Episode 655: The Du Pont Foxcatcher Murder Part III - Wrestle-Mania

Summary

Last Podcast on the Left

Episode 655: The Du Pont Foxcatcher Murder Part III – Wrestle-Mania
March 6, 2026

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Overview:

This episode concludes the harrowing saga of John du Pont and the Foxcatcher murder, exploring the intersection of obscene wealth, untreated mental illness, and the world of American amateur wrestling. The hosts—Marcus Parks, Henry Zebrowski, and Ed Larson—blend dark humor with incisive commentary to analyze how one eccentric heir, cut off from the family business, spun out into delusion, manipulation, and ultimately murder. The episode also spotlights how the vulnerabilities of elite athletes collided with a dangerous benefactor.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

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1. The Du Pont Family and John’s Outlier Status

• Contrast with the Rest of the Family:
  Marcus describes how previous episodes covered the Du Ponts’ wider-reaching crimes (chemical poisoning, generational greed) but John represented a new kind of insular menace:

  “John du Pont was an example of what happens when one of the du Pont is left to spin his own wheels completely apart from the rest of the du Pont clan... dangerously lonely, completely devoid of social skills, and mentally ill.” (04:04)

• Privilege and Consequence:
  If not for the family fortune, John would have likely become homeless or institutionalized. Instead, his resources enabled bizarre obsessions and increasing instability.

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2. Childhood and Upbringing

• Isolation and Mother’s Dominance:
  John’s siblings had left home before he was in grade school; his only playmate was a paid companion.

  “He was... painfully shy and soon developed a stutter. The closest thing John had to a childhood friend was the son of a du Pont family chauffeur. But... his mother had actually put this boy on the du Pont payroll, and his only job was to pretend to like John.” (12:03)

• Wealth Without Direction:
  John developed collection obsessions (seashells, stuffed birds) and built his own museum, but always felt aimless.

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3. Athletics, Injury, and Mental Health

• Olympic Aspirations and the Turning Point:
  John pursued swimming but lacked talent for elite competition.

  “When he competed for a spot on the swim team in the 1968 Olympic Games, for example, John came in second to last.” (16:44)

  A catastrophic riding accident led to a traumatic loss of his testicles and inconsistent hormone therapy, which the hosts speculate contributed to his psychological decline:

  “I think it is possible that the misapplication of hormones is what turned John from being a mere rich weirdo into a dangerous and unpredictable rich weirdo.” (17:09)

• Schizophrenia and Paranoia:
  Onset of mental illness emerged in his 20s and worsened with age, exacerbated by addiction and isolation.

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4. Eccentric Wealth, Dangerous Behavior, and Enabling Systems

• Weapons and Law Enforcement Cosplay:
  John constructed a shooting range, bought police equipment, and cozied up to local cops:

  “John kept a close relationship with the local cops from then on, donating money, buying them equipment, and even letting them use his helicopter... the Newtown Township police department gave John his very own police badge...” (25:12)

• Repeatedly Avoiding Consequences:
  From near-miss shootings at guests to blowing up foxes, driving tanks drunk, and even hitting a traffic cop with a car, John’s combination of money and local influence let him escape law and legal trouble again and again.

• Quote on Power and Privilege:

  “He just believed that everyone had their price. And if they didn’t have a price, John had the power to ruin whoever didn’t play by his rules...” (48:29)

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5. Foxcatcher Farms: Wrestling, Manipulation, and Control

• Buying a Sport:
  John’s interest in wrestling stemmed from both his own isolation and the cheapness of controlling an insular world:

  “If you choose an obscure thing, you can own it entirely.” (35:56)

• The Schultz Brothers:
  Dave and Mark Schultz, Olympic champions, were recruited by John.

  “...there were no financial opportunities for competitive wrestlers, no sponsorship deals for singlets, and the Schultz brothers seemed to feel like pro wrestling was beneath them.” (41:13)

• Dependency Built by Financial Need:
  John was able to collect elite wrestlers by offering resources no one else would. The athletes, chronically underfunded, tolerated his abuse and erratic behavior because their careers depended on his largesse.

• Cult of Personality and Toxic Culture:
  John obsessed over recognition, going so far as to stage fake award ceremonies for himself.

  “Bob's main job was to organize and host awards ceremonies that John Dupont held in his own honor, complete with awards that John would commission from the local trophy shop...” (51:22)

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6. Escalating Eccentricity: Paranoia, Power Games, and Abuse

• Paranoia and Violence:
  John’s delusions spiraled: fear of “spirits and spies,” belief in surveillance tunnels, and obsession with Nazis on his estate.

  “He hired a psychic to identify the spirits. He brought in laborers to check the walls and floors for spies.” (87:28)

• Manipulating and Humiliating Wrestlers:
  Notable is the “Foxcatcher Five” (ball-grabbing move) and recurring unwanted physical interactions:

  “...John would simply grab a wrestler’s testicles with his whole hand. That’s it. It’s just grabbing a guy’s balls and calling it a move.” (70:00)

• Quote on John’s Social Blindness:

  “He has no idea how to engage with these big strong men. He wants to be a big strong man and thinks he is a big strong man. And he thinks that just collecting the big strong men around him will make him one.” (71:30)

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7. Downward Spiral: Addiction and Detachment from Reality

• Substance Abuse:
  John’s behavior became even more erratic as his painkiller, alcohol, and cocaine use escalated.

  “Mark Schultz actually said that when John Dupont did cocaine, that was when he was his most coherent.” (79:50)

• Fake Competition and Eroding Self-Worth:
  John arranged for Bulgarian wrestlers to throw matches for him, deepening his delusions of prowess but also feeding his suspicion that people mocked him.

  “...everyone in the room, including John Dupont, knew that he had fully paid for this fantasy.” (92:39)

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8. Climax: The Murder of Dave Schultz

• Tension and Jealousy:
  After Dave became a father figure and confidant to many, John grew increasingly paranoid and jealous—particularly over Dave’s friendship with Bulgarian wrestler Valentin Yordanov.

• Sequence of the Murder:
  On January 26, 1996, after a night of partying and (reportedly) paranoid accusations, John shot Dave Schultz outside his home on the Foxcatcher property in front of Dave’s wife, who heard the shots from inside.

  “John pulled up to Dave, opened the door and said, hi, Coach. John then got halfway out of his car, wasn’t, didn’t even fully get out, pulled his .44 and shot Dave Schultz.” (106:33)

• Aftermath:
  John holed up in his mansion’s bomb shelter as SWAT and media surrounded him. He surrendered only after police disabled the building’s heating system.

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9. Trial, Verdict, and Legacy

• Disposition:
  John attempted an insanity defense, presenting himself as disheveled and incoherent, but was found guilty of third-degree murder (mentally ill) and sentenced to 13–36 years.

  “...while the jury believed that John did have paranoid schizophrenia, he had still fully understood that he was doing something wrong when he killed Dave schultz.” (116:07)

• Death and Estate:
  He died in prison in 2010, his estate left primarily to Valentin Yordanov.

• Systemic Commentary:
  The hosts note that John was the rare Du Pont to truly face consequences and reflect on the systems that enable the ultra-wealthy’s worst behaviors:

  “If you really want to understand how we got to this point, people like the Du Pont, you have to understand how this world works and what these people do. You know, you have to understand how people like John Dupont work.” (119:35)

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Memorable Quotes

• “‘John dupont was still careless, dangerously lonely, completely devoid of social skills, and mentally ill. Cool. Great combo...’” – Marcus Parks (04:03)

• “He grew up alone on this massive estate with his mother as his only companion. And, man, do we know how well it turns out when boys grow up with their mother as their only companion?” – Marcus Parks (12:11)

• “John would have likely become homeless. Instead, his resources enabled bizarre obsessions and increasing instability.” – Marcus Parks (paraphrase, 05:14)

• “With near unlimited funds, no sense of consequence, and zero social skills, John Dupont’s mental illness quickly became a danger to those around him.” – Marcus Parks (21:07)

• “He just believed that everyone had their price. And if they didn’t have a price, John had the power to ruin whoever didn’t play by his rules...” – Marcus Parks (48:29)

• “He set up Team Foxcatcher up to a point where he thought that maybe that would fulfill it. And then as they were winning and it wasn’t him, it wasn’t cutting the mustard.” – Henry Zebrowski (93:52)

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Timelines & Timestamps

• [04:04] – John’s emotional development, impact of isolation, and initial setup of the Foxcatcher story.
• [16:44] – John’s attempted Olympic swimming career and subsequent testicular injury.
• [25:12] – Foxcatcher Farms, John’s relationship with police, and escalation of weapons on property.
• [47:43] – Mark Schultz’s first meeting with John: physical appearance and manipulative style.
• [69:02] – John brings guns to wrestling practices, invents the “Foxcatcher Five”.
• [71:30] – John’s failed attempts at male camaraderie and the discomfort of the athletes.
• [83:04] – Mark Schultz’s departure and Dave Schultz’s arrival at Foxcatcher.
• [87:28] – Emergence of full-blown paranoia: spirits, spies, Nazi surveillance.
• [92:39] – Bulgarian exhibition matches; John’s fake victories.
• [106:33] – The murder of Dave Schultz.
• [116:07] – Trial verdict: third-degree murder, but mentally ill.
• [119:35] – Reflection on the sociopolitical relevance of the Du Pont story.

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Additional Notable Moments

• Comic Relief on Wrestling’s Image:
  Henry opens with jokes on the homoeroticism of wrestling, echoing the show’s penchant for dark humor.

• Chilling Parallels:
  The hosts frequently liken the pattern of rich men buying social power and “collecting” people to other predators, specifically making reference to Epstein:

  “Reminded me of every single thing every little girl in southern Florida was saying about Epstein...” (48:29)

• The Award Ceremonies and Ego Worship:
  John spent significant amounts of money on fake awards and staged ceremonies solely for self-validation.

