to look more
into this guy's family history, because I was like, well,
there probably means there's something else interesting there. And I
can only find one biography that was written about him,
which was the book Kingdom, and it's actually it was
published after he died, and it's actually a biography of
(07:28):
his whole family written by this hardcore libertarian author named
Jerome to Sill, and I think to Sill was a
fan of Hunt. He certainly wrote a history that I
would argue portrayed Hunt pretty close to how Hunt saw
himself a lot of the time. Although he does he
does include more of the warts than I think would have,
but he clearly like has this degree of like awe
(07:48):
in this man for being such a great businessman. It's
hard for me to tell how like real this biography
is because to Sill, again, he's like a guy with
an ideological bent that he's trying to get across in
his books. And his biography of Hunt includes all of
these verbatim conversations about conversations that would have happened in
(08:08):
like the eighteen hundreds, and this book was written in
the like one hundred years later. And I'm like, who
did you talk to to get the transcripts of these conversations?
You must have just made that up or you listen
to something that like these people's grandchildren said is how
the conversation went. So you have to take a lot
of this book with a grain of salt. Right, it's
(08:29):
getting like.
Speaker 4 (08:30):
Real person fan fiction.
Speaker 3 (08:31):
Like he is like, yeah, I just put myself into
the character, like what would what would my goats say?
Like what would my heroes say? And he's just like,
all right, I've got it, nailed it.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
I would say, think of it that way. This is
real person fan fiction. That said, it's the only book
we have about this guy's childhood, and it's clearly based
on conversations he had with members of this dude's family,
So you can't discard it because it's like our only source. Right,
that said, I want to We're going to talk a
(09:01):
little more about Tussil in this book too, because he's
kind of a very funny guy. You should know in
terms of evaluating how much can we trust this biography
that he was an early hardcore libertarian activist, although not
entirely the bad kind. He got like politically activated for
the first time in his life because he was disgusted
by the draft in the Vietnam War, and he staged
(09:22):
a walkout protesting the war at the Young Americans for
Freedom Convention in nineteen sixty nine, which is like good, yeah, yeah.
In nineteen seventy one, he published his first book. It
usually begins with iron Rand, A Libertarian Odyssey, which is
a book about how he went from an angry, lapsed
Catholic looking for a new religion to an objectivist libertarian.
(09:42):
Although he also kind of makes fun of iron Rand
in the book too, because she believed a lot of
crazy shit about sex that he does not on board with. Right,
so he's like some about her, but like makes fun
of her too. He wrote of his feelings in the
time for the moment, I considered myself uniq alone and
courageous individual who had found the holy grail after years
(10:03):
of floundering. That's how he reacts to reading iron Rand
for the first time. A lot of guys like that, Unfortunately, like.
Speaker 3 (10:10):
That's like the first time, Like you taught to a
guy who read Dune for the first time, He's like, I.
Speaker 4 (10:13):
Just had no idea.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
All my politics are now Dune, Dune exactly.
Speaker 4 (10:19):
Now.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
That same year, nineteen seventy one, to Sell wrote an
op ed for The New York Times and begged for
conservatives who still care about such things as peace and
justice and racial harmony to vote for candidates who really
be in peace when they say peace, who understand and
intend to promote the politics of decentralization of pollution, control
of economic and judicial reform, and so on all the
way down the line. So he's not like entirely bad.
(10:41):
This is back when the libertarian movement was a little
more complicated than it's going to become in the Trump years,
So that's positive. In nineteen seventy four, to Sell ran
for governor of New York on the Free Libertarian Party ticket.
He only got like thirty thousand votes, and he needed
fifty thousand to get the party a permanent place on
the ballot. The Times notes of his election campaign. On
(11:02):
the campaign trail, he's distributed to sell bills, fake dollar
bills that he assured voters would be soon worth more
than the real thing, given the country's ruinous economic policies.
He arranged for a woman in a beige body stalking
to ride through Central Park like Lady Godiva, on a
horse named Taxpayer. So he would have loved creating. You
would have loved like Jerome to Sill. You would have
(11:24):
loved bitcoin to.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
Sell coin like and he's given you naked ladies too.
He's like, listen, I'm giving you the taxpayers everything they
could want.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
A horse named tax horse name this man would have
had so many NFTs.
Speaker 4 (11:41):
Album can you imagine? Like there?
Speaker 2 (11:47):
And sorry this is in our episode about hl Hunt.
But when I started reading about the guy who wrote
his biography, I was like, this man's fascinating. So anyway,
take quotes that I'm going to read you from the
book Kingdom with a g of Salt. So Tousill's books
has very doesn't mention Watty Hunt Hunt's grandfather freeing his slaves,
(12:09):
so I suspect his grandson made all that up. But
he does talk about the fact that Watty created a
volunteer cavalry militia to support the Confederate cause, which should
tell you all you need to know about the man's politics. However,
there is an interesting discrepancy between what hl Hunt came
to believe and what to Sill Rights. In his biography,
to Still claims that Captain Hunt was quote shot to
(12:31):
death near his farm by Northern Raiders, but in his letter,
Hunt says he was killed by Cantrell's guerrilla fighters, and
Cantrell's Raiders were a pro Confederate partisan group of bushwhackers
that actually this is where Frank and Jesse James get
their start, and Cantrell's Raiders, now it would they definitely
killed a lot of Confederate farmers too, because kind of
by the end of the war they were just raiding,
(12:52):
you know, like they're.
Speaker 3 (12:55):
Like, we just like doing this now, like this is
our new passion, Like we gotta get a skille out
of this.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
When I got into this, it was for the racism,
but now it's just the love of raiding.
Speaker 4 (13:03):
You know.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
I just can't get over how much I like to raid.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
They're tapping into their Viking roots. They're like, this is
what I was meant to do ancestry.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
It's it's like how the Oakland Raiders are ostensibly at
like their fans are extensively there to support a football team,
but it's really about the raiding for the Oakland Raiders
fans too, you know, that's what makes that a great.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
Team, Las Vegas Raiders.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
No, no, no, Sophie, I don't accept that at all.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
That's like me with the net that like, oh, it's
it's the Brooklyn Nets. I'm like that they're from New Jersey.
