Episode 407: The Vine Succumbs

We end our story about Brotherhood of New Life, the esoteric Christian cult run by Thomas Lake Harris. In this part we cover how Nagasawa Kanaye starts to rise in prominence and changes the world of wine. While not a perfect man his legacy can at least be remembered. Also if you've got any of that wine we would not mind sharing it with you. Just saying.

Thanks for listening and remember to like, rate, review, and email us at: [e-mail] or tweet us at @C3Podcast. We have some of our sources for research here: http://tinyurl.com/CristinaSources

Also check out our Patreon: www.patreon.com/cultscryptidsconspiracies. Thank you to T.J. Shirley for our theme

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:28):
When did you When did you get in our house?

Speaker 2 (00:30):
Are we starting? We're starting okay as usually, Chelsea says, Hey, Christina,
I was about to but she took a deep breath
inside instead, So we were sitting in silence and mount
of socided. Hey, how's it going you guys.

Speaker 1 (00:43):
I'm doing great.

Speaker 2 (00:44):
Not don't have COVID rifle, very pleased about that. We
went mal and I went my family does like a
family reunion every year, and everyone was fine. And then
the next morning my mom texts me and is like,
I tested positive.

Speaker 3 (01:01):
And I was like, what the fuck? Because she was
fine all weekend. It happened and then she woke up
with a fever.

Speaker 1 (01:08):
We're pretty sure she was subjected. I suspect she was
subjected to it before the event even happened. Yeah, so
I don't. I mean, I hope no one else got sick,
But so.

Speaker 2 (01:17):
No one else has gotten sick, which is good. Crazy,
it may have been that she wasn't shedding the virus
at that point, like she wasn't contagious. While you guys
are interacting with your possibly, who is to say we're fine?

Speaker 1 (01:28):
Also, I funny, I've needed I need so much teethcare
teeth care is expensive. Brush your teeth, everybody.

Speaker 2 (01:34):
Teeth care is expensive. Why do people think that teeth
are the luxury bones? What's up? What I mean? Only
insurance thinks that in the sense that like, tooth stuff
is not covered by the same way, in the same
way by insurance neither, and like it's super expensive. And
so it's like all of your bones are required and
necessary except for the teeth. Those are the luxury bones,

(01:56):
I mean, and you don't have a right to them
being good.

Speaker 1 (01:58):
I guess again, the medical care system profits off us
being sick.

Speaker 2 (02:04):
That is true.

Speaker 3 (02:05):
Yeah, And the thing is that sucks because it's like
with medical stuff you can hit a deductible, and with
teeth stuff, apparently that's not a thing.

Speaker 2 (02:14):
I guess. I don't know.

Speaker 3 (02:15):
It's just we should have hit something, I feel like
by now with all of mouse teeth stuff, and it
hasn't happened, so I don't know if it ever will.

Speaker 1 (02:22):
Yeah, I'm not exactly clear, but I still have all
of my.

Speaker 2 (02:25):
Teeth, even the ones that you don't necessarily want.

Speaker 1 (02:28):
Even well I'm missing.

Speaker 2 (02:30):
I guess he's missing two wisdom teeth.

Speaker 1 (02:32):
But I don't count this as teeth.

Speaker 2 (02:34):
What do you count them ass?

Speaker 1 (02:35):
I mean, okay, they are teeth. Yeah, I'm not going
to count them as mine. I don't want them. I
don't need them, so I don't care.

Speaker 2 (02:40):
But they still have them. They are yours.

Speaker 1 (02:42):
I'm equipped with them against my will.

Speaker 2 (02:43):
They are yours because I have to afford your body
grewed them.

Speaker 1 (02:47):
God damn it. I didn't ask for that.

Speaker 2 (02:50):
We don't ask for anything that's true. That is not
our way. My mom didn't have any of her wisdom teeth,
which is unfair. I had three. I had to get
all of mine taken out when I was sixteen years old,
and it was relatively fine. My sister, the freak, got
hers growing in sideways, so she need to get them removed.
Just gonna walk in here. Before we started recording, they

(03:10):
were like, oh, that treat it's relatively quiet. It's not
as bad as the squeaky elephant toy that Minna has.
And I'm like, that is so what are you? Both
of you willfully not remember it how loud Midna is
with her treats. She just throws it on the floor,
she crunches it, she throws it on the floor and

(03:30):
it just stops stick trees.

Speaker 3 (03:33):
Just like she went to the bedroom and then concha
loud anything but not picked up in the microphone, but
came over here and then just slammed it on the floor,
picked it up and went back in the bedroom.

Speaker 2 (03:43):
Correct. She has her own agenda, and it's to be
a nuisance. Yes, a lovely little nuisance.

Speaker 1 (03:49):
I've raised her well, So.

Speaker 2 (03:50):
He is how you are? Yeah, we played D and
D yesterday and Mal has a tendency to make characters
that I know he's doing this on purpose, where he's like,
I'm gonna make my friends a little. The thing is
you make characters what that's not the case, and then
you make a lot of characters where it is. And
I'm like, I just this does feel purposeful.

Speaker 1 (04:12):
I just really enjoy bleeding through my characters in Danie.
Just being entirely helpful.

Speaker 2 (04:20):
You mean unhelpful, You mean incredibly unhelpful, starting a plague
in a city unhelpful. That was it wasn't even a thing.
I'm not even talking about shredder. Shredder was fine. Shredder
is not a problem.

Speaker 1 (04:32):
My barbary and what did nothing wrong?

Speaker 2 (04:34):
That's that's not here. Welcome everyone to cults, cryptids and
Mal's a menace has made I was because there's just
it's just bickering. Yeah, it's just it's just friendly bickering.
It's me in character in D and D threatening to
kill Mal multiple.

Speaker 1 (04:50):
Times, multiple times, multiple times. That's fair and out of Dane.
We are really close, great love. We're still threatened to
kill your close friends. I mean, you don't mean it,
but you do say it. I don't.

Speaker 2 (05:02):
I don't threaten to kill my friends, not outside of game.
I have.

Speaker 1 (05:07):
If I'm playing a game, I will. I will sometimes
be like, how dare you?

Speaker 2 (05:11):
I have threatened to end someone's bloodline before. It's usually
was laughing. I say like, I'm gonna end your bloodline.

Speaker 1 (05:17):
Just manca laughing.

Speaker 3 (05:20):
I've definitely told Corey to go fuck herself because not
the same, not because of the things that she subjects
us to.

Speaker 2 (05:27):
That's not that's not the same as threatening to murder.

Speaker 1 (05:30):
Yeah, that's that's.

Speaker 2 (05:31):
Basically names that I will kill you. That there, there,
there you go. But that's not an actual threat. We
all know it's a goofy. We all know it's a
fun little.

Speaker 3 (05:39):
Goof And I've also said I will I will fight
you in the Dny's parking lot, but that's also not necessarily.

Speaker 1 (05:43):
To the death. Yeah, I feel like, okay, when we
talk about arenas of combat, I feel like the Danny's
park a lot, it's implied sudden death.

Speaker 2 (05:51):
To me, it's implied that if it doesn't, if the
fight doesn't kill you, the tetanus will. That's what that
sounds like to me.

Speaker 3 (06:00):
Senters, we say Denny's parking lot because we don't have
waffle house here.

Speaker 2 (06:04):
I think there's waffle house. No waffle house in California.

Speaker 1 (06:07):
Oh well, there is a place that's there's chicken and waffles.
That's a different thing. That's a different thing.

Speaker 2 (06:12):
That's a completely different thing. And the Denny's parking lot
is not the same as as just a waffle house
because the waffle house is a different sort of liminal space.
That's true, they're both liminal spaces, but they are not
the same kind. But I do love that American gamers
were like telling the the creator of Mortal, I think
it was Mortal No Street Fighter, basically saying you need

(06:34):
to add a waffle house arena, and they were like,
I don't know what that is, and I just looked
it up and are you guys. Okay, I see that
frequently when it's like one, uh, there was a thing
that was going around where it was like the a
single British man versus a single American man who would win,
and everyone being like arguing over why certain people it's like, oh, well,

(06:55):
have you ever It's like a British rug beer would
destroy an American and everyone's like a single waffle house
employee versus anyone in the country of England. And that's
usually what the default is, which is that's our lore
and our history at a single American retail employee. I
don't know, man, they don't let us sit in America.

(07:15):
You can sit in other countries. I have worked retail,
and I have worked with some retail employees. I worked
Apple retail. I feel like I could easily annihilate. I
feel like they're so annihilatable.

Speaker 1 (07:28):
Let's move on from the sadness of retail.

Speaker 2 (07:31):
That's because they don't have the will to live.

Speaker 1 (07:33):
Okay, Okay, Like I said, let's move on from the
sadness of retail.

Speaker 2 (07:36):
How do we get here? Welcome everyone to Cults, Cryptis
and Conspiracies, the podcast where we talk about cult, scryptids,
and conspiracies. I feel like waffle House works in that.
Another conspiracy is are now and Chelsea doing this on
purpose when they give their dog their treats and then
they let her just be really loud and trying to
keep her distracted because otherwise she just wants to jump
on your lap.

Speaker 1 (07:57):
That's the thing that is where this comes from. I'm
just like, I wisht.

Speaker 3 (08:00):
It's like, what's the what's the better of the two options.
Is it Midna just having her treat and being loud
with it, or having to constantly stop the podcast because
you're being like, Midna, get down.

Speaker 1 (08:10):
Here's the thing she's not allowed when we're not recording.

Speaker 2 (08:14):
So she's saying she's doing it on purpose.

Speaker 1 (08:16):
I think this.

Speaker 2 (08:17):
Do you think that your dog is being delicious on purpose?
I think that she smacks her toy, not even a toy,
her treat routinely against the floor.

Speaker 4 (08:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (08:25):
No, I do think she actually look at she's showing up.

Speaker 2 (08:28):
She's literally like flinging it around.

Speaker 1 (08:31):
She throws it's so loud.

Speaker 2 (08:32):
Wait, wait, just watch, just listen. There it is there,
it is there, it is. I don't know if that
picked up on the microphone, but I did.

Speaker 1 (08:42):
I'll make sure it does this time. Normally I do
my best to try to get rid of it. Of
course I can't always get all of them, but she's
a menace.

Speaker 2 (08:49):
And conspiracies. We talk about those three things as well
as whatever else we feel like.

Speaker 5 (08:54):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (08:55):
It often just becomes us saying like, hey, here's a
weird history story that I didn't know about. Now I
want to talk. I think you need to know about it,
and I think you need to know about it. Well,
here's a weird concept I warned about, or a strange
phenomenon I warned about, and now I'm going to subject
it to you, my friends.

Speaker 1 (09:07):
Yes, Yes, because learning is good.

Speaker 2 (09:09):
Learning is fine. Before we get to the meat of
the podcast, we have a segment that we like to
call the bummers will sometimes.

Speaker 1 (09:18):
We don't actually have a segment. We have a thing
that sometimes happens. I don't know if i'd call it.

Speaker 2 (09:22):
This is a segment. A segment doesn't have to be
every time. No, it can be a recurring segment, but
it doesn't have to be a constant segment. That's why
it was called the sometimes because it was supposed to
only be sometimes, and then it was always, and then
you and I sat Chelsea down, were like, we need
it to be just sometimes.

Speaker 1 (09:38):
To get to we just sometimes.

Speaker 3 (09:40):
Everyone knows that I'm obsessed with documentaries. I love watching them.
They're very fun. There is a new documentary on Netflix
about No. I can't remember it, but it's Oh.

Speaker 1 (09:50):
I was watching this over Chelsea's shoulder. It's like four.

Speaker 2 (09:53):
Amy Bradley is missing. I have seen it, yes, yes, yeah,
I really want to see the documentary. I watched it.
Mal wants to watch now.

Speaker 3 (10:00):
I feel like we touched on Amy Bradley in the
episode I did about cruise ships, because I did. I
did talk about I remember I definitely talked about the
Disney Cruise employee that disappeared. But I thought I touched
on Amy Bradley because her story is fucking wild. And
the thing is like, it's three episodes on Netflix and
Mal's like, isn't it four?

Speaker 2 (10:22):
It might be four?

Speaker 3 (10:23):
But Mal is like, so you didn't do a whole
episode on her, and I'm like, no, she was just
kind of bunched in with all the other cruise ship disappearances.

Speaker 1 (10:29):
There's so much more after the cruise ship.

Speaker 3 (10:31):
There is so much more than I was aware, and
I didn't even realize that, Like, there have been updates
since the podcast started, and I didn't realize that because.

Speaker 2 (10:39):
The thing is, you did the cruise ship episode relatively early,
and I think Mal was going to say that he
will insert that episode here.

Speaker 4 (10:44):
Yeah, and that would be episode ninety six.

Speaker 2 (10:47):
And that was relatively considering we're it like the in
the four hundreds now of episodes. That was quite early
in the podcast run that you talked about why you're
afraid of cruise ships.

Speaker 3 (10:58):
But I didn't realize just how because it's like the
Amy Bradley thing. First of all, I didn't, like, I
knew some of this stuff. I didn't realize kind of
how spread out that information was when I did it,
because she disappeared ninety eight, and I knew about the
photos that they found, and I didn't realize that happened
in like two thousand and five, and I didn't realize

(11:19):
just how many appearances, how many people had come forward
since she disappeared, being like, no, I saw.

Speaker 4 (11:26):
Her as crypton.

Speaker 2 (11:27):
What I'm interested in is how many of our podcast
topics overlap with Doctor Phil Oh. God, yeah, that's a weird.
That's a weird reoccurring thing. That is because that Amy
Bradley's fan. We also appeared on Doctor Phil as a
way of like getting their story out there to a
wider audience when the pictures came in in two thousand
and five, because Doctor Phil was a hit show on

(11:50):
network television, so they were trying to be they were
trying to meet reach as many people as possible.

