Part One: H.L. Hunt: The First Elon Musk

Summary

Behind the Bastards

Episode: Part One: H.L. Hunt: The First Elon Musk
Date: May 12, 2026
Host: Robert Evans
Guest: Princess Weeks
Producer: Sophie
Podcast Network: Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts

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EPISODE OVERVIEW

In this episode, Robert Evans and guest Princess Weeks dive into the bizarre, fascinating, and unsettling life of H.L. Hunt — oil tycoon, right-wing media pioneer, and at one point the richest man in the world. The hosts position Hunt as a sort of "proto-Elon Musk," a man obsessed with using his immense fortune and private media ventures to inject his own political ideology into American society. Part One focuses on Hunt’s family roots, upbringing, and the early experiences that shaped his distinctly odd worldview, seeding the narcissism and ultra-conservative opinions that would later shape American media and politics.

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MAIN THEMES & PURPOSE

• To explore the origin story and early psychological makeup of H.L. Hunt
• To trace the roots of ultrarich right-wing influence on American politics via media control, connecting historical and modern figures
• To examine the personal eccentricities and family dynamics that contribute to the making of a “bastard” in historical context

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KEY DISCUSSION POINTS & INSIGHTS

Introducing H.L. Hunt – The First Elon Musk (00:48)

• H.L. Hunt is introduced as a central figure in the post-New Deal wave of ultra-wealthy right-wing oil barons.
• Unlike peers who networked, Hunt’s goal was to use his fortune and personal media projects to force his opinions on the public.
• Robert quips, “He was also... the guy who was only interested in forcing his own politics on people. Like, he didn’t want to talk to any other people on the right. He didn’t want to make friends. He just wanted to create media organizations that would push his politics on other people. He’s a very weird dude and his name was H.L. Hunt.” (01:16)

What Does H.L. Stand For? Old-School Racist Names & Family History (05:13)

• H.L. stands for Haroldson Lafayette Hunt, Jr. (“You know you’re in for a good time when you’ve got all those names together.” - Robert, 05:24)
• Hunt’s family origins: deep south, Confederate sympathies, and (possibly fabricated) tales of emancipation.
• Hunt’s own words tie his family legacy to the Confederacy and plug his personal MLM-style aloe vera cosmetics company—a motif throughout his career blending grift with ideology.
  • Memorable quote: “I love a right-wing skin care company. Yeah, right. But also always a grift.” - Robert (08:00)

Biographer Jerome Tuccille: Unreliable Narration & Libertarian Hijinks (09:11)

• The main primary source is “Kingdom," a biography by Jerome Tuccille, a colorful libertarian activist, frequent Rand-parodist, failed gubernatorial candidate, and prankster (think: fake currency, Lady Godiva tax protests, and self-aware admiration for Ayn Rand).
• Both hosts note how much Tuccille read like a “real person fan fiction” author idolizing his subject, prone to inserting detailed, probably fictional conversations into historical accounts.
  • Quote: “It’s giving like real person fan fict… He’s like, ‘If I just put myself into the character, like, what would my hero say?’ And he’s just like, ‘Alright, nailed it.’” - Princess (10:34)
• Discussion of Tuccille’s odd political credentials, blending anti-war activism, libertarian thought, skepticism toward Ayn Rand, and, later, a turn to finance writing and business biographies.

The Evolution of Family Values and Conservatism (16:33)

• Exploration of how Hunt’s family exemplifies the broader political realignment from Southern secessionism and Confederate bitter-enders, to opportunist Unionists, to later-day Republicanism and entrepreneurial myth-making.
  • “This is a family that, number one, never gives up on, like, the racist things… but Hash is a very pragmatic guy. He’s like, ‘The Confederacy’s not winning this war, and I want to be where the money is.’” - Robert (16:49)

Upbringing: Dysfunction, Homeschooling, and Narcissism (19:13)

• Hunt’s childhood: youngest of eight, doted on by his mother and sisters, bullied by his father Hash and brother James, and the later recipient of a modest upper-middle-class inheritance.
• Controversy over “hardship” narratives—Robert suspects embellishment, noting, “All conservatives who wind up crazy rich like to pretend they were poorer than they were.” (19:48)
• Homeschooling: Allegedly brilliant, with claims of reading at age three and mathematical precocity, but much of this is likely family and biographer myth-making.
• Card-counting emerges as an early true talent — a literal and symbolic precursor to Hunt’s later wealth and calculated risk-taking.

Ominous Family Dynamics: A “Freudian Dream” (27:33)

• The most jaw-dropping segment: Hunt, age 7, still being breastfed by his mother. Father Hash discovers this and explodes in rage, ending the practice and shaming his wife and son (28:31–30:56).
  • Quote: “He’s a Freudian dream. Like, it’s full blown Oedipal complex.” - Princess (31:07)
• H.L. interprets this as evidence of his “specialness”—reinforced by later bragging about it and using it as “further evidence of his innate specialness. Normal rules didn’t apply to him, he reasoned.” (32:12)
  • Quote: “Kids need to feel like they matter and like they’re special, but not in certain ways... As opposed to, ‘No, no—I’m special as opposed to everyone else.’” – Robert (32:40)

Childhood Socialization: Card Games, Alienation, and Fancying Himself a Genius (35:48)

• Hunt becomes unbeatable at card games, relishing the adulation from his sisters and the resentment from his brother James.
• The card games mark the start of his lifelong obsession with gambling and calculated risk, and set up his sense of being set apart from (and better than) others.

The Legend of His Looks: Biographer Thirst and Homoeroticism (38:08, 44:28)

• Recurring asides drag in Tuccille’s uncomfortable, almost erotic descriptions of Hunt’s supposed handsomeness, stature, and “animal magnetism.”
  • Quote: “With his good height and his hard, solid body, his deep set blue eyes and rugged looks, he had little trouble in attracting more than his share of young females... he exuded an aura of raw animal magnetism.” (44:32)
• Both hosts poke fun at how each new Tuccille biography (Trump, Hunt, even Fred Trump Sr.) contains effusive, objectively baffling physical praise.
  • “He loves money so much that it makes whatever man around him, like the hottest guy I’ve ever seen." – Princess (48:51)

Young Adulthood: Wanderlust, Hobo Life, and Defining Friendships (41:02)

• At age 12, Hunt starts regularly running away from home for short wanderings and quickly falls in with other teen vagabonds; by 16, he leaves for good.
• Experiences include sheep-driving to California, hopping rails, learning to hustle at poker, and brief stints at college where he mostly robs his peers blind at card games.
• Notably, much of his “most important” formative friendship with a man named "Steve" seems like Tuccille's Good Will Hunting fantasy (62:41). “A man who insisted on paying him and then did a Good Will Hunting to him. Yeah. His best friend, Steve. They knew each other for days.” – Robert (62:31)

The “Magical Prostitute” and Survival Narrative (54:10, 55:59)

• Allegedly, Hunt survives the notorious 1906 San Francisco earthquake by, according to the biography, fleeing a hotel on the advice of a prostitute who, after being impressed by his sexual prowess, warns him about being Shanghai’d—a transparent fantasy.
  • “I don’t know how much credence to give the whole ‘I was so good at sex that, like, a magical prostitute saved my life by helping me escape an earthquake’ thing.” – Robert (58:05)
• Hunt internalizes these freakish close-calls as proof he’s “marked out for greatness”.

Paranoia and Distrust: The Poker Incident (58:05)

• Hunt’s hypercompetitiveness and social alienation play out in a pivotal story: he wins all the money from a group of Mexican workers, then becomes convinced (with zero evidence) they’ll kill him for it, flees, and then repeats the same suspicion toward his white coworkers. “There’s this deep distrust of other people that again, at no point... is there any evidence that they threaten his life at all. I do want to emphasize that this is all entirely something he decides.” – Robert (60:44)

Grief & the Push Southward (64:00)

• After the death of his brother and father, Hunt inherits $5,000—a considerable sum—and, inspired by patriarchal tales of southern opportunity, heads to Arkansas to invest in a farm and begin building his fortune. (64:00)

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NOTABLE QUOTES & MEMORABLE MOMENTS

ON HUNT’S PURPOSE:
“He kind of made inflicting his opinions on everyone else his life mission and used the vast fortune he built to do it.” – Robert (00:48)

ON THE FAMILY NARRATIVE:
“Yeah, my grandfather freed his slaves before it was cool, before everyone had to do it.” – Princess (07:31)

ON HIS BIOGRAPHER:
“It’s giving like real person fan fict.” – Princess (10:34)
“He would have loved crypto.” – Princess (13:25)
“Who told you about his hard, hot body and his animal magnetism? Where’d you get that, Jerome?” – Robert (45:03)

ON FREUDIAN NIGHTMARES:
“He’s a Freudian dream. Like it’s full blown Oedipal complex.” – Princess (31:07)

