Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you should know from how Stuff Works
Speaker 1: dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
Speaker 1: There's Charles w Chuck Bryant. Jerry is not here, but
Speaker 1: who cares because we are at the Beautiful and More
Speaker 1: Theater And get this Sydney, Australia. Wow, Holy cal pretty good.
Speaker 1: Not not a bad start. Beat that hell lot of purse.
Speaker 1: Well we gotta cut that part down, Jerry cut No.
Speaker 1: They were very appreciative because they said people don't come here.
Speaker 1: They literally said that. Yeah. So to start this show,
Speaker 1: usually with the live show, we like to go back
Speaker 1: in time because we like to treat the audience to
Speaker 1: a free right in the way back machine trying which
Speaker 1: unfortunately doesn't exist. It's imaginary. Be quiet, come on, I
Speaker 1: just need you all to use your imaginations. Okay, like
Speaker 1: put on your thinking caps or your imagination cap, some
Speaker 1: sort of cap that will help you get into the
Speaker 1: way back machine. Maybe close your eyes like this, get
Speaker 1: the Lotus post. I don't care, but we're all on
Speaker 1: the way back machine. Now we're going to ironically go
Speaker 1: to We're gonna go to America. We came to Australia
Speaker 1: to bring you back to America in eighteen seventies six.
Speaker 1: So that's where we are right now. The funny thing is,
Speaker 1: we don't even rehearse the stuff, can you can you tell? Alright,
Speaker 1: So it's eighteen seventy six in America where we come from.
Speaker 1: We're just eleven years removed from the Civil War, the
Speaker 1: American Civil War. Uh. Let's see, Thomas Edison had just
Speaker 1: given us the oh, I'm sorry, Alexander Graham Bell had
Speaker 1: given us a telephone. Thomas Sayssen was still just a
Speaker 1: big loser, and he couldn't get the lightbulb to light up.
Speaker 1: It would still be three years away from that. Jesse
Speaker 1: James is robbing banks. This is old timey America basically, right.
Speaker 1: And the whole reason we're in because we want to
Speaker 1: point out just how terribly horribly people ate back then.
Speaker 1: I mean they well you'll see. Let me give you
Speaker 1: an example for breakfast. If you were sitting down for
Speaker 1: a normal breakfast, Um, somebody would bring out a whole
Speaker 1: live pig and butcher in front of you, salt it,
Speaker 1: and make you eat the whole thing in one sitting.
Speaker 1: That was just the first quarter too far out. Uh.
Speaker 1: The potatoes would be um fried in the congealed fat
Speaker 1: from last night's pig. Um, that actually sounds very nice.
Speaker 1: They were, well, i'll give you this breakfast. Okay, hasn't
Speaker 1: changed all that much. All right, there eggs, that kind
Speaker 1: of thing. But um, this was what people ate every
Speaker 1: single day. There was no breakfast on the go. It
Speaker 1: was heavy breakfast every morning. Granted they were all farming
Speaker 1: and stuff like that, but still it was pretty heavy breakfast.
Speaker 1: Even if you lived actually out in the sticks, you
Speaker 1: may eat a little healthier things like gruel and mush,
Speaker 1: but number one, you're eating gruel and mush, which it's terrible.
Speaker 1: And then secondly, it took you hours to prepare this
Speaker 1: gruel and mush. So either you were eating really really
Speaker 1: unhealthy or you were eating um food that took a
Speaker 1: very long time to prepare. Yeah, so that's breakfast. Uh,
Speaker 1: we don't even get into lunch, but it's probably more
Speaker 1: the same. But I found a dinner listed online from
Speaker 1: Delmonico's in New York City, And granted this is a
Speaker 1: very fancy sort of celebratory dinner that was planned out
Speaker 1: for a politician, but this is how that went down.
Speaker 1: First course, a raw oysters, a choice of two soups
Speaker 1: and order and a fish course. That's the first course.
Speaker 1: There's a course in course. There's four courses in the
Speaker 1: first course. The next course saddle of lamb, which I
Speaker 1: don't even know what it is, but it makes me sad.
Speaker 1: Filet of beef alright, not bad, followed by chicken wings
Speaker 1: and peas and also lamb chops with beans and artichokes,
Speaker 1: because you know you need some veggies in there. I
Speaker 1: guess that makes a healthy What came next. What came
Speaker 1: next was a casserole terrapin on casserole all of Maryland,
Speaker 1: which is turtle you can and that's Australia. Saying that
Speaker 1: I figured you guys would be like, yeah, we eat
Speaker 1: turtle all the time. Uh So that's the next course.
Speaker 1: Then you have a zorbet and you're like, okay, well
Speaker 1: that's the end of the meal. No. No, that is
Speaker 1: to cleanse the palate before the roast course comes out,
Speaker 1: which was I'm not lying, which was canvas back duck
Speaker 1: and quail. And then finally you get your dessert. Hey,
Speaker 1: the creamed ice creams, whipped cream, jelly dishes, bananimous pastries,
Speaker 1: petite fours liqueurs, and then a little fresh fruit at
Speaker 1: the very end, because why not. And in between courses
Speaker 1: they would smoke cigarettes to keep from puking everywhere, and
Speaker 1: then they would finish the whole meal off with a
Speaker 1: big fat cigar, and then they would die. So there
Speaker 1: was actually a Walt Woodman. The poet Walt Woodman called
Speaker 1: something called dyspepsia, which is um constipation diarrhea, and by
Speaker 1: the way, settle in for a lot of poop talk
Speaker 1: in this episode, constipation diarrhea somehow both at the same time, uh,
Speaker 1: indigestion um just basically wanting to die because you ate
Speaker 1: so much. That was called the Great American evil. This
Speaker 1: pepsia was, or the Great American stomach ache. Because everybody
Speaker 1: ate so terribly. Everyone just walked around going like, good
Speaker 1: to meet you. How's the stockmar could tune today? It
Speaker 1: was just like everyone felt terribly all the time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't unusual. It's just how people ate. Everyone
Speaker 1: just figured this is how you eat. You eat nine
Speaker 1: courses of of meat a meal is that and you
Speaker 1: feel like crap afterwards. So in the midst of all
Speaker 1: this flatulence, in Michigan, a state in our country, there
Speaker 1: were two brothers born who would go on to revolutionize
Speaker 1: health and diet. Um going to do a lot of
Speaker 1: weird stuff too. But there were decades and decades ahead
Speaker 1: of their time in many many ways. And their names
Speaker 1: were John Harvey and will Keith Kellogg. And for the
Speaker 1: Kellogg brothers, that's awesome. And if you're thinking, did these
Speaker 1: guys just fly across the world to talk about cereal?
Speaker 1: We did. But it's also about poop and masturbation, believe
Speaker 1: it or not, and in religion, and somehow all of
Speaker 1: things is coalesced in this kind of strange story. And
Speaker 1: oddly they coalesced around the Seventh day Adventist Church too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you guys have that here? Yeah? Are there any members here?
Speaker 1: All right? Probably we're gonna make fun of it a
Speaker 1: little bit. I just wanted to make sure that's good
Speaker 1: natured ribbing tops goons level. So the brothers, the brothers Kellogg,
Speaker 1: John Harvey and Will Um, they didn't like each other
Speaker 1: very much, even though they spent all of their life together.
Speaker 1: Practically Um John Harvey was the older one by eight years,
Speaker 1: and he was abusive to his younger brother and just
Speaker 1: about every way an older brother could be. As they
Speaker 1: were growing up, and then once they became adults, John
Speaker 1: Harvey hired Will so that he could abuse them further
Speaker 1: into adulthood pretty much, and he did things like um like,
Speaker 1: John Harvey would ride his bike, which is very unusual
Speaker 1: at the time to ride a bike just for exercise,
Speaker 1: but he would make Will jog alongside him and take dictation,
Speaker 1: because that's what a jerk does. That's only half of it.
Speaker 1: He would also uh, he was obsessed with his poop,
Speaker 1: and he would go into use to to go number
Speaker 1: two or I don't know what you call that here?
Speaker 1: Is it number two? Okay? Oh? Really the the universal language,
Speaker 1: so comforting number. He would go into take number two,
Speaker 1: have a little brother come in and take notes about
Speaker 1: his stools, and keep a log. Keep a log. I
Speaker 1: don't even mean that, oh boy, keep a log log
Speaker 1: a poop log. So they didn't get along. John Harvey
Speaker 1: was a jerk, and he was not paid well later
Speaker 1: on when they actually worked together, his little brother never
Speaker 1: got a formal title. So it should come as no
Speaker 1: surprise that later in life the two brothers would go
Speaker 1: on to countersue one another time and time again and
Speaker 1: basically not speak to each other. It's very sad, sad
Speaker 1: and interesting. Yes, that should be the name of our show.