It's okay. We don't have to make things up because
says it doesn't mean it's not right.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
Yeah. No, I refuse to accept that. So when Captain
Hunt gets murdered by whether it's by Northern Partisans or
Cantrell's Raiders, his son H. L. Hunt, which is the
same name as our HL Hunt, right, and it's his
dad takes control of the family. Now HL goes by
the nickname Hash for reasons lost to history, but are
(13:59):
more like rooted in potatoes than marijuana. He's a fascinating
figure because his life and his son's life kind of
perfectly embody the evolution of American conservatism from the Civil
War up to like the modern era, through like the
political realignment of the mid twentieth century. Because you have
like the Republican Party, which is this like radical progressive
(14:20):
force in the country that then becomes like the Conservative
Party over a period of time. Right and his family
really embodies that very well. In eighteen sixty four, before
the war was over, Hash took like, after his dad
gets killed, he moves up north and he takes an
oath of allegiance to the Union. Per the book Kingdom,
up North was where the money was. Hash told his
(14:42):
family the South as they had known at all their
lives was finished. It would not rise again for fifty
years at least. So you see, this is a family
the number one never gives up on like the racist
things that led them to support the Confederacy. But Hash
is a very pragmatic guy. He's like, the Confederacy's not
winning the and I want to be where the money is. Like,
I'm not going down with the ship. Fuck that my
(15:04):
dad did.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
That seems stupid, exactly, Like the slaves are gone. Let's
go up to the industry and abuse the Irish.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
Right, abuse whoever we can. Because I'm still racist, don't
get me wrong. We can divers So the family winds
up in Illinois, which is where our Ahll Hunt is
going to be born. In eighteen eighty nine, they start farming,
and things are going pretty well for the Hunts for
a while. Hash is a good businessman and a skilled farmer.
In short order, he meets a girl, the daughter of
(15:32):
an Army Union chaplain, and she's named Ella Henderson. This
is going to be ahell hunt. Our Hunt's mom. Tusill's
book claims that she quote was descended from an old
Huguenot line, and she deported herself with a certain aristocratic air,
not unworthy of her birth line. Now that's an interesting,
weird use of the word deported by too soil there
(15:52):
I've never heard. I think he meant to write comported,
because I don't think deported actually works that way. But
it made its way into the final copy of the book.
So they're like, we're just.
Speaker 3 (16:01):
Not Hugoot enough to understand how sophisticated that is.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
You gotta be way more Huguenots to get that word right. Yeah. So,
I don't know if she was had Huguenot blood in
her veins or whatever, but this is very consistent with
what hl Hunt's going to believe about his background and himself,
because he thinks he's special, and part of why he
thinks is special, he's special is because of his blood.
From eighteen seventy three to eighteen eighty nine, the Hunts
(16:27):
have eight children, the last of whom is our boy,
Haroldson la Fayette. Given that he has the same name
as his father, Hash, he was nicknamed Junior and the
family soon took to calling him June or Juni. So
as a boy, he goes by June or Juni because
he's got the same name as his dad, who goes
by Hash. Now, the Hunt's five hundred acre farm was
(16:47):
productive and supports the family well, but how well it
supports them is kind of hard for me to say
to sell rights that they quote just managed to scrub
out a meager living. But we also know that by
the time Hash dies, he gives his all eight of
his kids pretty significant inheritances. That suggests they're actually doing
very well. Now, maybe I don't know how long it
takes them to be doing very well, but certainly by
(17:10):
later in his life they're like upper middle class, right,
if not rich. It's a little hard for me to
tell that.
Speaker 3 (17:16):
Do we know the breakdown of like the genders of
the sibling was it like more girls than boys because
you can outsource the girls they get they can go
somewhere else.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
I think it's a pretty a pretty good split. But
he's got at least a couple of sisters. Okay. That said,
I think it's also Hunt kind of talks up his
family having a harder time when he was a kid
than they really did, because all conservatives who wind up
crazy rich like to pretend they were poorer than they were. Yeah,
at any rate. In eighteen ninety four, when JUNI was
(17:46):
like five or so, his dad Hash gets elected sheriff
of Fayette County. He ran as a Republican, which is
a major shift for the son of a Confederate volunteer
who'd fought against the Union himself. Hash becomes the first
Republican sheriff of Fayette, although not the last. He settled
into a pattern of spending a week or so in Vandalia,
the county seat, and then heading home for a few
(18:07):
days to tend his farm, which was now primarily maintained
by his wife and older sons. If Tusill's book gives
an accurate account, hl Hunt or Hash was not a
pleasant man to have as your dad. Quote Hash Hunt
would storm through the house sipping a bit of his
own homemade corn whiskey from a jar and thundering to
anyone with an earshot. His views on the world, on
the hard times that had spread through the nation like
(18:28):
a Pestilen's, on the politicians who had brought these conditions about,
and on the bare living he was able to scratch
out from his farm and his share of salary. So
they've got kind of right wing talk radio in the
form of their dad. He's just like a drunk rush
Limbaugh complaining about how hard things are while he makes
a lot of money.
Speaker 4 (18:45):
I'm so glad he has the authority to arrest people.
Speaker 3 (18:49):
Just drug like you. You there, do you know what
you're doing to the actage?
Speaker 2 (18:55):
No law about how drunk you can be as a
sheriff in Illinois in the eighteen hundreds, I feel confidence
saying that, Thank God for that, Thank God for that.
We used to be a proper country, Princess, we used
to be a proper country. Exactly So, as I noted earlier,
most casual bias of Hunt will point out that he
was homeschooled. Now, depending on the source I've seen, arguments
that his education was pretty minimal and lacking, and that
(19:18):
his mom did a really good job. Whatever the case,
he was brilliant from a young age. Hunt purportedly learned
to read before he was three years old, and as
one writer phrased, it, was clever with numbers from a
very early age. Now I suspect these claims are a
mix of the truth and some myth making. Hunt is,
as an adult going to be an almost supernaturally gifted
(19:38):
card counter. He is, legitimately, and there's enough evidence that
we know this isn't myth making. When he sits down
to play poker, he wins. Right, He's got like a superpower,
like he's he's incredible at it. And he's also just
His business career shows he's really good with money. He's
good at like counting up sort of risk analyzing risk
versus like the odds of profit and loss in his head,
(20:00):
making snap decisions that wind up being very accurate. So
I don't doubt that he's a math genius. I kind
of doubt he was full on reading before the age
of three, uh, but he probably was precocious. His sisters
adored him, and in general, the women and his family
paid close and doting attention to the boy. Hunt would
later complain of his family's poverty in those years, but
the Hunt family were an objectively better shape than their neighbors.