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Conclusion

The episode underscores how race, class, power, and neglect created a monstrous outcome on Foxcatcher Farms. John du Pont’s unchecked eccentricity met the economic desperation of elite athletes in an environment stripped of oversight, empathy, and consequences—culminating in tragedy. Through darkly comedic banter and pointed analysis, the hosts expose both the idiosyncrasies and systemic failures that made the Foxcatcher murder possible.

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For further context on the true story, check out ESPN’s 30 for 30 documentary and Mark Schultz’s memoir, both referenced throughout the show.

Transcript

[Henry Zebrowski]

This podcast is brought to you by Hotels.com make your next trip work for you. Hotels.com's new save your way feature lets you choose between Instant Savings now or Banking rewards for later. It's a flexible rewards program that puts you in control with no confusing math or blackout dates. Book [e-mail] Save Your Way is available to loyalty members in the US and UK on hotels with member prices. Other terms apply. See site for details. Last podcast on the left is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try [e-mail], progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states.

[Marcus Parks]

There's no place to escape to. This is the last on the left.

[Henry Zebrowski]

That's when the cannibalism started.

[Ed Larson]

What was that?

[Henry Zebrowski]

You know, I feel like I've grown a lot just in this sideways. No, no, no, no. You piece of shit.

[Marcus Parks]

Waistline.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I'm less swollen than I was because I've been sick. Okay. I've been sick. And so I realized, though, something cut through the cloud, the miasma of my sickness. Wrestling might not be gay. Yeah. I don't. I don't know how.

[Marcus Parks]

Oh, my God.

[Ed Larson]

At.

[Marcus Parks]

At. At this age, in your 40s, you. You. You find.

[Ed Larson]

I understand what you're saying.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I don't know. Like, again, I don't know how I came to that conclusion because none of the information actually would lead me to that conclusion.

[Marcus Parks]

Sure. But you did finally come to the conclusion that men can touch each other without it being gay.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I don't understand the desire, but that women either. I do. I'll hug a woman if she'll let me. I'll fuck any woman available. Believe it. You're a woman. I'll hug a man. I just don't want to hug. I don't. You know what it is? I just never understood. I grew up sisters. I was over mothered.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I don't like roughhousing with you boys. I don't like getting my. I don't like you boys getting your sweat on me. That's for. That's making love to a woman. I don't want your sweat on me. And I don't get it, but I understand. It's a sport thing that I just. It's past me.

[Ed Larson]

I like it. I had an alliance with the wrestlers. You know, I was on the football team, but I had an alliance with the wrestlers. Because I used to laugh when they beat up the baseball players

[Henry Zebrowski]

and they just wanted an audience.

[Marcus Parks]

Welcome to the last podcast on the left, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Marcus Parks. I'm here with God. I mean, I would say, I mean, a totally different Henry zabrowski.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I mean, 55%. It's just this one sport that I don't understand. But hey, you know, it's because they don't really make any money from it.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It's physically grueling.

[Marcus Parks]

Yep.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It's extremely difficult. It's almost impossible to make it to the very top of the heap. And then you can make it to the top of the heap, get hurt, never do anything ever again. Just end up selling cars just like everybody else.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And so I don't understand, like, why anybody would do any of this.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

But also, I mean, I did improv single, the single most charitably gay thing one day. So I don't know. What do I know?

[Marcus Parks]

And we've got the man who knows how to play the sides against each other. His name is Ed Larson. How you doing, Ed?

[Ed Larson]

I'm doing great. I'm doing great. The best way to find out if wrestling is gay or not is go into a room with a bunch of wrestlers in it and call them all gay.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I bet you won't kiss me to prove you're not gay. And then it just me. You just see me running, squealing, and away we go.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, now that we've spent two episodes demonstrating how the Duponts were one of the most evil and consequential families in world history, let's end this series with a focus on one Dupont in particular. Today, we're finally telling the full story of John Dupont and the Dupont Foxcatcher murder. Now, while the first two episodes of this series demonstrated what the Duponts were able to accomplish just so long as they had no regard for human life, John Dupont was an example of what happens when one of the Dupont is left to spin his own wheels completely apart from the rest of the Dupont clan, not even close to being involved in the business. See, while I wouldn't put John Dupont on the level of evil as, say, the Dupont who said it, when it came to poisoning all of us with Teflon, John Dupont was still careless, dangerously lonely, completely devoid of social skills, and mentally ill cool. Great combo, considering his behavior. I'd put John's emotional intelligence by the time he murdered someone just before he turn 60, I put him on the level of a disturbed 7 year old. If of course, that disturbed 7 year old had nearly unlimited funds to do whatever he wanted.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Oh, the movie Blank check.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. In a poorer man, these qualities would have simply made John Dupont homeless. But for an heir to the Dupont fortune, these shortcomings instead made John Dupont into a dangerous and unpredictable man who had a lot of power over other people. As such, in this episode, we hope to show you exactly how people like John Dupont work and what it's like to be in the immediate orbit of someone in the dupont family, even if they are separated from the dupont family. But to be completely fair, considering what the Epstein files have shown us concerning how incredibly wealthy people spend their time and money, I think that it's a bit of a minor miracle that John Dupont wasn't an absolute monster. Instead, I describe John Dupont as a dangerous weirdo, a guy who probably could have lived a relatively normal life if anyone in the Dupont family had given a damn. John, however, was left to figure out everything on his own. And since he was a Dupont, he did so in a world completely devoid of consequence. Until, of course, he committed a murder that was so brazen that it could not be swept under the rug.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I find it interesting that the rest of the dupont family, you know, let's say their crimes were perpetrated on the rest of the world. And this is an interesting case of a DuPont pulling the world crimes, as

[Marcus Parks]

far as we know.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, yeah. But pulling the world into his world. Like he did this thing where John dupont didn't have to go out to commit a bunch of crimes. He brought this very small world of high level competitive wrestling. It's an extremely small world.

[Marcus Parks]

Yes.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And he essentially bought it, brought it to his house, and that's where he did his crimes.

[Marcus Parks]

Yep. Now, as far as what John Dupont did, he shot and killed an Olympic gold medal winning wrestler named Dave Schultz. Dave had been a member of John's wrestling. Wrestling team, team Foxcatcher, which included a number of competitive wrestlers who all lived and trained on John dupont's sprawling Pennsylvania estate, Foxcatcher Farms. Dave had been introduced to John dupont by his brother, Mark Schultz, who was also an Olympic gold medal winning wrestler. Mark actually wrote our main source today, Foxcatcher, which is a surprisingly funny book considering how it is ultimately about the murder of Mark's brother.

[Henry Zebrowski]

He's an amazing talker, too. He's only 30 for 30, which is really how I had first even heard about this story.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah, he's not portrayed that way in the movie by Channing Tatum, I'll tell you that.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, that Kind of makes me that's why the fictional movies will never be the same. Like once you know all the story, it's not quite the same when you go and look at it. Because the real dude really had a lot of depth.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, yeah he did. And so let's get into the story of John Elutaire Dupont, starting with his bizarre and wealthy childhood. John Dupont was born in November of 1938 as the young youngest child of four to William Dupont Jr. And Gene Lisetter Austin. William Dupont was one of the many multi millionaire Duponts. And John therefore grew up in a massive mansion with more than 40 rooms on an estate outside of Newtown Square, Pennsylvania. The mansion, known as Licitor hall after John's mother, had been modeled after President James Madison's home in Vermont, which had been designed by the dupont's most famous family friend, Thomas Jefferson.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Man, he just did anything right.

[Marcus Parks]

Thomas Jefferson. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

He could just draw up a house.

[Ed Larson]

Oh, he fucking paid someone and said he did it. Thomas Jefferson hired someone who discovered a bird and he gave a bunch of money.

[Marcus Parks]

He's like call it John.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Thomas Jefferson could turn himself silver. He could turn into and he would protect us. Wouldn't be the. The emissary of the world Eater Galactic.

[Ed Larson]

That's right. And he personally killed the Barbary pirates. Like send people to go do it or nothing.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Tommy's my favorite. You can tell by the ponytail.

[Marcus Parks]

Nelicitor hall was on an 800 acre estate that eventually acted as a compound of sorts. An extravagant guest house called the Chalet sat next to the mansion, while the estate itself boasted several other smaller houses and buildings. Eventually this estate would come to be known as Foxcatcher Farms. Now when John Dupont was born, in the waning days of the Great Depression that his family had of course helped to create, Foxcatcher Farms was mostly dedicated to the breeding and racing of thoroughbred racehorses. From what it seems like, John dupont's father spent his time and his family's wealth on horse racing, just as John would later use that same generational wealth to insert himself into the world of competitive wrestling. But as opposed to wrestling, horse racing was the dupont family approved hobby.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And it's a hobby of many moneyed families that have been doing horse dealing and racing and breeding for an extremely long time. It's rich people behavior.

[Ed Larson]

It is, but have you ever slapped a saddle on a man?

[Henry Zebrowski]

Oh, hey, that's called creative engineering.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, the DuPonts were known for horse racing and John's father had achieved international acclaim for designing and building more 20 racetracks in steeplechase courses across the country.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Just went ahead and drew up them courses.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And it's a big old circle.

[Marcus Parks]

Maybe this circle can be a little wider than that.

[Henry Zebrowski]

The key here is the horses.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Are here. And they ran and ran and ran and ran.

[Ed Larson]

Nobody's right in the middle. A pond.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I hate you. Shoot this man in the head. No, no, it's just a pond.

[Marcus Parks]

Takes a good idea. Kill him and throw him in the pond.

[Ed Larson]

Seems like a Ponzi schem.

[Marcus Parks]

William Dupont, however, may have spent a little too much time on the horses because John's parents divorced when he was still a toddler. It also might show you that William dupont was probably not a great man, because getting divorced in the early 40s, especially in high society, it's a big fucking deal. I also suspect that John dupont may have been the baby that was supposed to save the marriage, because his three much older siblings had all married and left home by the time John was in grade school, and they had nothing to do with him.