ON SPECIALNESS:
“That he had nursed at his mother’s breast until the age of seven was a point of pride. Further evidence of his innate specialness. Normal rules didn’t apply to him, he reasoned.” – (Reading from Hindershot, 32:12)

ON AMERICAN CONSERVATISM:
“His life and his son’s life kind of perfectly embody the evolution of American conservatism from the Civil War up to, like, the modern era.” – Robert (16:40)

ON HUNT'S ALIENATION:
“There’s this deep distrust of other people that again, at no point... is there any evidence that they threaten his life at all.” – Robert (60:44)

HUMOROUS ASIDES:
“He was almost a serial killer. That was like...” – Princess (23:39)
"So now age 17, Steve or not, Steve Hunt briefly attends college." – Robert (62:45)

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IMPORTANT TIMESTAMPS

• 00:05 – Podcast opens: Hunt’s reputation and context
• 04:32 – Princess Weeks gives her “never heard of him but sounds like the patron saint of podcast bros” assessment
• 05:16 – Hunt’s full name revealed; family origins discussed
• 09:11 – Introduction of biographer Jerome Tuccille
• 14:57 – Southern family shifts allegiance, evolution of family values
• 27:33 – Oedipal moment: being breastfed at age 7
• 32:12 – Hunt makes a point of pride out of this “specialness”
• 35:48 – Card games develop his sense of superiority
• 38:08, 44:28 – Thirsty biographer digressions
• 41:02 – Hunt runs away, Peter Pan vagabond adventures
• 54:10 – Gambler in San Francisco, “magical prostitute” episode
• 58:05 – Card game with Mexican workers; paranoid fallout
• 64:00 – Family deaths, inheritance, and the journey south
• 65:30 – Preview for Part Two

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TONE & STYLE NOTES

• The episode maintains a brisk, irreverent, and sometimes caustically funny tone toward both its subject and its sources.
• Robert and Princess trade quips and cultural references (Game of Thrones, Succession, HBO shows) while dissecting family insanity and right-wing mythmaking.
• Ad breaks and asides are riffed on with in-jokes and meta-commentary, but are omitted from this summary.

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FINAL REMARKS & TEASE FOR NEXT EPISODE

After making sense of Hunt’s family craziness, mother-fixation, ever-growing narcissism, and first brushes with fortune (and misfortune), the episode closes as Hunt heads south, poised to become the richest man in the world. Princes sums up: “I love this really, really hot millionaire in training.”

Up Next: Part Two promises to cover Hunt’s transformation from gambling math prodigy to infamous oil magnate and right-wing media mogul.

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END OF SUMMARY – PART ONE

Transcript

[Sophie]

Media.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, goodness jiminy gracious Christmas. Welcome back to behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history, introduced by one of the very worst introducers in all of history, your host, me, Robert Evans. This week I have a guest who's better at introducing things, Princess Weeks. Princess, why don't you introduce yourself? Because we've seen how I do it.

[Princess Weeks]

You're. You're fabulous. I disagree with you.

[Robert Evans]

That's a lot.

[Princess Weeks]

Just with that. My name is Princess Weeks. I'm a writer, YouTuber, shit talker, and I love history and especially when I get to listen to Robert tell me about bad people.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, and I love bad people, especially when I get to inflict their badness on someone else. Wow. And this week we've got a guy who kind of made inflicting his opinions on other people, on everyone else his like life mission and used the vast fortune he built to do it. We're covering a fella here. He's the former richest man in the world. This guy was an oil in his time. He was a millionaire. But if you, you know, fix things to modern money. He was a billionaire from a fairly early point in like terms of modern money. And he was kind of the first of the right wing, like these ultra rich right wing guys to make pushing his own opinion in politics by taking control of like, or building media organs deliberately to force his own opinion on public. He was the first of these super rich guys to really do that or he was part of the first wave of rich guys that did that. And he was the biggest like, of this first wave of generally like post new deal, super rich, you know, multimillionaire billionaire oil guys who are funding right wing politics. He was the guy who was kind of best at it, but he was also the guy who was only interested in forcing his own politics on people. Like he didn't want to talk to any other people on the right. He didn't want to make friends. He just wanted to create media organizations that would push his politics on other people. He's a very weird dude and his name was H.L. hunt. Also, some people think he killed JFK.

[Princess Weeks]

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[Robert Evans]

And Doug, there's nowhere I wouldn't go

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[Robert Evans]

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[Robert Evans]

Somebody somewhere know something?

[Jordan Sillers]

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[Robert Evans]

So have you heard of this guy?

[Princess Weeks]

No, I've never heard of him. But he sounds annoying and like the patron saint of podcast bros. So like I'm ready to hear about it.

[Robert Evans]

He's got a lot of energy. He was kind of like the proto Elon Musk. Like what Musk has done with turning X and Grok into this, like basically building these companies just to push his own opinions on everyone else. That's what Hunt was trying to do with like the radio in the 50s and 60s and television and stuff. So he's an interesting character and like a freak in his own personal life. Which is always fun when one of these guys is just the strangest, weirdest little guy.

[Sophie]

So what does HL stand for?

[Robert Evans]

Great question, Sophie. That's what we're starting. Cause he has like one of the most racist old white guy names you could possibly have.

[Sophie]

I'm thrilled.

[Robert Evans]

Haroldson Lafayette Hunt Jr. Harold. That's this fucker's full name. Harold Haroldson. And a Lafayette in there. Lafayette Junior. You know you're in for a good time when you've got all those names together.

[Princess Weeks]

Hunt and Central Loser.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, all those.

[Sophie]

That's a good thing.

[Robert Evans]

Funny you mention that.

[Sophie]

That guy, I'm like, wow, would cover my drink.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, definitely. Haroldson Lafayette Hunt Jr. Was born in Carson Township, Fayette County, Illinois on February 17, 1889. Most of the articles and bios you'll find on him kind of breeze right through his childhood. A bio on the oil industry friendly website Oklahoma Minerals, which depicts Hunt as a hero. So, you know, kind of ideologically where this bio is from simply says that he was, quote, the youngest of eight children in a farming family. His early years were marked by a lack of formal education as he was homeschooled and never attended public or private schools. So we're off to a good start already, right? Like, this is a, this is a dude who. And that's not a weird upbringing for the time really, but it is kind of weird for him because his other, like, brothers and sisters aren't all private schooled. So Hunt was a pretty prolific writer of letters to the editor and of ads in the yellow Pages. So we do get other bits of his history if you're willing to dig deeper that go a little further than that. In the 1960s, he wrote this in an ad published by the Tennessean. So this is him trying to connect with other members of his family. My grandfather was Wattie Thorpe Hunt freeing his slaves long before the war began. Watty Thorpe Hunt migrated to Searchie County, Arkansas state, stopping en route to make a crop near Lookout Mountain. He formed a company of Confederates in 1860, which included his son. He was killed in 1864 by Cantrill's guerrillas. So that's him talking about, like his grandfather, right? Like, that's the family patron. And I'll let you know right now, he's the only one who says this guy freed his slaves long before the war began.

[Princess Weeks]

I was gonna ask, I was like, he made it sound like, yeah, my grandfather freed his slaves before it was cool, before everyone had to do it.

[Robert Evans]

But then he started a volunteer Confederate militia for love of the game.

[Princess Weeks]

You know, he's like, I vote even needed it.

[Robert Evans]

Now. Wadi may not have owned slaves, but that wasn't uncommon. Most people who fought in the Confederate army didn't have enough money to like, own slaves. Right? Like, but that's not entirely the point. Some people were racist without that Right. And that seems to have been his grandfather's deal. Now, what's very funny to me about this ad, which is him, like, trying to connect with other relatives by talking about his Confederate grandpa. Is that right? After being like, hey, does anyone know, you know, my grandpa? Anyone else related to whom I want to connect? He goes on to like, say, I want to exchange, you know, family history with relatives, quote, and present them with three of the HLH Aloe Vera cosmetics. That's his private cosmetic company. And a list of stores in the area carrying HLH cosmetics. And the remainder of the ad is a plug for his cosmetics business and his right wing radio show, which I just found very funny, that he's like, I want to connect with my family, but I also want to use this space in the newspaper to get people to buy my cosmetics. I love an mlm. Right wing skin care company. Yeah, right. It's. But also always a grift.

[Princess Weeks]

You said he's the youngest of eight of eight kids. How much more family connections does he need? I think that that's enough.

[Robert Evans]

Family you gotta have, bro. Right? Like, why do you care? It seems like you got your hands full there.

[Princess Weeks]

Yeah. You don't need any cousins when you have a basketball team. Like, it's fine.

[Robert Evans]

So that's a good point. That was very funny.

[Princess Weeks]

I fear I was your target audience for them.