(20:22):
The eighteen eighties played host to one of our nation's
many regular back before the Great Depression and then afterwards,
when they like changed the way the banking system worked
in significant ways. We used to have depressions a lot
more regularly. Right.
Speaker 3 (20:37):
It's it's like a diagnose of depression. It's like you're
gonna have it every couple. You're gonna have a high
low day.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
The national economy was dysthymic. Yeah, exactly. They didn't have
prozac yet to really regulate invented money prozac, which is
the the FDI. See. I guess h, I guess.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
So the eighteen eighties played host to one of our
nations one of these depressions, and most of their neighbors
lose everything or almost everything during this time. Now the
Hunts don't, but Hash is still unhappy to still describes
him as a man driven to rage by his failure
to make more of a success of himself, and one
who took his frustrations out on his wife and children.
(21:17):
This creates a miserable situation for Ella, and she tries
to distract herself by obsessively caring for her youngest son, Juni.
Per the book Kingdom, Juny was her pet, her baby,
and he looked to her for refuge against this strange,
violent man who filled him with terror every time he
entered the house.
Speaker 4 (21:34):
He was almost a serial killer. He was almost a killer.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
That was like, he's got he gets a few of
those vibes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Now you know who else
is constantly filled with a terrifying violent rage. Robert the
sponsors of this podcast, and we're back talking about the
(22:01):
uncontrollable anger that drives our beautiful sponsors. That's what makes
them great. So things with his dad and the fact
that his mom is kind of dealing with being in
a terrible marriage by obsessing over her youngest son. This
comes to a head with Junie, who again is the
future richest man in the world, was seven years old.
Hash came back early from a trip out sheriffing or something,
(22:23):
and he stumbles on to what had become something of
a secret between Juni, his mother, and the world. Quote.
Standing on a milk box in front of her as
she worked the dough, the seven year old Juni had
his face upturned as he suckled her naked breast. Now,
Hash had heard stories from James, the oldest boy still
at home who was working the family farm, that Ella
Rose was nursing juny longer than was natural. Hash dis
(22:45):
missed those stories at the time, having preferred abolishing the
thought to facing something that seems shameful and repugnant to him.
So that's a bit odd. Seven's late, it's giving.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
It's like a bad kid from Game of Throws. It's
like he gotta get off the kitty in that point.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
Seven's a bit much. I don't want to like shame
people for nursing, but seven's a bit late. No, we
can we can agree, swee Rob.
Speaker 4 (23:12):
And you gotta get off your mom's tit like that
is diabolical.
Speaker 2 (23:17):
Yeah, So to say that Hash doesn't take finding this
out well would be putting it mindly mildly. He starts screaming.
He goes into a rage. The book doesn't say he's violent,
so I hope he wasn't, but I don't know. But
at the very least, he screams at his wife and
demands that she explained what the hell is going on?
(23:38):
And this is where we get one of the first
instances of Dusill's book, presenting us with an incredibly detailed
conversation from a moment he absolutely could not know about
in any real detail.
Speaker 4 (23:48):
Yeah, this is his head cannon. He's like.
Speaker 3 (23:49):
He's like, if I get put myself into the mind
of my of my hero baby Hash, baby Judy, what
is he thinking wiping the milk off his mouth listening
to this conversation.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
This has to just be based on what Hunt remembered
seventy years later and told his sons maybe about this happening. Uh,
but yeah, he claims that. Ella begs her husband not
to don't make more of this than it is. Hash
and Hash starts yelling even more after this, to which
she begs, not in front of Junie. Hash, Please, you'll
regret your words later on. I'll regret nothing except not
(24:22):
listening to my own instincts. I've been blind for years,
too busy to put my foot down when it mattered most.
Let this be the end of it, you hear, I'll
listen to no pale excuses. This has to end at once.
Hash's word was final. Ella Rose never exposed her bosom
to her youngest son again, whether out of fear of
her husband or out of her own shame was never
explained to young June. The boy came to hate and
resent his father all the more for taking from him
(24:44):
what was the most important thing he had known so far,
his intimacy with his mother. Hash tried to assume a
more active role in family affairs from that day on,
but the effort was a hollow one. His heart simply
was not in it. So young Ahl is not going
to pick up any good lessons about this. Number one,
This is kind of like a weird intimacy that's probably
bordering on unhealthy, if not has crossed the line into unhealthy.
(25:07):
But the fact that his dad then screams at him
and takes it away is even worse and makes like
this guy is gonna have so much miny family related issues,
and one thing he's going to learn is that families
are better off without husbands.
Speaker 3 (25:21):
Yeah, he's a Freudian dream like it's and it's full
blown oedipal complex like you get.
Speaker 4 (25:27):
He gets caught like almost like cuckholding his own father,
you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
That's obviously not how he sees it as a seven
year old, but his dad sure sees it that way.
Speaker 4 (25:37):
Absolutely and I guess, And just.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
The visual of him needing to be on top of
a crate to reach the bosom, it's like it's too much,
Like I'm not I'm not team hash, but I.
Speaker 4 (25:47):
Definitely think you need to put the kebash on that,
Like that is not okay.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
Yeah, it's it's good stuff. So whenever I'm starting my
research into a new bastard, I don't know a lot
about going into the project. There's this period of anxiety
where I'm like sinking research time into a guy, but
I don't know if they're interesting enough to like work
as an episode yet. And when I hit this story
was the moment I stopped worrying about hl Hunt. I
was like, oh, thank god, Okay, Okay, there's something to
(26:12):
sink cartoon into with this motherfucker. We're gonna get You
don't tend to see this story mentioned in most other
articles on the Guy, with a notable exception of one
of my major sources for this, which was a chapter
from Heather Hindershot's great book What's Fair on the Air,
which is about Cold War era right wing broadcasting. She
devotes a chapter to Hunt, and she writes this that
(26:35):
he had nursed at his mother's breast until the age
of seven, was a point of pride, further evidence of
his innate specialness. Normal rules didn't apply to him, he reasoned.