Speaker 1 (11:54):
And it did. I mean it did.

Speaker 2 (11:55):
Yeah, but that has that's been a reoccurring thing like
the And then immediately comes to mind is love is one,
which that's shirt that episode. Now insert that episode here.

Speaker 4 (12:05):
And that would be episode two o seven.

Speaker 2 (12:07):
Where the leader's family also appeared on Doctor Phil. And
I'm just like, how often you are obviously not the
historical ones so much, but the more modern ones, how
many of them intersect with Doctor Phil. Want to make
a chart?

Speaker 1 (12:21):
What if Doctor Phil? I mean I know that Doctor
Phil stills on air, right.

Speaker 3 (12:26):
Yes, I think he's not on network television. I think
he's doing his own thing, which also involves for some
reason writing along with ice agents.

Speaker 2 (12:35):
Well, I mean he's a dick.

Speaker 1 (12:37):
Yeah, yeah, No, Doctor feels terrible, but he's terrible. Huh.

Speaker 3 (12:40):
He's also not a doctor. By the way, you don't
have to call him. You could call him mister Phil.

Speaker 1 (12:44):
I'm not I'm not calling him a doctor because he's
a doctor.

Speaker 2 (12:47):
That's the TV show name. We're referring to the TV show.

Speaker 1 (12:49):
I was going to say something, babe, and then I'm sorry.

Speaker 4 (12:52):
I'm so sorry.

Speaker 2 (12:53):
I'm so sorry. Is she I am? Is she truly repented?

Speaker 1 (12:56):
I'm not sure. Like I know you have no ill will,
but sometimes you have this thing.

Speaker 4 (13:00):
We're just like, if I don't get this out right now,
I'll die. It's the ADHD.

Speaker 2 (13:04):
I know, it is the ADHD.

Speaker 1 (13:05):
I know, which is what if he did an episode
about like mister Pythagoras, the pythagoron man.

Speaker 2 (13:11):
Are you bringing that up because we mentioned the cult
of Pythagoras yesterday? Oh did you?

Speaker 1 (13:15):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (13:16):
Because so we.

Speaker 1 (13:17):
Were playing D and D. I was playing Davis Combat,
I cast flight or fly. I moved seventy five feet
in the air, and so we had to figure out
was I too tall or too high range? We're out
of range because I was too high in the air
comparison to a person on the ground.

Speaker 2 (13:31):
Our DM Cameron at one point said, Pythagoras says that
you're out of range. And mal was like who. And
for a second, Cameron was like Pythagoras, like the triangle guy,
and Mal was like oh. And I was like, did
you think his like cultests were coming for you? Mal? Malins,
are that episode here?

Speaker 4 (13:48):
And that would be episode sixty seven, And.

Speaker 2 (13:51):
Then we had to tell everybody about the cult of
Paythagoras and about the beans and about how people. He's
also a.

Speaker 3 (13:57):
Character in Assassin's Creed Odyssey and he's like Atlantean in
that he's like, oh, he's immortal.

Speaker 2 (14:03):
Well I thought that the cultwagers thought he was mortal.

Speaker 1 (14:05):
Yeah, yeah, I liked honesty.

Speaker 2 (14:08):
By the way, that was one yeah, who is that
what we got? Just as an aside, if you are
not caught up on QAnon ship, I'm not going to
delve into it super deep, but they're turning on Trump
and it is funny to watch in a like ha haa,
not in a ha ha kind of way, but in
they're like, hmmm, yeah, we told you so. Mallins heard
the episodebout Jeffrey Epstein here, and.

Speaker 1 (14:29):
That would be episode yeah because jeff Epstein are two
separate episodes.

Speaker 2 (14:34):
No, but they're revolting because of they're revolting because Trump
is like, uh, that is like move on from Epstein,
and the QAnon people are like, what do you mean
move on from Epstein?

Speaker 1 (14:45):
Yeah, because Trump doesn't want us talk about it because
obviously he's because he's.

Speaker 2 (14:49):
Best friends with Epstein historically documented like, that's not a
contented thing.

Speaker 1 (14:54):
We knew about that even before Epstein's death.

Speaker 2 (14:57):
Well publicized documentation of them interact multiple times and being close.
Like I will say, the.

Speaker 3 (15:02):
Last time we did is sometimes I was like, yeah,
they released the video and there's like a minute missing.

Speaker 2 (15:05):
Apparently they did an analysis. There's like three minutes missing.
What a time? Yeah, what a time we live in?
All right, Well, on that note, let's move on to
the final section of my topic, the final part. But
first we will have a brief word from our sponsors.

(15:28):
What do you guys recall so far? So much has
time since then? That's why I ask, Yeah, what do
you recall? Is the answer? Nothing? I do. Remember that
there was a boy from Japan who was not right,
who was brought to Was he first brought to England
to go to school against to the US? Okay, yes, okay,

(15:51):
so he was first brought to England to go to school,
and then he was brought to the US because he
joined this new religion and his family back home was like,
you did what now? But people were doing it at
the time. Yeah, And then there was this whole thing.

Speaker 3 (16:03):
There's this guy who was really into the Spiritualism, but
then he got out of Spiritualism because his bff and
Spiritualism cheated or had an affair with a married woman.

Speaker 2 (16:14):
Correct. That was Thomas L. Harris, who was best friends
with Andrew Jackson Davis. Andrew Jackson Davis slept with a
married woman. He technically didn't cheat, but he assisted in cheating, right,
and then because of that they separated no longer into spiritualism.
Divine breathing right, the divine breathing that they never told us,
like how to breathe in order to get immortality, but

(16:36):
he died.

Speaker 1 (16:36):
Never figure that out?

Speaker 2 (16:37):
Well technically, Okay, So I spoiled you guys by saying
that Thomas, like Harris died. Is it a spoiler? Is
a spoiler that this Maes who was alive in the
eighteen hundreds is dead? Now? That was unfortunately spoiled for
you both that he did not reach a momortality. But
in the narrative where we are he has not yet
reached death. He has not yet reached death or mortality.

(17:00):
He's not recorded. Sorry, he has not accomplished either yet.
He also has not written down what his secret breathing
technique is. Well again, if he writes it down, then
you don't have a reason to go and learn it
from him.

Speaker 1 (17:14):
He's close to his death. He could have written it
down and it has been like I give to you
the masses.

Speaker 2 (17:20):
But he's saying he's immortal, so he's never gonna die.
So you're saying even on his deathbed, he was like, no,
well we'll get there. We'll get there everyone, okay, okay.
So where we were was that he well, he did
claim that he had achieved immortality. Where we left off
last time, Thomas Lake Harris had taken his inner circle

(17:41):
to California to set up a new the winery. I
forgot about the winery. That was the major part of it.

Speaker 1 (17:48):
This is just what his life is. He's just the
wine king.

Speaker 2 (17:51):
Well he isn't the wine king. Thomas like Harris isn't
the wine king.

Speaker 1 (17:54):
Oh, I mean.

Speaker 2 (17:57):
Becomes the wine king. That's where we're getting to. Thomas
like Harris takes his inner circle, including his adopted son Kane,
to the Napa Valley to the Bay Area Ish California,
Santa Rosa, specifically to buy four hundred acres of land
in order to set up a vineyard, right because he

(18:19):
was in legal trouble with a former bro, Lawrence Olifant,
who they fell out over a variety of reasons that
I no one deigns to tell me, apparently why the
beef started. But I want to know about the beef.
Where's the beef? Where's the beef? Oliphant? Anyway, they have
to pay back all the money that the Oliphants gave

(18:40):
to the commune, and they have to sell the land,
but they don't have to do it right yet, and
all this stuff they basically Thomas like Harris is like,
screw that. Me and my BFFs. We're going to California.
We're going to start fresh.

Speaker 1 (18:53):
Screw you guys.

Speaker 2 (18:53):
I'm going home.

Speaker 3 (18:54):
We're starting a new religion, but does not have black
jack and hookers.

Speaker 2 (18:58):
It's the same religion as before, it's just in a
new place. And now that he's there, and now that
Kanye is an adult, he is able to take on
more response responsibility with the day to day management of
Fountain Grove, which is the name of the commune. It's
interesting because fountain Grove, the area is one word, right,

(19:20):
the winery is fountain Grove. Two words. Huh. So the
business is Fountain Grove Winery, but the place is Fountain
Grove one word. Interesting, which does get I trip up
in my notes if you ever read them. I don't
know if anybody reads the notes, but if you do,
I may screw that up. Every now and then. Remember
when I.

Speaker 3 (19:40):
Did notes about Ernest Shackleton, and for some reason during
the notes it devolved into Ernst Shackelford.

Speaker 2 (19:47):
So like to this day, I don't remember which one
is the real one. Because of that, it's Ernest Shackleton
is the real one. I will forget. Yeah, that's okay, forgotten.

Speaker 1 (19:56):
You will best.

Speaker 2 (19:58):
I can't die much like Thomas Lake Harris, who claims
that as he is able to live a life that
is more dedicated to his spiritual development, he writes a
bunch of pamphlets. He preaches more. He starts having pretty
raging parties on the vineyard that everybody is just kind
of like those hedonistic cultists over there with their Buchnalian extravagances,

(20:20):
what they are going on, and then scandal emerges. There's
some more details that I uncovered about the scandal in
my further research, because as I'm telling the story, I'm
also like double check and stuff and learning more stuff
about it. And there was a thing so we had
said previously. I had said previously that there was no

(20:41):
evidences of like sexual abuse or sexual misconduct in the cult.
I still believe that is true. However, part of the
scandal that emerged in the press about Thomas Lake Harris,
there were particular reporters who had claimed that he was
a charlatan and a fraud, which is all true, and

(21:01):
that you know, this was a crazy, weird cult and
kind of tried to ruin their reputation in the area. Sure.
One of the things that they claimed was that he
was taking uncouth sexual liberties with the women and the cult.

Speaker 1 (21:15):
And it always happens.

Speaker 2 (21:17):
Evidence that was brought to that effect. I had mentioned
to you before that one of Harris's preachings was that
God had both aspects of like masculine and feminine to him.
He was referred to by Harris as bisexual. But what
he meant was kind of like containing both. What is
the word for that? Its not intersex? Intersex is different.

(21:37):
Intersex is different, I almost want to say, because like
saying something is like sexual usually implies in the way
it behaves sexually, which is not necessarily the implication here.
It's like you could say that God was bigendered. I guess, yeah,
I don't know. It's hard to really say what the
proper terminology would be here. But what again, what Harris

(21:58):
was implying was that the divine has aspects of both
masking and feminine. He does had some disparaging things to
say about women, a little bit like he didn't think
that they were lesser humans, but he did, like, you know,
he was very much a man of the time where
he was just kind of like women are catchy, and
they like their extravagances and they can be you know,
women be shopping, which was very much kind of how

(22:21):
like what his vibe was. I don't think he was
ever like I don't think women should vote, but he
was just like women, am I right? Yeah, in that way?
You know what I think about sometimes? Uh huh? How
sexist the Jetsons? Was the cart too?

Speaker 1 (22:35):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (22:36):
I don't remember I remember watching The Jetsons, but I
remember no saline details of it.

Speaker 3 (22:41):
I just remember there was an entire episode dedicated to
the wife wanting to learn how to drive, and it
was like a whole fucking thing.

Speaker 2 (22:50):
And it was just so sexist. Also a product of
its time. Yeah, I feel like even at the time
fair Yeah, But with this, I had mentioned before to
you both that Harris had a divine feminine counterpart that
he referred to as Lily, if you remember I do.

(23:11):
This was a sort of throwaway comment that I made earlier.
So one of the evidences that was brought against Harris
for how he was taking uncouth sexual liberties with the
ladies is because when he was doing his divine breathing,
he would essentially like channel the spirit of Lily and
thus be embodying more femininity. And so it was claimed

(23:33):
that like he would use the persona of Lily to
comfort the female members of his congregation.

Speaker 4 (23:39):
Ah.

Speaker 2 (23:40):
And that's the thing is Yeah, the magazines, the newspapers,
the articles, the scandal, they all implied where it's like
comfort scandalously, wherein we don't actually have proof that that
is the case. It's like maybe he was a little
weird with it, for sure, but we don't have any evidence, Like,

(24:01):
no one's ever come forward and said like, yeah, this
is super perfect. Grew a gross sex pest man sex pest.
It was from what I can tell reporting about him
taking you know, like advantage of anybody, like you have
to take that with a grain of salt, because it
does seem like it was part of the big scandal thing. Okay,

(24:21):
what I will say for sure is that he was
lying to people and taking their money. Him being a
charlatan is confirmed. Yeah, And so because of all of
that scandal, he left Fountain Grove. He said, oh, by
the way, I've gained immortality and I'm dipping peace peace,
and he and his wife left California.

Speaker 1 (24:44):
There they go.

Speaker 2 (24:45):
They went originally to England with the intent of staying
there forever. Yeah, they did have to move back to
the US. I don't really touch on it. And as
I'm going through this, there were a series of fires
at the Fountain Grove winery, just in the sense that
it was aery that existed over several decades and everything
was made of wood. Decades in California, in California, and

(25:05):
everything was made of wood, So like buildings would catch
fire on occasion. Yeah, that just happened. It was the
late eighteen hundred. It's like, there, what are you gonna do?
That still happens, It still happens to this day. And
so because of that, there was an instance where he
had to return to the US to like aid with

(25:25):
recovery for the fire. It didn't really take very long,
and he stayed in New York for a time, and
then they moved to Florida. And from what I remember,
I think that they remained in Florida, or maybe he
turned back to New York. They went to anglind at first,
eventually had to come back to the US, stayed in
the US, never returned to Fountain Growth proper Florida. What
people like to retired Florida. I would not want people. Well,

(25:48):
we're not people of humidity, No fuck that noise. This
is where we're going to now shift our focus. This
is where we're gonna shift our gears to Nagasawa kanaye.