[Robert Evans]

Damn near two, actually. So the Confederate connection was enough to convince me that, like, I needed to look more into this guy's family history. Cause I was like, well, that probably means there's something else interesting there. And I could only find one biography that was written about him, which was the book Kingdom. And it's actually. It was published after he died. And it's actually a biography of his whole family written by this hardcore libertarian author named Jerome Toussill. And I think Toussel was a fan of Hunt. He certainly wrote a history that I would argue portrayed Hunt pretty close to how Hunt saw himself a lot of the time. Although he does include more of the warts than I think Hunt would have. But he clearly has this degree of awe in this man for being such a great businessman. It's hard for me to tell how real this biography is, because to sill, again, he's a guy with an ideological bent that he's trying to get across in his books. And his biography of Hunt includes all of these verbatim conversations about conversations that would have happened in like the 1800s. And this book was written in the, like a hundred years later. And I'M like, who did you talk to to get the transcripts of these conversations? You must have just made that up. Or you listen to something that, like, these people's grandchildren said is how the conversation went. So you have to take a lot of this book with a grain of salt. Right?

[Princess Weeks]

It's giving, like, real person fan fict. Like, he's like, if I just put myself into the character, like, what would my goat say? Like, what would my hero say? And he's just like, all right, I've got it. Nailed it.

[Robert Evans]

I would say think of it that way. This is real person fan fiction. That said, it's the only book we have about this guy's childhood. And it's clearly based on conversations he had with members of this dude's family. So you can't discard it. Cause it's like our only source. Right. That said, we're going to talk a little more about Toussill in this book too, because he's kind of a very funny guy. You should know, in terms of evaluating how much can we trust this biography, that he was an early hardcore libertarian activist, although not entirely the bad kind. He got, like, politically activated for the first time in his life because he was disgusted by the draft in the Vietnam War. And he staged a walkout protesting the war at the Young Americans for freedom Convention in 1969. Which is, like, good. Yeah, yeah. In 1971, he published his first book. It usually begins with Ayn Rand A Libertarian Odyssey, which is a book about how he went from an angry, lapsed Catholic looking for a new religion to an objectivist libertarian. Although he also kind of makes fun of Ayn Rand in the book too, because she believed a lot of crazy shit about sex that he does not on board with. Right. So he's like, respect things about her, but, like, makes fun of her too. Yeah. He wrote of his feelings in the time. For the moment, I considered myself unique, alone and courageous individual who had found the Holy Grail after years of floundering. That's how he reacts to reading Ayn Rand for the first time. A lot of guys like that.

[Princess Weeks]

Unfortunately, that's like the first time. Like, you talked to a guy who read Dune for the first time, he's like, I just had no idea.

[Robert Evans]

All my politics are now Dune.

[Princess Weeks]

Exactly.

[Robert Evans]

Now. That same year, 1971, Tussel wrote an op ed for the New York Times and begged for conservatives who still care about such things as peace and justice and racial harmony to vote for candidates who really mean peace when they say peace, who understand and intend to promote the politics of decentralization, of pollution control, of economic and judicial reform and so on, all the way down the line. So he's not, like, entirely bad. This is back when the Libertarian movement was a little more complicated than it's going to become in the Trump years. So that's positive. In 1974, Tussaud ran for governor of New York on the Free Libertarian Party ticket. He only got like 30,000 votes, and he needed 50,000 to get the party a permanent place on the ballot. The Times notes of his election campaign. On the campaign trail, he's distributed to SIL bills, fake bills that he assured voters would be soon worth more than the real thing, given the country's ruinous economic policies. He arranged for a woman in a beige body stocking to ride through Central park like Lady Godiva on a horse named Taxpayer. So he would have loved Trading Guy, too.

[Princess Weeks]

He would have loved crypto.

[Robert Evans]

He was like, Jerome Toussill, you would have loved Bitco to sell coin.

[Princess Weeks]

He's like, and he's giving you naked ladies, too. He's like, listen, I'm giving you, the taxpayers, everything they could want.

[Sophie]

A horse named Tax, a horse named.

[Robert Evans]

This man would have had so many NFTs.

[Princess Weeks]

That is a great country album, though.

[Robert Evans]

Can you imagine? Like the horse snake.

[Princess Weeks]

Morgan Wallen and I.

[Robert Evans]

Sorry, this is in our episodes about H.L. hunt, but when I started reading about the guy who wrote his biography, I was like, this man's fascinating. So anyway, take quotes that I'm going to read to you from the book Kingdom With a Grain of Salt. So Toussill's book says very doesn't mention Watty Hunt, Hunt's grandfather, freeing his slaves. So I suspect his grandson made all that up. But he does talk about the fact that Wadi created a volunteer cavalry militia to support the Confederate cause, which should tell you all you need to know about the man's politics. However, there is an interesting discrepancy between what HL Hunt came to believe and what to sell. Writes in his biography to still claims that Captain Hunt was, quote, shot to death near his farm by Northern raiders. But in his letter, Hunt says he was killed by Cantrell's guerrilla fighters, and Cantrell's Raiders were a pro Confederate partisan group of Bushwhackers. That actually this is where Frank and Jesse James get their start in Cantrell's Raiders. Now, it would. They definitely killed a lot of Confederate farmers, too, because kind of by the end of the war, they were just Raiden.

[Princess Weeks]

You Know, like, they're like, we just, like, doing this now. Like, this is our new passion. Like, we gotta get a scale out of this.

[Robert Evans]

When I got into this, it was for the racism, but now it's just the love of raiding, you know, I just can't get over how much I like to raid.

[Princess Weeks]

They're tapping into their Viking roots. They're like, this is what I was meant to do, ancestrally.

[Robert Evans]

It's like how the Oakland Raiders are ostensibly, like, their fans are ostensibly there to support a football team, but it's really about the rating for the Oakland Raiders fans too. You know, that's what makes that a great team.

[Sophie]

Las Vegas Raiders.

[Robert Evans]

No, no, no, Sophie. I don't, I don't accept that at all.

[Princess Weeks]

That's like me with the Nets. It's like, oh, it's the new. It's the Brooklyn Nets. I'm like, they're from New Jersey. It's okay. We don't have to make things up. Just because Jay Z says it doesn't mean it's not right.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, no, I, I, I refuse to accept that. So when Captain Hunt gets murdered by, whether it's by Northern partisans or Cantrill's raiders, his son, H.L. hunt, which is the same name as R.H.L. hunt, right? And it's his dad, takes control of the family. Now, HL Goes by the nickname Hash for reasons lost to history, but are more likely rooted in potatoes than marijuana. Too bad. He's a fascinating figure, because his life and his son's life kind of perfectly embody the evolution of American conservatism from the Civil War up to, like, the modern era through, like, the political realignment of the mid 20th century. Because you have, like, the Republican Party, which is this, like, radical progressive force in the country, that then becomes, like, the conservative party over a period of time, right? And his family really embodies that very well. In 1864, before the war was over, Hash took, like, after his dad gets killed, he moves up north and he takes an oath of allegiance to the Union. Per the book, Kingdom up North was where the money was. Hash told his family the south as they had known it all their lives was finished. It would not rise again for 50 years at least. So you see, this is a family that, number one, never gives up on, like, the racist things that led them to support the Confederacy. But Hash is a very pragmatic guy. He's like, the Confederacy's not winning this war, and I want to be where the money is. Like, I'm not going down with the ship. Fuck that. My dad did that. Seems stupid.

[Princess Weeks]

Exactly. It's like the slaves are gone. Let's go up to the industry and abuse the Irish, right?

[Robert Evans]

Abuse whoever we can, because I'm still racist, don't get me wrong.

[Princess Weeks]

We can diversify.

[Robert Evans]

So the family winds up in Illinois, which is where RHL Hunt is going to be born. In 1889, they start farming, and things are going pretty well for the Hunts for a while. Hash is a good businessman and a skilled farmer. In short order, he meets a girl, the daughter of an Army Union chaplain, and she's named Ella Henderson. This is going to be a shell hunt. Our Hunt's mom Toussel's book claims that she, quote, was descended from an old Huguenot line and she deported herself with a certain aristocratic air not unworthy of her birth line. Now that's an interesting, weird use of the word deported by Toussil there I've never heard. I think he meant to write comported because I don't think deported actually works that way. But it made its way into the final copy of the book.

[Princess Weeks]

So they're like, we're just not Huguenot enough to understand how sophisticated that is.

[Robert Evans]

You got to be way more Huguenot to get that word right. Yeah. So I don't know if she was. Had Huguenot blood in her veins or whatever, but this is very consistent with what H.L. hunt's going to believe about his background and himself. Because he thinks he's special. And part of why he thinks he's special is because of his blood. From 1873 to 1889, the Hunts have eight children, the last of whom is our boy, Haroldson Lafayette. Given that he has the same name as his father, Hash, he was nicknamed Junior, and the family soon took to calling him June or Junie. So as a boy, he goes by June or Junie because he's got the same name as his dad, who goes by Hash. Now, the Hunt's 500 acre farm was productive and supports the family well, but how well it supports them is kind of hard for me to say. Tussaud writes that they, quote, just managed to scrub out a meager living. But we also know that by the time Hash dies, he gives his all eight of his kids pretty significant inheritances. That suggests they're actually doing very well. Now, maybe I don't know how long it takes them to be doing very well, but certainly by later in his life, they're like upper middle class, right? If not rich, it's a Little hard for me to tell that.