Speaker 1: So the I like that. It's a good idea. Maybe
Speaker 1: they'll be um. So John Harvey and Will Kellogg were
Speaker 1: raised in a little town called Battle Creek, Michigan, and
Speaker 1: Battle Creek, Michigan became the seat of the Seventh Day
Speaker 1: Adventist Church, and Seventh Day Advantism grew out of something
Speaker 1: called Millerism, which was a religious movement that was formed
Speaker 1: around a guy named William Miller. Appropriately enough, and William
Speaker 1: Miller had a knack for incorrectly predicting the second coming
Speaker 1: of Christ, like he was really good not being accurate.
Speaker 1: So he had some followers and he said, yea, brothers,
Speaker 1: on October ancestors, sorry, on October eighteen forty four, God
Speaker 1: will come back again. The world's going to end, and
Speaker 1: it's gonna get real. It's goodies level. He didn't say
Speaker 1: that though, and October twenty second, eighteen forty four, came
Speaker 1: in it and um, nothing happened. And as followers went,
Speaker 1: you get one more chance, one more Miller, what's it
Speaker 1: going to be? And Miller said April eighteenth, and they said,
Speaker 1: all right, we'll give you till then April eighteenth came
Speaker 1: in win. They said, that's it. We're done. Millerism is done.
Speaker 1: We're gonna name this April eighteenth, eighteen forty four, the
Speaker 1: Great Disappointment with like the G and the D capitalized,
Speaker 1: which I think they were trying to send William Miller
Speaker 1: a message about so Millerism crumbles. However, Millerites would go
Speaker 1: on to say, you know what I like kind of
Speaker 1: the vibe of what we got going on, Miller's out,
Speaker 1: why don't we just reform Under the leadership of the Whites,
Speaker 1: Ellen White and her husband sort of gathered everyone together
Speaker 1: and reformed as a as a new band to tour
Speaker 1: the world called the Seventh Day Adventists. They got the
Speaker 1: band back together they did in the eighteen sixties, but
Speaker 1: without the lead singer I know which Actually I was
Speaker 1: lead singer in a band like that once. No, No,
Speaker 1: they broke up and reformed without me. Of what I
Speaker 1: was saying, it's not worth cheering. Don't cheer for that
Speaker 1: band I was. I was gonna ask if you were
Speaker 1: going to clarify that, because you just had a little
Speaker 1: bit of glory there for a second. I got a
Speaker 1: cheer after all these years yeah, but look at you now,
Speaker 1: that's right where those guys take that? Sarah's greatest fan.
Speaker 1: That was the name of this stupid band. All right,
Speaker 1: so what was it? I'm not okay, you can listen
Speaker 1: to the episode. So Ellen White, what she did was
Speaker 1: connected religion to personal health and a very kind of
Speaker 1: well not weird, but it was. No one else was
Speaker 1: quite doing what she was doing. No, no, she um
Speaker 1: she said. So your body and your soul are intertwined.
Speaker 1: So if you really take care of your body, you're
Speaker 1: also taking care of your soul as well. And if
Speaker 1: you do that, then uh, it will it will be
Speaker 1: easier for you to get into heaven. It's one thing
Speaker 1: we haven't told you about Seventh day Aventists. What they
Speaker 1: believe is that there's a finite number of slots in heaven. Basically,
Speaker 1: it's like a zero sum game getting in. If you
Speaker 1: get in, somebody else didn't kind of thing. So so
Speaker 1: getting into heaven is obviously very important. So you can
Speaker 1: get into heaven more easily if you eat vegetarian, if
Speaker 1: you avoid um vices like um making the saints cry,
Speaker 1: I think is what you guys call it here, What
Speaker 1: do they teach us in person whanking You want to
Speaker 1: see clear of whanking? Yeah, I mean fried food, greasy food,
Speaker 1: winking pickled foods, which is that's just crazy. Surely somebody
Speaker 1: spoke up and was like, even olives. She's like, are
Speaker 1: all lives even pickles? And they're like I think so,
Speaker 1: And she's like, yea, even all of the no pickled food.
Speaker 1: And they said, what does this have to do with God? Again?
Speaker 1: Uh hates pickles, That's what I heard. Ladies. You should
Speaker 1: not wear binding corsets, you should not wear wigs, you
Speaker 1: should not wear tight dresses. Someone just went wo wigs
Speaker 1: because that led to the physically destructive self vice of
Speaker 1: masturbation and the less lonely and more fun vice of
Speaker 1: excessive sexual intercourse, which is to say, any intercourse not
Speaker 1: for procreation. And that's it. Like if you weren't making
Speaker 1: a baby, then you just don't do it. So this
Speaker 1: was the this was the town, This is the community
Speaker 1: that the Kellogg brothers were raised in, and Um. From
Speaker 1: a very early age, John Harvey kind of proved himself um,
Speaker 1: kind of a sharp adventist. He caught the eye of
Speaker 1: the whites, who hired him as a devil's apprentice. Which
Speaker 1: was a printer's apprentice. I don't know why they called
Speaker 1: it that um. And then in very short order he
Speaker 1: ended up becoming the editor of the monthly magazine and
Speaker 1: Battle Creek, Michigan, the Health Reformer, which on his editorship
Speaker 1: came out strongly in favor of olives and repealing the
Speaker 1: band on it. But he caught their eye, is what
Speaker 1: I'm trying to say. And and the Whites had they
Speaker 1: were actually followers of another guy named James Caleb Jackson.
Speaker 1: I don't believe he was actually a Seventh Day Adventist.
Speaker 1: He was into health himself. He was a health reformer
Speaker 1: and he opened a spa or what you would call
Speaker 1: like a health spa in New York in the eighteen fifties.
Speaker 1: And Ellen White and her husband went and visited this
Speaker 1: place and they were just struck. They were like, this
Speaker 1: is it. This really dove tails in with like this
Speaker 1: whole idea of like treating yourself really well. We should
Speaker 1: open one of these in Bentle Creek. And they did,
Speaker 1: They opened the Western Health Reform Institute, and it was
Speaker 1: a total flop right out of the gate. Yeah, it was.
Speaker 1: They didn't do it right. They served it's basically where
Speaker 1: you would go to eat really creddy tasting food and
Speaker 1: have quack doctors give lectures. And it was, like you said,
Speaker 1: it was not popular. People would go and I get out,
Speaker 1: but they wouldn't come back. But the important thing is
Speaker 1: is they kind of stole that original idea from James
Speaker 1: Kalb Jackson, because he's going to come around later again. So, uh,
Speaker 1: this is where John Harvey. They were like, the writings
Speaker 1: on the wall, we need if we want this thing
Speaker 1: to succeed. I think we need like a real doctor
Speaker 1: to actually run this thing. And so young John Harvey
Speaker 1: was there, the riding was on the wall. They saw
Speaker 1: how bright he was and he was going places. He
Speaker 1: was interested in medicine and health. So they paid for
Speaker 1: him as his parents, is it okay if we send
Speaker 1: your son to medical medical school, your oldest son, And
Speaker 1: they said, yeah, just don't send Will, poor Will Will.
Speaker 1: It was kind of a jerk too, but John Harvey
Speaker 1: went to medical school for real, became a real doctor,
Speaker 1: and returned to Battle Creek, Michigan in eighteen seventy six
Speaker 1: and was appointed director of what would become the Battle
Speaker 1: Creek Sanitarium. They changed their name and They chose sanitarium
Speaker 1: because at the time, Santa tori ums were places where
Speaker 1: you went like to die when you had tuberculosis. And
Speaker 1: they're like, well, we really want to distance ourselves from that.
Speaker 1: We're going to change the O to an A and
Speaker 1: I think that will really get our point, like scratching
Speaker 1: that out, writing it and being like, yeah, you think
Speaker 1: as you will. See. John Harvey Kellogg was not the
Speaker 1: best businessman ever um. Nor was he the best doctor ever.
Speaker 1: Really no, but it was important to him that. I mean,
Speaker 1: he said, I'll come back and I'll run your your
Speaker 1: your joint here. But aside from the religious principles, which
Speaker 1: I'm down with, it needs to be a medical institution.
Speaker 1: I want the science to be good and that's kind
Speaker 1: of one of my requirements. And then he went on
Speaker 1: to um not follow good science for a lot of
Speaker 1: his career. Yeah. He also said, my younger brother Will
Speaker 1: has to come on for my own personal reasons, and
Speaker 1: Will came on as the head of HR very quickly
Speaker 1: instituted all of Fridays at the sanitary. I love that
Speaker 1: olives bit it doesn't do very well. However, this is
Speaker 1: when things started to flourish. They really did it, right,
Speaker 1: This place was super lux very nice. They figured, hey,
Speaker 1: let's give him better food and make people want to
Speaker 1: come here and have marble floors and banana trees and
Speaker 1: the lobby and palm trees and just it would be
Speaker 1: today what you would think of as like a super
Speaker 1: deluxe kind of health resort spa. Right. Yeah, And like
Speaker 1: like you said, it flourished. They went from like this
Speaker 1: house basically to a four story structure in just a
Speaker 1: few years, and then um, a few years after that,
Speaker 1: they built it into like a fifteen story, huge, enormous structure.