Speaker 1 (25:57):
Hell yeah, two episodes finally we're here as the winery.

Speaker 2 (26:02):
He's been a fairly like he was the beginning of
this frame story. He's a fairly prominent part. But at
the beginning of the story, he is a child. Yeah,
he doesn't have so much agency as Thomas Lake Harris
and all these other crazy dudes have. Now he is
gaining more of it, and especially as the winery is
becoming more profitable, because as it does, it's becoming more

(26:24):
important to the whole organization, to the brotherhood of New
Life Nagasawa. Kanye's role as the manager of it changed.
Originally he was the grape guy. He's there for planting
the grapes. He's so good at that grape, greape grape.
Now he's got to be business guy. Originally business businessess

(26:44):
of business. As Thomas Harris pulled back from the main
running of the group, Kanye stepped in to fill that void.
He was now the leader and the figurehead. Before he
was doing a lot of the day to day management
of the group. But now he also has to kind
of be in charge because Harris is gone. Yeah, Thomas left,

(27:07):
Kanye's got to be in charge of everybody, and he
was forced to become more involved in the business decisions
and in general more savvy about business as a whole.

Speaker 3 (27:17):
It's like that point in your life when you're like,
oh shit, I need an adult, and then you realize, oh, fuck.

Speaker 2 (27:22):
I am the adult. I have to be the adult.

Speaker 1 (27:25):
It's me.

Speaker 2 (27:26):
And he was also at the same time, he was
basically Harris's personal secretary up until he left Fountain Growth.

Speaker 1 (27:33):
So we had a lot of knowledge about the inner workings.

Speaker 2 (27:35):
You had a lot of knowledge about the inner workings.
It wasn't necessarily that he was struggling to do it
all because he knew how stuff worked. He was a
very smart dude. He picked up on it. He learned
how to be a businessman out of necessity and seemed
to thrive in that position. But he didn't mean he
wanted to do it.

Speaker 1 (27:50):
Well.

Speaker 2 (27:51):
Here's the problem is that by the time that Harris
steps down and is no longer in charge and is
no longer like, Okay, Kanye, you're my person secretary, you're
the wine guy, and you're managing the wine whatever. Now
he's doing everything. It's eighteen ninety one and Kanye is
almost forty at this point, and he has dedicated his

(28:12):
entire adult life to serving Harris and the group. He
has been the right hand manned manned, He's been the
right hand man, the dude kind of like doing his
own thing, but also taking orders for his entire adult life.
And now he is in charge of everything, and the
guy who was kind of like his dad is gone. Yeah,

(28:36):
and it seems like he went through a little bit
of an identity crisis through this transition. To start with
Nagsal Kanye a Japanese man, Yeah, in the United States,
in the United statesmoil and he's not World War two yet,
not yet, We'll get there. He was losing touch with

(28:57):
his culture, he felt, because though he had kept contact
with his various friends and connections in Japan, the majority
of Kanye's life was in America with Americans. He came
to the US when he was like fourteen years old
and never left. Yeah, so for the vast majority of
his life he is well. And how long was he

(29:17):
in England? And England was like less than like two years.
I think like it was really not that long at all.
He did not spend a very long time in England,
though apparently he did have a Scottish accent, because I
think that's where he learned English. Because when he was
living with the guy who originally brought him over, when
they were living in Edinburgh, when he met Lawrence Oliphant.

(29:40):
I believe that's how he learned English, was in Scotland,
and so he spoke English with a Scottish accent because
of that, even though he moved to America and lived
in America for the next thirty years. Yeah, okay, but
he was also he did remember Japanese. He was that
was his first language. He was a Japanese speaker for
a large portion his life. He was also living with

(30:01):
other Japanese people. But if you remember when they made
the trip to Napa Valley, all the other Japanese members, well,
I mean even before then they had returned to Japan
after the Meiji Restoration. Right, so he was one of
the only og Japanese converts in the group, and he
didn't really have a lot of close people in his

(30:24):
day to day life that were also Japanese. Apparently there
was more than one occasion when he was speaking to
a not natural age native native Japanese speaker and he
realized that he was forgetting parts of his language. No,
which is like that can be devastating, that can be
super devastating, and it was for him. There's one specific

(30:45):
thing where he was like at a it was a
foreign diplomat he met, and he was at a dinner
at their house and they referred to this kind of
like traditional Japanese dessert, and Kanye misunderstood what they were
saying because he didn't remember what certain word meant, and
so like it wasn't a big deal, but like he

(31:05):
reacted like, oh, no, I don't really like that food.
That's gross, and they're like, what are you talking about,
Like it's it's this, and he's like oh, And he
felt really embarrassed. He felt like he made a fool
of himself because he forgot words in his own native language.
I forget words in English all the time, and I
only know English. I feel like English is a special
case in that this language is appalling. Yeah, I say,

(31:26):
as a native speaker of it. So to rectify this,
Kanye made the decision to begin and hire more Japanese
farmers to work at Fountain Grove. At the time, it
was much more common for laborers to be from Italy
or China. Yeah that makes it, and they had a
lot of Chinese and Italian workers on the farm. But
now Kanye is like, let's get some Japanese guys in

(31:48):
here so I can talk to them. Yeah, American farms
have always relied on immigrants help, oh, one hundred percent,
especially in California. Agriculture has been read on the backs
of immigrants from the beginning, even when it was colonies.
We were the immigrants once upon a time.

Speaker 1 (32:08):
Yeah, you know, in a sense, we still are.

Speaker 2 (32:11):
True.

Speaker 1 (32:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (32:13):
So this, like I said, it did the double duty
of helping him keep his language and culture alive. He
was now interacting with native Japanese speakers more frequently, but
it also helped to strengthen his position internationally as a
job creator and a supporter of Japanese immigrants. There were
people who now in the new now open Japan who
was trying to establish better relationships with America, where like, oh,

(32:35):
that dude is great for international relations. He helps so
many of our people get jobs over there and get
settled and get a foothold in this country. Love that dude. Secondly,
as I mentioned in a very real way, Harris leaving
was like Kanye losing his family. Yeah, that guy was
his dad, you're my dad. Harris and his wife dipped

(32:57):
out of state, and that meant that Kanye couldn't talk
to the guy who had become his father figure. Again,
this was eighteen ninety one. We didn't have cell phones.
We did not have cell phones. You had the mail.
I think he had telegraphs at this point. Also we
have fax machines.

Speaker 1 (33:10):
And again he went to England and then went back
to Florida. So basically, never.

Speaker 2 (33:14):
If you were like, you're gonna write letters, but you're
not gonna write, You're not gonna hear from this man
every day. You are not gonna have regular contact with
this dude, especially if you're trying to write a letter
to England, Gonna take months, Gonna take months to get there.
This left a huge void in this man's life, like
a significant portion of his socialization, his support network, you know,
his like social circle, had now left, and that was

(33:38):
a void that he had to figure out how to fill.
And it should also be noted that from what I
can find, there is no evidence that Knie ever had
a romantic relationship at any point in his life. A
lot of people claim a variety of reasons for this.
They claim that Harris's preaching kind of turned him off
the idea of a relationship. I don't think that's necessarily true,

(33:59):
because Harris was really big on being married.

Speaker 1 (34:01):
Yeah, he didn't so big on it. He was married
three times.

Speaker 2 (34:04):
He was married three times. Dude loved being married. He
wasn't big on husbands and wives living together. He made
them live in separate compounds. But he did want everyone
to be married.

Speaker 3 (34:15):
You can only like you can't have sex with your spouse,
but only for the purpose.

Speaker 2 (34:19):
Of procreation, and you can be married, but you cannot.
And honestly, I don't Yeah, I know even that we're
not really a big fan of you having sex, So
I don't necessarily think that was the case. A lot
of people also point out that the way that he
was raised because the clan that he came from originally
was a samurai clan, and samurai do there are like

(34:41):
certain norms when you're younger, Like there's these certain like
vows or whatever you take about not pursuing women, and
people kind of copecting Samurai have been romanticized. That's very interesting.
It's it's interesting. I cannot claim to be, you know,
an expert on that topic. I don't think that that's

(35:01):
actually very relevant to this because if that was true,
for it may have been something that he was taught
as a child, but as an adult man in America,
like decades later, I don't think he's still hanging on
to those exact same ideals. Obviously, his culture, the way
he was raised do a huge thing to form his

(35:24):
outlook on life. But I do think that like your
dad telling you as a kid, hey, no, don't look
at women, right, it just charged him. It's not going
to hold out until you're a forty something year old man,
like living on your own in the US, surrounded by
other people. Like I don't think that was the reason.

(35:44):
I think that he legitimately just was never really interested
in it, and.

Speaker 1 (35:48):
Judging by the fact that he was no longer involved
the Harris again in his late in his mid forties,
and then again, you're going to talk more about the
Hawaiian thing, but it becomes the wine king, which you
talked about last episode, is going to be I'm sure
there's plenty of women who are like, hey, you're rich, sure,
and do you want to go out And the fact
that he just again like you said, never had a relationship. Yeah,

(36:09):
it sounds like something you just didn't want.

Speaker 2 (36:10):
It just sounds on people are just a Some people
are really not feeling it, and that's fine. It doesn't
have to be more complicated than that. It's just one
of those things where there was a lot of speculation
as to why. Apparently there was also I cannot find
the name of it for the life of me, but
there was also apparently a film made about him in
the nineteen twenties which it was supported and it was

(36:32):
informed by people who knew him in real life. But
they very much did take creative liberty where they put
a romance story in it, like they claimed that when
he was im meaning they did with the Turing. Oh
with Alan Turing. Yeah, oh yeah, it's this in a
similar vibe, yeah, Where like when they claimed that when
he was living in England that he had a fling
with a girl there. They claim that he had like

(36:53):
a sweetheart back home that he was supposed to get
married to when he was a child, like they were
betrothed or whatever, but then she went on to Mary's
someone else. The Turing one, I feel, is still so
much worse though. It's this whole thing where like I I,
it's a thing that people want to do for the
sake of a narrative, is to put romance in it.
But for everything I can find, there is no evidence

(37:15):
that he ever was in a romantic and relationship at
any point in is not every story I needs romance, No,
And this one just has a lot of wine. Yeah.
In the early years of Kanye being in charge, there
was a lot of experimenting with his new role. He's
trying to find himself, trying to figure out, like, all right,
this is my winery, Now what do I do with it?
He started trying to produce new and different types of

(37:36):
wine at the vineyard. Apparently, like there was a brief
flirtation with Champagne, which I don't think worked out in
the long run, but like they tried it with a
real champagn unless it's from the Champagne resion of France.
What's it called then? Is it just sparkling sparkling fountain growth. No,
it's just sparkling wine. But also who gives a shit?

(37:56):
But also I don't drink, so I can say whatever
I want. So he He also participated in a bunch
of agricultural studies. He submitted the wine to competitions, Like
he was still trying to make a name for himself.
He was still very good at marketing. The wine was
a very high quality. That was something I wants some.
That was always like stated was that it was really
good stuff. Well, I mean, we've had wine from Santa

(38:17):
Rosa several times.

Speaker 1 (38:18):
But does that mean it's from fountain growth.

Speaker 3 (38:20):
No, I'm just saying that, like it's the same. We've
had wine from that region.

Speaker 1 (38:24):
That's cool, but it's not.

Speaker 2 (38:27):
Those grapes were not raised by Nagasawa Kanic.

Speaker 1 (38:29):
That's the thing.

Speaker 2 (38:30):
Yeah, I want you want that man's grapes.

Speaker 1 (38:32):
I want that man's grapes. Episode title right there. I
want that man's great I want that man's grapes.

Speaker 2 (38:37):
There was also apparently, like in the early eighteen nineties
the vast majority of the wine coming out of Santa
Rosa because there were other wineries in the area, but
like ninety percent of it was coming from fountain growth
they were producing. I have a follow up question.

Speaker 3 (38:50):
Actually, okay, mouths like I want grapes raised by that man,
and I'm like, well that was over a century ago.

Speaker 2 (38:56):
But I'm like, wait, you keep wine for a real
long time. That's true, But I'm thinking, like, are grapes
and our grapes are perennial, Like do they just keep
producing year after year or do you have to replant them.
I think that they I think that I don't know. Yeah,
I don't grow grapes, so I don't know.

Speaker 1 (39:14):
Since it kind of feels relevant to the conversation, I'm
going to double check sure are grapes, Like are the grapes?

Speaker 2 (39:22):
Is it possible that they're for there to be grape
plants in the ground that were raped by him?

Speaker 1 (39:26):
The answer is yes. They live for more than two
years and typically wrote grow back each spring from the
same root system after a period of dormancy. I do
think that the idea of summer over one hundred years old.

Speaker 2 (39:39):
Oh wow, Okay, I will say that the idea of
a bottle of wine surviving is most likely than the
plant itself survival. I was just people's curiosity, for sure.
Irrelevant question. So he started to a bunch of that one,
like I said, branching out in the wine side, submitting competitions,
agricultural studies, all this stuff. He's also trying some other industries.

(40:05):
So Kanye attempted to import, well, he didn't attempt. He
succeeded to import a bunch of mulberry trees into California
to try and cultivate silkworms.

Speaker 1 (40:13):
So he's the worst.

Speaker 2 (40:15):
Yeah, I was gonna say that's a problem. Now. I
don't know if he's the reason why southern California is
like rife with them or whatever. But he did bring
some over to try and do silk production in the US,
and he did succeed in making silk in the US,
which is apparently a very high quality.