[Princess Weeks]

Do we know the breakdown of the genders of the siblings? Was it like more girls than boys? Because you can outsource the girls. They can go somewhere else.

[Robert Evans]

I think it's a pretty good split, but he's got at least a couple of sisters. Okay. That said, I think it's also. Hunt kind of talks up his family having a harder time when he was a kid than they really did, because all conservatives who wind up crazy rich like to pretend they were poorer than they were.

[Princess Weeks]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

At any rate, in 1894, when Junie was like five or so, his dad, Hash, gets elected sheriff of Fayette County. He ran as a Republican, which is a major shift for the son of a Confederate volunteer who'd fought against the Union himself. Hash becomes the first Republican sheriff of Fayette county, although not the last. He settled into a pattern of spending a week or so in Vandalia, the county seat, and then heading home for a few days to tend his farm, which was now primarily maintained by his wife and older sons. If Toussill's book gives an accurate account, HL Hunt or Hash was not a pleasant man to have as your dad, quote, Hash Hunt would storm through the house, sipping a bit of his own homemade corn whiskey from a jar and thundering to anyone within earshot his views on the world, on the hard times that had spread through the nation like a pestilence, on the politicians who had brought these conditions about, and on the bare living he was able to scratch out from his farm and his share of salary. So they've got kind of right wing talk radio in the form of their dad. He's just like a drunk Rush Limbaugh complaining about how hard things are while he makes a lot of money.

[Princess Weeks]

I'm so glad he has the authority to arrest people. There's nothing. There's nothing. Just drunk and be like, you, you there. Do you know what you're doing to the Agata?

[Robert Evans]

No law about how drunk you can be. As a sheriff in Illinois in the 1800s, I feel confident saying that.

[Princess Weeks]

Thank God for that.

[Robert Evans]

Thank God for that. We used to be a proper country, princess. We used to be a proper country.

[Princess Weeks]

Exactly.

[Robert Evans]

So as I noted earlier, most casual bios of Hunt will point out that he was homeschooled. Now, depending on the source, I've seen arguments that his education was pretty minimal and lacking and that his mom did a really good job. Whatever the case, he was brilliant from a young age. Hunt purportedly learned to read before he was 3 years old. And as one writer phrased, it was clever with numbers from a very early age. Now, I suspect these claims are a mix of the truth and some myth making. Hunt is, as an adult, going to be an almost supernaturally gifted card counter. He is legitimately. And there's enough evidence that we know this isn't myth making. When he sits down to play poker, he wins. Right. He's got, like, a superpower. Like, he's incredible at it. And he's also just. His business career shows he's really good with money. He's good at, like, counting up sort of risk, analyzing risk, versus, like, the odds of profit and loss in his head and making snap decisions that wind up being very accurate. So I don't doubt that he's a math genius. I kind of doubt he was full on reading before the age of three. But he probably was precocious. His sisters adored him, and in general, the women in his family paid close and doting attention to the boy. Hunt would later complain of his family's poverty in those years. But the Hunt family were in objectively better shape than their Neighbors. And the 1880s played host to one of our nation's many regular. Back before the Great Depression and then afterwards, when they, like, changed the way the banking system worked in significant ways. We used to have depressions a lot more regularly.

[Princess Weeks]

Right. It's like diagnosis of depression. It's like, you're gonna have it every couple. You're gonna have a high, low day.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. The national economy was dysthymic. Yeah, exactly.

[Princess Weeks]

They didn't have Prozac yet. To really renovate the banking system.

[Robert Evans]

We had invented money, Prozac, which is the FDIC, I guess.

[Princess Weeks]

I guess.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So the 1880s played host to one of our nation or one of these depressions. And most of their neighbors lose everything or almost everything during this time. Now the hunts don't, but Hash is still unhappy. Tussil describes him as a man driven to rage by his failure to make more of a success of himself and one who took his frustrations out on his wife and children. This creates a miserable situation for Ella, and she tries to distract herself by obsessively caring for her youngest son, Junie. Per the book Kingdom, Junie was her pet, her baby, and he looked to her for refuge against this strange, violent man who filled him with terror every time he entered the house.

[Princess Weeks]

He was almost a serial killer. He was almost a serial killer. That was like.

[Robert Evans]

He's got. He gets a few of those vibes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now you know who Else is constantly filled with a terrifying, violent rage.

[Sophie]

Robert. No.

[Robert Evans]

The sponsors of this podcast.

[Robert Smigel]

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[Robert Evans]

donation to the group?

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[Robert Evans]

Right?

[Princess Weeks]

That's the name.

[Robert Smigel]

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[Princess Weeks]

We're open.

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[Robert Evans]

Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny.

[Kier Gaines]

Welcome to my new podcast, Learn the Hard Way with me, your host and your favorite therapist, Kier Gaines. And in recognition of Mental Health Awareness Month, I'm bringing over a decade of my own experience in the mental health field and conversations with so many incredible guests. I'm talking Trip Fontaine, Ryan Clark. Sometimes when we're in the pursuit of the thing, we get so wrapped up in the chase that we don't realize that we are in possession of the thing and we're still chasing it and we don't know when we've done enough. Because people, scoreboard wise, life becomes about wins and losses. Steve Burns, Dustin Ross. Cause you find it important to be a good person while you here on earth. Or are you a good person because you're afraid? Cause that's two different intentions, bro. Absolutely. And that's two different levels of trust for I want you to just really be a good person. Join me, Care Gaines, as we have real conversations about healing, growth, fatherhood, pressure and purpose. On my new podcast, Learn the Hard Way. Open your free iHeartradio app, search learn the Hard Way and listen now.

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[Robert Evans]

I know we annoyed a lot of

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our listeners by our severe lack of Survivor knowledge. That is the point of the show. I'm just gonna remind you, I have watched some Survivor. I obviously haven't watched enough.

[Robert Evans]

Did people not like. Yeah, just because we.

[Sophie]

Yeah.

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[Robert Evans]

And we're back talking about the uncontrollable anger that drives our beautiful sponsors. That's what makes them great. So things with his dad and the fact that his mom is kind of dealing with being in a terrible marriage by obsessing over her youngest son. This comes to a head when Juni, who again is the future richest man in the world, was 7 years old. came back early from a trip out sheriffing or something, and he stumbles onto what had become something of a secret between Juni, his mother and the world. Quote, standing on a milk box in front of her as she worked the dough, the seven year old Juni had his face upturned as he suckled her naked breast. Now, Hash had heard stories from James, the oldest boy still at home who was working the family farm, that Ella Rose was nursing Juni longer than was natural. Hash dismissed those stories at the time, having preferred abolishing the thought to facing something that seemed shameful and repugnant to him. So that's a bit odd. Seven's late.

[Princess Weeks]

It's giving. It's like that kid from Game of Thrones is like, you gotta get off the kitty.

[Robert Evans]

You gotta get off the kitty.

[Princess Weeks]

At that point, seven's a bit much.

[Robert Evans]

I don't want to like shame people for nursing, but seven's a bit late. I think we can agree, sweet Robin,

[Princess Weeks]

you gotta get off your mom's tit at that point is diabolical.

[Robert Evans]

Drop off that. So to say that Hash doesn't take finding this out well would be putting it mildly. Mildly. He starts screaming. He goes into a rage. The book doesn't say he's violent, so I hope he wasn't, but I don't know. But at the very least, he screams at his wife and demands that she explain what the hell is going on. And this is where we get one of the first instances of Toussill's book presenting us with an incredibly detailed conversation from a moment he absolutely could not know about in any real detail.

[Princess Weeks]

Yeah, this is his headcanon. He's like. He's like, if I could put myself into the mind of my. Of my hero baby Hash, baby Judy. What is he thinking, wiping the milk off his mouth, listening to this conversation?

[Robert Evans]

This has to just be based on what Hunt remembered 70 years later and told his sons maybe about this happening. But yeah, he claims that Ella begs her husband not to don't make more of this than it is, Hash. And Hash starts yelling even more after this, to which she begs, not in front of Junie, Hash, please. You'll regret your words later. Later on, I'll regret nothing except not listening to my own instincts. I've been blind for years, too busy to put my foot down when it mattered most. Let this be the end of it, you hear? I'll listen to no pale excuses. This has to end at once. Hash's word was final. Ella Rose never exposed her bosom to her youngest son again. Whether out of fear of her husband or out of her own shame, was never explained to young June. The boy came to hate and resent his father all the more for taking from him what was the most important thing he had known so far. His intimacy with his mother. Hash tried to assume a more active role in family affairs from that day on, but the effort was a hollow one. His heart simply was not in it. So young Hl is not going to pick up any good lessons about this. Number one, this is kind of like a weird intimacy that's probably bordering on unhealthy, if not has crossed the line into unhealthy. But the fact that his dad then screams at him and takes it away is even worse and makes like, this guy is going to have so much many family related issues and one thing he's going to learn is that families are better off without husbands.