[Henry Zebrowski]

John kind of sounds like a baby that was conceived by just sitting on a bunch of extra cum that was sitting on the toilet. Like, I don't know if it was purposefully done. It sounded like he just kind of sneezed while he was inside her once and then just come and set a piss shot out of him and then just made him.

[Ed Larson]

You're a doctor now.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I'm Thomas Jefferson.

[Marcus Parks]

All right?

[Henry Zebrowski]

I think I know a little thing about how babies are made.

[Marcus Parks]

Right.

[Henry Zebrowski]

My name is Thomas Jefferson.

[Marcus Parks]

John's parents. Yeah. Thomas Jefferson actually does know quite a bit about how babies are made.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I invented Tommy Jefferson. I invent Fuck. Are you the Tommy Jefferson now?

[Marcus Parks]

When John's parents divorced, his father left and was not involved in John's life from that point forward. So John basically grew up alone on this massive estate with his mother as his only companion. And, man, do we know how well it turns out when boys grow up with their mother as their only companion?

[Ed Larson]

It's nice.

[Marcus Parks]

They definitely never stopped calling them mother.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Mother.

[Marcus Parks]

And as a result, John grew up painfully shy and soon developed a stutter. The closest thing John had to a childhood friend was the son of a dupont family chauffeur. But John later learned that his mother had actually put this boy on the dupont payroll, and his only job was to pretend to like John.

[Ed Larson]

Oh, like a frat boy.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, it's like paying for improv classes.

[Marcus Parks]

Even though John still had no friends, by the time he reached high school, he was still well known enough to be voted both laziest student and most likely to succeed, which was an obvious wink towards John Dupont's family name. He was actually held back a grade, not because he was dumb and out in any way whatsoever. He was just very lazy.

[Ed Larson]

I think it was most likely to secede from the union. Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

John was, however, reasonably athletic. And while he did participate in wrestling in high school, his first love in athletics was swimming. When he eventually went to the University of Miami, he actually competed on the swim team. And he graduated in 1965 with a Bachelor's degree in marine biology.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Now, I believe he did have his own little Olympic dreams, according to the 30 for 30.

[Marcus Parks]

Very much so. Yeah, we're gonna get to that here in a second.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah. But when he did his marine biology, he learned how to wrestle dolphins, which is very hard because you're so sl.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Absolutely. And honestly. And it really helps you. You can see how that frustration will build, that eventually you start just shooting those dolphins in the head.

[Ed Larson]

They already got a hole there.

[Marcus Parks]

Now, like many eccentric wealthy men, John had a ton of interests and hobbies throughout his life. In the 60s, John was really into birds and seashells. So he traveled the world collecting thousands of seashells. And he eventually had a collection of over 40,000 stuffed birds, which is incredibly harmless behavior for a Dupont.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah, Tell to the birds.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I mean, I just. It's not leading up to something good,

[Marcus Parks]

but in 1965, John's father died. And to show you how much money these people had, even after the inheritance was split between John and his three siblings, John still walked away with somewhere between 50 and 80 million dollars. And that's 1965 money.

[Ed Larson]

Not bad.

[Henry Zebrowski]

That's pretty cool, considering I got negative money. Yeah.

[Ed Larson]

God.

[Marcus Parks]

Now, John did use some of that money to build the Delaware Museum of Natural History, because, remember, the duponts owned Delaware. Uncle Doopie.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

This was basically a building that held John's personal collection of seashells and stuffed birds. Got to put those 40,000 birds somewhere. John was actually such a prolific ornithologist that he is personally credited with discovering over two dozen species of birds.

[Ed Larson]

I'm sure he did it just like everyone.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Dude, do you have any idea how empty your life has to be to find new birds? New birds. Think about how long and how much time. And he's not getting paid to do it. He's doing it on his dime, going and looking at trees, which would later drive him insane. And he's just staring at it and just going like, there's a do bird. It's like, what, what is this? Can't anything else be done?

[Ed Larson]

I just feel bad for the guy who really discovered the birds.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Most of the time think that he saw these birds.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah. Cuz he was standing next to someone very smart.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It's easy to see a bird. He didn't go to school. He doesn't know anything about anything.

[Marcus Parks]

He was school. He had a bachelor's degree from most lazy.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

No, but he got a. He did get a bachelor's degree from University of Miami.

[Ed Larson]

This man has done nothing. You can't convince me that he has an ounce of intelligence.

[Henry Zebrowski]

He saw a bird. He saw a bird, said that's a board.

[Marcus Parks]

John's true love, however, was athletics. See, John had dreamed of swimming in the Olympics, but he was at best a good swimmer rather than a great one. While John's wealth meant that he could participate in pretty much any athletic competition, he did not have the ability to win, nor to even come close.

[Ed Larson]

If you swam in circles, he would have won. Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

When he competed for a spot on the swim team in the 1968 Olympic Games, for example, John came in second to last. But from what it seems, things started going terribly wrong for John Dupont in the late 60s.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Who came? Who could have been slower than him?

[Marcus Parks]

Someone richer and fatter.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah. Hello. The neighbor from Pee Wee Herman shows up.

[Marcus Parks]

I want to swim in the Olympics. Well before the late 60s, far as I can tell, John Dupont really was a fairly normal wealthy weirdo with very specific tastes. But what seemed to truly change John was an incident that happened when John was about 30 years old. He was riding a horse when the horse threw him from the saddle. And John landed straddling a fence like he's fucking Wile E. Coyote. His testicles were. Were so badly injured that they developed an infection and they had to be removed completely. Those testicles were replaced with plastic falsies. And John was supposed to take testosterone shots every day following this incident. While I know that hormones can be perfectly safe, I also know that they can greatly affect a person's behavior if they aren't applied correctly. And I'm not sure how advanced hormone treatment was in the late 1960s. Even if you're as rich as John Dupont as such, I think it is possible that the misapplication of hormones is what turned John from being a mere rich weirdo into a dangerous and unpredictable rich weirdo.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I think later on it would go on to the mixture of alcohol, drugs, and the haphazard use of hormones.

[Marcus Parks]

Yes, the let's say the inconsistent, inconsistent use of hormones. Yeah.

[Ed Larson]

Apparently when you're hammered and on cocaine, you forget when to take your real medicine.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I heard that. I was on my medicine.

[Marcus Parks]

Now, right around the time that John lost his testicles, he also aged out of competitive swimming. It seems like John figured out very quickly that if he wanted to participate in something, the Dupont fortune would open any door he wanted.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I did have a question I want to ask the audience. There's so much ball smashing fetish content. Right guys? I've seen this guys jumping onto saw horses with their balls, getting kicked in the balls and doing this kind of stuff. And it's for sexual pleasure. My question is to why don't their balls get mashed up so bad that they need to be replaced? Side stories. LPOTL gmail.com I think when you involve

[Ed Larson]

a horse, it changes everything, right?

[Marcus Parks]

I'm sure they do. I did actually work with a girl in Brooklyn. We worked at this flower shop together many years ago and she made extra money doing ball fetish videos.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yes.

[Marcus Parks]

And she said that like, it looks much worse than it is.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Oh, you think you're pulling it?

[Marcus Parks]

They're pulling it. Yeah, they're pulling it.

[Ed Larson]

You can't go off willy nilly.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Some of these guys like getting their balls humored.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, I'm sure some of them definitely lose their balls. Yeah, they're very, very delicate side stories. LPOTL gmail.com Even though John didn't even try to compete in the 1976 Olympic Games, he was still made a manager as a reward for his financial contributions. That meant that John Dupont could wear the team's warm up uniform and pose with them for a photo, which gave John the illusion that he had actually earned a spot on the team. In fact, and the illusion was enough for John. Usually that's kind of all he needed because John was indeed starting to lose his grip on reality. As it turned out, in addition to everything else, John was also schizophrenic. And by this point in his life, he's one of those guys where it seems to have showed up in his mid to late 20s and really started getting going hard in his 30s. But after that, the rest of the Duponts, they more or less washed their hands of this oddball relative who was obsessed with swimming and birds instead of horse racing in institutionalized mass murder.

[Henry Zebrowski]

How will we reach these keys? How will we reach him? He needs to be making forever chemicals.

[Ed Larson]

Have he tried tweeting at him?

[Marcus Parks]

Well, if he's not interested in the Burning point of human breath, then I don't know what to talk about.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I guess he'll have spent his days watching parrots and playing grab ass. That's fine with us.

[Marcus Parks]

And so, with near unlimited funds, no sense of consequence, and zero social skills, John Dupont's mental illness quickly became a danger to those around him. In the late 70s, for example, a swim coach that John knew had been invited out to Foxcatcher Farms. And that swim coach brought along his young son. The coach's son was taking a swim in the estate's pond while John was fishing that day. But John became enraged because the fish weren't biting. They weren't doing what he wanted them to do.

[Ed Larson]

Sounds like a Ponzi scheme.

[Marcus Parks]

I love it.

[Henry Zebrowski]

You should be filled with fish, though. You know what I mean? You should be absolutely filled with other fish. And then you bring fish to other empty ponds after you've taken the fish from them, and then you got to do that and you pay back. You're robbing fish to pay carp.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah. I think your backyard could use a pond. I can sell you one.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Oh, wow. That sounds amazing.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, John eventually decided that the reason why the fish weren't biting was because the local geese were casting spells on him. So John pulled out his handgun and started shooting at the pond geese, completely forgetting that a child was swimming in the pond. And John came very close to shooting his guest's son.