So that's based on He would talk about this moment
like journalists and to his kids, and he was proud
of it because again he develops pride in being different
from everybody else, right, not subject to the rules. That's
(26:55):
also a very important I'm the eldest boy.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
Yeah, yeah, early, sweet boy, I can suck up my
mom's hit as long as.
Speaker 2 (27:03):
I want, boy. Yeah. Now, yeah, there's a lot to
say about, like how good because kids need to feel
like they matter and like they're special, but not in
certain ways. Also like you need to feel like you
matter and you're special because everyone matters and a special
which is like what mister Rogers tried to get across
(27:25):
as opposed to No, no, I'm special as opposed to
everyone else.
Speaker 4 (27:32):
And that's why they want to defund PBS everyone. They
want you to be reliant to the breast milk.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
Only the breast milk. That's big breast milk is behind
all of this, Princess. I've been saying that for years.
Speaker 4 (27:43):
That's true.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
Yeah, the breast milk industrial complex is what really runs
this country, good lord. So the feeling of specialness and
young h l Hunt was stoked by the way his
sisters treated him. While his older brother James and his
dad both bullied him, his mom and the girls mothered
him with attention. In his biography, to Sill writes that
June's sisters teased him often enough about being Ella Rose's favorite,
(28:06):
but the teasing was good natured and playful, unlike James's
sneering and resentful taunting. The girls regarded Junie as their
own special pet as well as Ella Rose's. Right, so
that's probably not bad. You know, your sister's kind of
babying the youngest kid. But again, this is all going
to sort of feed into his I am a special
person complex, which isn't gonna be ideal for everyone. Hunt
(28:29):
also enjoyed a close relationship with his older brother Leonard,
who he idolized and who loved him back. Tusill is
one of the people who will argue that this homes
that his homeschooling education was quite good. Ella Rose teaches
her youngest son Greek, Latin, French, and German, and when
he starts reading at age three. It said that she
gives him issues of the newspaper so that he could
learn what was going on in the world. Now, again,
(28:50):
some of this has got to be myth making, but
to still claims that Hunt quote gained a reputation throughout
the region as a child genius, despite the fact that
he never attended the local school. Now what's odd about
this to me is the fact that Tusylvin adds his
entire education was received from his mother and from his
sister's readers, which he devoured when they came home from school.
So again, his sisters and brothers get to go to school. Yeah,
(29:14):
and it sounds like he doesn't because he's too smart
and his mom wants to homeschool him. Is at which
is really weird and different and also is going to
make him feel very special. I did look through Hunt's
FBI report which claims that and that there's a reason
why he's got an FBI report, and it includes claims
that Hunt was known in the areas being able to
(29:35):
memorize a page of pros in two readings by the
time he was in the fifth grade, and that that
was the end of his schooling. So that kind of
suggests he does go to a public school for a while,
but everyone else says he didn't. So I don't know
what the truth is.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
Weird is the truth?
Speaker 2 (29:52):
Weird is the truth? I think there might be because
a lot of the people who write about the end
he never went to school, he was homeschooled are like
weird right wing and libertaire sources because this guy becomes
a weird right wing billionaire. That may be the because
it doesn't sound as good to their kind of narrative
of like, well, he went to school until he was
in the fifth grade, at which point he was homeschooled
the rest.
Speaker 3 (30:11):
Of the way, right right, or adding that he was
homeschooled by his mother who continuously put her breast in
his face, right right?
Speaker 2 (30:19):
Yes, good, it makes less of a good case for homeschooling.
Speaker 4 (30:23):
Yeah, not not the triadwife ideal. I'm sure that they
want to promote.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
A mouth Yeah, home schooling. So the first way that
June exhibited his intellect in a major way to the
world was by getting really, really unbeatably good at card
games and other games of chance. This is kind of
the earliest happiness that he experiences and probably remembers which
is beating the piss out of his sisters and brothers
at various card games and being praised for it. So
(30:48):
this is going to teach him an important lesson. He's
never going to get over loving gambling. However, the fact
that he's so smart is not without its downsides. Per
the book, Kingdom, hash Hunt was not nearly so impressed
with his names mental agility as others were, and right
from the beginning, Young June had problems with James. You
think you're better than the rest of us, don't you,
James badgered him incessantly when they were alone. You think
(31:09):
you're smarter than we are. Now again to still relates
like a page long argument between him and his brother
that sounds more like a cheesy screenplay dialogue than a
real conversation. There's even a part where his big brother says,
you're a mama's pet. That's all you'll ever be. Just
like you just write that in you if you're a
hack screenwriter, And then you transition immediately to him like
as a young adult trying to get his foot in
(31:31):
the door at his first business or something right right,
It's like he.
Speaker 4 (31:34):
Would have loved young Sheldon.
Speaker 2 (31:36):
He would have loved young Sheldon. So as he grows
up in this account, he does everything he can to
be the opposite of a mama's boy. First off, he
gets swollen. He starts working out. I mean mainly he's
just doing like hard labor outdoors, but he gets really jacked.
He's a big guy. He's tall, and he is like
a bit large, muscular dude. Everyone seems to agree about that.
(31:58):
He becomes a skilled or wrider, even bareback, and a
skilled outdoorsman. He works with his brother in the family
business on the farm, and he proves his worth by
using his skill with numbers to benefit everybody and improve
the family business. After summarizing all this, too, So gives
us another absolutely made up claim. He was growing into
a handsome young man, the best looking of all of
(32:19):
his brothers. And he's still's gonna say a lot of
weird stuff about how sexy this guy is. We'll talk
about later. That's kind of a through line in his
other biographies. I don't know why it's a stand. To me,
he's a stand. He's the ultimate stan.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
He's like, he's so hot.
Speaker 4 (32:34):
Look at Yeah, this dude.
Speaker 2 (32:36):
Could have fucked.
Speaker 4 (32:39):
Now.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
None of you have photos of this person.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
Yeah, yeah, we've got some. You can look at some up,
So if wy, don't you try to find us a
younger one. I only found some. I should have included one.