[Princess Weeks]

Yeah, he's a Freudian dream. Like it's full blown Oedipal complex. Like you get. He gets caught like almost like cuckolding his own father, you know, that kind of visual dad.

[Robert Evans]

That's obviously not how he sees it, as a seven year old, but his dad sure sees it that way.

[Princess Weeks]

Absolutely. And I just. And just the visual of him needing to be on top of a crate to reach the bosom, it's just like. It's too much like, I'm not. I'm not Team Hash, but I definitely think you need to put the kibosh on that. Like, that is not okay.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's. It's good stuff. So whenever I'm starting my research into a new bastard, I don't know a lot about going into the project. There's this period of anxiety where I'm like, sinking research time into a guy, but I don't know if they're interesting enough to, like, work as an episode yet. And when I hit this story was the moment I stopped worrying about HL Hunt. I was like, oh, thank God. Okay, okay. There's something to sink our teeth into with this motherfucker. We're gonna get into it. You don't tend to see this story mentioned in most other articles on the guy, with a notable exception of one of my major sources for this, which was a chapter from Heather Hindershot's great book, what's Fair on the Air, which is about cold air war era right wing broadcasting. She devotes a chapter to Hunt, and she writes this. That he had nursed at his mother's breast until the age of seven was a point of pride. Further evidence of his innate specialness. Normal rules didn't apply to him, he reasoned. So that's based on. He would talk about this moment to, like, journalists and to his kids. And he was proud of it because again, he develops pride in being different from everybody else. Right. Not subject to the rules. That's also very important.

[Princess Weeks]

Like, I'm the eldest.

[Sophie]

Boys.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[Princess Weeks]

I'm a sweet boy. I can chuck on my mom's tit as long as I want you.

[Robert Evans]

God damn you now. Yeah, there's a lot to say about, like, how. Good. Because kids need to feel like they matter and like they're special, but not in certain ways. Also, like, you need to feel like you matter and you're special because everyone matters and they're special, which is like what Mr. Rogers tried to get across, as opposed to. No, no. I'm special as opposed to everyone else.

[Princess Weeks]

And that's why they want to defund pbs. Everyone. They want you to be relying on the breast milk.

[Robert Evans]

Only the breast milk. That's big. Breast milk is behind all of this, Princess. I've been saying that for years.

[Princess Weeks]

It's true.

[Sophie]

My goodness.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. The Breast milk industrial complex is what really runs this country.

[Sophie]

Good Lord.

[Robert Evans]

So the feeling of specialness. And young H.L. hunt was stoked by the way his sisters treated him. While his older brother James and his dad both bullied him, his mom and the girls smothered him with attention. In his biography, Tussaud writes that June's sisters teased him often enough about being Ella Rose's favorite. But the teasing was good natured and playful. Unlike James's sneering and resentful taunting, the girls regarded Junie as their own special pet, as well as Ella Rose's. Right. So that's probably not bad. You know, your sister's kind of babying the youngest kid. But again, this is all gonna sort of feed into his I am a special person complex, which isn't gonna be ideal for everyone. Hunt also enjoyed a close relationship with his older brother Leonard, who he idolized and who loved him back. Tussel is one of the people who will argue that this home. That his homeschooling education was quite good. Ella Rose teaches her youngest son Greek, Latin, French and German. And when he starts reading at age 3, it said that she gives him issues of the newspaper so that he could learn what was going on in the world. Now, again, some of this has gotta be myth making, but Toussill claims that Hunt, quote, gained a reputation throughout the region as a child Geni, despite the fact that he never attended the local school. Now, what's odd about this to me is the fact that Toussill then adds, his entire education was received from his mother and from his sister's readers, which he devoured when they came home from school. So, again, his sisters and brothers get to go to school. Yeah, and it sounds like he doesn't because he's too smart and his mom wants to homeschool him. Is that. Which is really weird and different and also is going to make him feel very special. I did look through Hunt's FBI report, which claims that. And that there's a reason why he's got an FBI report. It includes claims that Hunt was known in the area as being able to memorize a page of prose in two readings by the time he was in the fifth grade, and that that was the end of his schooling. So that kind of suggests he does go to a public school for a while, but everyone else says he didn't. So I don't know what the truth is. Anyway, weird is the truth. Weird is the truth. I think there might be, because a lot of the people who write about the. And he Never went to school, he was homeschooled. Are like weird right wing and libertarian sources because this guy becomes a weird right wing billionaire. That may be the cause. It doesn't sound as good to their kind of narrative of like, well, he went to school until he was in the fifth grade, at which point he was homeschooled the rest of the way. Right, right.

[Princess Weeks]

Or adding that he was homeschooled by his mother who continuously put her breast in his face.

[Robert Evans]

Right, right. It makes less of a good case for homeschooling.

[Princess Weeks]

Yeah. Not, not the trad wifi deal. I'm sure that they want to promote homeschooling.

[Robert Evans]

So the first way that June exhibited his intellect in a major way to the world was by getting really, really unbeatably good at card games and other games of chance. This is kind of the earliest happiness that he experiences and probably remembers, which is beating the piss out of his sisters and brothers at various card games and being praised for it. So this is going to teach him an important lesson. He's never going to get over loving gambling. However, the fact that he's so smart is not without its downsides. Per the book Kingdom Hash Hunt was not nearly so impressed with his namesake's mental agility as others were. And right from the beginning, young June had problems with James. You think you're better than the rest of us, don't you? James badgered him incessantly when they were alone. You think you're smarter than we are now again, to sill relates like a page long argument between him and his brother. That sounds more like a cheesy screenplay dialogue than a real conversation. There's even a part where his big brother says, you're a mama's pet. That's all you'll ever be. Which is like you just write that in if you're, if you're a hack screenwriter. And then you transition immediately to him like as a young adult trying to get his foot in the door at his first business or something. Right, right.

[Princess Weeks]

It's like he would have loved young Sheldon.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, he would have loved young Sheldon. So as he grows up in this account, he does everything he can to be the opposite of a mama's boy. First off, he gets swole. He starts working out. I mean mainly he's just doing like hard labor outdoors. But he gets really jacked. He's a big guy, he's tall and he is like a bit large, muscular dude. Everyone seems to agree about that. He becomes a skilled horse rider, even bareback, and a skilled outdoorsman he works with his brother in the family business on the farm. And he proves his worth by using his skill with numbers to benefit everybody and improve the family business. After summarizing all this, Tussel gives us another absolutely made up claim. He was growing into a handsome young man, the best looking of all of his brothers. And Toussill's gonna say a lot of weird stuff about how sexy this guy is. As we'll talk about later. That's kind of a through line in his other biographies. I don't know why. It's a Stan. To me, he's a Stan. He's the ultimate Stan.

[Princess Weeks]

He's like.

[Robert Evans]

He's so hot.

[Princess Weeks]

Look at. No one could resist him.

[Robert Evans]

Could have fucked. Now, none of this.

[Sophie]

Do we have photos of this person?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Yeah, we've got some. You can look some up. So if you want to try to find us a younger one. I only found. I should have included.

[Princess Weeks]

Yeah, let's see this hottie.

[Sophie]

I've only. The photos I've only seen are of him when he's older.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I only found older ones, but I didn't look as hard as I should have.

[Sophie]

I'll try to find some.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. None of this work earns him his father's approval. And his older brother keeps hating him because once Junie proves himself, James resents him for being the better businessman. Eventually, June's constant frustration is alleviated by a miracle. The US declares war on Spain in 1898, and James enlists, which gets his ass out of the home and gives June some breathing room for the first time in his young life. While the future richest man on earth nears adolescence, his father uses the by now considerable wealth and clout that he'd amassed to start a small local bank, the People State Bank. Weirdly, his oldest son, Robert, who had moved out of the house by this point, starts a separate bank to compete with his dad's bank, which says a lot about the family dynamic that isn't spelled out in this book. But you don't do that. If you have a good relationship with your dad, create a spite bank. A spite bank. A bank just to spite your father.

[Princess Weeks]

It's so Kendall Roy coded. It's like, I just think everything is giving a succession. I'm just kind of like. He's like, I'm the eldest boy. I'm going to make my own bank, dad.

[Robert Evans]

It's a really petty succession because the town. These banks only serve the town they're in. And the town they're in, Ramsey, has 600 people

[Princess Weeks]

and every member counts.