[Ed Larson]

That's fucking power, man. He's just being a piece of shit. He knew what he was doing.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, no, he definitely. He definitely knew what he was doing. But that. That's the thing about the. It's the consequence thing, because, you know, I definitely don't want to imply in any way whatsoever that being schizophrenic, inherently dangerous. It absolutely does not.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Well, if you're unmedicated and you're on. If you're not doing stuff well, even

[Marcus Parks]

if you're unmedicated, it still doesn't make someone inherently dangerous. It doesn't.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It absolutely nothing makes anything, anybody inherently dangerous.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ed Larson]

Having multiple loaded guns on them, that helps.

[Marcus Parks]

See that that's not a good thing to have.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yes.

[Marcus Parks]

And. And because a lot of people are stopped, you know, by their own sense of consequence, their own sense of, like, if I do this, that will happen. I mean, it's why we have not guilty by reason. Reason of insanity. Because some people do cross the threshold, know the difference between right and wrong. John Dupont always knew the difference between right and wrong, but his schizophrenia did make him far more unpredictable and Far more dangerous than, you know, the regular person.

[Henry Zebrowski]

He would have cared either way.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. Now, John's burgeoning mental illness and his penchant for carrying around massive loaded weapons, that didn't stop him from getting married in 1983. The wedding was massive, with over 500 guests. A true Dupont affair. But the marriage only lasted a few months because John Dupont was. Was highly abusive in addition to everything else. See, John Dupont was also an alcoholic. And when he drank, he got mean. Allegedly. In just the few months that he was married to his first and only wife, John threw her into a burning fireplace, tried to shove her out of a moving car, and threatened her with a knife. In an incident that sounds like the last straw. John once even held a gun to his wife's head and accused her of being a Russian spy, saying, quote, russia's spies get shot. Laughing at the voice. Well, after that, John's first wife fled, never to return.

[Ed Larson]

But Bob.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, but following the departure of John's wife, after he showed her just how dangerous he could truly be, John decided to focus completely on athletics while also bringing himself closer to local law enforcement. This is another thing that I think he does very much on purpose.

[Henry Zebrowski]

What really started the wrestling obsession?

[Marcus Parks]

We have no idea because we'll get to it here in a bit. We're gonna. That's a whole thing, but we'll get to it a bit. But yeah, we have no idea. John built a 14,000 square foot world class athletic training facility on Foxcatcher Farms in 1985. But that facility also included a shooting range. While John did indeed use the range to become an expert marksman along with everything else, he also invited the local cops to use the shooting range for tr. A lot of rich guys do this. Make the cops your friends and you can get away with anything.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Murdoch family we've seen over and over again.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. John kept a close relationship with the local cops from then on, donating money, buying them equipment, and even letting them use his helicopter. But consequently, the Newtown Township police department gave John his very own police badge, which showed John yet again that he could buy his way into pretty much anything thing.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, but it doesn't mean anything. It's another thing they just gave him, you know.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, you know, the average person on the street don't know that he shows up, but when he shows a very official looking. Well, what is an official police badge?

[Henry Zebrowski]

I mean, that's what Alec Murdoch did when you drive around with it in his front dash.

[Ed Larson]

Steven Seagal and Shaq.

[Marcus Parks]

Yep. Elvis.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Shaq was an honest cop.

[Marcus Parks]

And so was Elvis. And so Jon's close relationship with the police, combined with the fact that John was estimated to be worth about $200 million by the year 1987, that meant that the police ignored behavior from John that ran from simply concerning to outright criminal. For example, Sometime during the 80s, John took a stick of dynamite and blew up a litter of newborn baby foxes for no apparent reason.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah, it's called Fox Catcher, not Fox Blow Upper.

[Marcus Parks]

Fox Exploder.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, Fox Exploder is a cool album name, man.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, it's Fox Exploder. That's like a disco punk album from 2005. Next from Les Spot. Savvy Fu. Fox Exploder. And while some might say, sure, he can do what he wants, it's his property. Most people don't have tanks on their property like John dupont had. Somehow, John had bought a tank that had been stripped of its weapons. John used it to drunkenly joyride the vehicle around the estate. Sometimes even brought it up for local parades. But around Christmas time, 1984, a police officer and his wife, who were living in one of Foxcatcher Farm's many houses, they said they heard the tank of coming. John was, of course, drunk and had driven the tank through the trees. This was the type of tank that sank the political career of Michael Dukakis. You remember Michael Dukakis with his goofy little head, sitting up, like, outside, like, he's riding the tank and he's got the helmet and he's looking so happy. And that's why George H.W. bush won the presidency, because that stupid tank.

[Henry Zebrowski]

The old days. One embarrassing picture.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Could destroy your entire career.

[Marcus Parks]

And it's not even that embarrassing. Like, look it up. He's just, like, grinning. He's having a good time.

[Henry Zebrowski]

But guess what? That is enraging. Yeah, that makes me angry. Just see, honestly, truly look at Michael Dukakis smile and tell me you don't want to absolutely destroy it.

[Ed Larson]

Where would Dan Quayle misspelled potato? Ruined his life.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, it was the only thing we. It's like number one joke in Mad magazine for a good five years.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It's all Jay Leno said for years. Hey, maybe if you learn how to smell potato, you wouldn't be a bad bit.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Unbelievable.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, this is the one, of course, where the head goofily sticks out the top. And since John had just barreled right through a bunch of tree branches, he was covered in blood. His face was just scratched as shit. But John had no fear driving a tank drunk and bleeding up to a cop's house.

[Ed Larson]

House.

[Marcus Parks]

Even if it was on his own property. Instead, John parked the tank out front and yelled for the officer to quote,

[Henry Zebrowski]

come out of the play. Come out of play.

[Ed Larson]

You own all the land and there's a fence around the land and you own the tank on that land. Can you not drive the tank truck?

[Marcus Parks]

I know. I don't think you can.

[Henry Zebrowski]

You know, driving even on property. Because they did this with. This actually came down with the Bill Murray case with the golf cart.

[Marcus Parks]

Oh.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Because they were trying to. He was basically said all that and they're like, well, you're drunk in a moving vehicle. We caught you.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. Because by that logic, you could murder someone. But hey, it's on my own property.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Okay.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, you have to. You have to not.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, it's a laws of law most of the time.

[Ed Larson]

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[Henry Zebrowski]

Wow.

[Ed Larson]

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[Henry Zebrowski]

This is a paid ad by BetterHelp. You know, women deserve to be celebrated.

[Marcus Parks]

Celebrated.

[Henry Zebrowski]

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[Marcus Parks]

worst thing John Dupont did in the 80s, which again it's all relative here was when he was driving his Lincoln Continental and hit a flagman directing traffic. He hit a traffic cop with his car in broad daylight.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah, they're dressed in yellow waving flags.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Not a good thing to do. Now that's an amazing talking right There. Thank God he made himself so obvious

[Marcus Parks]

when John hit him. The traffic cop rolled over John's hood and then slammed onto the ground. And John did, at the very least, stop. He dragged the obviously injured traffic cop to the sidewalk and sat with him for a few moments. But eventually he just said, you'll be all right, and then drove away just as the police arrived.

[Henry Zebrowski]

You know, I would like to ask you the question of why aren't you flat? I thought when I hit things with my car that they would turn into flat little pancakes and then turn into paper like people.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah. Good thing you went up and not down.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I don't understand you, why you jump like a rabbit. Why aren't you.

[Marcus Parks]

Okay, you're. You're starting to fall into Don Corleone territory. Yeah. Well, John, he just drove to his estate and off somewhere in his helicopter. And when he returned to Foxcatcher Farms, the only consequence faced for the hit and run of a traffic cop was a meager fine for $42.50. Might as well be fucking pocket lent to a guy like John Dupont. Yeah. Now, while John Dupont's interest in athletics ran from swimming to target shooting, he eventually settled upon wrestling as his number one love. Although nobody is exactly sure why John Dupont became obsessed with wrestling. Just as no one can answer the question of why he was obsessed with birds or swimming or target shooting. He just found something and, and hyper focused on it for sometimes years at a time.

[Henry Zebrowski]

What I have also found in smaller market areas for rich people, or rich, like you could buy the entire scene. Right. Like it's one of the. Where you just get to skip past everybody. We were joking about how I got to meet. Like if you show interest in a small world, you can get access to everybody. Met a lot of like professional blowing glass artists.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

All of a sudden you can meet everybody that's ever been the top of blowing glass. If you ever ask them, you know what I mean, they're excited to meet you. You know, they want to go out there where like Dupont might have understood if you choose an obscure thing, you can own it entirely.

[Marcus Parks]

It's a damn good point. Yeah, yeah. And those people are going to want to talk because no one ever asked them about it.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah. Here's my theory. I think that he got into wrestling not cuz he was homosexual or anything, but because he found it to be the only way he would ever touch a person.

[Marcus Parks]

Person. You know what, that's the. That, that really there, there could be something to that. Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

The, the tactile need he has. You can see he's like a little boy. He does feel like a little boy. Like, he looks like a little boy that's never been hugged. And this is how he can get millions and millions and millions of hugs.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, John had wrestled in high school, but in 1986, competitive wrestling became John Dupont's new obsession. But this was Jon's first obsession that actually involved other people. And it would eventually end in murder. John dupont was not interested in the professional wrestling we see on tv. He wasn't trying to hang out with Jake the Snake Roberts.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, the real wrestler.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, the real cocaine.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I'm gonna get the fucking shit beat out of me, guys. I just listen. I'm barely straight.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah, okay.

[Marcus Parks]

Or rather, John became obsessed with the elite Olympic style of competitive wrestling, where two guys just walk onto a mat and grapple each other until one of them gets pinned for a single second. It's not a 3 fall, it's just 1.

[Ed Larson]

I know, it's annoying. I always thought it was 3.

[Henry Zebrowski]

You hear that sound? The relaxing sounds? The ASMR world of collegiate wrestling. Oh, you got me so good.

[Marcus Parks]

You were doing so good.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Dude, you got me so good.