Speaker 4 (32:49):
Yeah, let's see this.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
Hot I've only the photos. I've only seen her of
him when he's older.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
Yeah, I only found older ones. But I didn't look
as hard as I should have. I'll try to find Yeah.
None of this work earns him his father's approval, and
his older brother keeps hating him because once Juny proves himself,
James resents him for being the better businessman. Eventually, June's
constant frustration is alleviated by a miracle. The US declares
(33:16):
war on Spain in eighteen ninety eight and Jameson lists,
which gets his ass out of the home and gives
June some breathing room for the first time in his
young life. Well, the future richest man on Earth nears adolescence.
His father uses the by now considerable wealth and clout
that he'd amassed to start a small local bank, the
People State Bank. Weirdly, his oldest son, Robert, who had
(33:37):
moved out of the house by this point, starts a
separate bank to compete with his dad's bank, which says
a lot about the family dynamics that isn't spelled out
in this book. But you don't do that if you
have a good relationship with your dad, create a spite bank.
A spite bank, a bank just despite your father.
Speaker 3 (33:56):
It's so Kendall roy coated. It's like I just giving
a succession. I'm just kind of like he's like, I'm
the eldest boy. I'm going to make my own bank. Dad.
Speaker 2 (34:06):
It's a really petty succession because the town these banks
only serve the town they're in, and the town they're in,
Ramsey has six hundred people, and every member counts and
every way, Yeah, every member counts in the Spike bank. Yeah,
it's it's very funny to sell includes this quote. Hash
(34:26):
haat Little appreciated this unique form of incestuous capitalism, but
it was a great source of merriment among the neighbors.
Everyone's laughing about the spiite bank that his oldest made.
Speaker 3 (34:35):
Right.
Speaker 4 (34:36):
They're like, if you have a problem with one bank,
just like and I will go over to yourself.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
To your brothers, your son's shitty bank. Yeah. So not
long after this, his older brothers move out of the
house too, and favorite brother Leonard, heads out to the
Pacific Northwest to work as a logger. This seems to
have ignited a wanderlust and young hl Hunt a desire
to go out into the world and make something of himself. Previously,
he'd been content living at home and being doted on
(35:00):
by his sisters, But at age twelve, he runs away
from home for the first time, and he doesn't go far,
and the way that Tusil describes it, he's motivated less
to escape forever than just he wants to get away
for a couple of days and see a little bit
of the world before he comes back. He just kind
of wants to ramble. And you could kind of do
that as a twelve There's not like a CPS going
around to make sure everyone's twelve year olds aren't running
(35:21):
around right in the rails, like nobody cares in the
government at this point in time.
Speaker 3 (35:27):
And there's eight of them, so really you don't even
like if you lose one, you got seven other.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
You lose one, you got plenty of kids left. Yeah,
he's away a couple of nights, but he comes back
changed and from this point on, over the next four years.
He's going to leave home regularly every couple of months
to explore, and he lives a very peter Pan style existence.
In those days two Sill Rights, he had discovered that
many other young vagabonds were on the road, boys and
girls alike whose families were too poor to feed them
(35:52):
properly at home. On occasion, he had hooked up with
a gang of them and slept in teenage hobojungles around
open campfires.
Speaker 4 (36:00):
That does sound kind of awesome. I would read about that.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
That sounds pretty cool and also kind of like a
special hell. But you know, it could be either. I'm
imagining it as being exactly like the movie Hook, though,
I'll be honest with you, like right down to that
brightly colored imaginary food stuff that they throw at each other.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
I have found a young a young hl image.
Speaker 2 (36:21):
Oh good, good, good. You think about that, I'm gonna
think about Rufio getting stabbed.
Speaker 4 (36:26):
I was literally like, what if he looks like young
Jacob ALRDI not as.
Speaker 2 (36:31):
Not as much, but yeah, he's a big guy. You
could see he's like very broad shoulders. Yeah, you know,
he's an eighth.
Speaker 4 (36:38):
The looks Maxers would approve of him.
Speaker 2 (36:39):
I think, h Yeah, he's a reasonably good looking guy. Yeah,
certainly not a bad looking guy. Nice. Chan just kind
of looks like a big white guy.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
Gotta be honest, he just looks like a guy.
Speaker 2 (36:51):
He looks like a big white guy. He's not like
a movie star for sure, but he's real big.
Speaker 3 (36:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:57):
In those days, if you were huge, it just said like, wow,
you're malnourished and dying. Let's make kids.
Speaker 4 (37:02):
You know. It's like George Washington, like, of course he
was going to be president. He was six four.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
He was six four. Not a lot of people got
to be that big back then. He had to be
eating a lot of milk and meat when you were
a kid. Yeah. So when he's sixteen, June leaves the
house for good. He is six feet tall now, and
as we just saw in the picture, pretty big. He's
big enough nobody questions that he's like not old enough
(37:29):
to be doing whatever he's doing. By the time he's sixteen,
he looks enough like an adult that people treat him
like one. He leaves in the spring of nineteen oh five,
and he first hit Saint Louis, where he gets a
job on a railroad. He takes odd jobs to get
from Kansas to Colorado, and then he heads up towards Utah,
where he gets a gig watching a car load of
sheep on a train ride to California. As soon as
he gets to California, he falls in love with it,
(37:51):
like all sensible people do. Although being a libertarian, to
still has to write this in the grossest way that
he can. He found California much to his liking, especially
the lust blonde beauties who appeared as plentiful as the
succulent fruit that grew in this golden, sun soaked land.
And no, I gotta tell you this is based on
(38:11):
what Tusill thought of California in the eighties. In nineteen
oh five, California isn't like the center of like a massive,
world renowned entertainment industry. It's like a place some people
live in are farming and stuff.
Speaker 3 (38:26):
Like.
Speaker 2 (38:26):
The weather's famously good, but it's not famous for its
blonde beauties. It's just famous as there's when the dust
bowl hits in a few decades, it doesn't get hurt
as badly as everywhere else. Like people are thinking of
California and nineteen oh five in those terms, that's that's
that's some shit that Tusill is thinking about. Also, I
(38:48):
got to read these next couple of sentences to you.
This is this is too Sol describing Hunt after he
gets to California.
Speaker 4 (38:53):
Spoiler alert, Oh gosh.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
With his good height and his hard solid body, his
deep set blue eyes and rugged looks, he had little
trouble in attracting more than his share of young females.