[Robert Evans]

And every. Yeah, every member counts in the spite bank. Yeah, it's very funny to sell. Includes this quote, hashtag. Little appreciated this unique form of incestuous capitalism, but it was a great source of merriment among the neighbors. Everyone's laughing about the spite bank that his oldest made, right?

[Princess Weeks]

They're like, if you have a problem with one bank, just like, and I will go over to your son, I'll

[Robert Evans]

go over to your brother's or your son's shitty bank.

[Sophie]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So not long after this, his older brothers move out of the house too. And favorite brother Leonard heads out to the Pacific Northwest to work as a logger. This seems to have ignited a wanderlust in young H.L. hunt, a desire to go out into the world and make something of himself. Previously, he'd been content living at home and being doted on by his sisters. But at age 12, he runs away from home for the first time. Now he doesn't go far. And the way that Tussel describes it, he's motivated less to escape forever than just to. He wants to get away for a couple of days and see a little bit of the world before he comes back. He just kind of wants to ramble and you could kind of do that as a 12. There's not like a CPS going around to make sure everyone's 12 year olds aren't running around right in the rails like nobody cares in the government at this point in time.

[Princess Weeks]

And there's eight of them. So really you don't even like, if you lose one, you got seven others,

[Robert Evans]

you lose one, you got plenty of kids left. Yeah, he's away a couple of nights, but he comes back changed. And from this point on, over the next four years, he's going to leave home regularly, every couple of months to explore. And he lives a very Peter Pan style existence. In those days, Tussaud writes, he had discovered that many other young vagabonds were on the road, boys and girls alike, whose families were too poor to feed them properly at home. On occasion, he had hooked up with a gang of them and slept in teenage hobo jungles around open campfires.

[Princess Weeks]

That does sound kind of awesome. I would read about that.

[Robert Evans]

That sounds pretty cool. And also kind of like a special hell. But you know, it could be either. I'm imagining it as being exactly like the movie Hook, though, I'll be honest with you. Yeah, like right down to the brightly colored imaginary foodstuffs they throw at each other.

[Sophie]

I have found a young Hl image.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, Good, good, good. You think about that. I'm gonna think about Rufio getting stabbed. Real bummer.

[Princess Weeks]

I was literally like, what if he looks like young Jacob Elordi? Not as much.

[Robert Evans]

What if he looks like Elordi? Not as much, but yeah, he's big guy. You can see he's like very broad shoulders.

[Princess Weeks]

Yeah, he's a, you know, he's an 8. The looks maxers would approve of him, I think.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, he's a reasonably good looking guy. Yeah. Like certainly not a bad looking guy. Nice chin. He just kind of looks like a big white guy.

[Sophie]

Gotta be honest, he just looks like a guy.

[Robert Evans]

He looks like a big white guy. He's not like a movie star for sure, but he's real big.

[Sophie]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

In those days if you were huge, it just said like, wow, you're not malnourished and dying. Let's make kids, you know?

[Diana Maria Riva]

Right.

[Princess Weeks]

It's like George Washington. Like of course he was going to be president. He was 6 4.

[Robert Evans]

He was 6 4. Not a lot of people got to be that big back then. He had to be eating a lot of milk and meat when you were a kid. Yeah. So when he's 16, June leaves the house for good. He is 6ft tall now and as we just saw in the picture, pretty big. He's big enough, nobody questions that. He's like not old enough to be doing whatever he's doing. By the time he's 16, he looks enough like an adult that people treat him like one. He leaves in the spring of 1905 and he first hits St. Louis where he gets a job on a railroad. He takes odd jobs to get from Kansas to Colorado and then he heads up towards Utah where he gets a gig watching a carload of sheep on a train ride to California. As soon as he gets to California, he falls in love with it like all sensible people do. Although being a libertarian, Toussel has to write this in the grossest way that he can. He found California much to his liking. Especially the lust blonde beauties who appeared as plentiful as the succulent fruit that grew in this golden sun soaked land. And no, I gotta tell you, this is based on what Tussel thought of California in the 80s. In 1905, California isn't like the center of like a massive world renowned entertainment industry. Yeah, it's like a place some people live in are farming and stuff. Like the weather's famously good. But it's not famous for its blonde beauties. It's just famous as there's when the dust bowl hits in a few decades, it doesn't get hurt as badly as everywhere. Like, people are thinking of California in 1905 in those terms. That's, that's, that's some shit that Toussill is thinking about. Um, also, I gotta read these next couple of sentences to you. This is, this is to sell. Describing Hunt after he gets to California.

[Sophie]

Spoiler alert.

[Princess Weeks]

Hahaha. Oh, gosh. All right.

[Robert Evans]

With his good height and his hard, solid body, his deep set blue eyes and rugged looks, he had little trouble in attracting more than his share of young females. His sexuality was strong and developing, and he exuded an aura of raw animal magnetism.

[Princess Weeks]

Okay.

[Sophie]

With his good height, in his hard, solid body.

[Princess Weeks]

Oh, my God.

[Robert Evans]

Who told you that? Jerome Toussel. Who told you about his hard, hot body and his animal magnetism? Where'd you get that, Jerome?

[Sophie]

His raw.

[Robert Evans]

Did you make that up? Yeah, it's.

[Princess Weeks]

The homoeroticism is just like. Just blow him.

[Robert Evans]

Pretty weird.

[Princess Weeks]

Just, Just blow it. It's okay.

[Robert Evans]

He was dead by this point.

[Princess Weeks]

So, I mean, don't let that limit you. Clearly.

[Robert Evans]

Don't let. Wow, wow, Princess weeks. Don't let that limit you.

[Princess Weeks]

That's a dream. Dream big.

[Robert Evans]

Dream big. Dream big and weird. So I should probably say a little more about Toussill here. In the late 1970s, after writing that book about Ayn Rand and failing to become the mayor or the governor, I forget which, he grew disillusioned with libertarianism as a political tendency. He'd also long since broken with Ayn Rand over a number of things that he disagreed with her about. He gives up political rabble rousing and becomes a stockbroker and eventually a financial writer. In the 1980s, he started writing books on investing, and then he launched a series of biographies. Kingdom is one of them. Another, written in 1985, was the saga of America's most powerful real estate baron. This is the first published biography of our current president that tracks. I didn't know that. That makes sense.

[Sophie]

Cool.

[Robert Evans]

Per the New York. I'm gonna quote from the New York Times here. Denied access to his subject, members of his family, and most of his associates, Mr. Tussel relied heavily on newspaper and magazine accounts to produce what Michael Stern, writing in the New York Times Book Review, called a gee whizzer of a biography that points a key to Mr. Trump's career, his ability to turn political friendships, tax abatements, and government loans into opportunities for profit. Which does sound like an accurate descriptive, like kind of how he made his money but also it shows like that's kind of his sources. He found some newspapers and magazine accounts. Maybe he talked to a couple guys about Hunt who knew him. But a lot of this is just him kind of filling into blanks to make this exciting. And I know I'm spending way longer in these episodes about Hunt talking about his biographer than I should, but everything I find out about Jerome Tussaud kind of drives me crazy. His other. I look to do his bibliography and his other books, his like most famous book, one of them is he wrote a history of black soldiers in the Spanish American War. That's like super anti Teddy Roosevelt. And it's apparently a pretty good book. He's not like a crypto fascist or anything. But when I saw that he'd made a Trump biography, I got this like, I decided to look into that a little bit and I just started doing some word searches. Cause I was like, like, does he. Is this weird, him calling Hunt hot a lot? Is that like a pattern in his books? I was gonna ask and I'm gonna read you. Yes, yes, princess, it is. Here's a paragraph from his book on Trump. Fred Trump was still taught. And that's our president's dad. Fred Trump was still tall and slim at 67, with a full head of dark graying hair. Handsome in a 1940s movie star way, sporting a swept back pompadour and a dark pencil thin mustache. Indeed, he looked as though he might have stepped out of an old movie starring Barbara Stanwyck or Joan Crawford, the mysterious charmer. Faintly dangerous Donald, as tall as Fred. Both men standing a couple of inches over six feet, handsome, clean shaven, with only a hint of a pouty sneer crossing his lips.

[Sophie]

I. I've seen what this man looked like in many phases of his life.

[Robert Evans]

He is none of that. I know he is not. I'm going to show you a picture of these two neck to each other from this time.

[Princess Weeks]

He's DTF.

[Robert Evans]

He's DTF. Trump's dad. And here's Trump's dad in 1969. He does not look like a sexy movie star.

[Princess Weeks]

No, but he wants the Eiffel Tower. That Trump Tower, guys, he's in it.

[Robert Evans]

He does. And he looks sort of like if Walt Disney had progeria. Like his face is not smooth looking like he's not handsome is a weird way to describe Fred Trump. Yeah. A lot of forehead.

[Princess Weeks]

So much forehead.

[Robert Evans]

A lot of forehead. Very red.