Speaker 1: And at this time in the US, if you had
Speaker 1: like a ten story building in a major city that
Speaker 1: was the pride of your city. They built a fifteen
Speaker 1: story huge complex into a health spa UM in in
Speaker 1: Battle Creek, Michigan, which would be like building the same
Speaker 1: thing in Gunda Windy or something like that. Right, is
Speaker 1: that a good example? All right? We do our research
Speaker 1: here is anyone from Gunda Wendy. Yeah, Gondo Windy, Sorry,
Speaker 1: I knew he's pronounced uh so in order, And it's
Speaker 1: kind of like it would be today if you wanted
Speaker 1: people to really take a note. It really helps of
Speaker 1: celebrities pay attention to it, and they did. People like
Speaker 1: Amelia Earhart went there, President William Howard Taft, Thomas Edison
Speaker 1: went there. I guess he was still working on the
Speaker 1: light bulb. But maybe he did that. Maybe he did
Speaker 1: that there. Who knows. Uh. Johnny Weissmuller, who played Tarzan
Speaker 1: in the movies, he had a knack for going into
Speaker 1: the dining room and doing his Tarzan call is sort
Speaker 1: of like ringing the dinner bell. I guess. And it
Speaker 1: was a big deal. Like people took note. But Middle
Speaker 1: America they still weren't on board. They called them battle freaks.
Speaker 1: They thought it was completely weird because you know, this
Speaker 1: was the eighteen seventies. After all. It was not the
Speaker 1: time to talk about soy milk and vegetarians. It was
Speaker 1: a time to eat a saddle of lamb while you're
Speaker 1: writing a cow that you were then going to eat
Speaker 1: after you ate the lamb. Yeah, that was what was done,
Speaker 1: and wash it down with some turtle. So when you
Speaker 1: went there. But I got no problems with turtle. You
Speaker 1: would eat turtle, Uh, don't judge me. Um, would you
Speaker 1: eat penguin? No? Someone just gasped, gasping, yes, No, nobody.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't eat kangaroo once you've laid with the kangaroo,
Speaker 1: tough to tough to imagine eating it. And I found
Speaker 1: that out either in either sense of the word. I
Speaker 1: think you couldn't eat the kangaroo after that, all right,
Speaker 1: I'm already lost. Well and I got us all right.
Speaker 1: So the sand they called it the Sand. The sanitarium, Uh,
Speaker 1: like you said, it was huge. There were more than
Speaker 1: a thousand employees there. They had physicians and nurses, masseuses,
Speaker 1: baker's bell hops, waiters, orderlies, attendants. It was like a
Speaker 1: really super deluxe place where you would be examined. I
Speaker 1: believe every patient for a while at least was treated
Speaker 1: personally by Dr John Harvey Kellogg. Yeah, each each person
Speaker 1: who came through, and we're talking tens of thousands of
Speaker 1: people a year, um was seen by John Harvey Kellogg
Speaker 1: and he would give them each like a personalized regimen
Speaker 1: to follow. And a lot of this stuff was like
Speaker 1: real common sense things that what we think of his
Speaker 1: common sense now, like go get some exercise, Um, a bike.
Speaker 1: Would would it kill you to get on a bike?
Speaker 1: Fresh air, sunshine, um. That was one of the first
Speaker 1: lectures would it kill you to get on a biker? Right?
Speaker 1: Ten a m in the East Lobby. Quit quit smoking, um,
Speaker 1: stopped drinking, cut out the caffeine, which is madness. Um.
Speaker 1: Just just common sense stuff that we think of his
Speaker 1: health that really kind of originated out of this area. Yeah,
Speaker 1: out of this era, yeah and area. So things are
Speaker 1: going pretty well. Common sense treatments and also really crazy
Speaker 1: crazy gizmos and contraptions. You can look these up online
Speaker 1: when you get home. Do you have Google here? But
Speaker 1: we call it googly goot. You totally do love your
Speaker 1: accents so much. Really, and you know what I even did.
Speaker 1: I changed my maps voice to a female Australian to
Speaker 1: drive me around Wine Country and it really was just
Speaker 1: a cherry on top. It's very lovely. I'm gonna go
Speaker 1: home and least me like, who's that? What happened down there?
Speaker 1: Get rid of her? But on the robot voice, that's Sheila.
Speaker 1: Good one. Thanks. Josh is in rare form to night everybody,
Speaker 1: look out, look out Sydney all right. Uh. One was
Speaker 1: called the kneating machine, like as in bread kneading, and
Speaker 1: they would treat you like a loaf of bread dough.
Speaker 1: You would lay down, and I had these mallets that
Speaker 1: would grind into your body, and people would turned cranks
Speaker 1: and things, and it was all in an effort to
Speaker 1: get you to poop. That was everything. So we we've
Speaker 1: got to tell you a little something about John Harvey
Speaker 1: Kellogg and his medical views. He subscribed strongly to this
Speaker 1: idea and now discredited theory called auto intoxication, and auto
Speaker 1: intoxication says that sure you poop. We all poop, Like
Speaker 1: the book says, everybody poops, but none of us are
Speaker 1: really good at pooping. We don't poop quite enough, and
Speaker 1: a little bit gets behind each time, and as it
Speaker 1: builds up, that left behind poop poisons the rest of
Speaker 1: your body. And this results in things like diabetes or
Speaker 1: high blood pressure or stroke or like getting hit by
Speaker 1: a bus. Whatever. It all comes back to the poop
Speaker 1: you're not getting out. So everything walking in the sunshine,
Speaker 1: riding a bike, would it kill you? UM, quitting smoking, UM,
Speaker 1: the needing machine, and all the other machines that he
Speaker 1: came up with. All of it was to get that
Speaker 1: extra little poop out of you and get the toxins
Speaker 1: associated from that. You better. You used to be saying
Speaker 1: poop and getting the toxins associated with that poop out
Speaker 1: of your body. That's right. Uh. He also invented something
Speaker 1: called the electric light bath cabinet, which sounds like an
Speaker 1: Elton John album, but it's not. It was basically an
Speaker 1: early version of the tanning bed. If you look this
Speaker 1: thing up, it's a huge box that you would sit
Speaker 1: in that kind of came up to your neck and
Speaker 1: had a nice little seat. Inside was lined with mirrors
Speaker 1: and the light bulb, remember, had just been invented, so
Speaker 1: they had no idea about wattage and there was just
Speaker 1: light bulbs everywhere that would I think the quote is
Speaker 1: that would boil the toxins, I'm sorry, boil the poisons
Speaker 1: out of the pores of the body. And he believed
Speaker 1: in light, uh not only sunlight, which does make sense,
Speaker 1: but light bulbs curing you. So he would fire up
Speaker 1: light bulbs all over the place and said, it'll cure gout,
Speaker 1: It'll cure typhoid, scarlet, fever, diabetes, OBCD, scurvy, gets strit
Speaker 1: us in constipation, because why not light bulbs some of
Speaker 1: these things that like, this guy must have made a
Speaker 1: mint on these machines because you could find them outside
Speaker 1: of the sanitarium too. There's actually a couple that were
Speaker 1: on the first class Gymnasium on the Titanic, which means
Speaker 1: some of John Harvey Kellogg's weirdo contraptions are at the
Speaker 1: bottom of the sea and the Titanic with some skeleton
Speaker 1: on the needing machine, like police, can I just ride
Speaker 1: a bike? It's like your chance for riding a bike
Speaker 1: is long from what else did he had? He had
Speaker 1: the electric bed, which sounds like a lot of fun
Speaker 1: to be, the foot foot vibrator, which also sounds lovely.
Speaker 1: And then our favorite machine, our favorite machine, the colonic machine.
Speaker 1: You guys are familiar with colonics. Has anyone ever had
Speaker 1: a colonic? Just left just like that? Yeah? Good one. Uh.
Speaker 1: I've actually had a couple of calonics before I have,
Speaker 1: and they're like, it's it's hit or miss. I can
Speaker 1: tell you. Sometimes you get off of the clonic machine,
Speaker 1: you feel like a million bucks. Other times you're like,
Speaker 1: you know what it means to feel gray? Miss? Yeah,
Speaker 1: when it's when it's a miss, it's a bad mess.
Speaker 1: It's not fun. Yeah. So, and I don't think we
Speaker 1: mentioned this whole four bottel movements a day thing that
Speaker 1: he had he went to Africa on a safari. This
Speaker 1: is the level of science this guy was operating at.