[Marcus Parks]

You started saying that. You did not think that. Rest. And.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And now my legs behind my ears. Deeper.

[Marcus Parks]

What? How long, Rob? 20 minutes?

[Henry Zebrowski]

Deeper. 35.

[Marcus Parks]

35 minutes.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Gag me with it. You gag me with me. You my girlfriend. You know why?

[Ed Larson]

It's not gay. No gay man would choose to do something that would ruin his ears like that.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I picked your perfect ear.

[Marcus Parks]

Now, back in the 80s, wrestling was not what you would call America's sport. A lot of colleges didn't even have wrestling programs. And John dupont noticed that nearby Villanova University was totally bereft of sweaty young men tussling with each other on a competitive level. So John convinced Villanova, and by convinced, I mean he gave him a lot of money to let him start an NCAA team from scratch. Now, in the mid-80s, the best competitive wrestler in America was arguably a man named Dave Schultz. Jon wanted Dave Schultz as Villanova's wrestling coach. But Dave had just gotten a raise coaching at Stanford University. So Dave suggested his brother, Mark Schultz, who was also a gold medal winning competitive wrestler. Now, the Schultz brothers have a fascinating story all on their own. Born in Palo alto, California, in 1959 and 1960, the Schulz brothers were natural athletes. In fact, parents said that Mark Schultz had a six pack and sculpted muscles by the age of four. Which sounds like a bizarre and terrifying sight to behold.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, Mark, I like to See P, that's my boy. Yeah, Mark, that's the kind of build you get on a boy from slave labor. He can't get it anymore. You can't make a boy build a boat anymore.

[Marcus Parks]

I remember watching episode, episode of Maury once. It was like the world's most muscly kid.

[Ed Larson]

I remember.

[Marcus Parks]

You remember that one?

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah. And it had that little Jack kid come out doing pull ups.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, he had a mullet.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah, I heard his mom wasn't even dilated. He just ripped it open himself.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, he walked out standing up.

[Marcus Parks]

Now, while Mark came to be known as the sledgehammer for the brutal wrestling style he developed, his brother Dave was described, described as the Yoda of wrestling. See, Dave was dyslexic and the way his brain was wired enabled him to master the technical aspects of wrestling, which led to the creation of new winning techniques and strategies. Dave Schultz changed the game.

[Henry Zebrowski]

He was a animal.

[Marcus Parks]

He was.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And I love. Well, I actually started like looking up his matches, like watching him go, like, actually made me see more of the sport. Truly like he's a monster. And you know, I love, love Harry back. Yeah, that's what I love. See, you never see these anymore.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, yeah. Like a King Kong Bundy.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I love it. Just hairy and, and, and just love that guy.

[Ed Larson]

What I loved about Dave Schultz, from what I could tell, I could be wrong, is that, you know, like, Mark was very intense, but Dave was like, shake your hand, smile at you, hang out with you type of guy.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Ed Larson]

And fight you to the death.

[Henry Zebrowski]

That's what Mark said. Mark said. He's like, don't ever fool, don't let him fool you. He's like, never let his personality fool you. He was the most brutal he's ever met to wrestle with on the face of the planet. Dave Schultz was like a master.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, yeah. And since wrestling was neither a popular nor a well funded sport, the Schultzes ended up in low paying assistant coaching jobs after college, like most competitive wrestlers who wanted to make wrestling a career. But even though both of them had to move back in with their dad in Palo Alto. And this really gives you a perspective on competitive athletics. Yes, they both competed in the 1984 Olympics. They both won gold medals. They were the first brothers in history to even win medals at the same Olympic games, much less win the gold. Despite their accomplishments though, there were no financial opportunities for competitive wrestlers, no sponsorship deals for singlets, and the Schultz brothers seemed to feel like pro wrestling was beneath them. So the Schultzes had limited means of making money if they wanted to make wrestling a full time gig. And that cat cannot be. That is probably the most important aspect of the story.

[Henry Zebrowski]

You mean to tell me you don't think that it was worth it for them to put on like, sort of like a. A semi garb of another race and go to another place and do. And do steroids? Your name is Tatanka now. Your name's Tatanka. You're a Native American. Dave Schultz. Let me guess. Japanese. Yeah, that's what you are. You know, like he's got to go in there and then that's got to be hard.

[Marcus Parks]

Can you play Arab?

[Ed Larson]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Because we need.

[Henry Zebrowski]

He's getting a little. Let me show you.

[Marcus Parks]

For his British.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Let me show you. Let me show you.

[Ed Larson]

If they made him the rabbi.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

The wrestling rabbi is a great idea.

[Ed Larson]

I really think anyone take it. If you're a wrestler, you're looking for an identity, please be the rabbi.

[Marcus Parks]

And actually he wouldn't have to change his name at all. It's like, hello, my name is David Schultz. I'm the wrestling rabbi.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, come here. Come close. I'm going to make this a pr.

[Marcus Parks]

Oh, and he's hitting him with the circumcision.

[Henry Zebrowski]

He's hitting him. That's an abomination against God's creation. Can you even believe me? Where did he get the little knife?

[Marcus Parks]

Things got desperate for Mark Schultz when he was fired from his coaching job at Stanford University in the summer of 1986. That meant that Mark had no place to train for the upcoming 1988 Olympics.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I will also see why his family were really asking about that. I can see why. Because if he's spending all of this money, you would assume that if he's a Dupont, according to family, that he would have a view on a long form business plan, Right?

[Ed Larson]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And what's funny about wrestling is that there was none. There's no money to be made.

[Marcus Parks]

No.

[Henry Zebrowski]

So he was just. That's kind of. I think that's a part of the reason why they were like. Why you're literally just flushing money. You're just giving money away.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. No. Oh, you mean how the rest of the Duponts saw John Dupont. Oh, yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

You're just giving money to these strangers.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. They didn't see the point in it because of course with horse racing you might win some. But that's the thing.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Horse rating is horse trading and breeding and sell the horse. There's other ways to make money.

[Ed Larson]

People buy tickets to go.

[Marcus Parks]

Yes.

[Henry Zebrowski]

There's ways to make money within that. That's Gambling. Yes. The horse racing is actually extremely lucrative and all of the world of it. So you could see why they're like, no one makes, no one makes money off of this.

[Ed Larson]

Unless it's like the big five sports. We do not take care of our athletes, especially our Olympic athletes in America, other countries, like literally you can make it career and you have a good life and you have a nice house, but in America, we could give a shit.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, no, we. We run on the capitalist. We run the capitalist model of like, if it's worth something, then a rich weirdo will deign upon himself to give you money to do your thing, or you have to wait until somebody makes it. Like, I have decided that this is valuable enough to give you money.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And all of America's are really good at what we do here too. Is that if you're already making money, then help comes.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

So that will happen. Is that as if you became. If he went and he got a gold medal and then he put out an album and then he did all. And he was already making all this money, other stuff would come to help him make more money.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. Well, in Mark Schultz's moment of greatest desperation, he's lost his job at Stanford. He needs to train for the 88 Olympics. That is when Mark Schultz got a call from John dupont. John called up Mark and told him about this wrestling job at Villanova. He told him that Mark would have the opportunity. Opportunity at the age of 26 to build a program from the ground up. And it did seem weird. Too good to be true, some might say. But John told Mark repeatedly that his only motivation for hiring him, doing the program, all of it, was the elevation of wrestling.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It had to be.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, I mean, it's not necessarily ahead. His motivations were far worse. His real motivations were far worse. But finding funding for these sorts of athletic endeavors, it's the number one problem faced by elite athletes in America. And Mark hoped that wrestling was finally going to have a money man who would support his sport regardless of cost. This was also wrapped up in the Cold War because the Russians had consistently produced the best wrestlers in the world. And this goes to your point, Eddie. This is due to the fact that Soviet wrestlers, like all Soviet Olympic athletes, the reason why, why the Soviets were always so incredible at the Olympics is because these people lived and competed only for the glory of the Soviet Union. They had no other responsibilities and they spent their entire lives training.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah. And then they would train against bears. Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

You know, from what I heard.

[Marcus Parks]

And so if America had the capitalist version of that setup. That is a rich weirdo with a lot of time on his hands. Then maybe American wrestlers could compete in the world championships on a consistent basis.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It's not a raw. Not an incorrect idea.

[Marcus Parks]

It's not. So despite the fact that Mark felt that John Dupont was, at the very least hiding something, he said yes to John's offer. Now, when Mark met John Dupont for the first time, Mark said that he immediately got the vibe that John was a massive loser. As Mark put it, John Dupont was like Richie Rich, all grown up, but with a drug problem. John also had a bizarre appearance. John Dupont was nearly 50 years old by the time he met Mark. And. And since he was going gray, he had taken to dyeing his hair. Problem was John had chosen Ronald McDonald Red as his hair color and he hadn't kept up with it. So his natural gray hair color had taken over. Gray roots, red on the side. And he had this weird middle part haircut.

[Henry Zebrowski]

He's very strange haircut.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Honestly, if I saw that haircut, I would have turned around. I feel like it's. That the haircut was the very first warning.