[Princess Weeks]

Very red. Yeah. He loves, I think he just loves money so much that it makes Whatever man around him, like the hottest guy I've ever seen.

[Sophie]

That is not what we call a Babraham Lincoln.

[Robert Evans]

That is. I have to read a lot of biographies and even autobiographies, you know, for these. This show. I do. I've never run into a guy who talks about how hot his subjects are this often. It's really. It's really weird.

[Princess Weeks]

It's mean.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's really weird. You know what?

[Princess Weeks]

That's Olivia Newsy's like, inspo board. She's like, that's fantastic.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, she's got him on there.

[Sophie]

Great reference, great reference.

[Robert Evans]

So I did, I kept digging cause I wanted to see how far down the rabbit hole this went. I found an archived copy of Toussel's biography of Rupert Murdoch from 1989. Because of course he wrote Rupert Murdoch's biography. That said, I didn't find any returns for Handsome or any related terms. I didn't read through the book. So maybe he just used different words to talk about Murdoch being hot. Anyway, this is a pointless diversion, but I had to do it. Sorry.

[Sophie]

Thank you.

[Robert Evans]

It's perfect.

[Princess Weeks]

Now I'm imagining like him doing biographies of like Elizabeth Holmes.

[Robert Evans]

There's a lot of. A lot of pages talking about how that turtleneck fed her. Jerome, we need to do. We need to edit maybe some of this down.

[Princess Weeks]

That's what the people want. They're here. They're here for my thirst traps.

[Robert Evans]

You know who else has a crush on Elizabeth Holmes?

[Princess Weeks]

Those.

[Robert Evans]

The products and services of this podcast. Sorry, that's right, that's right, that's right.

[Robert Smigel]

Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy. Not quite on Humor Me with Robert Smigel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Garrett Afigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier this week. My guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an acapella band with their between songs banter. There's the worst singer in the group. The worst. Yeah, me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge

[Robert Evans]

donation to the group?

[Robert Smigel]

The group.

[Liberty Mutual Ad Voice]

The Yard Birds.

[Princess Weeks]

Right, that's the name.

[Robert Smigel]

The Harvard Yard. They're open.

[Robert Evans]

Do you have a name suggestion? We're open.

[Robert Smigel]

Since you guys are middle aged, one erection, listen to Humor Me with Robert Smigel and friends on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast.

[Robert Evans]

Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny.

[Kier Gaines]

Welcome to my New podcast, Learn the Hard Way with me, your host and your favorite therapist, Kier Gaines. And in recognition of MENT Health Awareness Month, I'm bringing over a decade of my own experience in the mental health field and conversations with so many incredible guests. I'm talking Trip Fontaine, Ryan Clark. Sometimes when we're in the pursuit of the thing, we get so wrapped up in the chase that we don't realize that we are in possession of the thing and we're still chasing it and we don't know when we done enough. Because people, scoreboard wise, life becomes about wins and losses. Steve Burns. Dustin Ross. Cause you find it important to be a good person while you're here on Earth, or are you a good person because you're afraid? Because that's two different intentions, bro. Absolutely. And that's two different levels of trust. I want you to just really be a good person. Join me, Care Gaines, as we have real conversations about healing, growth, fatherhood, pressure and purpose on my new podcast, Learn the Hard Way. Open your free iHeartradio app, search learn the Hard Way and listen. Now.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

If you're seeking to try to understand the forensic science behind these cases that we hear about in the news, body bags is where you need to turn. There's no fluff. We do a deep dive into the forensics. Listen to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan and start listening.

[Liberty Mutual Ad Voice]

Hey, everyone, it's Ryder Strong and Will Friedle from Pod Meets World. And now, the Pod Meets Twirled podcast. We're two men who were completely clueless to reality tv who now have covered Dancing with the Stars, Traitors, and we're gearing up for the season finale of Survivor. So, yeah, now we're experts.

[Robert Evans]

I know we annoyed a lot of

[Liberty Mutual Ad Voice]

our listeners by our severe lack of survival Survivor knowledge. That is the point of the show. I'm just gonna remind you, I have watched some Survivor. I obviously haven't watched enough.

[Robert Evans]

Did people not like. Like what? Yeah, just because we.

[Liberty Mutual Ad Voice]

Yeah. We'll be recapping the big conclusion of the 50th season, from the final attempts at gameplay to the desperate pleas of finalists to a bunch of ha, ooh,

[Robert Evans]

ha ha ooh ooh.

[Liberty Mutual Ad Voice]

Again, we are experts, so make sure to tune into Pod meets Twirl for all our Survivor 50 takes. Listen to Pod Meets Twirl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

We're Back. So let's talk about June HL Hunt some more.

[Sophie]

Right? I got a case of myself for that one.

[Robert Evans]

I'm so sorry.

[Princess Weeks]

I'm so sorry.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, you should be sorry, Sophie. I'm not happy. No one's happy.

[Sophie]

I'm sorry.

[Robert Evans]

No one's happy except the subject of our episodes, H.L. hunt, who is happy because he's. He's moved to San Francisco by this point in the story, the early 1900s. And he falls into a happy life gambling with sailors and prostitutes and other assorted people living on the margins of the world. He finds out that he's really good at poker and that he can win money basically every time he plays. De Sil chalks this up to his photographic memory. In essence, Hunt is someone whose brain just automatically starts card counting. Like, he doesn't even know what he's doing. Right. But that's just how his head works. And so he just always wins when he's playing poker. Hunt is able to live comfortably in a fleabag motel as a card shark. And, you know, after some period of months of this, Tisil treats us to another deeply uncomfortable paragraph about Hunt. Like, he invites this prostitute into his room, and he's so good at sex that she falls in love with him. Like, he wins the heart of a prostitute for being really good at fucking.

[Princess Weeks]

And according fan fiction. Lord, stop it.

[Robert Evans]

Free My Queens is great. According to this account, this prostitute that he's with finds out that the hotel he's staying in, he tells her, and she's like, oh, no, they drugged young men there and, like, shanghai them to force them to work on boats somewhere, which is the thing that happened in that period of time. And he's like. And they're about to do it tomorrow night or something like that. And so he has to flee town, and he winds up like. Like leaving fucking San Francisco for Reno. And he tries out for a minor league baseball team, but that doesn't pan out. But while he's away, there's a horrible quake in San Francisco, and the hotel that he'd been staying in collapses. So June becomes convinced as a result of this that he's someone special and that the universe has marked him out for a purpose. All of this has just really reinforced that he is the special boy of history. Right. That's how this man grows up feeling.

[Sophie]

Yeah. And. And. And, you know, like they said, he didn't have the making of a varsity after.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, he does not have the makings of a varsity athlete. No.

[Sophie]

Princess and I are just referencing every Single HBO show.

[Princess Weeks]

Exactly.

[Robert Evans]

It's just like, we're.

[Princess Weeks]

Just throw it out there.

[Robert Evans]

It's good.

[Sophie]

Also, audience. Robert's never seen the Sopranos, and I'm very upset about it.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that's not my. Yeah, I don't know. It's anti Italian discrimination, Sophie. That's my issue with the Sopranos. You know, my people didn't work a very, very hard to become famous for making hand gestures and running buca di beppo for you to bring us down by associating us with the mafia. And yes, I did have multiple family members who were involved in organized crime, but that's still a bad stereotype, even though a lot of Italians do have a family history involved in the movie.

[Sophie]

I think you would fucking love this.

[Princess Weeks]

It's an amazing show. Like, the amount of racism that I have that I'm like. But I love Tony Soprano. I was like, listen, I get it. It's fine. I forgive him because he wants to fight the FBI.

[Robert Evans]

He wants to fight the FBI. He wants to. Hey, so did one of my cousins. It didn't end well for him. The gun that killed him sold at auction a few years ago for like, 50 grand or something.

[Princess Weeks]

Nice.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Yeah. I feel like I should own that. Actually kind of bums me out. Some collector has the gun that killed my cous and. Yeah, I do too.

[Sophie]

But I wouldn't approve of you spending that much on a family heirloom.

[Robert Evans]

No, no, no, no. It's. That's why I didn't. You put it on the auction. But I was. I was like, it's fucked up for anyone else to own the gun that killed my cousin. It's fucked up to sell a gun and be like, this is the gun that killed this guy.

[Princess Weeks]

But 50 grand is wild.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that's all happening at around this time. I forget how exactly how much it sold for. It was a crazy amount. So anyway, I don't know how much credence to give the whole. I was so good at sex that, like, a magical prostitute saved my life by helping me escape. An earthquake thing.

[Princess Weeks]

That's not real.