Speaker 1: He went to African safari and saw guerrillas whooping four
Speaker 1: times a day, and he literally said, well, they seem
Speaker 1: happy we came from them. I don't. Actually, he probably
Speaker 1: didn't believe that at all, but we all know now
Speaker 1: that we did. And he said, so that's what we
Speaker 1: should all shoot for as humans, is for a day.
Speaker 1: And if you need a little help and the kneeding
Speaker 1: machine isn't doing it, and the light isn't boiling it
Speaker 1: out of you, then just have a seat on the
Speaker 1: calonic machine and hook yourself up to the spigot. Yes,
Speaker 1: turn on the water and see what happens. Water moves
Speaker 1: things along great. Uh. If not. It was followed by
Speaker 1: a yogurt treatment. You would eat half of the yogurt
Speaker 1: and the other half. Seriously, he would shoot yogurt up
Speaker 1: people's butts. I never did that. I have I have
Speaker 1: principles and rules. Draw lines places daw. I drew a
Speaker 1: line right through the yogurt. He had a little the
Speaker 1: little fruit on the side though that let's call the
Speaker 1: parfet machine, right so uh. He actually had a couple
Speaker 1: of patents for this thing, for the clonic machine. The
Speaker 1: first one, I don't know what that said, but we
Speaker 1: looked up the improved patent because we were like, sure,
Speaker 1: why not see what he got wrong? Uh? He said
Speaker 1: for the improved version he wanted an irrigating apparatus particularly
Speaker 1: adaptable for colonic irrigating, sure, but also susceptible for other
Speaker 1: irrigation treatments. So I guess after the people got on
Speaker 1: he was like, well, we could water the lawn while
Speaker 1: we're at it. There's a fire in the kitchen. It's
Speaker 1: just going to waste. You're in You're in the movie tonight,
Speaker 1: Did I get you? I didn't realize it was such
Speaker 1: a classy city. And and also the the improved patent
Speaker 1: called for one where you could actually measure the amount
Speaker 1: of liquid entering and exiting the body, So before that
Speaker 1: it was just a wild ride. And one of them,
Speaker 1: one of these colonic machines, had multiple spigots on it,
Speaker 1: which meant you could fit more than one person on
Speaker 1: it a time. And I gotta tell you, having done
Speaker 1: calonics before, you do not want anyone anywhere near you
Speaker 1: are in the same room. Even you do not want
Speaker 1: to look over while you're getting a chlonic at somebody
Speaker 1: else getting a chlonic because you don't want to connect
Speaker 1: with another human being like that. Yeah. No, so it
Speaker 1: must have been some Melton John. It sounds like fun.
Speaker 1: So um. I don't know about you guys, but uh,
Speaker 1: I think this is going pretty well so far, so good, okay,
Speaker 1: good good good. Well, then we have bad news because
Speaker 1: that means we have to take a message break, but
Speaker 1: we also have good news because we're not reading an ad.
Speaker 1: We have something very special. Yep. We have a fellow,
Speaker 1: a local guy named Alex Sfton who you might recognize
Speaker 1: in a second, who's going to come on out and
Speaker 1: help us and we will be right back right after
Speaker 1: these messages my out in podcast land. It's time for
Speaker 1: your fabe shorty. Stop we the chalk shoe chals stop
Speaker 1: you sh no, thank you Alex? Yes, wow, oh man,
Speaker 1: that does not happen everywhere everybody. Uh and we're back.
Speaker 1: Yeah man, that was amazing. He was one of the
Speaker 1: one of the early jingle writers that sent one in.
Speaker 1: He was number seven and he wrote us and said, uh,
Speaker 1: I live in Sydney and how about if I come
Speaker 1: up on stage and do that in front of people,
Speaker 1: and we said, that's a great idea, one of the greatest, wonderful. Wow,
Speaker 1: I really classed this show up, like eight chokes, poop
Speaker 1: and wanking everyone. Let's get back to it. So, so
Speaker 1: one of the things about John Harvey Kellogg is, yes
Speaker 1: he had some weird contraptions, and yes he um he
Speaker 1: did weird stuff with yogurt, but there was some things
Speaker 1: where he was actually pretty ahead of his time. Like
Speaker 1: we said, what we think of as health like was
Speaker 1: cutting edge and was brought to America and the world
Speaker 1: by guys like this, and in particular mostly by John
Speaker 1: Harvey Kellogg. Um. One of his earliest books was called
Speaker 1: Tobacco is Um, and in it he writes about how
Speaker 1: tobacco is really bad for you. And this is at
Speaker 1: a time when people didn't think that way. No doctors
Speaker 1: would literally smoke while they treated right, They'd be like,
Speaker 1: I have good news, you're pregnant, so I'm gonna need
Speaker 1: you to move to camel lights during yeah, during the term.
Speaker 1: Let me look at your chart, right, you have lung cancer.
Speaker 1: I don't know what to say. I do too, everyone
Speaker 1: does the sittle of lamp. It was a crazy time
Speaker 1: when people just thought it was normal to do that.
Speaker 1: But he was the anti tobacco train way way early.
Speaker 1: He was one of the first doctors, especially in the
Speaker 1: United States, two champion probiotics, and obviously with the yogurt
Speaker 1: acidophilus um eating the yogurt that is, and gut flora,
Speaker 1: and people just didn't know about this stuff. People doctors
Speaker 1: at the time tried to treat disease, not prevent disease.
Speaker 1: It was just accepted that. They didn't call it healthy eating.
Speaker 1: They just called it eating and dying. That was the progression.
Speaker 1: You get to your fifties, maybe your sixties, and you
Speaker 1: get diabetes or heart disease or stroke and you just
Speaker 1: keel over dead. And John Harvey really, to his credit,
Speaker 1: was like, wait a minute, I think if we take
Speaker 1: care of our bodies, you could live longer. And they
Speaker 1: said who are you, which confroned him. He also he
Speaker 1: was actually so when you went to the Battle Creek Sanitarium,
Speaker 1: one of the things they had was food, and he
Speaker 1: actually came up with a substantial amount of food. He's
Speaker 1: one of three people listed as an inventor of peanut butter,
Speaker 1: which I mean you can like die with that one
Speaker 1: and be pretty happy. Um. He invented a lot of
Speaker 1: nut based meat substitutes, which today it's like, how many
Speaker 1: can you find to those at the grocery store? A
Speaker 1: lot like to furky, it's not nut based, but you
Speaker 1: get what I'm saying. Um, what else did he come up? Oh,
Speaker 1: I've got one. Remember how you weren't supposed to eat
Speaker 1: or drink caffeine. He had a coffee substitute that was
Speaker 1: made from toasted grains and molasses with no caffeine. So
Speaker 1: you wouldn't drink it. You would throw it in somebody's
Speaker 1: face when they served it to you. But that's what
Speaker 1: you would get for coffee in the mornings at the
Speaker 1: sand So you're having a great show, thank you, So
Speaker 1: are you? Guys? All right? This next section we're gonna
Speaker 1: call sexy time. Oh no, it's really bad and awful.
Speaker 1: It's actually the antithesis of yeah. And this this next
Speaker 1: part is tough, everyone, but we all got to get
Speaker 1: through it together. Hold hands with your neighbor if you want.
Speaker 1: This is tough. But here goes again. Not for whanking
Speaker 1: very much against it, wrote about it a lot. He
Speaker 1: was obsessed with poop and masturbation. Wrote about it in
Speaker 1: a book called Plain Facts for the Old and Young,
Speaker 1: about half of which were facts maybe, and this is
Speaker 1: one of the things he wrote about how to kick
Speaker 1: the habit. So before Chuck reads is I want to
Speaker 1: point this out. This is coming from one of the
Speaker 1: most famous, most revered physicians in the world. Okay, bear
Speaker 1: that in mind when you're listening to what he's about
Speaker 1: to prescribe. A remedy which is almost always successful in
Speaker 1: small boys is circumcision. The operations should be performed by
Speaker 1: a surgeon without administering an anesthetic. That's the correct response.
Speaker 1: You're right, they pass, they pass the test. You're all right, Sydney.
Speaker 1: As the brief pain attending the operation will have a
Speaker 1: salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected
Speaker 1: with the idea of punishment, as it may well be
Speaker 1: in some cases, the soreness, which continues for several weeks
Speaker 1: interrupts the practice. And this had not been previously become
Speaker 1: too firmly fixed, it may be forgotten and not resumed.
Speaker 1: So I fucking update this for a minute. If you
Speaker 1: catch your son whyanking, I think, as you call it, um,
Speaker 1: you would take your son to the doctor. To be
Speaker 1: circumcised without anesthetic as punishment. That's why he just recommended
Speaker 1: in that past. So it's all been kind of fun.