Speaker 3 (40:34):
We raised silkworms in third grade. How that affect Uh, fine,
except for I brought a bunch home and well because
my neighbor actually did have a mulberry tree, so we
let them as soon as they were moths, we let
them loose.

Speaker 2 (40:51):
But one of them didn't quite make it. So, like
months later, there was just a moth in my room.
It somehow survived. I feel like it can't have been
the same, It can't have.

Speaker 3 (41:01):
Been months, but it's still it's like there. There was
just there was a silk moth in my room.

Speaker 2 (41:06):
It happened.

Speaker 1 (41:06):
Yeah, aren't they cute?

Speaker 2 (41:08):
They are kind of cute. Actually I can't I don't
remember what they look like.

Speaker 1 (41:11):
Yeah, but I don't like I don't google bugs because
I'm fair. I might not like what I get.

Speaker 2 (41:16):
That's fair. Let me go for a bug. So it
it doesn't matter in the long run. This is a
little bit of a blip. Over several years, they you know,
attempted to cultivate silk production.

Speaker 1 (41:27):
Hard swerve, it's about the silk.

Speaker 2 (41:29):
All about the silk. Now. They attempted to cultivate silk
production in the US as like an American grown silk,
like a competitor to Asian silk. They're very cute. I
think the guy, it's a fluffy little guy.

Speaker 1 (41:41):
But that didn't work out.

Speaker 2 (41:42):
It didn't work out. They didn't really say why they
stopped doing it. I think it was a cost thing.

Speaker 1 (41:47):
That makes sense.

Speaker 2 (41:47):
I think it was just like it wasn't bringing enough
profit to justify continuing to do it.

Speaker 6 (41:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (41:53):
He also tried his hand in the mid eighteen nineties
eighteen ninety five to raising cattle and bre horses.

Speaker 1 (42:01):
I mean that's a big California thing too.

Speaker 2 (42:02):
For sure. And they had the land, they had the acridge,
and that was much more successful. Apparently he was very
good at both those things, raising cattle and breeding horses.
He produced fine quality livestock horses for racing. It was
race horses, all right. I wouldn't want to keep horses
because I don't know what to do with horses. You
race them.

Speaker 1 (42:22):
I will never own livestock unless it's maybe chickens.

Speaker 2 (42:26):
I would love to I could see with a goat,
That's what I was gonna say. I would love to
have a goat.

Speaker 1 (42:31):
They scream, yeah, chicken, chickens scream in a different Desciwell,
that doesn't bother me.

Speaker 2 (42:38):
Okay, what about sheep?

Speaker 1 (42:42):
And I'd have to learn. I mean, I'm not saying
this is a negative, but then if I own a
sheep and have to have the responsibility of learning how
to shear properly because otherwise.

Speaker 2 (42:51):
To someone else to share it, I to share them
once a year.

Speaker 3 (42:54):
Great because they'll keep your lawn like sheep will do
that too, Oh they will.

Speaker 1 (42:59):
Okay, hey, can we get a sheep?

Speaker 2 (43:02):
Okay, we need to have own a house. Not with
the same voraciousness as a goat, I think, but sheep do, grace.

Speaker 3 (43:07):
I think goats are great, though, have you seen baby goats?
Baby goats are wonderful.

Speaker 2 (43:10):
So AnyWho, uh, these are all things that Nagasola Kanye tried.
He was like, what if we did this? Also, what
if we weren't just the line? And you know what,
some of it worked out and some of it didn't.
Throughout all this time, the spiritual side of things was
waning at Fountain Grove. The Vineyard was still supporting the
Brotherhood's compounds. The one in New York was like the

(43:30):
land in UH Like there was the legal dispute about
the land or whatever, but there were still people there
in New York who believed, you know. And there was
the business in New York that was exporting wine and
was you know, distributing it around the East Coast as well.
So the Vineyard was supporting all of that. And Kanye
just wasn't the spiritual leader that Thomas was. Like he

(43:55):
It's really interesting because when people asked him after the fact,
like what do you think about all this stuff? He
wasn't super into Christianity. Oh boy, Like he was like,
I it was fine, it's fine, it was fine. He
was kind of it was charismatic for sure, but his
passion was more focused on practical things and not preaching

(44:15):
to the remaining faithful. Apparently, like the main takeaway that
he got from UH like his father figure was like
diligence and appreciation for hard work. He was like, I
respected him. I respected him. As a leader. The divine
breathing stuff. I was there, I just like breathed.

Speaker 1 (44:33):
I was there and I breathed.

Speaker 2 (44:35):
But what about my wine though, Yeah, which is interesting
because he was in the inner circle and he was
like this dude's adopted son. Yeah, so it's very much
in the sense of like, so you were not allegedly
as in it as a lot of other people were,
but you were just so like But I liked him.

Speaker 1 (44:52):
That was my dad.

Speaker 2 (44:54):
That's my dad. That's that guy. Yeah, not that guy.
He's gonna talk about breathing. I'm gonna breathe.

Speaker 1 (44:59):
Yeah, I'm doing it right now.

Speaker 2 (45:00):
Me do it right now. I'm gonna breathe now, conscious
of it.

Speaker 1 (45:04):
So you stopped.

Speaker 2 (45:05):
I'm sorry to everyone who's breathing. Man. So now I'm
like thinking about it. Yeah. So the divine respiration stuff
became less and less important the less that Thomas Harris
was around, and little by little the long term residents
of the compound were slipping away. The truly faithful were
kind of just like moving on. Okay. In eighteen ninety six,

(45:25):
one of Kanye's nephews, IgG Domiki, came to live at
Fountain Grove just like Hey.

Speaker 1 (45:32):
You know I heard, you know from the family that
you just got weird. Can I come on over?

Speaker 2 (45:37):
No, So what actually happened is they had been corresponding. Okay,
so this was his brother in law, Like he he
his brother in law owned land and Korea. One of
his sisters had gotten married to this very wealthy manning.
Don't look at their relationship between Japan and Korea. Okay,
I'm telling listeners, I know, I'm just saying, like, we're
not going to talk about that right now. They lived

(46:00):
there and the Egg family, Tomakey, his nephew. They were close,
like he wrote to his family, and his nephew had
gotten the vibe from the letters that Kanye was really lonely,
Like I was saying, he was going through identity crisis.
Thomas had left. Yeah, I mean, he's trying to find himself.

(46:22):
He's trying to cultivate his culture's trying to bring He's
not really into dating. He's trying to bring Like literally,
his family had had a thing where they were like,
we need to get this guy a wife, and he's like,
not only in my style, not really into this.

Speaker 1 (46:33):
That's a big or at least I don't know about now,
because I don't know enough about Japanese culture. I mean,
it's a big thing in Americas.

Speaker 2 (46:39):
As a person who doesn't date, now, I can tell
you very much that like family being like, so when
are you going to start seeing somebody is constant.

Speaker 1 (46:47):
No, I know that, but like the American assault of
it versus the Japanese perspective, it, I'm sure feels different.
So I don't know how intense his family was about.

Speaker 2 (46:55):
That, true, And it was also again this was in
the eighteen nineties where it was even more like conservative
from our perspective about that kind of thing, about the
relationship to the family, yeah, or the responsibility to the family.

Speaker 1 (47:08):
Yeah, I would assume that it was a heavy burden.

Speaker 2 (47:11):
Yeah. So he's not really into dating. He's literally hiring
Japanese immigrants just so he can have somebody to talk
to in Japanese sus and forget the language. So his
nephew is like, so what if I moved in? Hey, hey, uncle, Kanye,
what have I moved in? What have I moved in?
What have I moved in? Speak Japanese together, and yeah,
I can help. And his uncle was stoked about that.

(47:33):
Kanye I was like, hell, yeah, I got so much acreage.
I have all these empty bedrooms. Come on, come on,
move in. You want a horse, Let me get you
a horse. It happened. He was like, you want some horses, kid?
Your dad? Your dad lives in Korea. E racist horses, right,
have a couple. Would imagine if one of our friends
was like, I've got all this acreage and all these
empty bedrooms, and all of us would be like, yeah,

(47:53):
if we we just need to make friends with the
adopted child of a cult leader and then kill the
we need to have the adopted child who's chill and
the colt's dying. And do you just have all this land?

Speaker 1 (48:08):
You know in California, I bet there's a cult out
here we could find, Oh.

Speaker 2 (48:11):
God, certainly.

Speaker 1 (48:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (48:14):
And so when he comes to California, he starts living
with Kanye and Tomoky is just kind of like, what
if you went back to Japan, like to visit, Like
he at this point had never returned home since he
originally left Okay, Okay, and so his nephew was just like,
why don't you go visit family? Like you could just
go visit Japan for a bit. It's like he couldn't

(48:35):
come back yeah, exactly, like the country's open now you
can just go and come back. That's totally fine.

Speaker 1 (48:40):
Versus the isolations. And that was around when he was fourteen.

Speaker 2 (48:43):
Because he had to be smuggled out of the country. Yeah,
but he I.

Speaker 1 (48:46):
Don't know how the law works, like if he returned
and they were like, well he.

Speaker 2 (48:51):
Technically because after he I think it's like an open secret.
Where like because the big thing was that when they
left they had to change their names. That couldn't bring
like the lawsuit or whatever the criminality upon their family.
So technically it wasn't Nagasawa Kanye who left the country wink,
Thats okay. But also at this point, I don't think

(49:12):
anyone cares. Now major restoration has happened, Like all of
these dudes who are international students smuggled out the county
are coming back and becoming ambassadors like your shell. They're
chill about it. They don't care. So at the like
they Toma Kee says, Bondie go visit family. They decided
to go in eighteen ninety seven. Kanye, his nephew and

(49:36):
also another friend who had been a long term They
referred to them as like Harrisonites. Okay, a follower of
Thomas L. Harris who was also Japanese. The three of
them made a trip to overseas to go visit.

Speaker 1 (49:50):
Sounds fun.

Speaker 2 (49:50):
The trip was incredibly pleasant for tom For Kanye, he
got to see relatives that he hadn't seen in decades. Apparently,
like a cousin greeted him at the dock, and they
were all really worried that he would have forgotten Japanese,
and so they had like studied up in advance on
English so they could talk to him.

Speaker 1 (50:06):
I mean, and that's kind of was becoming problem.

Speaker 2 (50:09):
Yeah, But when they rolled up, like apparently Kanne recognized
his cousin instantly greeted him in Japanese and they like
hugged each other and cried because they hadn't seen each
other in decades. Yea. So this was like a really
pleasant homecoming. And his family was trying to like be like, Celen,
are you getting married? And he was just kind of like,
you know who's not married, My nephew Tomaky here and

(50:30):
they're like, you're right, we do need to find Tomoki
a wife.

Speaker 1 (50:33):
And then deft literally.

Speaker 2 (50:37):
He's a young man, he needs to get married. And
also tom uh Tomoky is yes, he's he's a young
man who needs to be to be married, and Kanye
is like his elder so now he's involved in the
process of all right, here are some lovely ladies that
we think would be great as Tomaky's bride, So like,
help us pick a good one. And they So the

(50:57):
family got together and they made a match for Tomik
to get engaged. They couldn't get married right away because
they there was like stuff they had to do. But
also because tome Ki was now living in California, there
was a bunch of stuff with immigration also, like his
wife then would have to move to California also, and
that was a whole legal process at the time.

Speaker 1 (51:16):
Did that happen?

Speaker 2 (51:17):
It did end up happening.

Speaker 1 (51:18):
He did say, is this a sad story?

Speaker 2 (51:20):
No, they do. I was gonna say, does he also
not get married? No? Gets married? He they do go
on to have kids together and they live in California.
But in this moment in eighteen ninety seven where they're
just they're hook they're setting him up. It's like, here's
new fiance. Here's this lovely lady who's going to be
your fiance.

Speaker 1 (51:38):
Arranged marriage style. Yeah, yeah, pretty much pretty much.

Speaker 2 (51:41):
And also it was interesting because Connie dabbled in business
while he was there, because he's very business minded now
and he's always thinking about he's on that grind. Yeah,
he's hustle Culture twenty for seven. Is this man? Is
this man an ace autistic about wine? Who is to say?

Speaker 4 (51:57):
Is why?

Speaker 2 (51:57):
And his special interest are the grapes of special interest?
I cannot.

Speaker 1 (52:01):
I'm just thinking of like all of the celestial things
that had to like align for him to be this
kind of person, to be the way he is, to
be the way he is.

Speaker 2 (52:08):
Yeah, But what he was there actually wanting to do
is in a way, it was to expand the Brotherhood.
He wanted to make a new Brotherhood commune in Mexico,
but he wanted to populate it with Japanese immigrants. He
wanted to host a bunch of Japanese people to come
to North America and to set up a place for

(52:31):
them to live, to expand the you know, the commune
influence business of the Brotherhood of New Life. Right, that
was his plan, that he's going to set up a
new place for everybody in Mexico, and he needs two
million dollars to do that. And that did not work out.
They could not fundraise. That never ended up happening. He

(52:52):
was asking around for it when he was in Japan.
He was putting feelers out, he was he was hustling.
He was hustling. Do you think he'd be a crypto
bro today. I feel like he would have gotten on
it in the early waves of crypto and of like NFTs,
and then fallen off of it very quickly. Okay, I
feel like he because it does it doesn't have longevity.
It doesn't have longevity. He would have been like, this

(53:13):
is the big thing, but then as he's getting into
it and learning more about it, he's like, oh no,
this doesn't have staying power, this isn't worth the investment.
I do think that he would be a sponsor of
that horse Girl racing game that's now taking over everything.
He would get in on the ground for the horse
Girl anime racing game.

Speaker 1 (53:29):
To take a pause, and not the kind of pause
where it's we're going to get into what the game is,
because I don't want to do that here. But it
did surprise me when the conversation about the Yakaza came
up in relation to this game.