[Robert Evans]

I can believe. I can believe that, like, he left a hotel in San Francisco and not long after, there was an earthquake. Because that earthquake did happen, and a lot of stuff was destroyed by it. And a lot of people had the experience of a week or two earlier, I was in the hotel that collapsed. Tons of people would have had a story like that. So it's very possible. And it's just a thing that happened to hundreds and hundreds of people, because that's how hotels work. And he takes from this. I am special and marked out for greatness. Right? So one of the other things that we see in hunt, you know, in the early days, he has this growing belief that he's special, and he also has a fundamental distrust of his fellow man. Not long after all of this brouhaha with San Francisco and trying out for baseball in Reno, he's like, goes. He's. I think he's in Arizona. He's in the southwest. He's working. He's, like, with a bunch of day laborers, and there's, like, white day laborers, and there's a group of Mexican day laborers, and they have separate camps because it's the 19. It's like 1906 or something, 1907. And he goes over, along with some of, like, the other white workers to play cards with the Mexican laborers one night, and hunt just wins everything. He takes all of these Mexican guys money, which winds up to, like, four grand, everything they have in the world. And so the other white dudes, the longer he wins, they start leaving to go back to their camp because they're like, hey, hey, man. Or, hey, hunt, maybe you want to go. You probably don't want to take all these guys money. This seems like it could get dangerous. So they leave. But hunt doesn't. He can't stop playing cards when he's playing cards, so he doesn't stop until he's taken all of their money, at which point he realizes all of his friends are gone, and he gets, like, scared, and he basically takes the money and runs off into the bushes because he feels like he has to hide from the Mexicans, Even though, as far as we know, they never go after him or try to hurt him. All of the evidence suggests they took their loss fine. And they didn't, like, threaten him. He just is sure that because they're Mexicans, they're going to try to kill him to get their money back. So he, like, hides in the bushes, and then he. He tries to, like, in the middle of the night, Hike back to the camp with his friends. But when he gets back there, he's like, wait a second. How well do I really know these guys? They're definitely going to rob me. They know I have all this money. They might kill me. So he has a panic attack, and he, like, hides and camps out in the woods that night. And then, like, goes. Just leaves, quits the job and hikes off into another town, basically because he. He doesn't want to be near where anyone knows that he's won this money. Quote from Tussel's book. How could he trust these brawny strangers who knew he had made a killing that night? What was to stop two or three of them from jumping him in his bunk, leaving him with a knife between his ribs and slipping off with his winnings?

[Princess Weeks]

The burden of being the most special boy.

[Robert Evans]

Right? There's this deep distrust of other people that again, at no point. And Tussaud just writes this like, of course, he was reasonable to fear that these Mexicans were going to kill him. But at no point is there any evidence that they threaten his life at all. I do want to emphasize that this is all entirely something he decides. So he makes his way to South Dakota, where he meets who to. Sill's book describes this as the best friend he's going to have in his entire life. A dude named Steve, no last name provided. Now, to still insist that this is the best. No last name provides to another man. We don't even need last names. We're that close.

[Princess Weeks]

That is such a cliche of, like, boy friendships. Of, like, what's his last name? I don't know. He's the best.

[Robert Evans]

Steve.

[Princess Weeks]

One name.

[Sophie]

He thinks he's Zendaya or some.

[Robert Evans]

What's happening, Right, Steve. Steve. I kind of think Hunt probably tells his kids later in life that this guy was his best friend ever, because I don't know. Otherwise, YT sil would insist it. But they only know each other for, like, a few days, maybe a few weeks. And the main thing, the only story we get about their marvelous friendship is that one night, Hunt beats Steve at cards and takes all of his money, which is like 260 bucks, and he feels bad about it, so he's like, hey, man, you don't have to pay me back. And Steve is like, no, you know, I made a promise. You know, this is a. This is a bond. I owe you, and I'm gonna pay you. You know, don't think anything about it. And then Steve sits down and has, like, the fucking Ben Affleck conversation with his friend, where he's like, you need to leave here. You gotta go to college. You're too smart to keep, you know, working like this, right? And so Hunt is like, you know what? You're right, Steve. And he leaves off to go to college, and they never see each other again. And that is the greatest friendship of his entire life.

[Princess Weeks]

God, he invented a father figure just so he could go to school.

[Robert Evans]

A man who insisted on paying him and then did A goodwill hunting to him. Yeah. His best friend, Steve. They knew each other for days.

[Sophie]

That's his best friend ever.

[Robert Evans]

Steve never met again.

[Sophie]

Steve Zendaya.

[Princess Weeks]

Exactly. Steve is Michi.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So now age 17, Steve or not, Steve Hunt briefly attends college.

[Princess Weeks]

17?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, he's 17. He goes to Valparaiso, which is known as the poor man's Harvard, and he robs his fellow students there blind at card games and then dips after, like a semester. He never gets a degree. He just kind of takes everyone's money and then leaves. He goes home. He's around 18 now when he finally makes his way back home for the first time since he'd left. And he stays at home for a while, but then he sets out again with his brother Leonard. This time they go out to, like, work in the Northwest together and make money. But Leonard gets sick with tuberculosis, you know, and pretty soon he can't. Friend of the pod, tuberculosis, and he can't keep up with his brother. And he has another. Tussil has another, like, heartfelt, you know, Leonard is like. To his brother, look, you got to go on without me. I'm too slow. Don't let me stop you from achieving greatness, basically. And so Hunt goes up to Canada, right? And he's working in Canada in 1910, when he gets a telegram that his. His brother is. Has just. Just died. Leonard has died, you know, of his tuberculosis. So Hunt heads home for the funeral, and he stays at home for a few months. And while he's there, his dad dies too, right? So at this point, H.L. hunt is like 18, 19, you know, he's no longer going by Junior, and after his dad dies, he inherits $5,000. He doesn't get the land. Someone else gets the land because he's not living at home. But he gets, like, a nest egg of money. And he takes this and he adds it to the money that he's saved up from working as a card shark. And he decides, I'm going to stop wandering. I'm going to make real money. And in order to do that, I need to, like, invest in something, and I want to start a farm, right? His dad had always talked about how much better the soil was down in the south and how, oh, if only we lived in Arkansas, then we'd really be doing well, you know, as farmers. So Hunt moves down south to Arkansas near the end of 1911, and he's gonna buy a farm and he's going to invest in, you know, the next part of his life, and we will get to that. And what happens later and how he becomes the richest man on earth in part two. Princess, how you feeling?

[Princess Weeks]

I am excited to find out about this man whose family was like, let's move to the north. Oh, wait, actually, I regret that. Let's go back.

[Robert Evans]

Yep.

[Sophie]

Princess, do you have anything you want to plug real quick?

[Princess Weeks]

Oh, yeah, I have a YouTube channel, Princess Weeks. I talk about pop culture, sci fi, all the good stuff, and yeah, just happy to be here. This is really interesting. I. I love this really, really hot millionaire in training.

[Robert Evans]

This. Yeah, sexy millionaire narcissist. Yes.

[Princess Weeks]

So hot. His brother's like, no, you're just too. Keep going. Just keep going. Don't stop.

[Robert Evans]

Just keep going. Keep going. You're too hot. Don't. Don't be slowed down by my. My conveniently, narratively convenient death.

[Sophie]

Wow. We'll be back with part two.

[Robert Evans]

All right, everybody, go to hell. I love you.

[Sophie]

Bye.

[Robert Evans]

Bye.

[Sophie]

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of behind the Basterds are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit remind me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips in our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, YouTube.com behindthebastards we love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

[Robert Smigel]

Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy not quite on Humor Me with Robert Smigel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier this week. My guests, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an acapella band with their between songs banter.

[Liberty Mutual Ad Voice]

Where does your group perform?

[Robert Smigel]

We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to Humor Me with Robert Smigel and friends on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

If you're seeking to try to understand the forensic science behind these cases that we hear about in the news, Body bags is where you need to turn. There's no fluff. We do a deep dive into the forensics. Listen to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan on America's number one podcast network. I heart open your free iHeart app and search Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan and start listening.

[Jordan Sillers]

Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors, where the terrain is unforgiving. The evidence is scarce and the truth gets buried under brush and silence.

[Liberty Mutual Ad Voice]

I seen something in the road. I instantly thought, thought it was a sleeping bed, that there was a pool of blood.

[Robert Evans]

Somebody somewhere knows something.

[Jordan Sillers]

I'm Jordan Sillers. Season 2 is out now with new episodes every Thursday. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Diana Maria Riva]

Hey, I'm Diana Maria Riva, and on my new podcast, How Hard Can It Be? I call on my Gen X squad. From Ohio to Hollywood as we navigate midlife's most fantastic bs unfiltered conversations. From night sweats to fupas to scheduling sex. Wait, what sex? Is it just me, or does every woman my age want to look at

[Princess Weeks]

Pinterest instead of having sex?

[Diana Maria Riva]

Sometimes they say we can't polish a turd, but we're sure gonna try. So let's get blunt with laughs, tears, or tears of laughter. Listen to How Hard Can It Be? With Diana Maria Riva on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Princess Weeks]

This is an I Heart podcast. Guaranteed human.