Speaker 1: But this guy is a monster. Yeah, oh yeah, we
Speaker 1: forgot to tell you. This is where it takes a
Speaker 1: really dark turn. Another method of treatment consists in the
Speaker 1: application of one or more silver sutures in such a
Speaker 1: way as to prevent erection altogether. The foreskin is drawn
Speaker 1: forward over the glands, and the needle to which the
Speaker 1: wires attached has passed through from one side to the other.
Speaker 1: After drawing the wire through, the ends are twisted together
Speaker 1: and cut off close. It is now impossible for an
Speaker 1: erection to occur. You held a book and the slight
Speaker 1: irritation thus produce x as the most powerful means of
Speaker 1: overcoming the disposition to resort to the practice. Monster. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was a monster, Okay, And I know he was
Speaker 1: doing this in the back room. I disagree. We have
Speaker 1: an ongoing dispute about this. I was wanking. I think
Speaker 1: he never did. I honestly think he never ever ever
Speaker 1: did in his entire life. I think he wanted to,
Speaker 1: but I don't think he did. Um women didn't get
Speaker 1: off the hook. He knew that they masturbated too, so
Speaker 1: he had it no, no, no, get out of the
Speaker 1: way back machine man, come to the future. It's okay
Speaker 1: he uh if. And if you were on the fence
Speaker 1: about John Harvey prepared to tip over? Um, he had
Speaker 1: an easy solution for that. Just throw some carbolic acid
Speaker 1: on the female genitalia or junk Isn't think about that
Speaker 1: next time you eat corn flakes. We'll get to the ceial.
Speaker 1: Trust me, that's coming. He had some other really stupid
Speaker 1: ones to like tying your hands together. That's like the
Speaker 1: three stooges remedy actually makes it a little easier to
Speaker 1: be honest. He was away off face. I don't know
Speaker 1: about you could still you could still get the job done.
Speaker 1: What else, Oh, here's one. He built a sort of
Speaker 1: an underwear contraption with a cage on the front that
Speaker 1: went around your genitalia, and just in case you could
Speaker 1: not be stopped, he built a literal prison around your genitalia.
Speaker 1: So that means that, um that John Harvey Kellogg invented
Speaker 1: the tanning bed apparently, peanut butter and the in the
Speaker 1: box justin timber Lake rolling over in his grave in
Speaker 1: the future. Yeah, he's alive for now, he's doing quite well.
Speaker 1: He eats a saddle of lambid day, all right. So
Speaker 1: that's a bit of the dark side of John Harvey. Uh,
Speaker 1: it gets even darker because he was also a eugenicist, right,
Speaker 1: You've heard us talk about this some on the show.
Speaker 1: If you don't know what that is, it is sort
Speaker 1: of this insane belief of racial purity to like the
Speaker 1: nth degree, to where he thought like, not only white
Speaker 1: is right, but you should, we should have a pedigree system.
Speaker 1: And it was it was all tied into like eating
Speaker 1: in health and stuff too. It was called he actually
Speaker 1: had a version called authentics, and eugenicists made fun of
Speaker 1: him behind his back. He was so out there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: his whole thing was eugenics plus where you could actually
Speaker 1: be even more racially pure if you were a vegetarian
Speaker 1: or you suitured your foreskin, you know, for fun on
Speaker 1: a Thursday. And like Chuck was saying, like even the
Speaker 1: eugenicists were like this guy's oh was mine? You heard
Speaker 1: what he thinks, which is really saying something coming from eugenicists,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, his eugenic he never did it, but
Speaker 1: he proposed the Eugenic Registry where he created a pedigree
Speaker 1: of breeding between people like dogs, to where you could
Speaker 1: you should only breed with certain types to make the
Speaker 1: uber race like dogs, which I mean like if that
Speaker 1: had ever taken whole, can imagine what Tinder would be
Speaker 1: like the Lord. But apparently to John Harvey Kellogg, it
Speaker 1: went white people, cocker spaniels. All right, now we're gonna
Speaker 1: get to cereal finally, thank you, thank you. We all
Speaker 1: got through it. You can still hold hands if you want.
Speaker 1: That's nice. So uh, as far as the Battle Creek
Speaker 1: Sanitarium goes, in the medicine part, John Harvey had an
Speaker 1: iron grip on things. As it was coming out of
Speaker 1: my mouth, Josh is like, he had an iron grip
Speaker 1: on nothing. I tell you he didn't. He didn't. He
Speaker 1: had had a stranglehold on the medicine. But he was
Speaker 1: not a great businessman. He changed, you know, sanatorium to sanitarium,
Speaker 1: and I was like, hey, what do you think of that?
Speaker 1: Check me out. Luckily for him he had a little
Speaker 1: brother around, Remember young Will, He's still around. He was
Speaker 1: actually a pretty good businessman and turns out a pretty
Speaker 1: good marketer. And uh. When John Harvey was trying to
Speaker 1: search for a breakfast health food which would later become
Speaker 1: cereal as you will see. Uh, he hypothesized that you
Speaker 1: know what, if we like get the digestion going before
Speaker 1: you even eat it, that's even better for poop. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the poop comes out that much easier. So so they started,
Speaker 1: uh with double baked biscuits. They were basically these really
Speaker 1: hard crackers that they double baked, so they were, you know,
Speaker 1: already sort of digested. And I don't even think we
Speaker 1: mentioned that he believed you should choose everything forty times
Speaker 1: forty times? Can you manage chewing tofurky not? Could it
Speaker 1: just be like ghosts choose after like you know, it's
Speaker 1: like absorbed into my gums. So, as legend goes at
Speaker 1: Battle Creek, a woman, an older lady, broke her dentures
Speaker 1: on one of these double baked biscuits, and he was like,
Speaker 1: this is not good because I don't want to get
Speaker 1: sued by every old lady or young podcaster who breaks
Speaker 1: his teeth. Did you get that one? I got implants?
Speaker 1: All right, thanks appreciate that. Uh. And so they started
Speaker 1: to grind them up into little little crumbs and breaks
Speaker 1: up these little biscuits, and that was sort of their
Speaker 1: first little version of what would become cereal. Right, that's
Speaker 1: like the way Kellogg's tells it. The truer story is
Speaker 1: that they said, we need a breakfast cereal that's, you know,
Speaker 1: easy on the stomach. What what what does James Caleb
Speaker 1: Jackson doing at his sanitarium And they went and found
Speaker 1: out that he was making a cereal called granula, And
Speaker 1: granula was made from graham powder. It's these little baked,
Speaker 1: little nuggets um that are not food. You had to
Speaker 1: soak them overnight in milk or water, your choice to
Speaker 1: be able to eat it the next morning. Right, not
Speaker 1: good breakfast cereal. And they said, let's steal that recipe,
Speaker 1: and they took James Caleb Jackson's granula and they called
Speaker 1: their version of it granula, because again, John Harvey was
Speaker 1: not a very good business fan. So James Keller Jackson
Speaker 1: found out about this and sued them, and they were
Speaker 1: forced to come up with a new recipe in a
Speaker 1: new name, and they came up with granola because again
Speaker 1: they had a real knack for switching a vowel out
Speaker 1: here there. That's the old John Harvey Kellogg trick. And
Speaker 1: they swapped out the graham flower for wheat flour, and
Speaker 1: they made something you guys have never been cursed with.
Speaker 1: We did our research, um, something called grape nuts. Has
Speaker 1: anyone ever heard of grape nuts? They're like these little
Speaker 1: tiny pebbles. Yeah, it's like, um, boy, as a kid,
Speaker 1: if you ever made the mistake of thinking it tastes
Speaker 1: anything like grapes, if you were wrong, or even nuts,
Speaker 1: it's like, yeah, you're right. It's like if you took
Speaker 1: a rock and a hammer and broke it up into
Speaker 1: the smallest things that you could and said box, go
Speaker 1: have sex with a cardboard box, and then whatever that
Speaker 1: produces is grape nuts. Cereal. It's disgusting. So that is
Speaker 1: when it's still it's still like a popular cereals still
Speaker 1: around today. Yeah, and old folks, Yes, every every kid
Speaker 1: in America goes through this rite of passage where you know,
Speaker 1: when you pour a big bowl of cereal, you're like, hell, yeah, honeycombs,
Speaker 1: I love these things or um uh, what do you
Speaker 1: call them, like choco pops or something like that. Very cereal,
Speaker 1: So you pour like a big old bull. You do
Speaker 1: not do that with grape nuts because they are denser
Speaker 1: than a neutron star. But you don't know that as
Speaker 1: a kid, and you pour a big old bowl and
Speaker 1: by the time like you realize you're horrible mistake. Your
Speaker 1: mom's like you already put milk on that. You have
Speaker 1: to finish that whole thing, finish all that grape nuts,
Speaker 1: and you have to finish it. You never make that
Speaker 1: mistake again. It's a it's a bad day when that happened,
Speaker 1: they should call it large hadron collider cereal. But the
Speaker 1: thing about grape nuts is grape nuts came out of
Speaker 1: the Kellogg brothers stealing granula from Caleb Jackson. Grape nuts
Speaker 1: is made by the C. W. Post Company, and c W.