Speaker 2 (53:40):
I was not surprised at all. It's about horse racing. Now,
of course the acus is involved.

Speaker 1 (53:43):
I just did never think about that.

Speaker 2 (53:46):
But do we have to do an episode on this
fucking horse racing game. No, it's a conspiracy. It's very
blatantly advertising for horse racing in Japan. Yeah, like, it's
exactly what it is.

Speaker 1 (53:56):
It's to promote gambling.

Speaker 2 (53:57):
It's to promote gambling, for sure.

Speaker 3 (53:59):
I feel like we could do an episode on the
conspiracy of like the gambling apps in the US though
probably Yeah, that have tried to advertise in our podcast
and we keep telling them no, and.

Speaker 2 (54:10):
They keep doing it. Anyway, this would definitely make them
not want to I don't think so. I think that
they would still do it. So Ultimately, like I said,
that whole thing, the fundraising, the business aspect of his
visit didn't shake out, but it was still a good trip,
and at the end of it, Kanye was given a
katana to return home with as a symbol of his
reclaimed heritage.

Speaker 1 (54:29):
That's nice.

Speaker 2 (54:30):
However, when he was returning face with returning to America,
Kanye was just all the more aware of how different
things were in Japan than in America, because, let's be
real as successful and charismatic as Kanye was. Racism still
exists and is still a huge thing. Yeah, being a

(54:51):
Japanese business owner in America came with hurdles and struggles
that history likes to really gloss over. A lot of
the stories about Kanye and about like what it was
like at the time, especially more contemporary stories like closer
to him actually living because borers, this man also dies.
So not so of contemporary then, because isn't contemporary like

(55:14):
current current It contemporary is of the time. I maybe
I'm phrasing it wrong, because what I mean is when
I say contemporary to him, to his time, to his time,
more contemporary to him in the sense that they was
closer to the time when he was alive versus closer
to our time. I see nowadays a lot of the
stories talk about the racism, but older sources that talk

(55:36):
about him and coming up and taking over Fountain Grow
don't mention the struggles that he and every Asian person
living in California would have had to face to high
school and will.

Speaker 1 (55:49):
Have in another forty years.

Speaker 2 (55:51):
No, it's not forty. I was thirty, Yeah, thirty, I mean,
because this is what years, this we're in the late
eighteen nineties.

Speaker 1 (55:59):
So yeah, I mean, yeah, well I was going to say,
not that there wasn't a s Yeah right, I'm just talking.
I'm trying to allude to a specific moment that we
will talk about.

Speaker 3 (56:09):
And I will say, to my high school's credit, because
I have a lot of complaints about my high school,
we actually had a former resident of a Japanese internment
camp come speak to us in our high school history classes.

Speaker 2 (56:20):
Oh nice to get like the actual live perspective. Yeah.
So I mentioned before that Kanye started hiring a lot
of Japanese farmers to Fountain Grove to help reconnect with
his language, which was true he did that, but also
the Japanese or the Chinese Exclusion Act of eighteen eighty
two also meant he couldn't hire new Chinese workers anymore.

(56:41):
I forgot about the Exclusion Act. Yeah, yeah, So the
Exclusion Act came along in eighteen eighty two, literally right
after Harris left, and it was like, oh, you cannot,
you can't, like Chinese people can't come here to work anymore.
I have a question.

Speaker 3 (56:53):
So you may not know the answer to this, okay,
Because it was the Chinese Exclusion Act. But white Americans
are super racist.

Speaker 2 (57:00):
It's literally just about to say because like sorry, no,
but you're yes, okay, Americans, a lot of Americans can't
tell the difference, yeap, to answer your question, A lot
of Americans can't tell the difference. To this day, a
lot of Americans can't tell the difference. Yeah, And the
fact that he could not hire as I had said before,

(57:23):
the majority of the farm wabers at the time were
Italian and Chinese, and in eighteen eighty two, he can't
hire new Chinese workers anymore. So fill the void with
Japanese workers. Like that was part of it, for sure,
and nobody really mentions that, even in the more like
modern discussions about like oh, yeah, he's reclaiming his culture

(57:43):
by hiring a bunch of Japanese workers and he's helping
with international relations. It's like, yeah, the Exclusion Act had
just passed. Also, let's not forget that's part of it.
But and also yes, there's a lot of anti Chinese sentiment.
He's not a Chinese man. Most Americans, white Americans probably
didn't care to tell the difference.

Speaker 1 (58:01):
No, So I mean that was one hundred years ago.
Thinking of like when the two towers fell. It's just
like there was amount of racism towards the brown, anyone
of any kind of brownness.

Speaker 3 (58:13):
Yeah, it was especially stupid for people wearing like turbans,
because it's like that's a completely that's seek, that's not
yeah fucking idiots.

Speaker 2 (58:21):
Yeah yeah, you know, you can't even do the racism right.
But that's the part of it is because it's just
inherently stupid. So this also isn't to say like that
there were not laws that were actively screwing over Japanese specifically.
Also because yes, the majority of the anti Asian sentiment
at the time was geared towards the Chinese, but also
they hated everyone.

Speaker 3 (58:42):
Okay, I just read about this. Yes, it was never
mind because it was it was this whole thing about
like why certain ethnicities like categorized on the census are
still considered white.

Speaker 2 (58:53):
But that was that was a Middle Eastern man, Okay,
that was that.

Speaker 3 (58:57):
There was a whole lawsuit that went to the Supreme
Court about it.

Speaker 2 (59:01):
We are not relevant to this at all. Yeah, I
had to think about it for a second.

Speaker 1 (59:04):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (59:05):
Sorry. Previously I had stated that Nagasol Kanye was the
first Japanese permanent resident in the US, which is very cool.
But he could have been the first Japanese naturalized citizen
if it wasn't for the eighteen seventy eight law that
literally banned all Asians from becoming citizens. I mean what
I just said is kind of relevant because that was
the law that was challenged, and it's not just Japanese Americans.

(59:27):
That law was for any non white No.

Speaker 1 (59:30):
So there was.

Speaker 2 (59:30):
Originally a law that said non white people are not
allowed to be citizens. It was amended to allow for
African of like African nationals right after Americans to become citizens,
but it specifically excluded Asian people. OK. And then there
was another law maybe this is when you're thinking of
where there was a Mongolian man who argued that as

(59:52):
a Mongolian he was not Asian, he was counted as white. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (59:56):
I think it was because this is a man who
was he like served America and one of the World Wars.

Speaker 2 (01:00:03):
This is eighteen seventy eight, so not that. So then
it wasn't that yet. No, because this law that I'm
talking about was specifically a law that said, we are
hearing your argument that certain Asian ethnicities or in Asian
countries quote unquote are not like should be because it's
like you should be considered white. It's probably something to
do with like the Caucus region, the Caucasians. Yeah, whatever,

(01:00:26):
and we're saying no, actually, you're not allowed to be citizens. Explicitly,
the law is that Asian people can't be citizens of the
United States. Yeah, so Nagasola Kanye could be a permanent
resident but could not be a citizen.

Speaker 3 (01:00:38):
It's a whole fucking thing, like that whole history of
like that law. The thing is, it's like, so it's
still relevant today because they're still like on a survey
you have to be like are you Caucasian?

Speaker 2 (01:00:48):
Are you not? Are you Latino? Like?

Speaker 3 (01:00:51):
Are you non white Latina? Like it's so fucking stupid.
The way that I mean, it's it's just the way
that we categorize.

Speaker 2 (01:00:58):
People is very antiquated, for sure, because we just haven't
thought about it more. I guess I don't know, because
if they keep dividing us by race, then we won't
we won't come together by class. And if we came
together by class, they know they know. So things weren't
all raging parties and wine, money and furthering Japanese American relations.
So that's all happening. Everything's great, All of this stuff

(01:01:19):
is happening at the same time too. Nagasawa Kanye was
a lonely man facing tremendous adversity, and he spent decades
after Thomas Harris left carving his own place in the world.
He's trying to find out where he fits in this
country that refuses to accept him as its own.

Speaker 1 (01:01:36):
Did he ever think about just returning back to Japan.

Speaker 2 (01:01:39):
I'm sure that he did, But at that point his
life and his grapes, his grapes now canpan the grapes.
He has built an empire. Legitimately, he is so wealthy
and he is literally being referred to by the people
of Sonoma County as the Wine King. This starts happening

(01:02:00):
in as his has his star is rising, as he
is developing more and more agriculture in the area. He
is known as the Wine King because he's putting this
place on the map, and he's producing the most and
some of the best wine in the entire region. Interesting
and so literally he's also the entire world, yes true,

(01:02:20):
So literally, he has got a kingdom in Fountain Grove.
This is his home, no matter what the government says.

Speaker 1 (01:02:28):
You're saying this, but I don't think good things are
on his horizon.

Speaker 2 (01:02:31):
Well we'll get that. When did he die? Can you
just give me a year he did?

Speaker 1 (01:02:34):
No? Okay, I refuse, He's immortal.

Speaker 2 (01:02:39):
I just want to know what we're getting into now.
I know I just praised the dude a whole bunch,
and generally I still think very highly of him as
a person. But I have to put a footnote in here,
and I cannot go into detail about this particular story
because it is too long. It would be its own episode,
and I've already said this was only going to be three.
Maybe another time we will talk about this before. Maybe

(01:03:01):
another time we will talk about this particular incident, Okay,
But in eighteen ninety six, there was a death at
Fountain Grove under Connoe's watch. Mary Harris, Thomas Harris's fifteen
year old granddaughter from one of his estranged sons. Because
he had two sons, remember sons, sirs not appearing in

(01:03:21):
this movie. In this film, apparently they were a strange
from him. But through a series of reasons, one of
his granddaughter's two of his granddaughters actually came to live
on Fountain Grove after Harris left. They moved on to
the property while he was still there, but after he
left they remained and they remained under the care of
Kanye A as well as some other people who are

(01:03:43):
higher ranking members of the Brotherhood at the time, and
she Mary Harris died by accidental suicide from consuming a
lethal amount of strychnine. What strick nine. It is a poison,
but at the time it was also used in small
amounts as like a home run for certain ailments. Okay,
it was not unusual for it to be in the

(01:04:04):
same way that people just have like arsenic in their house.
Uh huh. It was not unusual for strych nine to
be lead available. Well, you didn't have raw lead usually
hanging around your house. Okay. This was something that people
knew was lethal and high doses, but in small doses
it was used commonly. It was prescribed commonly for a
variety of ailments in the same way that people gave

(01:04:25):
like take some cocaine about it, you know, I mean,
and there's still drugs like that today where it's like
in small doses it's totally fine. Yeah, Like sleep mets.
We're better now at being more. Don't do that. By
the way, I'm like, mal, why are you like this
that we're not going to talk about that right now. No,
this was something that again, having it in a high
quantity in the home was not uncommon. It for sure

(01:04:47):
was negligence to have it so available.

Speaker 4 (01:04:49):
Interesting.

Speaker 2 (01:04:50):
She was also fifteen.

Speaker 3 (01:04:51):
She was fifteen years old, small child accidentally getting into
the medicine cap No.

Speaker 2 (01:04:55):
And I guess I'm not going to go into great
depth about this because is there's so much detail and
so much contention about what happened with Mary again, so we.

Speaker 1 (01:05:06):
Won't go into it. But I would love to hear
about that someday.

Speaker 2 (01:05:08):
Okay, I will maybe at some point in the future
to the episode about asking you get into it. But
is the whole thing, like whether or not it was
an accident. Basically everyone agrees that it was an accident. Oh, okay.
There was a lot of and this is part of
what I want to get into. There was a lot
of speculation and sensationalism after the fact about conspiritualizing if
she was intentionally poisoned. Did this actually happen as they

(01:05:29):
claimed that it happened, What was the circumstance around it.
From all that everyone can tell, this was truly an
accidental poisoning where she Kane claimed she she said she
took a little bit to scare people, like she was
trying to make herself sick to scare people and accidentally
took too much. This is before therapy and so and

(01:05:52):
that's again there's so much to go into that, And
there's spoywer warnings for that, I guess spoy warnings, but
like content warnings for that. Like it's it's sad story,
it's very it goes into a lot of questions about
like mental health and also about like child neglect and
child abuse, like emotional abuse. Yeah, for sure. So I

(01:06:12):
don't really get into that. But Kanye was the guy
responsible for her well being at the time. He was
one of the last people to see her alive, and
he after the fact tried to go to the press
and downplay what happened. So that because he knew the
second the press got a hold of it that this cult,

(01:06:33):
a girl had killed herself in this cult that had
just been a big scandal all of that. Yeah, he
knew that the second that the Prescott wind of it,
they were going to go absolutely binans with the STIRLI exactly.
And so he went to the local newspapers and tried
to play down the incident after the fact, tried to
kind of quiet the story, which is not a good

(01:06:55):
look or vibe even as a thing to do. Knowing
like even in the mos most generous incident, like generous
innocent views of that action, it's like, no, that's still
you shouldn't have done that. You shouldn't have done that.

Speaker 3 (01:07:07):
But I can't and I'm not excusing behavior, but I
am saying he's already seeing, he's already witnessing and experiencing
a lot of racism.

Speaker 2 (01:07:16):
I can see the.

Speaker 3 (01:07:17):
Thought process into that, yeah, being like, the racism will
get worse if they think I'm responsible for this white
girl's death.

Speaker 2 (01:07:26):
And they also think that this whole compound is like
a weird, gross sex cult. They already think badly of us. Yeah, Like, yeah,
I get why he did it. I earnestly don't believe
that it was like I don't believe that anybody killed her. Yeah,
But like I said, there is a lot to go

(01:07:47):
into I do think he was he was definitely responsible
for some negligence with that scenario. So despite me singing
his praises, this was a human being. He made mistakes,
he was flawed. You can make arguments about him being
like a product of his time because this was the
eighteen nineties and you didn't really like the way that
you treated mental illness. In the way that you treated
children at the time was very different from how we
do it now. Yeah, that's what doesn't make it cool,

(01:08:08):
you know. Yeah, right, Okay, so have to mention that
I will probably do an episode about just that situation
because it's really complicated and there's a lot of moving parts.