[Marcus Parks]

And the redness left in John's hair only highlighted lighted the thick layer of dandruff that covered John's head. John also had dark yellow teeth caked with food. And when John started talking, it was obvious that he was either drunk, stoned, or both. This is their first meeting. Mark, however, had called around to his wrestling buddies for advice on what to do in this situation. And every single one of them had told him that this was an unbelievable situation, an opportunity that he could not pass up. So Mark decided that he was going to put up with John Dupont's weirdness for the good of the sport.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Remind me of every single thing every little girl in southern Florida was saying about Epstein, about what was going on. And then everybody, their friends that were all embedded in it, were telling him the same thing. Just being like, it's a lot of money.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ed Larson]

I. I was watching the behind the scenes on the making of the movie Foxcatcher with Steve Carell and everyone who knew John Dupont that saw Steve Carell on Unbelievable. He's got everything. He looks exactly like him. He acts just like him. He's got everything that's similar to him except for the smell.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

John Dupont looked like a guy legitimately. He looked like he reeked.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. Now, amongst John Dupont's many shortcomings, he had no social skills, which translated to horrendous table manners. John would Talk with his mouth full, spraying food and spit all over anyone unlucky enough to sit next to him the during a meal. Before long, Mark recognized that John was the most miserable man he'd ever met. But it wasn't just because he was strange and difficult. Mark quickly saw how manipulative John Dupont can be. He saw how John Dupont saw the world. All the manipulation always came down to money. Like most people with generational wealth on the level of the Duponts, John knew how much power his money allowed him to have over other people. And John truly believed that everyone had their price. And if they didn't have a price, John had the power to ruin whoever didn't play by his rules once they were in his immediate orbit. And remember how small of a world competitive wrestling is. Yeah. Now, John was vague when Mark asked how involved John was going to be in the wrestling program at Villanova, but he did give the impression that he would be largely absent. Won't even know I'm here. Mark, of course, quickly discovered when he started at Villanova in the fall of 1986 that this was a lie. See, John had told Mark that the school was going to build a dedicated wrestling facility on campus. But when that didn't manifest, John insisted on training the Villanova wrestlers at his facility at Foxcatcher Farms, which, honestly, was probably John's plan all along.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Oh, yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Mark also came to realize that part of his job was to be in John Dupont's crew, so to speak. See, not too long after starting his job at Villanova, Mark was invited over to John's estate, where he was surprised to find a to party already in progress. To a guy like Mark, the whole thing was immediately weird. It was just a room full of mysterious men in suits. And soon, Mark was introduced to a guy named Bob, who John said was his events organizer. Now, I know what you're thinking, but Bob was no Ghislaine Maxwell. Rather, Bob's main job was to organize and host awards ceremonies that John Dupont held in his own honor, complete with awards that John would commission from the local trophy shop and awards them to himself.

[Henry Zebrowski]

That's worse than a Jizz Lane Maxwell. I feel like with a Jiz la Maxwell, at least you're getting blown and you're getting sex out of it. Just the idea of you setting up

[Marcus Parks]

a fake award ceremony thing to say, yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yes. Yeah. But the you get something out of it where something like this is like you're just getting a trophy and they're all looking at each other. It's very Strange.

[Marcus Parks]

It's very, very strange.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It's extremely strange, man.

[Ed Larson]

I bet that trophy guy had. Didn't ask no questions, though.

[Marcus Parks]

No.

[Ed Larson]

Number one. So happy.

[Marcus Parks]

Happy. I bet.

[Ed Larson]

What do you want on top of it?

[Henry Zebrowski]

You got it. What else did he win?

[Marcus Parks]

Sure.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Congrats.

[Marcus Parks]

When John Dupont was arrested, I bet that trophy shop guy, I bet he shot himself in the head. Well, it's over. I'm overextended on so many loans, I

[Henry Zebrowski]

gotta pull Stephanie out of private school

[Marcus Parks]

now. On that night, John was drunker than usual. And as drunk people usually are, he was there for four more. Exhausting. Mark said that John had the ability to suck the life out of people. And most of the guests were either annoyed or worn out by John before Mark even showed up.

[Henry Zebrowski]

He's a psychic vampire, like, of the. Of the utmost, of the highest level.

[Marcus Parks]

When Mark walked in, John sarcastically called him pal, loudly saying, quote, thank God you're here, pal. There you go. John then got another his hands and knees and crawled up to Mark. Mark barely knew John at this point. John then grabbed Mark by the waist and clawed up Mark's body while repeatedly

[Henry Zebrowski]

calling him my big old pal.

[Ed Larson]

Big old wife pal.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Why rub my no balls on you?

[Marcus Parks]

I'm sure everyone present side rolled their eyes and looked at their watches.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah, a lot of times, you know, like, that's interesting whenever you meet someone who's like that rich and crazy, because then you just look at it because they get away with it because they're so rich and be like, man, that guy's crazy, man. You're, like, excited about it at first, of course.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

But the difference is here is that all the other people in the room, they've seen it all before, many times. And with Mark, this is his new boss, and he is starting to see, like, oh, this is what I signed up for Me.

[Ed Larson]

So I should stand up to Henry.

[Henry Zebrowski]

No, no, do not.

[Marcus Parks]

John Dupont did stay out of the Villanova athletics department for the first few weeks of the job because while the training facilities were out at Foxcatcher, Mark's office on the Villanova campus was shared with the school's baseball coach. But pretty quickly, John started dropping by drunk, high, or both, barging into Mark's office to rant for hours on end using a highly annoying vocal tech. See, after every statement, John was known to end his rant with the phrase,

[Henry Zebrowski]

you understand what I'm saying?

[Marcus Parks]

And this is John's way to get people to acknowledge him, no matter how bizarre his statements were. An example Mark Schultz gave in his Book John once showed up to his office and said, quote, I'm really craving

[Henry Zebrowski]

blueberries right now, man. If I had a basket of blueberries right now, I would eat them all up. Yum, yum, yum. You understand what I'm saying?

[Marcus Parks]

Why is he now, like, kind of jive?

[Henry Zebrowski]

I like the first we do it, it was like, I'm really craving blueberries right now. If I had a basket of blueberries right now, I would eat them all up. Y. You understand what I'm saying?

[Marcus Parks]

There you go.

[Henry Zebrowski]

There you go.

[Marcus Parks]

This was while Mark was in his office trying to do paperwork. He's a 26 year old dude who's just been hand like, hey, build a wrestling program at one of the most well known colleges in America.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

But since John Dupont had donated so much money to Villanova, money that spread far beyond the fledgling wrestling program, he was pretty much allowed to do whatever he wanted. Nobody at Villanova ever said no to John dupont. In fact, it soon became part of Mark Schultz's job description to deal with dupont whenever John wanted to drop by the campus in Yammer, which became an increasingly frequent occurrence as the months went by.

[Ed Larson]

Man, you know, it was already hard as hell for him to actually duplicate paperwork.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. He's a lifelong wrestler. He's been an assistant coach.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

And that's the only job that he's had. His assistant wrestling coach.

[Ed Larson]

That was always so annoying whenever, like, you get good enough at your job in, like, kitchens and they make you a chef, and the next thing you know, you're the manager. It's like, I just know how to cook.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Like, all of a sudden I'm doing

[Ed Larson]

schedules and like, yeah, yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Doing wing math.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Like, you know how to do onion rings. Let's see you do taxes.

[Marcus Parks]

Since this program at Villanova was new, it was difficult to attract wrestlers. So after John hired a wrestler named Chuck Yarnall as head coach, John and Chuck would roam the Villanova campus looking for guys wearing high school wrestling T shirts.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Nothing gay about any of this. Nothing remotely first time.

[Ed Larson]

I agree with you.

[Marcus Parks]

They would then approach these guys unsolicited and say, hey, you want to join a wrestling team?

[Henry Zebrowski]

They ask a question. How do you feel about taking that wrestling from that. That shirt to my body?

[Marcus Parks]

Well, to try to entice guys who were on the fence about wrestling for a drunk weirdo with bright red hair, costing them on their way to class, John would give these guys rides on his private jet or rides on his helicopter. He would promise them full scholarships, even though he had no authority to do so. This method of course did not turn up any all stars. So John and Chuck gave up after a few weeks. Just ran roaming the campus. Took them a while to realize, hey, Mark Schultz is an actual gold medal winning wrestler. Maybe we should get him to do the recruiting. Yes. And then after Mark started doing the recruiting, the program did start to attract some pretty solid wrestlers.

[Ed Larson]

Villanova, I think they still are pretty well known for their wrestling.

[Marcus Parks]

Are they?

[Ed Larson]

Pennsylvania in general is a big wrestling state.

[Marcus Parks]

It is, yeah.

[Ed Larson]

Right behind. I think Iowa's the biggest. And then Pennsylvania is like number two. I believe so. I'm sure I'll get yelled at.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, I know, yeah, yeah. I think they are pretty huge. I, I think Wisconsin might be number one.

[Henry Zebrowski]

But, but I do that. If you put your thumb on the scale with that kind of money in this world, it does crazy stuff.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, in the, on the collegiate level, this was back before they were like, hey, you know, we need to keep money in college separate. Like on the collegiate level, his money really didn't do a whole lot. It wasn't until he took it out of the collegiate, you know, the collegiate sphere that his money really made a difference. Now the group that would become the infamous Team Foxcatcher was a different entity from the Villanova wrestling team that Mark had been hired to rebuild. Team Foxcatcher started as of an all around athletics program that included training for swimming, the patathlon and the triathlon.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Cuz I do believe his first obsession was the pentathlon.

[Marcus Parks]

He did like, yes, he, he was. Well, it was swimming first and then it was the pentathlon.

[Henry Zebrowski]

The pentathlon. Is that the one with shooting to or is that the. The, the. The. The was the other one. The ten one.

[Marcus Parks]

I have no idea which one's the

[Henry Zebrowski]

one where you race to a, a woman, she's stuck in a well, you have to pull the pantyhose down before the water reaches her face.

[Marcus Parks]

It's fencing.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Shoot the guy in the. The trans man. And the

[Marcus Parks]

modern pentathlon was fencing, swimming, equestrian, show jumping and a combined laser run of pistol shooting and running.

[Ed Larson]

Jesus Christ. That is strictly for rich people.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah. Oh yeah. This is just about killing humans for sports. Where's your sword outfit?

[Ed Larson]

Now jump on your horse and now have your high power powered laser rifle

[Henry Zebrowski]

like well, come on, that's fun.