Speaker 1: Post was a patient at the Battle Creek Sanitarium and
Speaker 1: he stole the recipe from grape nuts from the Kellogg brothers.
Speaker 1: What a time to be alive. It really was just
Speaker 1: steal everything. It doesn't matter, change a letter, it's fine,
Speaker 1: all right. So they're experimenting. They still didn't have these
Speaker 1: lovely little flakes that we know as corn flakes for
Speaker 1: frosted flakes. They were experimenting with flavor. They were experimenting
Speaker 1: with like gram flour with wheat flour. Uh. Finally they
Speaker 1: tried corn and they thought they were onto something with corn.
Speaker 1: And it depends on who you asked, but either John Harvey,
Speaker 1: Will his little brother, or his wife Ella. John Harvey's
Speaker 1: wife found out that if you is that a subway,
Speaker 1: I think it's an earthquake. Okay? Are we good? Is
Speaker 1: this normal? Do you guys have earthquakes? Here? It's a
Speaker 1: rat parade. Mit ain't as young as out in front.
Speaker 1: They're all like doing their top path. It's very Jerry
Speaker 1: leave that in, Yeah, Jerry leave that in? Where was I? Okay?
Speaker 1: So either La Will or John Harvey realized that one
Speaker 1: of the key things was to roll it out really
Speaker 1: really flat. So they were getting there. They were double
Speaker 1: baking it. They landed on corn. They were rolling it
Speaker 1: out flat, but it still wasn't quite right. No, so, um,
Speaker 1: John Harvey, there was something else we didn't mention. If
Speaker 1: you couldn't poop and the calonic machine wasn't working, he
Speaker 1: would just take out part of your colon and surgery.
Speaker 1: That was another thing he could do. Right. It maybe
Speaker 1: much too bitch in there, sir, Maybe maybe tossing a
Speaker 1: silver suture for free while he was at it. While
Speaker 1: you were under right, So he was called away to
Speaker 1: surgery one day while he and Will were experimenting down
Speaker 1: in the basement in the sanitarium, and Umi was notoriously frugal,
Speaker 1: so rather than throw away the dough they've been working
Speaker 1: on that hadn't worked, he just kind of set it
Speaker 1: off to the side for later. And when he came back,
Speaker 1: he found that something had happened, something called tempering, where
Speaker 1: the dough gets just a little bit moldy, not like
Speaker 1: you gross moldy, but kind of like this is delicious moldy, right,
Speaker 1: like the air in the water just kind of spreads
Speaker 1: evenly around it. And the upshot of all this is
Speaker 1: that when you bake mold that's or baked dough that's
Speaker 1: been tempered, it turns into perfect little flakes. So that's
Speaker 1: how the flaked breakfast cereal was accidentally discovered in the
Speaker 1: Battle Creek Sanitarium by Will, who is too cheap to
Speaker 1: throw away the dough. That's right. So John Harvey was thrilled,
Speaker 1: Uh not because he wanted to become a cereal magnate.
Speaker 1: He was like, I'm a doctor, I want this for
Speaker 1: my patients. Uh, now we can just easily pour this
Speaker 1: breakfast cereal into a bowl, and for the first time
Speaker 1: people can eat a very simple, nutritious what we think
Speaker 1: is at least as a nutritious breakfast. And uh Will
Speaker 1: was like, well, I don't know, big brother, he said
Speaker 1: in his head because he dared not speak aloud. Right,
Speaker 1: he said, the way I see it, and this is
Speaker 1: all in his brain now, the way I see it,
Speaker 1: you don't have to be ill to eat breakfast cereal.
Speaker 1: I think healthy people might just like a special, little
Speaker 1: simple breakfast that they can pour out of a bowl.
Speaker 1: And he was sitting over there going like this, and
Speaker 1: Jarvey said, John Harvey said, what are you doing over there?
Speaker 1: You have nothing, big brother, nothing, pay no attention. Are
Speaker 1: you thinking about wanking? No? On. So in the end, however,
Speaker 1: the patent for flaked cereals and Process of preparing same
Speaker 1: was issued on April fourteen to John Harvey Kellogg alone,
Speaker 1: not his wife nor his brother, just to him. And
Speaker 1: it did pretty well for a little while. It did. Um.
Speaker 1: They sold something like a hundred and eighty thousand cases
Speaker 1: in in um. No, I'm sorry. They sold the stuff
Speaker 1: for about ten years UM, and they sold enough that
Speaker 1: they were making their money back. They were selling it
Speaker 1: outside of the sanitarium, but not much, not much. Will
Speaker 1: figured out that they would probably sell a lot more
Speaker 1: of the cereal if it didn't taste like so he said,
Speaker 1: I've got an idea. It's a radical idea, but I
Speaker 1: think this might just work. Let's add a little bit
Speaker 1: of salt and sugar to this cereal recipe. And John
Speaker 1: Harvey might get out demon salt and sugar are as
Speaker 1: bad as olives, and uh, he'd had a change of
Speaker 1: heart about alives by this time, and Will said, no, no,
Speaker 1: I really I think this is a good idea. And
Speaker 1: if you stop and think about it, everyone's head like
Speaker 1: Kellogg's corn flicks, right, how much sugar do you have
Speaker 1: to put on those things to make them taste decent?
Speaker 1: Imagine what they must have tasted like before. What we're
Speaker 1: all eating is the improved taste version, right, because I
Speaker 1: can't imagine how bland they were before? And just cry,
Speaker 1: eating these things so still better than grape nuts, nuts
Speaker 1: of the worst? Uh, Captain crunch, peanut butter? Do you
Speaker 1: have that here? Captain crunch? Oh? What you've had? It?
Speaker 1: Isn't it the best? It's the best sugary cereal. When
Speaker 1: my wife goes out of town. That's my vice. Like
Speaker 1: some guys are like, I don't know. I don't know
Speaker 1: what guys do when women go out of town their wives.
Speaker 1: I get cereals, like she'll never know when she comes back,
Speaker 1: she's like, do I smell breakfast cereal? How could you
Speaker 1: let me smell your spoon? It sounded dirty for some reason? Oh?
Speaker 1: Where are we? So, Jerry, Jerry, Okay, I know where
Speaker 1: I'm sorry. So John Harvey goes out of town. He
Speaker 1: goes to Europe to do some lecturing and back then.
Speaker 1: I guess it takes like a month to go to Europe,
Speaker 1: in a month to come back, and a couple of
Speaker 1: months to go on tour and do his lecturing. He's
Speaker 1: gone for he was gone long enough for a little
Speaker 1: brother to build a manufacturing plant. Will was like, I
Speaker 1: hope he doesn't notice the mass production plant that I
Speaker 1: built while he was gone, with big vats of sugar
Speaker 1: and salt. And John Harvey came back and he was
Speaker 1: really piste off, and he said, you're gonna pay for
Speaker 1: this out of your own pocket, out of your allowance
Speaker 1: that I gave you, out of your chief allowance that
Speaker 1: I give you, and Will was done. He was like,
Speaker 1: I'm done. I'm tired of you, big brother. I've been
Speaker 1: working for you and getting abused for all these years.
Speaker 1: He said, Uh, everyone listening, please note I just made
Speaker 1: a friends reference. Do you have friends here? Sure? They
Speaker 1: called it mates man, which apparently made either means like
Speaker 1: I love you or you're about to get your ass kicked.
Speaker 1: I had thus this whole time, have been like, all right,
Speaker 1: are you howking? Are we fighting? Just hugging, Just hug
Speaker 1: that's it. That's our motto, just hugging. Wank So the sanitarium.
Speaker 1: Will had had enough. The sanitarium actually burned down in
Speaker 1: n two from a from an accidental uh furnace gone wrong,
Speaker 1: and Will was like, all right, I'll help you rebuild
Speaker 1: this because we've all kind of put everything into it.
Speaker 1: And then after that, I'm really gone, trust me. He
Speaker 1: was genuinely spineless. Yes, he was, brother, I'm out of
Speaker 1: here after I help you rebuild the fifteen story sanitarium.
Speaker 1: But John Harvey actually refused to get on that sugar train.
Speaker 1: He sold the sweetened version to his brother. He actually
Speaker 1: bought the patent from his brother of the decent tasting
Speaker 1: version and on February nine six at the age of
Speaker 1: forty six years old. I'm a little older than that,
Speaker 1: even he was a late bloomer. Yeah, yeah, when we
Speaker 1: get it. Will Kellogg founded the Battle Creek Toasted corn
Speaker 1: Flake Company and became a very, very very rich man.