Speaker 1 (01:08:19):
That makes me very curious.

Speaker 2 (01:08:21):
In nineteen oh four, the New Century is turned. We're
jumping ahead. Kanye receives a letter from Thomas Harris. This
is the first time that he has really like well,
because Thomas Harris is inviting him to come visit. He's like,
come see me in Florida. In Florida, this is the
first time he's actually seen the man in person since
he left like almost a decade ago. Okay, I was

(01:08:44):
about to say, it's been it's been like seven years
I think at this point. Okay, something like that.

Speaker 1 (01:08:50):
And with that communication, that's a lot longer time than
we're used to.

Speaker 2 (01:08:54):
Even just like minimal, it's been twelve years. It's been
over a decade at this point. Yeah, so it's it's
a long time to not see a guy. Yeah, that
was your dad. That was your dad. So despite claiming
publicly that he had achieved mortality, he was an old
man in poor health and he wanted to see Kanye
and get his affairs in order. Like it very much
seems like the pass on the breathing technique did pass

(01:09:14):
on the breathing No, it very much seemed like Thomas
knew that, like, I'm not going to last much longer here.
So he asks for Kanye to come visit him in Florida,
which Kanye does. He leaves Tomaki in charge and he
goes to Florida where Thomas and his life are living,
and he was told about if you remember I had
mentioned in an earlier episode, there was a fund that

(01:09:37):
Thomas Harris had been siphoning all the profits into and
saving right the Brotherhood Trust Fund that Harris was in
charge of. He at this point had accumulated one hundred
and thirty or thousand dollars almost said million, but that
would be in correct. One hundred and thirty thousand dollars.
Still a fuck ton of money, even in today's money.

(01:09:57):
In today's money was four point five million dollars. Yeah, yeah,
in this fund, nothing to sneeze at. According to Harris,
I could use that. The plan was that after he passed,
money would go to his wife, and after she passed,
the money would go to Kanye.

Speaker 1 (01:10:13):
And so Kanye I killed them both, and so he
had a knife.

Speaker 2 (01:10:17):
No, that was the plan. I started blaston. I started
start blasting. The plan was that the money was always
supposed to be for the care and continuation of the
Brotherhood of New Life. That was what the purpose of
that fund was for. And his wife would become the
steward of it after he died, and then after she passed,
Kanye would become the steward of it. What's infuriating to

(01:10:37):
me is that I can't find harm for hard confirmation
that Kanye ever got the money. I don't know with
one hundred percent certainty that he did get it. I
believe that he did, Okay, All of the sources that
I read said that the estate transferred to Kanye's ownership
after Harris died. Okay, which he did do in nineteen

(01:10:57):
oh six. Harris died an old man in nineteen oh six,
and while those close to him saw this coming, the
rest of the cult refused to acknowledge his death for
three months.

Speaker 4 (01:11:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:11:10):
Didn't they do that to Hubbard too? Probably they refuse
to acknowledge his death for three months. Yeah. They instead
said that he was sleeping, He's just sleeping, Pap was
just taking a nap, and that he presumably would wake
up from the best nap ever and then go on
to live for out. That was all love as one did.
Hey did that do that? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:11:30):
Phase two of life?

Speaker 2 (01:11:31):
Yeah, three months now new second phase begins. And so
when that happened, when they had to acknowledge that, no,
this guy's dead this Doman style, the group began to
bleed off members in a slow descent into irrelevancy. Yeah,
and there was some beef. So the situation with the

(01:11:52):
state wasn't so clean cut. Is like Thomas dies, Kanye
gets everything Now. There were other people involved in the
ownerships of the property, and through various reasons, they either
eventually quit Fountain Grove or died like they'd been going
for a long while. Some of these dudes were getting old,
like Paris himself, so things were a little bit convoluted,

(01:12:13):
but eventually, from what I gather, by the mid eight
or nineteen tens, Kanye was the only member of the
Brotherhood who still actually lived in Fountain Grove. There were
no members of the Brotherhood of New Life in California.

Speaker 1 (01:12:29):
Other effectively, there just is no Brotherhood anymore.

Speaker 2 (01:12:32):
There are people who still believe in other places, but effectively, yes,
like the cult's pretty much dead, got it very like
within within like a decade.

Speaker 1 (01:12:43):
I mean, that's a better ending than most.

Speaker 2 (01:12:45):
Yeah, it just kind of fades out.

Speaker 3 (01:12:46):
Fading out is so much better than the ones were
used to covering.

Speaker 2 (01:12:50):
The Brotherhood of New Life one hundred percent went out
with a whimper, not a bang, which is like the
preferred way for a cult.

Speaker 1 (01:12:55):
Yeah, so Kanye.

Speaker 2 (01:12:58):
To me appeared to be a member and name only
by that point where he was like, yeah, he's still
a member of he believes in Harris or whatever, but
kind of not really. The wine was the main focus,
and the wine was still flowing. Kanye Star would continue
to rise. He would still be thriving in his new

(01:13:21):
position because he's still making the good wine. He's still
making that good wine, that good juice. In nineteen fifteen,
he was acknowledged for his expertise in wine making by
being selected as one of the jury of judges at
the Panama Pacific Exhibition in San Francisco. Have you guys
heard about this? No, but it sounds prestigious. It is.

(01:13:42):
So this was a huge fare that was put on
to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal. Oh, that
makes sense. And it was basically like a World's fair.
There was a Japanese exhibit there that Kanye helped run,
which was a very like it was an honor essentially
to be like, we're asking you to represent the country
of Japan in this international fair that people from all

(01:14:04):
over the world are going to go to.

Speaker 4 (01:14:06):
That's cool.

Speaker 2 (01:14:07):
And he gets picked to be an expert judge in
the wine tasting competition at this fair, which is like
a huge Again, they're acknowledging like, you know good wine,
you know good and wine enough to be trusted to
pick what is good wine out of international wine selection.

Speaker 1 (01:14:22):
I bet he had a lot of feelings and opinions.

Speaker 2 (01:14:23):
He did have a lot of feelings and opinions. He
was good at being a judge, and he considered being
chosen as a judge to be a really high honor
that he really like took seriously. Later that year, also
he got an even higher honor. Emperor Tai Show of
Japan acknowledged Kanye's work for international relations by awarding him
one of the highest honors a civilian can get, which

(01:14:47):
is the Order of the Rising Sun.

Speaker 1 (01:14:48):
Oh wow.

Speaker 2 (01:14:49):
They had a really elaborate The Emperor did income himself,
but they had a really elaborate ceremony on Fountain Growth
to award him the Order of the Rising Sun. In
nineteen fifteen, the Emperor gave him an award for being
so good at international Japanese American relations.

Speaker 1 (01:15:05):
That's huge.

Speaker 2 (01:15:06):
It was one of the biggest accomplishments of his life.
Like later in his life he would say, yeah, that
and the wine judge thing are like my two favorite
things I've ever done.

Speaker 1 (01:15:14):
Nineteen fifteen was a great year.

Speaker 2 (01:15:15):
Dai fifty was a great year for Nagasawa.

Speaker 1 (01:15:17):
Kany it already happened.

Speaker 2 (01:15:20):
It already happened at that I think I think what
one's over at that point, Yeah, I think it ended
nineteen fourteen, didn't it?

Speaker 1 (01:15:25):
Yeah, and Kanye wouldn't have gotten drafted because he wasn't
He wasn't a citizen.

Speaker 2 (01:15:29):
Yeah when I was too old at that point, wasn't
he Yeah he was. He was well passed to, like, yeah,
he's he's in his like sixties now at this point,
I think, so, yeah, that's not something that anybody's anybody's
worried about. Backstops at thirty, doesn't it. It does now,
But I don't know about back in the day, right, Yeah,
that's my thought, Like, I don't know. So in the
story of Nagasawa Kanye, there is always a focus on

(01:15:51):
the lavish parties he held, even during the height of prohibition,
because that was a thing when prohibition rolled around, the
winery didn't stop. A lot of wineries at the time
got around the fact that they were not illegally allowed
to sell alcohol by just selling grape juice, which is
what Fountain Grove did. They sold quote pure wine grape

(01:16:11):
juice to the public. I was disgusting, it probably was,
but I think the point of it was this was
the thing that they did during prohibition where you could
buy grape juice and it would come with this little
pamphlet that's like, you know, if you mix this with yeast,
it will turn into wine. So you shouldn't do that
because you don't want to have wine, So don't mix
this grape juice with yeast. Wink. Prohibition was so dumb,

(01:16:33):
and so that would that was happening, and I'm sure
that the Fountain Grove Winery was doing the exact same thing,
where they were like, this is our pure wine grape juice.
If you turn it into wine, we're telling you don't
do that, But don't do that, like OJ Simpson writing
the book, I didn't do it, but if I did,
this is Yeah. So while that was happening, alcohol was

(01:16:54):
still flowing freely in private, like they had a bunch
of boozs still, and so like we're not selling it.
They we'll just have it for our parties like people.
It's not only that, but like overseas they don't have prohibition,
Like we're just selling in the.

Speaker 1 (01:17:10):
I'm aizen of your country.

Speaker 2 (01:17:12):
I don't have to believe in your loss. Yeah no,
so he's still in prohibition, living it up very lavishly,
having these bacchan alian parties. The parties don't stop, is
what I'm saying to.

Speaker 1 (01:17:23):
I mean, if he's got all that money, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:17:25):
But behind all of that were the struggles of an
immigrant family trying to keep hold of their business. Ichih
Ptolemaky the nephew. If you recall who's married, who's married.
He's married. His wife is now in America and they
have a few kids.

Speaker 1 (01:17:40):
Oh yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:17:41):
One of those kids is a boy named Koske who
was born in California and an American citizen.

Speaker 1 (01:17:48):
I was about to ask an American citizen.

Speaker 2 (01:17:49):
As a time of recording, you were an American citizen
if you are born in the US. It's really sad
that you have to say that that could change. So
at this point he cost k is an American citizen.
He was born in Fountain Grove. He was born in California.
And this is important because in nineteen thirteen, the Californian

(01:18:12):
Alien Land Law passed which forbade any Asian national from
owning land in California. If you were from another country,
you were not an American citizen. You were not allowed
to own land.

Speaker 1 (01:18:24):
What if he already owned land, it's that's not.

Speaker 2 (01:18:27):
Yours any forfeit. Yeah, So Kanye got around that by
doing what a lot of Japanese people did at the time,
which was he gave the rights to the property to
his newborn grand nephew. This isn't my property anymore, this
is Coast ca'se property. Who's a natural he was a
natural born citizen. He was born in California. Yes, he's
a newborn baby. That's fine. Just take care of it

(01:18:50):
until he's old enough. Hand it over to vaguely he
owns it, but he's just a baby. So I'll take
care of it until he's old enough to do so.

Speaker 1 (01:18:59):
Thank God that I'll so fucking Christ.

Speaker 2 (01:19:01):
So we're going to fast forward to nineteen thirty four
where Nagasawa Kanye passes.

Speaker 1 (01:19:08):
Nothing bad happened.

Speaker 2 (01:19:09):
That year, that year very soon after, but not that
year thirty four.

Speaker 1 (01:19:17):
From understanding, A lot of bad things happened from late
nineteen thirty one up to the start of the world.

Speaker 2 (01:19:21):
I mean, there was the Great Depression also, that was
happening too, just like a lot of a lot of
the things were going on. But it's forty one that's
going to be the real sticking point. Thirty nine also
sucks because that's when that's when the war starts, and like, yeah,
forty one's when we joined the war. But like a
lot of things happen, I'm saying in this story in particular,
forty one is gonna suck. Forty two, oh, it's forty two.

(01:19:41):
Forty two is when it starts sucking. But yes, Naasawa
Kanye passes in nineteen thirty four at the age of
eighty two wo And although he never married and never
had any children, he was nevertheless surrounded by family and
loved ones. At the end of his life, he had
had his nieces and nephews from his siblings children, he

(01:20:03):
had grand nieces and grand nephews. He had friends that
he had made, and all of these relationships he had
developed over the course of his life. And he was
he He died on as far as I'm know where,
he died at Fountain Grove like this, this empire, this
palace he built, I don't believe. So that would have
been cool, But I don't believe he was buried there and.

Speaker 1 (01:20:24):
He became a part of the grapes.

Speaker 2 (01:20:26):
He's one with the grapes, now what he would have wanted.
So it is said that the Brotherhood of New Life
died with Kane. But I think in truth, the cold
had been dead for a while up to that point,
because I don't think that, especially later in his life,
he was really that much in it anymore. Certainly as
an adult. He wasn't really sipping the kool aid too

(01:20:47):
much of or breathing huffing Harris's air if you will.
He wasn't really intur kissing God. Nah, he wasn't. He
wasn't that deep into it. And the colt had been
slowly declining ever since Harris died. So Kanye wanted to
keep the property of Fountain Grove in the family and
let the next generation benefit from his hard work.

Speaker 1 (01:21:07):
I was owned by his nephew, right, Yeah, But.

Speaker 2 (01:21:10):
Very sadly that's not how that would shake out. You See,
when he died, kosk was still a minor, which meant
he wasn't legally old enough to control the estate that
Kane had willed to him, and so a white American
trustee took control of the land and soon after sold it.

Speaker 1 (01:21:31):
Ah.

Speaker 2 (01:21:32):
So the agencies were not going to take that lying
down though. They were. They were going to fight for
Fountain Grove. This was their family home. Yeah, and they
did in court. They tried to make a lawsuit happen.
They were like, this is like this trustee was put
in because.