His sexuality was strong and developing, and he exuded an
aura of raw animal magnetism.
Speaker 1 (39:13):
Okay, with his good height in his hard solid body.
Speaker 2 (39:18):
Who told you that, Jerome to sil, who told you
about his hard, hot body and his animal magnetism? Where'd
you get that? Jerome is raw?
Speaker 4 (39:28):
Did you?
Speaker 2 (39:30):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (39:30):
It's the home is just like just just just blow it. Okay.
Speaker 2 (39:35):
He was dead by this point.
Speaker 4 (39:37):
So, but I mean, don't let that limit you.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
Clearly don't Wow, Wow, Princess Weeks. Don't let that limit you.
Speaker 4 (39:43):
That's a dream, dream big, dream.
Speaker 2 (39:46):
Big, dream big and weird. So I should probably say
a little more about too Sill here in the late
nineteen seventies, after writing that book about iron Rand and
failing to become the mayor or the governor, I forget
which he grew dissolute with libertarianism as a political tendency.
He'd also long since broken with iron Rand over a
number of things that he disagreed with her about. He
(40:07):
gives up political rabble rousing and becomes a stockbroker and
eventually a financial writer. In the nineteen eighties he started
writing books on investing, and then he launched a series
of biographies. Kingdom is one of them. Another, written in
nineteen eighty five, was Trump, The Saga of America's most
powerful real estate baron. This is the first published biography
of our current president that track I didn't know that
(40:30):
that makes sense heard of the New York I'm going
to quote from the New York Times here denied access
to his subject, members of his family, and most of
his associates. Mister Tussill relied heavily on newspaper and magazine
accounts to produce what Michael Stern, writing in The New
York Times Book Review, called a g whizzard of a
biography that points a key to mister Trump's career his
ability to turn political friendships, tax abatements, and government loans
(40:53):
into opportunities for profit, Which does sound like an accurate
descriptive kind of how he made his money. But also
it shows like that's kind of his sources. He found
some newspapers and magazine accounts. Maybe he talked to a
couple guys about Hunt who knew him. But a lot
of this is just him kind of filling into blanks
to make this exciting. And I know I'm spending way
(41:14):
longer in these episodes about Hunt talking about his biographer
than I should. But everything I find out about Jerome
Tussol kind of drives me crazy. His other I look
to do his bibliography and his other books. His most
famous book, one of them is he wrote a history
of black soldiers in the Spanish American War. That's like
super anti Teddy Roosevelt, and it's apparently a pretty good book.
He's not like a crypto fascist or anything. But when
(41:37):
I saw that he made a Trump biography, I got this,
like I decided to look into that a little bit,
and I just started doing some word surges because I
was like, does he is this weird? Him calling a
Hunt hod a lot? Is that like a pattern in
his books. I'm going to read you, yes, Yes, Princess,
it is. Here's a paragraph from his book on Trump.
(41:59):
Fred Trump was still tall, and that's our president's dad.
Fred Trump was still tall and slim at sixty seven,
with a full head of dark, graying hair, handsome in
a nineteen forties movie star way, sporting a swept back
pompadour and a dark, pencil thin mustache. Indeed, he looked
as though he might have stepped out of an old
movie starring Barbara Stanwicker Joan Crawford, the mysterious charmer, faintly dangerous.
(42:21):
Donald as tall as Fred, both men standing a couple
of inches over six feet, handsome, clean shaven, with only
a hint of a poudy sneer crossing his lips.
Speaker 1 (42:30):
I've seen what this man looked like in many phases
of his life.
Speaker 4 (42:33):
He is none of that.
Speaker 3 (42:35):
I know.
Speaker 2 (42:35):
He is not going to show you a picture of
these two next to each other from this time. He's
the t F. He's d F DTF Trump's dad, And
here's Trump's dad in nineteen sixty nine. He does not
look like a sexy movie star, but he does want.
Speaker 4 (42:51):
The Eiffel Tower. That Trump Tower guys.
Speaker 2 (42:54):
He dan it does, and he kind of he looks
sort of like if Walt Disney had projeer Rha, like
his face is not smooth, looking like, he's not handsome.
It's weird way to describe Fred Trump. Yeah, a lot
of forehead, forehead, a lot of forehead, very red.
Speaker 4 (43:16):
Very red.
Speaker 3 (43:16):
Yeah, he loves I think he just loves money so
much that it makes whatever man around him like the
hottest guy.
Speaker 1 (43:23):
Not that that is not what we call a Babraham Lincoln.
Speaker 3 (43:27):
That is.
Speaker 2 (43:28):
I have to read a lot of biographies, very and
even autobiographies, you know, for these this this show I do.
I've never run into a guy who talks about how
hot his subjects are this often. It's really, it's really, yeah,
it's truly.
Speaker 3 (43:43):
Now what that's Olivia Newsy's like in Spoboor She's like,
that's the text.
Speaker 2 (43:48):
Yeah, she's there. It's great reference. So I did. I
kept digging because I wanted to see how far down
the rabbit hole this went. I found an archived copy
of two Sells biography of Rupert Murdoch from nineteen eighty nine,
because of course he wrote the Murdox biography that said,
I didn't find any returns for handsome or any related terms.
I didn't read through the book, so maybe he just
(44:09):
used different words to talk about murder being hot anyway,
This is a pointless diversion, but I had to do it.
Sorry you.
Speaker 3 (44:17):
It's now I'm imagining like him doing biographies of like Elizabeth.
Speaker 4 (44:22):
Holmes, and.
Speaker 2 (44:24):
There's a lot of a lot of pages talking about
how Turtleneck fed her Jerome. Do we need to edit
maybe some of this down.
Speaker 4 (44:32):
That's what the people want. They're here, they're here for
my thirst straps.
Speaker 2 (44:35):
You know who else has a crush on Elizabeth Holmes
those products this podcast? Sorry, that's right, that's right, that's right.
We're back. So let's talk about La hl Hunt.
Speaker 1 (44:54):
Some more about myself for that one.
Speaker 4 (44:57):
I'm so sorry.
Speaker 2 (44:59):
Yeah you should. Sorry, Sophie. I'm not happy. No one's happy.