Speaker 1: So at this point, John Harvey and Will Kellogg have
Speaker 1: now gone their separate ways for basically the first time
Speaker 1: in their lives. And we're going to take a message
Speaker 1: break again right here. So Alex, if you will come
Speaker 1: out one more time, Alex Sexton, everybody, we will be
Speaker 1: right back right after this messages. He st off with
Speaker 1: jos trae ah oh together now everyone of you. Nice sport.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Alex w wow. Uh and we're back everybody,
Speaker 1: thank you. Kind of it's like we've practiced this or something.
Speaker 1: You guys are good. So um Will struck out on
Speaker 1: his own with the recipe that he bought from his brother,
Speaker 1: and uh. Now he started selling a hundred and eighty
Speaker 1: thousand cases of corn flakes in the first year, first
Speaker 1: year after he separated from his brother, less than the
Speaker 1: first year, because they separated in February, So in less
Speaker 1: than a year he sold a hundred and eighty thousand cases,
Speaker 1: and there's like four or five boxes to a case
Speaker 1: of corn flakes because they okay, there's like six or
Speaker 1: seven boxes to a case. Because he put a little
Speaker 1: salt and a little sugar, and it started to take
Speaker 1: the world by storm. But he realized he was never
Speaker 1: going to um make it a national product unless he
Speaker 1: took New York, because you know, if you could make
Speaker 1: it there, you could make it anywhere. So he started
Speaker 1: something it's pretty good and ever, thank you, I just
Speaker 1: came up with that. I like that. That should be
Speaker 1: a T shirt. It should be we should totally license
Speaker 1: it and get our suit off for it. Uh So
Speaker 1: he um he started an advertising campaign and he threw
Speaker 1: me off. He started an advertising campaign specifically for New
Speaker 1: York called Wink Wednesday, which was pretty risque actually, especially
Speaker 1: for will Kellogg, but also for nineteen o six. It
Speaker 1: was basically he might as well have been asking women
Speaker 1: to show a little ankle, because he advertised in all
Speaker 1: the New York papers on Wednesday, when you go shopping, ladies,
Speaker 1: wink at your grocer, and your grocer will give you
Speaker 1: a free box of corn flakes. And you know, obviously
Speaker 1: people would do anything for free corn flakes, including winking
Speaker 1: at a strange man not winking. No, no, that was
Speaker 1: it was a different egg camp. But it was a
Speaker 1: big deal to give away a free box of cereals.
Speaker 1: You know, it wasn't There were no You didn't have
Speaker 1: to enter stuff as your code or anything like that.
Speaker 1: Just a wink and you get your your free cereal.
Speaker 1: So it was a big deal. Another few dominoes started
Speaker 1: to fall to help this thing really explode. In the
Speaker 1: nineteen tens, pasteurization of milk finally happened, so it was
Speaker 1: no longer dangerous to eat cereal. I guess what else
Speaker 1: did they come up with? Oh like kids like cutting
Speaker 1: out box tops and mailing them in for sort of
Speaker 1: creddy prizes. That was a big marketing thing in Battle Creek, Michigan.
Speaker 1: If you grow up, even like at our age in
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies and eighties in America, you knew like
Speaker 1: Battle Creek, Michigan was an address where they would send
Speaker 1: you things. If you sent in cereal, I want a
Speaker 1: crappy whistle. It's gonna break after three blows. But I
Speaker 1: got basically because they sent in a box top. That
Speaker 1: was the whole thing. Uh. They started expanding into new
Speaker 1: markets in nineteen fourteen, went to Canada. Uh. They started
Speaker 1: brand flakes in the nineteen fifteens and sixteens. They finally
Speaker 1: in the nineteen twenties built a plant right here in Sydney, Australia,
Speaker 1: right and uh oh, what else? They they invented the
Speaker 1: little uh those awesome little single serving boxes that are
Speaker 1: still one of my favorite things because they're like small things.
Speaker 1: I think the little single serving a cereal box that
Speaker 1: you can actually open up and eat out of. It's
Speaker 1: like the pinnacle of human technology. It's pretty good. I
Speaker 1: love it. Large Hadron collider mini box that you can
Speaker 1: eat out of cereal. Who knew the large Hadron collider
Speaker 1: was going to make two appearances I have in a
Speaker 1: nineteenth century Kellogg's episode. Uh oh. And the other thing
Speaker 1: Will did was very revolutionary. During the Great Depression when
Speaker 1: people were I mean a lot of people are going
Speaker 1: out of business, businesses were not doing well, or they
Speaker 1: would just really kind of go down to bare bones,
Speaker 1: he doubled down on advertising because he thought, I've actually
Speaker 1: got a pretty cheap, easy to eat food and he
Speaker 1: made money during the Great Depression. It was remarkable. He
Speaker 1: was extraordinarily successful. He founded the W. K. Kellogg Foundation.
Speaker 1: He endowed it with fifty million dollars is back in
Speaker 1: like the nineteen tents, just a tremendous amount of money.
Speaker 1: Now it's worth like nine billion today. Um so he
Speaker 1: was extraordinarily wealthy. And all of this happened the moment
Speaker 1: he stepped doubt from his brother's shadow. And his brother
Speaker 1: didn't like that one bit. So John Harvey said, well,
Speaker 1: I don't care at all about um cereal myself, but
Speaker 1: I really don't like my little brother being successful. So
Speaker 1: I'm gonna make my own cereal. I'm going to make
Speaker 1: corn flakes and I think i'll call them Kellogg's corn flakes.
Speaker 1: Now he said corn flakes with an M, and people
Speaker 1: like corn flakes or corn flakes, and he was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you tell me right. So he made these things and
Speaker 1: Will was like, well, big brother, I'll see you in
Speaker 1: court and he sued John Harvey, and John Harvey said,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, well I'm suing you back because that's the
Speaker 1: American way. And they went to court with them dueling lawsuits.
Speaker 1: And what was that issue was who had the right
Speaker 1: to use the Killogg name. I mean, what was really
Speaker 1: a hurt was ego. Let's be honest. They were both
Speaker 1: named Kellogg. That's part of it. But also John Harvey
Speaker 1: was like, I'm the famous John Harvey Kellogg. I'm the
Speaker 1: Doctor Oz of my day. And it was like who
Speaker 1: is that? He's like, just wait, you'll see it's a
Speaker 1: sensible reference. Do you know who doctor Oz is? Okay,
Speaker 1: r Australia. I was like, wait a minute, did they
Speaker 1: get that Dr Australia. I'd go to that guy right.
Speaker 1: So so on the other hand, Will was like, well,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, wait a minute. Yes, my brother is
Speaker 1: the most famous doctor in all the land, but I
Speaker 1: have built this Kellogg's brand over the last you know,
Speaker 1: couple of decades and I've actually eclipsed his fame. So
Speaker 1: there's there was like, like you said, a lot of
Speaker 1: ego at shirt here the family name, but also which
Speaker 1: was the more famous Kellogg? And it turns out that
Speaker 1: the court said lose. He wasn't a good guy either,
Speaker 1: by the way. He didn't Yeah, he didn't silver suiture things.
Speaker 1: But yet he was very he was a very unhappy,
Speaker 1: I'm fulfilled man. He would uh spend a lot of
Speaker 1: evenings at home kind of longingly looking at the cage
Speaker 1: that his brother had built around his genitalia and just think,
Speaker 1: why why did I let him talk me into that?
Speaker 1: And does anyone have any wirecutters? I don't know about that.
Speaker 1: So after these lawsuits, they rarely ever spoke again. And
Speaker 1: was I mean, really really sad. If you've ever had
Speaker 1: a good brother or a good sibling, you know how
Speaker 1: wonderful that is. They were not tight at all. They
Speaker 1: didn't speak. Uh. If they ever did, Will would make
Speaker 1: sure he had a witness there just to hear the conversation. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, things are really bad when you have like
Speaker 1: a stenographer in the room at Thanksgiving. Uh. So today
Speaker 1: most nutritionist agree and obesity experts agree that they actually
Speaker 1: had it kind of wrong as far as corn flakes scale. Yeah, so,
Speaker 1: I mean, the whole reason they made corn flakes in
Speaker 1: the first place was to aid in digestion, because everybody
Speaker 1: showed up like, oh, I feel so terrible, and they
Speaker 1: would feed them corn flakes or brand flakes or whatever.
Speaker 1: But in doing this and pre digesting the food for
Speaker 1: the patient by baking it a couple of times, um,
Speaker 1: they actually stripped away a lot of the actual healthy
Speaker 1: stuff from the grain. Right, if you just strip away
Speaker 1: the outside of corn or of weed or something like that,
Speaker 1: that's the stuff that allows you to kind of um
Speaker 1: slowly digest something and keeps your blood sugar from spiking.