Speaker 1 (01:21:45):
The king, he was the wine king. He built it.

Speaker 2 (01:21:48):
He built Napa Valley almost is that's this, and he
willed it to Costke cost Kate legally owned it. A
trustee cannot come in and then just sell all of
it underneath our feet.

Speaker 4 (01:21:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:22:00):
So they argued against this in court, and this was
a really big long lawsuit. It's a lot of property,
it's very expensive. There's a lot of moving parts in
that too, and it goes on for years. And then
in nineteen forty two, before the lawsuit can finalize, President
Roosevelt signed Executive Order ninety sixty six and ordered that

(01:22:21):
all everyone of Japanese descent, citizen or not, to be
imprisoned in internment camps. The Aegchiese, as well as Conye's
other relatives who were living on Fountain Grove at the time,
were forced from their home and lost any chance they
had to get it back.

Speaker 1 (01:22:39):
Oh damn, they.

Speaker 2 (01:22:41):
Lost it forever. I mean yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:22:42):
So it's like I was thinking, like, even if the
lawsuit hadn't happened, they would have lost it anyway.

Speaker 2 (01:22:46):
Because they would have been forced to go to an
internment camp, and then there would have no one to
keep the property, and it would it would have likely
been because this is what happened to a lot of people,
even those who willed property to their children and their
children successfully maintained haned ownership of it when they were
gone to camps. A lot of this property was just
like taken, yeah, regardless, no one could fight against it, exactly.

(01:23:10):
A lot of it was either just like squatters took it,
or it was reclaimed by the government, the local there
was a profitable business, it was reclaimed by the government
for sure. They just were like, we're just gonna if
we We're just gonna take this because you're not here
to stop us from doing it. Yeah, And along with
the Agchiese, later on people would get like reparations from

(01:23:31):
the internment to the tune of twenty thousand dollars right,
which is nowhere close to the value of Fountain Growth.
So the business, the property, everything just to check.

Speaker 1 (01:23:41):
So found Grave Grove never goes back into their hands.

Speaker 2 (01:23:44):
Never it gets split up, the assets get liquidated, everything
gets sold off. Now I don't want their wine Fountain Grove,
the winery does not exist.

Speaker 1 (01:23:52):
I don't want their wine.

Speaker 2 (01:23:53):
You can't get it.

Speaker 1 (01:23:54):
Fuck them, you can't get.

Speaker 2 (01:23:55):
Fountain Grove wine there. I mean, unless there's been bottles
out there maybe, but the winery itself doesn't exist anymore.

Speaker 1 (01:24:01):
Because Chelsea was checking out to a hotel or something
or a moteler. There are resort something.

Speaker 2 (01:24:07):
Let's let's continue, okay, spoiling herself. I spoiled myself accidentally,
go dare you so? Like I said, all of Connie's
family was eventually released from imprisonment, but they never got
what was rightfully. There's cos K any descendants that still
live in California. Oh yeah, oh okay, yeah, for sure.
The there are the great great like cos K Egyci's

(01:24:30):
children I think are still alive. Oh because they they
would go on to do something to help in something.
Because Cosk being especially wronged in this way, like the
land was legally his, he was a minor. He was
a minor. He was literally like just shy of eighteen
O fuck yeah where I don't know exactly how close,

(01:24:51):
but like just shy of eighteen when they was taken
away from the family, and so he felt especially like
wronged by it, and the family returned to the area.
The great grand nephews and nieces of Kanye would go
on to say that like, yeah, kosk never talked about it,
Like he refused to tell his children about what happened

(01:25:12):
because it was too painful. But other relatives would like
drive by the former Fountain Growth property and would like
there'd be a sense of like anger and sadness because
that used to be their home and it was taken
from them. So it wasn't until nineteen ninety six gee,
when the Paradise Ridge Winery, which sits on Thomas Lake

(01:25:33):
Harris Drive in the Fountain Grown neighborhood of Santa Rosa,
create an exhibit dedicated to Kanye, that his story was
ever really acknowledged. So some of his living like I
can't say descendants because they're not his direct children.

Speaker 1 (01:25:48):
Yeah, but if you want to try it in the.

Speaker 2 (01:25:50):
Same way his yeah, like they're his wood, his and
in that sense, his descendants, his living descendants, were a
part of making this exhibit talking about the family history,
talking about the the like work that Kanye did and
to to develop this region and the business he had
and everything the story of it. At the Paradise Ridge Winery,

(01:26:13):
which literally sits on the land that used to be
the Fountain grown who owned it at the time, like
just some made it basically. I mean like it's a
winery in Santa Rose. It's a winery in Santa Rosa.
I don't really go into like I didn't read the
names of Japanese Paradise Paradise Ridge. Yeah, we know that winery.

(01:26:35):
We've passed it several times when we've gone up north.
I mean it's a it's a fairly prominent vineyard, yeah,
And from what I can tell, it was I think
it was like the wife of the owner was very
much into history and was looking into it and was
like uncovered a lot of this history about yeah, and
she was one of the like major proponents and like

(01:26:58):
we should do something about that, like which would knowledge this?
And the family got involved and in nineteen ninety six
they made this exhibition, this permanent exhibit in the winery,
itself dedicated to Kanye himself, to Nagasawa Kanye. They worked
to collect stories, They had artifacts they put on display,

(01:27:18):
including the sword that Kanye brought back from Japan.

Speaker 1 (01:27:21):
That's right.

Speaker 2 (01:27:22):
They had the sword in the exhibit. And then in
twenty seventeen when the Tubs fire destroyed the vigar. The
sword was the only thing that survived.

Speaker 1 (01:27:33):
Geeez.

Speaker 2 (01:27:34):
Everything else, including the round barn that they built that
I showed you the beginning, burned down. The sword survived,
and the sword is still there. You can still see
it at They recreated the bunch of the stuff. There's
like recreations of artifacts, there's recreations of pictures. They did
everything they could to recreate the exhibit. The sword is
original and it's still there at the winery to this day.

(01:27:57):
The Tubs fire was fucking awful. It was, Yeah, and
and you can read about the people because again this
was this was twenty seventeen. Yeah, that was the one.
If I remember correctly, The Tubs fire was the one
where we were in San Francisco. We were working in
San Francisco at the time, and we had to wear
masks in the city because the smoke was so bad
from Santa Rosa.

Speaker 1 (01:28:15):
There was also the conversation while I was at work
in the financial district where they were just like, you
should go home. You might not have a home to
go to if you don't leave money.

Speaker 2 (01:28:23):
Well, because there.

Speaker 3 (01:28:24):
Was a bunch of fires popping up, and there was
there was a fire that ended up breaking out in
Dublin and because it was gone by the time we
got home exactly.

Speaker 1 (01:28:33):
But it was one of those things where I was
like that whole region.

Speaker 2 (01:28:35):
Had a lot of horrific fires. It went that time.

Speaker 3 (01:28:38):
Extremely devastating for the for the California wine industry for sure.

Speaker 2 (01:28:43):
Yeah, And it destroyed the Paradise Ridge Winery and if
any other extant like buildings or anything that had existed,
because even though the government came in and they like
sold off all of the property and they sold off
and liquidated all the assets, there were still buildings that existed,
abandoned and neglected from the original Fountain Grove Winery there. Yeah,

(01:29:07):
that round building was there until until twenty seventeen. The
only thing that's left is that sword that Kanye brought
when he returned from Japan as an adult.

Speaker 4 (01:29:16):
Damn.

Speaker 2 (01:29:17):
And that is the story about the California Wine King,
the Japanese American who he could refuse to be acknowledged
as an American by the US, but he lived the
majority of his life here. He put a Napa Valley
on the map. He joined a cold as a fourteen
year old was adopted by its leader as his adopted son.

(01:29:40):
So it was like, I'm not really into it, but like, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:29:43):
I breathe right, But also, what's this thing called a grape?

Speaker 2 (01:29:46):
Tell me about your grapes?

Speaker 1 (01:29:47):
Tell me about these these grapes. Then and then was
again the biggest thing of his life was recognized by
the emperor of countries home country.

Speaker 2 (01:29:56):
Yeah, the Emperor of Japan gave him a medal. He
he lived a wonderful life all things considered compared to
died happy, died happy, surrounded by loved ones, and the
government took all of that away because racism.

Speaker 1 (01:30:09):
That sounds like the government. Yeah, so I'm confused because
you said there was a spoiler. There wasn't a spoiler.

Speaker 2 (01:30:15):
Fire was the spoiler?

Speaker 3 (01:30:16):
Was I accidentally looked it up to see if we
could go visit it and saw the thing about the
topes fire.

Speaker 1 (01:30:19):
I mean, I don't know if that's a spoiler. That's
just a natural event that happened in life.

Speaker 2 (01:30:24):
I mean that's a spoiler in the story in a
sense that you're like, can I get this wine? And
I don't want to tell you all of it was
seized by the government and the winery's gone now because
racism and internment.

Speaker 1 (01:30:34):
Oh, I mean you would have said because the fire,
not because of internment.

Speaker 2 (01:30:37):
I knew the winery is gone, Yeah, because of internment.
Yeah right, I understand that grove is gone because of
systemic racism. No.

Speaker 1 (01:30:46):
I knew that by the time on the clock we
got to nineteen forty two, that yes, the government would
have taken it all. By then, I was already there.
I wanted to know if the historic buildings were still there,
regardless of who owned them.

Speaker 2 (01:30:58):
You wanted to have the wine.

Speaker 1 (01:30:59):
I wanted to have the wine because I was like, Oh,
if the winery is still there owned by a Wykeye,
sadly I could try the wine. Nope, but no, it's not.

Speaker 2 (01:31:06):
Neither the wine. Again, maybe somebody has like an X
and bottles in their basement somewhere of Fountain grow wine.
It's possible that is worth a lot. It was probably,
it's probably is. And because it was again an incredibly
productive winery, they were shipping bottles all over the of
the world, not just the country, but all over the world.
So somebody out there probably still has some Fountain Grove
wine somewhere.

Speaker 1 (01:31:26):
Yeah, that's wild.

Speaker 2 (01:31:27):
But no more will ever be produced and all of
the buildings are gone.

Speaker 1 (01:31:31):
You just got that one sword. Hey, if you're listening
to this podcast, you have one of those bottles. You
don't have to share it with us, obviously, don't pick.
Just send us a pick.

Speaker 2 (01:31:38):
I know what it looks like.

Speaker 3 (01:31:41):
This, this whole thing reminds me of one of the
things that I was always so angry about as a child,
because I'm so I'm so hardcore California and it's we're
so aware.

Speaker 1 (01:31:51):
We're so aware of and also so full of anger.

Speaker 2 (01:31:53):
It's a full of anger. But the worldwide and a
majority of the country perception of immigration is like Ellis Island.
Growing up in California, though, I was like, no one
talks about Angel Island because the two biggest ports of
entry for the longest time, for decades were Ellis Island

(01:32:14):
on the East coast.

Speaker 3 (01:32:15):
And it was Angel Island on the west coast. And
the reason we don't know as much about Angel Island
is because it was majority white immigrants in Ellis Island.
It was a majority Asian immigrants at Angel Island for sure.
And this is just another one of those things where
it's like because as you're talking about like Chinese immigrants
and Japanese immigrants.

Speaker 2 (01:32:34):
I'm thinking, like, yeah, that's that is why it is
called the Golden Gate in the Bay. Like, it's called
the Golden Gate because it was the gate into America
for people who were immigrating in that direction.

Speaker 1 (01:32:46):
Didn't also have something to do with like the reflection
of the sun and that the people who are immigrating,
the Asian people were coming from the land of the Sun.
Wasn't there some parallel there that I don't know could be.

Speaker 2 (01:32:58):
I just know that it's called the Golden Gate because
it was the gate into America. That being said, Angel
Island and Ellis Island also had two very different feels
because Ellis Island was majority white and an Angel Island
was not. So Like I was just looking it up
and it's like, yeah, Ellis Island, you wouldn't really be
detained for very long as you came into the US,
whereas an Angel Island you could be detained for years
because a majority of the people coming in through Angel

(01:33:19):
Island were Chinese, Japanese, Asian. Yeah. Yeah, I mean again,
this is a story about how and this is a
not uncommon story. There's similar stories about the Potato King
and the Garwick King of California.

Speaker 4 (01:33:35):
Real rocks.

Speaker 2 (01:33:36):
Yeah, but who put those places on the map for
the production of specific parts of staples of California agriculture
were immigrants? Yeah, it's people who came to this country
and they made these empires of business and agriculture, and
the US because they weren't white and weren't born here,
the US refused to acknowledge them and ultimately gave them

(01:33:58):
the horrible run end of the middle.

Speaker 1 (01:34:00):
Not only is most of the agriculture that you listener
in the United States come from California is made by immigrants.
We the ones who are here are immigrants. Yeah, we
came from people who came here and established this land.

Speaker 3 (01:34:15):
I was always upset, and I still look it upset
at people who call like small town America as real Americans.
And I'm like, I grew up in the Bay Area
where there were people from all different cultures.

Speaker 2 (01:34:28):
Like I ate food. I hate a lot of Indian food,
but I ate food from many different cultures. I did not.
And the thing is, like, I they're like, oh, if
you live on like the east of the West Coast,
like you live in a liberal bubble, and I'm like,
I disagree.

Speaker 3 (01:34:42):
I think if you're in a small town America, that's
the bubble because I have to I am forced to
interact with so many people on a daily basis from
so many different walks of life, Whereas if you're from
small town America, it's you and your white Christian neighbors
and that's it.

Speaker 1 (01:34:55):
It's just so insulated.