Speaker 4 (45:04):
I'm sorry, No one's happy.
Speaker 2 (45:06):
Accept the subject of our episodes, hl Hunt, who is
happy because he's moved to San Francisco by this point
in the story of the early nineteen hundreds, and he
falls into a happy life gambling with sailors and prostitutes
and other assorted people living on the margins of the world.
He finds out that he's really good at poker and
that he can win money basically every time he plays
(45:27):
to Sill chalks U up to his photographic memory. In essence,
Hunt is someone whose brain just automatically starts card counting,
like he doesn't even know what he's doing, right, but
that's just how he his head works, and so he
just always wins when he's playing poker. Hunt is able
to live comfortably in a fleabag motel. Is a card shark.
And you know, after some period of months of this,
(45:49):
to Sill treats us to another deeply uncomfortable paragraph about Hunt,
like he invites this prostitute into his room and he's
so good at sex that she falls in love with him,
Like he wins the heart of a prostitute for being
really good at fucking.
Speaker 4 (46:05):
Lord, yeah, stop, it.
Speaker 2 (46:07):
Is great. According to this account, this prostitute that he's
with finds out that the hotel he's staying in he
tells her, and she's like, oh no, they drug young
men there and like shanghai them to force them to
work on boats somewhere, which is the thing that happened
in that period of time. And he's like, and they're
about to do it tomorrow night or something like that,
so we have to flee town. And he winds up
(46:28):
like leaving fucking San Francisco for Reno, and he tries
out for a minor league baseball team but that doesn't
pan out. But while he's away, there's a horrible quake
in San Francisco and the hotel that he'd been staying
and collapses. So June becomes convinced as a result of
this that he's someone special and that the universe has
marked him out for a purpose. All of this is
just really reinforced that he is the special boy of history, right,
(46:51):
That's how this man grows up feeling.
Speaker 1 (46:53):
Yeah, and you know, like I said, he didn't have
the making of a.
Speaker 2 (46:58):
Varsity ye, yeah, not have the makings of a varsity athlete.
Speaker 4 (47:02):
No, Princess and I are just.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
Referencing every single HBO show.
Speaker 4 (47:07):
Exactly or just like we're just throwing out there.
Speaker 1 (47:11):
It's good also, audience, Robert's never seen the Sopranos, and
I'm very upset about it.
Speaker 2 (47:16):
Yeah, that's not my Yeah, I don't know. The anti
Italian discrimination, Sophie, that's my issue with the Sopranos. You know,
my people didn't work a very very hard to become
famous for making hand gestures and running buca to Beppo
for you to bring us down by associating us with
the mafia. And yes, I did have multiple family members
who were involved in organized crime, but that's still a
(47:39):
bad stereotype, even though a lot of Italians do have
a family history in Baltimore.
Speaker 1 (47:46):
Wow, I think you would fucking love this.
Speaker 4 (47:49):
It's an amazing show.
Speaker 3 (47:51):
Like, Okay, the amount of racism that I have that,
I'm like, but I love Tony Soprano.
Speaker 4 (47:55):
I was like, listen, I get it. It's fine. I
forgive him because he wants.
Speaker 2 (47:59):
To fight the f Yeah, by the FBI. He wants
to Hey, so so did one of my cousins. It
didn't then well for him. The gun that killed him
sold at auction a few years ago for like fifty
grand or something. Nice. Yeah, yeah, I feel like I
should own that. Actually kind of bumped me out.
Speaker 4 (48:21):
You're just.
Speaker 2 (48:22):
Killed my cousin.
Speaker 1 (48:23):
Yeah, I do too, But I wouldn't approve of you
spending that much on a family heirloom.
Speaker 2 (48:28):
No, no, no, no, it's that's why I didn't you
put it on the auction. But I was, I was like,
it's fucked up for anyone else to own the gun
that killed my cousin. It's fucked up to sell a
gun and be like, this is the gun that killed
this guy, but fifty is wild. Yeah, that's all happening
at around this time. I forget how exactly how much
it's sold for. It was a crazy amount. So anyway,
(48:51):
I don't know how much credence to give the whole
I was so good at sex that like a magical
prostitute saved my life by helping me escape an earthquake.
Thing that's not I can believe that, Like he left
a hotel in San Francisco and not long after there
was an earthquake, because that earthquake did happen, and a
lot of stuff was destroyed by it, and a lot
of people had the experience of a week or two earlier,
(49:13):
I was in the hotel that collapsed. Tons of people
would have had a story like that. So it's very possible.
And it's just a thing that happened to hundreds and
hundreds of people because that's how hotels work. And he
takes from this, I am special and marked out for greatness. Right,
So one of the other things that we see in Hunt,
you know, in the early days, he has this growing
(49:34):
belief that he's special, and he also has a fundamental
distrust of his fellow man. Not long after all of
this Brujaja with San Francisco and trying out for baseball
and Reno, he's like, Gozies, I think he's in Arizona.
He's in the Southwest. He's working like with a bunch
of day laborers, and there's like white day laborers, and
there's a group of Mexican day laborers and they have
separate camps because it's the nineteen it's like nineteen o
(49:57):
six or something that's a little seven. And he he
goes over along with some of the other white workers
to play cards with the Mexican laborers one night, and
Hunt just wins everything. He takes all of these Mexican
guys money, which winds up to like four grand everything
they have in the world. And so the other white dudes.
The longer he wins, they start leaving to go back
(50:18):
to their camp because they're like, hey, hey man, or
hey Hunt, maybe you want to go. You probably don't
want to take all these guys' money. This seems like
it could get dangerous, so they leave, but Hunt does it.