[Marcus Parks]

Okay, admittedly I did, since this is quick. I did read that off AI so that my God knows if that's true or not.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Still, that's fun as hell. I want to do that sport.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I want to ride on my horse with a sword and a gun in either hand and then think about that. Put them all together, one act, all together, two people on a horses, sword, gun. Who kills the other first? Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

And then we could bring it like the pro wrestling angle into it and we could give you a turban and call you the sultan.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Oh, yeah, especially because I got all that brown makeup in my suitcase.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, wrestling was actually added to team Foxcatcher later, and it was done with such little thought at the beginning that the wrestlers had to put down mats in the shooting range and train in there. But since the clearance is low in shooting ranges to prevent ricochets, the wrestlers couldn't lift each other above their heads lest they smash each other into the ceiling.

[Henry Zebrowski]

That's fun though.

[Marcus Parks]

It is fun. But once the program moved out to Foxcatcher Farms, John began throwing around cash to recruit non clipping collegiate wrestlers. Guys who had won competitions but didn't have any other avenue to make money. And that is when Dave Schultz, John Dupont's eventual murder victim, joined his brother Mark in Pennsylvania. Now, Dave was still coaching on a collegiate level and figured he could draw two paychecks here. And since Mark didn't think his brother had any intention of leaving coaching, he didn't warn Dave about what an incredibly annoying weirdo John Dupont was. Could be. Pretty soon, once more, burly men started showing up at Foxcatcher Farms along with Dave. Dave was the draw.

[Henry Zebrowski]

That's how I feel.

[Ed Larson]

Men are together, a bunch of clam meats just jumping.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, after that, Mark got the feeling that John Dupont was collecting wrestlers just like he collected seashells and stuffed birds. And John's father had collected horses. The dark. The difference is that wrestlers are actual human beings, but that means they're also far more fun for someone like John Dupont to manipulate. He saw them as toys, as objects. And according to Mark, if you did not want to be displayed on John's wall like an object, things could go very bad very quickly. It soon became obvious that this whole wrestling thing was heavily wrapped up in John Dupont's ego. In 1988, John hired a camera crew for a documentary about himself called Quest for the Best, which actually aired on the Discovery Channel. John also wrote a 115 page book called off the Mat Building Winners in Life. But it's almost certain someone else took the brunt of the writing. Because while Mark never saw John Dupont writing a book, he did hear John drunkenly dictating the book into A tape recorder from time to time. Mark was also asked to write the forward for the book. But the finished product was published with an addition put in by John dupont. While the draft that Mark Schultz turned in mentioned nothing about John's coaching, the finished product had Mark saying that he could not have accomplished anything without John's guidance.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Not even this forward, which I did not write me not being John dupont.

[Marcus Parks]

John also made Mark's life more difficult in other ways, seemingly just to play with him. John made Mark fire Villanova's head coach. That guy that he used to wander the campus with. Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

His vision partner.

[Marcus Parks]

But instead of giving Mark the job, John dupont took the title of head coach for himself. Villanova, of course, followed John's lead by releasing a statement saying, no, no, no, no, no. John dupont's always been the head coach. John also tried controlling and manipulating Mark by nickel and diming him, throwing a fit about the cost of paperclips one day, then taking a private jet to another country that the next, just so John could fire the starting gun at a triathlon.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Well, it seems like it just wasn't going fast enough for him.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, I think John was also a person who. He could get emotionally dysregulated very easily. There were not a lot of people in his life that were forced to be around him, people that he could take that out on. And Mark Schultz was forced to be. It was part of Mark's job to take the brunt of John dupont's emotional dysregulation.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Well, he's one of those guys that believes in every single interaction with humans is transactional.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

So he. So on some level, like, it goes away from it develop.

[Ed Larson]

I feel like.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I wonder. It's like a selfishness bordering on sociopathy that you wonder if it's clinical or not. Like, you don't know whether or not it's like he literally can't have empathy for other human beings, or is he just fucking lost in the sauce of many different mental illness descriptions, Rampant alcohol and drug use and just being just a straight up fucking weirdo?

[Marcus Parks]

I mean, it does, like, raise the question of, like, if you're raised with this amount of extreme wealth, like you. I know that, you know, people are. Most people who are raised with this amount of extreme wealth, like, they don't look at the rest of us as people. No. But it even begs the question, do they even look at each other as people?

[Henry Zebrowski]

I doubt it.

[Marcus Parks]

Like, do they see. Do they have the sort of, you know, interaction that is necessary to make a Human.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Apple Paltrow is going to decide who lives or dies. Do you guys understand that? She's going to decide. That's who's going to decide. Lily Rose Depp is going to lead the ground invasion of Iran. Good. It's what's going to happen.

[Ed Larson]

She'll do a great job.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I. I think she's great there.

[Ed Larson]

Isn't she part vampire?

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, no, she's part pirate.

[Marcus Parks]

Vampire.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Pirate.

[Marcus Parks]

Pirates. Sorry.

[Henry Zebrowski]

That's right.

[Marcus Parks]

There's nothing wrong.

[Henry Zebrowski]

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[Marcus Parks]

Right?

[Henry Zebrowski]

Bark, bark, bark was a test. And as I got her through the IXL like program, not only she become more erudite, she already started asking better questions. You know, I just looked at her and instead of asking stuff like bark, bark, bark with to test, she goes like bark, bark, bark. I want chicken. I'm like that. IXL is really expanding her vocabulary. And I can't believe she can talk. Make an impact on your child's learning. Can I excel now? Last podcast on the left. Listeners can get an exclusive 20% off IXL membership when they sign up today at ixl.com left visit ixl.com get the most effective learning program out there at the best price. With the dozens of notifications you got on your phone a day from, you know, Grindr, fetlife, it's easy to become desensitized to them. But if the latest ping is from your security camera, ignoring it could spell disaster. Especially if you're stuck inside some giant latex balloon. Picture this, somebody's breaking, breaking in, but you're stuck inside a rubber box with a snorkel tube coming out of your mouth and the only thing that's there is your spotter and they're in the bathroom. You'll see the footage in a couple of hours, but by then it's too late. Simplisafe's Active Guard Outdoor protection can help prevent break ins before they happen. It's customizable. Whole home security System backed by 24, seven monitoring agents you can rely on to act even when you can't. We use Simplisafe here at the studio, so it really is wonderful how it, it does give you a peace of mind every single time Marcus and I are doing our rubber play or when we, you know, sort of submerge ourselves up to our eyebrows and latex as a way to kind of flop around each other like a couple of greased up tadpoles. But while we're doing that, we know that Simply Safe has our back and for that we thank you. Right now, my listeners can get 50% off their new Simply Safe system at simply safe.com/LPOTL that simply safe.comLPOTL there's no safe like Simply Safe.

[Marcus Parks]

The Mark Schultz really was trying his damnedest to get a wrestling program going at Villanova. But John was nothing but a hindrance, shouting and arguing, arguing with both wrestlers and coaches. John then brought guns into the mix, waving them around at practice while dressed as a cop just to see the wrestlers scattered.

[Henry Zebrowski]

All right, it's time for me to see who here's got the the littlest butt. And the guy who's got the littlest butt goes to Dupont Jail, which is in my house. You can stick me. I hope so.

[Marcus Parks]

John also got highly inappropriate with the wrestlers, as was demonstrated by a so called move that John invented with called the Foxcatcher 5. Was this in the movie?

[Ed Larson]

No, it was not in the movie. It was not in the documentary.

[Marcus Parks]

Really surprised this. I mean, I'm not surprised it wasn't in the documentary. Surprised it wasn't in the movie.

[Ed Larson]

It would have been great in the movie.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I think the problem with it is that if Steve Carell is doing the Fox Catcher 5, it will be funny. Yeah, that is true.

[Marcus Parks]

It's gonna be really funny. Yeah. Well, in this move, John would simply grab a wrestler's test.

[Ed Larson]

40 year old,

[Henry Zebrowski]

The same character.

[Ed Larson]

Wow.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, in this move, John would simply grab a wrestler's testicles with his whole hand. That's it. It's just grabbing a guy's balls and calling it a move. Ooh.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It's not move. No, I mean it's a move.

[Marcus Parks]

It's a move of sorts. Now, Mark said that he was going to be on the receiving end of The Fox Catcher 5 one day when John held out his hand like a claw and moved towards Mark's crotch playfully

[Henry Zebrowski]

saying, quote, fox got your Fox Catcher five is coming. Here's the Fox Catcher one, Fox catcher two, and my favorite, Fox Catcher three. Of course, to get the middle Fox Catcher four and Fox Catcher. Ooh, the pinky comes around the corner of the ball.

[Ed Larson]

God, it's so hard not to hit you right now. I don't know how these guys do.

[Marcus Parks]

But it was possible to make Jon back off in these moments. And after Mark gave the him a withering stare, John ended the bit.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I guess some people find things funny and I guess some people don't find things funny.

[Marcus Parks]

Other wrestlers, however, were not so lucky. A lot of them got their balls grabbed by John Dupont at Foxcatcher Farms. And since Jon was giving them all opportunities that otherwise wouldn't exist, the ball grabbing became just another thing to put up with.

[Henry Zebrowski]

This is where I will put the idea that John Dupont, you know, I was making jokes, talking about all this stuff, but really it's about like masculine horseplay.

[Marcus Parks]

Sure.

[Henry Zebrowski]

That he has no idea how to do.

[Marcus Parks]

Yes. Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

He does not know how to engage with these big strong men. He wants to be a big strong man and thinks he is a big strong man. And he thinks that just collecting the big strong men around him will make him one. And I think in that way this is one of those like nut tapper scenarios that all men have to deal with where you have to deal with everybody doing pain games with each other. He's doing it as a thin, needle faced, weird nerd against a bunch of actual very powerful men that probably should have Broke his body.