Speaker 2 (01:34:56):
Yeah, it's a situation. This is again, these are stories
that are not uncommon at all about how people will
build and grow and develop and it will be taken
away from them for stupid, horrible reasons. It's happening now,
and that is is the ultimately, Like I don't want

(01:35:17):
to say that's Kane's legacy, because he did so much
and he his legacy is more far reaching than just
like Fountain Grove itself, because I refer to him as like, yeah,
he put Napa Valley on the map, which and that continues.
He is, He's one of the main influences over the
reason why Napa Valley is known as wine country. That

(01:35:38):
is such a huge portion of our state revenue for sure,
and so it's just it's interesting how that story gets
lost because parts of it are ugly, and also parts
of it involve a weird cult. Hamilton immigrants, we get
the job done. Yes, that is the Hamilton.

Speaker 1 (01:35:56):
There's a lot of parts, a lot of ugly parts
of the United States of America because we're really not
that united.

Speaker 2 (01:36:02):
We're not. No, I you guys are just like whipping
out lines or whatever. I'm just over here, Like, I
want to know how much of history also is like
and this is from a really weird cult. We don't
like to talk about that.

Speaker 1 (01:36:11):
Yeah, Like I also want to know about that, like
that aspect.

Speaker 4 (01:36:15):
Yeah, although those.

Speaker 2 (01:36:16):
Aspects are important to me, some of them are more
important than others, for sure. But I also also want
to know about like, but how much of this is
from a really weird cult too. It took me so
long to realize that the billboards I would pass in
my childhood about how Saturday was the actual Lord's Day.
We're from a really weird cult. That's it's so much
of life. It's actually a really weird cult.

Speaker 1 (01:36:33):
Just don't think about it.

Speaker 5 (01:36:34):
No.

Speaker 1 (01:36:35):
Yeah, and they don't call them cults now. They just
call them, Oh they're just a little different or that's
a set they know.

Speaker 2 (01:36:39):
They call them cults. They for sure call them. I
think they call them cults now more than ever.

Speaker 1 (01:36:43):
I mean, in my hometown, they don't call the seventh
Adventist cults. They just call them.

Speaker 2 (01:36:46):
Right, how many of the people I was about to say,
how many people theirst haven'tdayed that?

Speaker 1 (01:36:49):
I understand?

Speaker 2 (01:36:50):
Yeah, I said, to be fair, you came from the
Seventh Day Adventist cult. So that's what we just said.

Speaker 1 (01:36:56):
Yeah, but like specifically, I mean, yes, someone in my
family was a part of it, but also like, what
was it? My grandfather was Roman Catholic and then my
grandmother results was it? Jehovah's Witness is a cult? Right,
So it's like there was a lot going on. There's
a lot going on, I do. I had this conversation
with her once. I was like, so there's one hundred
and forty four thousand I'm gonna get picked, right, And
she was like yeah. I was like, what makes you

(01:37:17):
think you're gonna get picked? I got in big trouble
that day.

Speaker 2 (01:37:21):
I imagine, So, I imagine.

Speaker 1 (01:37:23):
So, but yes, thank you so much for telling us
about the Wine King.

Speaker 2 (01:37:26):
You're welcome. Do we have any takeaways from this other
than America's history? Is bleeding with racism to this day.

Speaker 1 (01:37:32):
I want some of that wine.

Speaker 2 (01:37:34):
Oh, you usually come back around to it.

Speaker 1 (01:37:36):
Well, because even though it was taken by the government, Yeah,
the government stopped making the wine.

Speaker 2 (01:37:40):
Well, the government was never making the wine exact wine
from being made right.

Speaker 1 (01:37:44):
Right, So that means there is still it might be
some wine pre government interference. I want to try that wine.

Speaker 2 (01:37:49):
There might be some wine that still is to infuse
with the divine breath in it. That's what I want,
That's what that's what it could be out there.

Speaker 1 (01:37:56):
Maybe maybe we'll find a bottle. We'll find a bottle
and then we'll peel the label off, and then there
will be the instructions by Harris for the divine breath. Finally,
the instructions will be there and.

Speaker 2 (01:38:05):
It won't be as we're just putting on the inside
of the labels whole time. You have one of those
bottles of wine, peel back the label and then tell
us you will tell me one peel back the label
on this old ass no doubt incredibly expensive vintage of wine.
To peel the label off to see if there's the
cult instructions on the bench.

Speaker 1 (01:38:24):
Just rip it off, don't worry. No one's gonna careacter fine,
it's fine.

Speaker 2 (01:38:27):
Oh there's also uh, there's I do say that like
the sorts of the thing that survived, they did name
a park after There is a park in Sonoma County
that's named after Counte as well as a little There's
so many parks in Sonoma County. Sonoma County is so wonderful,
and that is my tale. I will come back in
on a later date to discuss the incident of Mary Harris,

(01:38:48):
and that'll be like a fun throw back. Very curious,
have a second takeaway. Okay, much like the protagonist in
our story, I also would like to live Sonoma County.

Speaker 1 (01:38:59):
We're very aware.

Speaker 2 (01:39:02):
That's all we got for the episode for today, except
for our final section, which is correspondence and corrections. But first,
let's have a brief word from our sponsors.

Speaker 1 (01:39:18):
Chelsea has slowly been sinking further and further into the
sack she's taken the long. Do you understand why I
get sleepy in that I do.

Speaker 2 (01:39:27):
I never questioned it. Yeah, I don't think it was ever.
We were walking you for being sleepy, but we never
questioned why you.

Speaker 1 (01:39:32):
Were being But you were prepared to th our things.

Speaker 3 (01:39:34):
Yeah, yeah, because you were falling asleep during the recording.
It wasn't that you were going to sleep in the sack.
It was that you were going to sleep during the recording.

Speaker 2 (01:39:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:39:42):
Okay, Well let's start with blue Sky, Blue Sky. So
first we have East of the Fox saying soup of
the day implies another, possibly even seductive soup of the night.

Speaker 2 (01:39:51):
It's just a picture of soup at night, at night,
at night, soup of the night. We also have from
at A. W. D. Organ, who says bad Military Industrial
Complex Doggo, which is a video of several big dog
robots being deployed from a military vehicle. I hate it,
the robot doggos, which are very menacing on purpose. At

(01:40:15):
our Electric American Rando says, I'm tired. So now a
musical interlude about the sack I got the magic sack
lit Kim and love Sack, Baby, Love Sack. The fifty
two very good at this gaming, vis gaming, thank you.
I was like, do I say yes? Do I say wys?

(01:40:35):
Do I say views? Re episode four oh six tangents,
Please never stop yapping. If people want to try boring,
why if people want dry boring script reading, there's dozens
of those podcasts out there. Yours is better for the
yapping because your banter is great and don't let anyone
tell you different.

Speaker 6 (01:40:52):
Ah.

Speaker 2 (01:40:52):
Thanks, we can't not yap or tangent. Yes, that's how
our minds work. Yeah, yeah, thank you. I'm got to
enjoy it. At Hino Rishi's says a comparison of the
copper seller EA and EA the games producer, and it's

(01:41:14):
the things that they have in common. They're named EA,
they sell subpar product, they laugh at customers. But the
difference is that the ancient one keeps copies of customer
complaints for fun, and then the other one is just
like EA, just does not keep copies of customer replaints,
just like for any reason, there's no copies of customer complaints.
Firsts not at Perude Perud, Yeah, says me. When a

(01:41:36):
seagull features in the latest ISTD episode, but it's not
a Chelsea cameo. And then it's a crying dog because
there is a seagull on one of the more uh
I think it was two episodes ago. At the time
of this episode going out, there was a seagull that
was introduced. Oh boy. Unfortunately not Chelsea not me. Uh
blank spaces eighty four asses everyone, Okay, We're fine. Was

(01:42:00):
there was we were there was a concern of COVID.
There was a COVID concern, which thankfully is assuaged.

Speaker 3 (01:42:08):
It turns out new COVID gives you a sore throat,
and I did have a little bit of a scratchy throat,
so I was very concerned that I got the COVID,
but I had tested negative and scratchy throat went away.
But by the time it went away, and we.

Speaker 6 (01:42:19):
Were like foreling better about the situation. That it's too
late to record an episode East the Fox, says scientist
probe uranus and find it's warmer than expected, which is
a headline.

Speaker 2 (01:42:33):
Oh boy, but that's very funny.

Speaker 3 (01:42:36):
American Rando also says this week's episode of the Past
times they read old newspapers and usually make fun of
slash or horrified by the contents, uses a nineteen oh
nine paper from New Jersey that drops the Jersey Devil
as possible source.

Speaker 2 (01:42:47):
Of mysterious footprints. Love that the paper also uses the
word cryptid, and I did not know that word goes
that far back. I didn't either. We actually I did
a story, and I believe I did. It is about
the sman malinsert that episode here where we talk about
the guys who formed cryptology or not cryptology but crypto

(01:43:09):
zoology as a field quote unquote, and the origins of
that as as a field and the word cryptid to
to describe what they were researching. I believe it is.
I think it's the Montana ice man I Maliner that
episode here.

Speaker 4 (01:43:26):
And that would be episode two nineteen awesome.

Speaker 2 (01:43:30):
Uh the paper okay?

Speaker 3 (01:43:31):
And also that if you think newspapers are bad, now
cancel you New York Times and LA Times subscriptions. Yes,
standards in nineteen oh ninety Jersey allowed. We think someone
saw a Jersey devil, maybe a uniped and then they
send us a link to the past times.

Speaker 2 (01:43:46):
Excellent. Love a podcast recommendation. Love it. So now onto
the email mail. Will you read me an email? Chelsea?
I would love to read you an email, probably just
the one because we've been going for albeit, we have
been going for a bit. I will you one refuse
we trapped here?

Speaker 5 (01:44:06):
Your soul was trapped to her mouth? It is you
have to destroy the slab a ry. I got one
from John the ft m okay, f d M.

Speaker 2 (01:44:16):
Wow John the FDM.

Speaker 3 (01:44:18):
Yes, Forever Plaid overly deep thought on a tangent in
episode three my my referencing of Forever Plaid, I remember this, Yes,
hello three C squad. I'm not a huge musical dot guy,
but I am a music guy, so I'm gonna put
an actually got on you regarding Forever Plaid, begging your
forgiveness in advance.

Speaker 2 (01:44:36):
You never have to forgive us for correcting us, so
you have to forgive them, right. You said you don't
have to forgive us. I'm sorry, I meant the other
way around. We deserve no forgiveness, but we forgive you
for for correcting me about what I got wrong about
Forever Plaid.

Speaker 1 (01:44:51):
Yeah, never forgive me for my sins.

Speaker 3 (01:44:53):
The Plaids were not a barbershop quartet. They were a
close harmony guide group, which was a style that was
popular in the nineteen fifties. Barbershop quartet music peaked in
popularity in the early nineteen hundred. All right, now, I'm
not just nerding out here. This distinction is what makes
the musical so cool. The Plaids are on their way
to see the Beatles on Ed Sullivan when they are killed.
That singular TV appearance ended the popularity of the close

(01:45:14):
harmony groups and kickstarted the British invasion. So they are
physically killed the night their musical style was metaphorically killed.
That's a fun nuance, but it goes even deeper than that.
Many sixties and seventies rock musicians described being changed forever
after seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan on TV. One
can easily imagine for musically adapt high schoolers experiencing a
similar transformative experience witnessing it in person. Had the Plaids

(01:45:36):
made it to the show, they would have never been
the same. So they are forever Plaid, not only because
they died, but because they missed the one event that
would probably have inspired them to grow musically but not
be the Plaids anymore. Again, forgive me for geek explaining,
but this music history undercurrent is what makes the show
so poignant and bittersweet.

Speaker 2 (01:45:52):
I love that. I do too. I saw them as
a child and so did not fully you know, absorb
all of or appreciate all of the news behind the
music history of Forever Plaid. I just liked the music
and the goofiness and the idea of it being the
ghosts of a bunch of dudes singing one last time
before they go in the afterwife. So I love that.

(01:46:14):
Thank you John for this Nuance Deifle, I love I
love that. And that's it. That's all we got. All right, Well,
thank you all for this. It was a little bit
of a long way to get here. I'm sorry you
had to wait, but I hope you enjoyed my story.
I'm marry about the COVID. Remember, COVID still exists. COVID
still exists. Mel and Chelsea. Delightful to have you here, listeners.

(01:46:37):
Do I ful to have you here. If you have
a correction, If you have some Fountain Grove wine, if
you know more history or interesting tidbits or lore or
whatever whatever you want to send to us, feel free
to do so. They can email us at Cult scripts
Conspiracies at gmail dot com. I'll turn it well. You
can reach out to us via our social media is.

(01:46:58):
We have a Blue sky at three podcasts and a
Patreon Patreon dot com slash cult Scripted Conspiracies. We also
have a website where you can find everything linked for
your convenience, which is Cultscryptedconspiracies dot com or Moosetooth dot
com or orca Lie dot com. I don't know if
those still redirect to us, but we could find out

(01:47:18):
and they might. Yeah, definitely the first one works, the
second to my or you could in the meantime buy
several hundred acres in the Napa Valley and let us
live on it and let us live there as like
a cult. Yeah, but like but like not really chill,
kind of like chill. We're mostly doing wine stuff. I
don't I'll have the grape juice. I'll help with the

(01:47:40):
other agriculture. Like, wine stuff is interesting even if you
don't drink wine. True, very true. You could stomp grapes,
or we could just chat. We're just there to chat.
We could start a D D campaign in a vineyard,
like the campaign's in a vineyard, or we're in a
vineyard playing D and D. Yes. Okay, all right, Well

(01:48:00):
you can do all of that within the next week
until we come back with another episode. Until then, goodbye Chelsea,
Bye Christina, Bye now I can still hear his voice.

Speaker 1 (01:48:08):
Bye ladies,