He can't stop playing cards when he's playing cards, so
he doesn't stop until he's taken all of their money,
at which point he realizes all of his friends are
gone and he gets like scared, and he basically takes
(50:39):
the money and runs off into the bushes because he
feels like he has to hide from the Mexicans, even
though as far as we know, they never go after
him or try to hurt him. All of the evidence
suggests they took their loss fine and they didn't like
threaten him. He just is sure that because they're Mexicans,
they're going to try to kill him to get their
money back, So he like hides in the bushes, and
then he tries to, like, in the middle of the
(51:00):
night hike back to the camp with his friends. But
when he gets back there, he's like, wait a second,
how well do I really know these guys. They're definitely
going to rob me. They know I have all this money,
they might kill me. So he has a panic attack
and he like hides and camps out in the woods
that night, and then like goes just leaves quits the
job and hikes off into another town, basically because he
(51:20):
doesn't want to be near where anyone knows that he's
won this money. Quote from Tusill's book, how could he
trust these brawny strangers who knew he had made a
killing that night? What was to stop two or three
of them from jumping him in his bunk, leaving him
with a knife between his ribs, and slipping off with
his winnings. So you've heard of being the most special boy, right,
there's this deep distrust of other people that again, at
(51:44):
no point, and he so just writes this like, of
course he was reasonable to fear that these Mexicans were
going to kill him, But at no point is there
any evidence that they threaten his life at all. I
do want to emphasize that this is all entirely something
he decides. So he makes his way to South Dakota,
where he meets who, to Sill's book, describes this as
(52:04):
the best friend he's going to have in his entire life,
A dude named Steve, no last name provided now to
still insists that this is the best, the c closest.
Speaker 4 (52:17):
Man.
Speaker 1 (52:17):
We don't even need.
Speaker 2 (52:18):
Last day if we're that close.
Speaker 4 (52:20):
That is a cliche of like boy friendships of life?
Was his last name?
Speaker 1 (52:23):
I don't know Steve one name he thinks he's fucking
Zendaya or some shit.
Speaker 2 (52:28):
What's happening right, fucking Steve, see I kind of sink.
Steve Hunt probably tells his kids later in life that
this guy was his best friend ever, because I don't
know otherwise why t still would insist it. But they
only know each other for like a few days, maybe
a few weeks, and the main thing, the only story
we get about their marvelous friendship is that one night
Hunt beats Steve at cards and takes all of his money,
(52:50):
which is like two hundred and sixty bucks, and he
feels bad about it, so he's like, hey, man, you
don't have to pay me back, and Steve is like, no,
you know, I made a promise. You know, this is
a this is a bond I owe you, and I'm
gonna pay you. You know, don't think anything about it.
And then Steve sits down and has like the fucking
ben Affleck conversation with his friend where he's like, you
need to leave here. You got to go to college.
You're too smart to keep you know, working like this, right,
(53:13):
And so Hunt is like, you know what, You're right, Steve,
and he leaves off to go to college. And they
never see each other again. And that is the greatest
friendship of his entire life.
Speaker 4 (53:23):
God, he invented a father figure just so he could
go to school.
Speaker 2 (53:26):
A man insisted on paying him and then did a
goodwill Hunting to him his best friend Steve. They knew
each other for days, friend Steve never met again.
Speaker 1 (53:40):
Steve.
Speaker 2 (53:42):
Yeah. So now age seventeen, Steve or not Steve Hunt
briefly attends college. Yeah, yeah, he's seventeen. He goes to Valpereiso,
which is known as the poor Man's Harvard, and he
robs his fellow students they're blind at card games, and
then dips after like a s. He never gets a degree.
He just kind of takes everyone's money and then leaves.
(54:05):
He goes home. He's around eighteen now when he finally
makes his way back home for the first time since
he'd left, and he stays at home for a while,
but then he sets out again with his brother Leonard.
This time they go out to like work in the
Northwest together and make money. But Lynyard gets sick with tuberculosis,
you know, and pretty soon he can't friend of the
(54:26):
pod tuberculosis and he can't keep up with his brother,
and he has another. He still has another, like heartfelt car,
you know, Leonard is liked his brother. Look, you got
to go on without me. I'm too slow. Don't let
me stop you from achieving greatness, basically, And so Hunt
goes up to Canada, right, And he's working in Canada
in nineteen ten when he gets a telegram that his
(54:47):
brother is has just died. Lenyard has died, you know,
of his tuberculosis. So Hunt heads home for the funeral,
and he stays at home for a few months. And
while he's there, his dad dies too. Right, So point
hl Hunt is like eighteen nineteen, you know, he's no
longer going by junior. And after his dad dies, he
inherits five thousand dollars. He doesn't get the land. Someone
(55:09):
else gets the land because he's not living at home.
But he gets like a nest egg of money and
he takes this and he adds it to the money
that he's saved up it from working as a card shark,
and he decides, I'm gonna stop wandering. I'm gonna make
real money. And in order to do that, I need
to like invest in something, and I want to start
a farm. Right, His Dad had always talked about how
(55:29):
much better the soil was down in the South, and
how oh, if only we lived in Arkansas then we'd
really be doing well, you know as farmers. So Hunt
moves down south to Arkansas near the end of nineteen eleven,
and he's gonna buy a farm and he's going to
invest in, you know, the set next part of his life,
and we will get to that and what happens later
(55:49):
and how he becomes the richest man on earth in
part two, Princess, how you feeling?
Speaker 3 (55:55):
I am excited to find out about this man whose
family was like, let's move to the north.
Speaker 4 (56:00):
Oh wait, actually I regret that.
Speaker 2 (56:01):
Let's go back yep, Princess.
Speaker 1 (56:04):
Do you have anything you want to plug real quick? Oh?
Speaker 3 (56:08):
Yeah, I have a YouTube channel, Princess Weeks. I talk
about pop culture, sci fi, all the good stuff. And yeah,
I'm just happy to be here. This is really interesting.
I love this really really hot millionaire in training.
Speaker 2 (56:25):
Yes, sexy millionaire narcissist. Yeah, so hot.
Speaker 4 (56:29):
His brother's like, no, you're just keep going, just keep going, don't.
Speaker 2 (56:33):
Keep going, keep going. You're too hot. Don't don't be
slowed down by my my Conveniently narratively convenient. Yeah wow, uh.
Speaker 1 (56:44):
Will be back with part two.
Speaker 2 (56:49):
All right, everybody go to help. I love you, Bye bye.
Speaker 1 (56:57):
Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media.
From more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (57:05):
App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1 (57:09):
Full video episodes that Behind the Bastards are now streaming
on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Kit remind me
of Netflix. You don't miss an episode. For clips in
our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube
channel YouTube dot com slash at Behind the Bastards. We
love about forty percent of you, statistically speaking,
Behind the Bastards News
Host
Robert Evans
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