Speaker 1: So back then and today, if you ate something like
Speaker 1: corn flakes or like any kind of breakfast cereal, your
Speaker 1: blood sugar would spike and it would crash and you
Speaker 1: would get ravenously hungry very early. Whereas if you ate
Speaker 1: like whole grain like gruel or mush, it might have
Speaker 1: sucked and taken three hours to make, but you would
Speaker 1: stay full or longer. Um. So yeah, today breakfast cereals poisoned.
Speaker 1: I guess it's the message of all of this. Ironically,
Speaker 1: So the sanitarium and Battle Creek was driven out of
Speaker 1: business eventually for a few reasons. Um, the Great Depression
Speaker 1: was a big one. Um. You know, when there's a
Speaker 1: recession or a depression in the country, the first thing
Speaker 1: to go still today are these sort of luxury items.
Speaker 1: And so this hippie dippy like uber lux health spa
Speaker 1: in the early nineteen hundreds of the nineteen twenties and thirties,
Speaker 1: it was not like celebrities even stopped going there. That's
Speaker 1: how bad it got during the depression. Like even Amelia
Speaker 1: Earhart stopped showing up after a while. Really is it
Speaker 1: is it too soon for an Amelia kick? Uh? Some
Speaker 1: people classed at that awful, awful, mean spirited joke. So yeah,
Speaker 1: he had to lay offf workers. Uh. Will was getting
Speaker 1: rich and on Harvey was going broke, well not broke,
Speaker 1: but he was getting more poor. Eventually he would have
Speaker 1: to sell off the building itself to the US government.
Speaker 1: They converted it into a military hospital and Battle Creek
Speaker 1: though was somehow because of the cereal boom, became the
Speaker 1: home of breakfast cereal around the world. So there were
Speaker 1: one hundred different cereal company. I guess they thought that's
Speaker 1: the only place you could make it. Like, oh, I
Speaker 1: guess we gotta go to central Michigan to make serial. Sorry,
Speaker 1: we want to make cereal. We got to move there.
Speaker 1: But I mean still today it's still the serial capital
Speaker 1: of the world. And uh. In his twilight years, John
Speaker 1: Harvey became very very much eccentric, even more eccentric in
Speaker 1: his than his younger days. Yeah he um. He would
Speaker 1: have like two hour long meals a couple of times
Speaker 1: a day, end up putting on a lot of weight,
Speaker 1: and he was a vegetarian. Bear in mind, but during
Speaker 1: these meals he would have guests and he would say,
Speaker 1: excuse me, guests, I'll be right back, and you would
Speaker 1: pick up a pail on his way out, and he
Speaker 1: would come back with a pail filled with his own
Speaker 1: poop and he would say, gettle, gettle, whiff of this.
Speaker 1: He seriously, that's not a joke. He said that that
Speaker 1: his stools were as sweet as a nursing baby, well
Speaker 1: the nursing babies stools, I should say, or that they
Speaker 1: were no more offensive than warm biscuits. Which if that's true,
Speaker 1: that's actually kind of worth showing off at dinner. To
Speaker 1: tell you the truth, I might actually be like, seriously,
Speaker 1: smell it smells like warm biscuits. I've thrown a lot
Speaker 1: of dinner parties. But no one like that, not like that.
Speaker 1: So finally he approached death. And we have to point
Speaker 1: out these guys. I mean, they were cookie, but they
Speaker 1: lived into their late eighties and nineties at a time
Speaker 1: when people didn't generally live that long. So they were
Speaker 1: doing something right diet wise. And in three is John
Speaker 1: Harvey approached death in his late eighties, he started to
Speaker 1: feel a little bit bad about little brother Will after
Speaker 1: eight years of being a dick, and he wrote a
Speaker 1: letter of apology, and part of it said this, I
Speaker 1: earnestly desire brother, to make amends for any wrong or
Speaker 1: injustice of any sort I've done to you. I'm sure
Speaker 1: you were quite white in regards Sorry Jerry cut that
Speaker 1: part out. I realized I just said quite white, which
Speaker 1: he probably meant that too. You're like such a cocker spaniel. Brother.
Speaker 1: I realized you were quite white and right in regards
Speaker 1: to the food business. Your better balanced judgment has doubtless
Speaker 1: saved you from a vast number of mistakes of the
Speaker 1: sword I've made, and allowed you to achieve great success,
Speaker 1: for which generations will come to owe you gratitude. P S.
Speaker 1: What's it like to have sex? I bet it's great? Right.
Speaker 1: So he closed this letter and gave it to his secretary,
Speaker 1: and his secretary took it um and read it and
Speaker 1: decided not to mail it. Secretary found it just too
Speaker 1: demeaning to John Harvey and decided that this isn't going anywhere.
Speaker 1: But John Harvey didn't realize this, so he just sat
Speaker 1: around waiting to hear back from Will and then died.
Speaker 1: While you feel bad for this guy, did you forget
Speaker 1: the carbolic acid and the white supremacy? No, that means
Speaker 1: you have feelings that we live in the future. It's
Speaker 1: fun to judge people who are who lived in the past.
Speaker 1: So uh. Will eventually did get that letter though, five
Speaker 1: years after John Harvey's death, when Will was eighty eight, uh,
Speaker 1: and he was getting you know, on a their and age,
Speaker 1: he got that letter and finally, at the end of
Speaker 1: his long career, he realized that he had gotten his
Speaker 1: brother's approval. Um. Granted, he didn't get to, you know,
Speaker 1: say thank you or you're welcome back, but he got
Speaker 1: this letter. H. The W. K. Collogue Foundation that he
Speaker 1: started is now a nine billion dollar fund that guides
Speaker 1: the belief that children, all children have an equal opportunity
Speaker 1: to thrive. And they do really really good work here
Speaker 1: uh in the all over the world actually, but especially
Speaker 1: in the United States. It's a good good organ station.
Speaker 1: So um. Will Harvey died and like Chuck kind of
Speaker 1: alluded to earlier, he wasn't the greatest guy ever. He
Speaker 1: had that little brother bitterness that only a little brother
Speaker 1: can have when they have an older brother that they've
Speaker 1: never resolved their issues with. And so that means that
Speaker 1: he took it out on everybody else except for John Harvey.
Speaker 1: So he was kind of a overbearing father and husband.
Speaker 1: And when he died, his grandson and this is his grandson, right,
Speaker 1: like like grandkids are supposed to just love their grandparents unconditionally,
Speaker 1: not this one. Will's. Will's grandson wrote when he died
Speaker 1: at age, nobody really shut a tear. Most felt a
Speaker 1: great sense of relief, as if a heavy weight had
Speaker 1: been lifted from them family. Am I right, corn flakes? Yeah?
Speaker 1: But the grandson was like, but I really appreciate the
Speaker 1: ten billion dollar inheritance. Grandpa right, he can rott in hell,
Speaker 1: but I really like them on thank you, Grandpa? All right,
Speaker 1: bring us home. Brother. So if you go to Oak
Speaker 1: Hill Cemetery in Battle Creek, and a lot of people do, um,
Speaker 1: you've been on the tour before hiving to the cereal tour. Seriously,
Speaker 1: people go to Battle Creek to tour cereal factories. But
Speaker 1: when you're there, when you're there, some people you can.
Speaker 1: You can go to Oak Hill Cemetery and you can
Speaker 1: visit Will Kellogg's a massive burial plot. It's like made
Speaker 1: a blue slate, it's got black wrought iron fence around
Speaker 1: it with the iconic Kellogg's k on that which that
Speaker 1: was his signature. By the way, then Kelloggs that you
Speaker 1: see is will signature UM. And it's a it's a
Speaker 1: pretty big tourist stop in Battle Creek because there's nothing
Speaker 1: to do in Battle Creek. But what most people don't
Speaker 1: realize is that years before Will Kellogg bought that burial plot,
Speaker 1: he and his brother had adjoining burial plots side by side,
Speaker 1: with little simple tombstones, just enough for names and dates
Speaker 1: of birth and dates of death. Um. It was weird
Speaker 1: for brothers to have adjoining plots. We have a joining plots,
Speaker 1: but we're friends, so it makes a little more sense.
Speaker 1: But when people are visiting Will Kellogg's um grave, what
Speaker 1: they don't realize is that just about ten spots away
Speaker 1: his original grave site that he had moved from because
Speaker 1: he hated his brother so much, His brother, John Harvey,
Speaker 1: is still buried there. And so when they're visiting Will's grave,
Speaker 1: just a few steps away, one of the most famous
Speaker 1: physicians who ever lived in America is buried there in
Speaker 1: a very simple little headstone. That's right. So even in death,
Speaker 1: little brother finally is giving his brother the finger, you know.
Speaker 1: And that's the story of the Kellogg's brothers. Everybody I said,
Speaker 1: thank you. Yeah he bob by ah Wee said all right.