[Ed Larson]

Well, they also knew that once he started, like grabbing on him and wrestling them, that they would just have to let him do his thing.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Oh, yeah. No, they're like, just. Honestly, if he gets up at you, let him finish.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, yeah. It's so funny to watch him wrestle these guys. Like the footage. There's so much footage of John Dupont trying to wrestle these world class athletes in the documentaries and he just, he looks like a fish trying to wrestle a man.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, he's like, he's like just kind of flopping back and forth between their hands and like circling around them like they're like they're in a jitterbug contest and you can.

[Marcus Parks]

The wrestlers are trying to figure out how to let him win. Yes. Now relations between Mark and John, unsurprisingly, began to disintegrate, but not because of Mark's performance. Mark actually won the 1987 World Championships of wrestling. He demolished the Soviets just like he hoped he could. But Mark was not behaving in the way that John wanted him to. So On Christmas Day, 1987, John called up Mark and fired him from Villanova, adding that Mark shouldn't even come back to campus because, quote, the cops were looking for him. Now, Mark hoped that he could still train at Foxcatcher Farms because he was desperate. He had seen what he could accomplish. With John's financial backing, the Americans could finally compete with the Russians.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I can't stress enough. Watch the 30 for 30. To see him really describe the wrestler's life. Like, that's what I really appreciated about that documentary, how he had two jobs and he was training for the Olympics and he was doing. It's just, it's, it's thankless.

[Ed Larson]

Also, training for wrestling is harder than any other sport.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. But when Mark went back to John's mansion in January of 1988 to ask, hey, can I still train here? He found John just as drunk as ever, yelling and repeating what else but

[Henry Zebrowski]

who. Understand what I'm saying?

[Ed Larson]

You understand what, what I'm saying?

[Henry Zebrowski]

You understand what I'm saying?

[Marcus Parks]

Mark eventually left, but the next day, John actually called Mark and told him, sure, you can train here, you can go back, absolutely. But the only condition is that you gotta live on the farm.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And let's just say when we're all watching tv, your favorite seat is this right knee right here. Yeah.

[Ed Larson]

And you gotta wear this horse suit.

[Henry Zebrowski]

If you would

[Ed Larson]

marry Mark. Want a carrot

[Henry Zebrowski]

apple?

[Marcus Parks]

Mark, of course, agreed it was free rent next to a training facility, even though the same person Offering said free rent was the same guy who'd fired Mark from his job for no reason just weeks earlier.

[Henry Zebrowski]

So you take that money. This goes out to all y'. All. I know a rich ass dumbass guy that's just pouring money into your life. You take that money, but then you leave.

[Marcus Parks]

You leave. I say do not take the money, because the money always comes with strings attached every single fucking time with these rich assholes, it always, always either he wants to be your friend, your. You're going to have to do something that you really do not want to

[Ed Larson]

do, and they'll give you just enough to make you not successful.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, well, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

[Marcus Parks]

No, there's not. And so Mark moved into the chalet right next to the big house on Foxcatcher Farms about a month after he'd been fired. And he soon discovered that if John was a bad BO, he was an even worse neighbor. John would randomly barge into Mark's house, ranting and raving with a gun in his hand. And John once showed Mark a video of a surveillance van shooting lasers into a house window. Made it possible to hear the conversations inside the house via the window's vibrations. This, of course, was a clear threat to Mark, saying that John was always watching. But in between threats, John actually started opening up to Mark. One day, John was making them both sandwiches when he suddenly told Mark the story about he lost his testicles in the horse accident.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Now put some peanut butter and jelly and smash them together. This reminds me,

[Marcus Parks]

John admitted. Hey, I got plastic in my scrotum where my ball should be.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Take a look.

[Marcus Parks]

And that while he was supposed to take testosterone shots every day, he did forget sometimes. And this, I would imagine, only contributed to John Dupont's instability. Up and down and up and down. Now, John Dupont tried running Villanova's wrestling team by himself after he fired Mark, but he had absolutely no idea what he was doing. The team's morale, which was now coached by the instigator of the Foxcatcher 5, it plummeted. And when Mark moved to the farm, John decided to shut down the Villanova wrestling program to focus on Team Foxcatcher, which was, by this point, mostly wrestlers. And so, with a whole stable of the best competitive wrestlers in America living in various houses on Foxcatcher Farms, John threw completely into the world of competitive wrestling. He donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to USA Wrestling. That's the organization that governs freestyle and Greco Roman wrestling nationwide.

[Henry Zebrowski]

What's the difference between the two?

[Marcus Parks]

Freestyle you can use and attack the legs. Greco Roman. You cannot use any holds below the waist or attack the legs. That's the only difference.

[Ed Larson]

Oily.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, well, Greco Roman was more so served with like a shaved cheese and that with freestyle. Normally you don't want to serve it with cheese.

[Marcus Parks]

Yes. With Greco Roman. Before you wrestle, they actually measure your back hair. And if it's not at a certain length, you're not allowed.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Is back here not a liability for a wrestler? Or does it make you slick? Like if you cover yourself up with dural? Like that's what I'd do if I got in there. I'd cover myself with like Vaseline or something.

[Marcus Parks]

I would think that hair actually makes you. I would think it would be a. A hindrance because they'd make you more tactile, easier to grab on.

[Henry Zebrowski]

That's what I'm saying. Yeah. I'm surprised, but that's how good Dave Schultz was. He was just slick to the touch. Like a beaver.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Ed Larson]

He would Velcro on to the other wrestlers.

[Henry Zebrowski]

He said it was like they said wrestling David Schultz was like wrestling a python.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Is what they.

[Ed Larson]

A hairy python?

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah. It's me, baby. Yeah, well, you, you certainly are kind

[Marcus Parks]

of like one length up and down

[Henry Zebrowski]

throughout your whole body had to get measured for a thing. I'm exactly the same from the bottom of my belly all the way to my shoulders. I'm the same measurement, dude. It's amazing. I explained to the guy, I'm.

[Ed Larson]

This is actually easy to make.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I said, I'm an apple on two toothpicks. And then afterwards he was like, you weren't lying about that apple part.

[Marcus Parks]

I got some for you. In the new year, Tube top

[Henry Zebrowski]

tried being less of you.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, John's name was soon on everything related to USA Wrestling, and he gave so much money that they had no choice but to give him the man of the year award. But at the same time, John was becoming more erratic and with good reason. He was over 50 years old at this point, and he had injured both of his knees and his back in various athletic incidents over the years, doing shit that he was too old to do. John dupont was therefore addicted to pain medication. Medication in addition to being an alcoholic. So to even himself out and to put a little zip in his step, John dupont also began doing a lot of cocaine.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Well, that's the whole thing about self medicating, is that if you're adding one, you got to make sure you balance it out with the other. And honestly, right now I'm not Feeling right.

[Ed Larson]

So there we go.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I love this guy.

[Marcus Parks]

You know, Mark. Mark Schultz actually said. Said that when John Dupont did cocaine, that was when he was his most coherent. Honestly.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Great for coke. That's a great advertisement for cocaine.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. Probably ADHD in this guy. Good old stimulants. I could talk for hours. When I did cocaine back in the

[Henry Zebrowski]

day, cocaine was clean, too, man.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. Wow.

[Ed Larson]

You could just do it without dying.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Everybody did. Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

So many people did cocaine without dying.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Nobody ever died of cocaine, man. They only died. Died of being a.

[Marcus Parks]

And their nose being weak or from being too cool. That's the other way to die from cocaine. Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah. Too cool. Lif.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, as far as where John Dupont got his coke, he certainly had a dealer. But Mark said that one night, John showed up with a kilo of cocaine in a big bag marked evidence in big orange letters.

[Henry Zebrowski]

This is the evidence that we're about to do a whole night's worth of cocaine, just like it's called. I know what the crime's going to

[Marcus Parks]

be ahead of time.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It's a bit of a murder mystery.

[Marcus Parks]

Mark didn't think that the cops had just given John a kilo of cocaine. Instead, Mark believed that John. Remember, John loved cosplaying as a cop. And remember he had a badge that the local cops had given him. Mark thought that John just put on the badge, put on the uniform, and then used his incredible amount of unearned confidence to just walk into the evidence locker, the local. Local PD to take whatever he wanted.

[Henry Zebrowski]

What if he just wrote it on there?

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Now, this is cool.

[Marcus Parks]

Such a funny joke.

[Henry Zebrowski]

This is funny, funny stuff, man.

[Ed Larson]

I just always, whenever I think of an evidence locker, I don't know why, but I always, like, where's the crossbow?

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Where's the crossbow section, you mean?

[Henry Zebrowski]

Let me just make sure I get to sneak into the evidence area. Let me make sure you got a tiptoe past the sleeping bills. Oh, that's where the Mexican March powder is.

[Marcus Parks]

Now, since John Dupont was obscenely wealthy.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Panther. But weird. In my mind, I imagine him as he. In his head, he's Pink Panther. He's Pink Panther and everybody else, he's John Dupont.

[Marcus Parks]

Yep. Since John Dupont was obscenely wealthy, the media naturally tried as hard as they could to pinpoint an exact moment when he, quote, unquote, changed. They, of course, wanted to explain away his behavior and the subsequent murder that he committed. Often, they would point to the death of John's mother in 1988 as the turning point, because John's mother was the only family member who would have anything to do with him throughout his entire life. The media said that John became untethered after his mother's death. But Mark Schultz maintains that after John's mother died, absolutely nothing changed. And Mark would know because he was actually living on John's estate. When John's mother died, he was in the chalet next to the mansion, and John was constantly coming in. And John like to talk, and if it really bothered him, he would have talked about it endlessly. Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Oh, yes.

[Marcus Parks]

Mark said that John Dupont never really had much to say about his mother's death. Said it didn't really affect him. He was just as weird after the death as he was before. Mark, however, eventually had enough of foxcatcher farms by 1990.

[Henry Zebrowski]

You know what it could be interesting is that because the mother. There was a couple of times when he was throwing his own award ceremonies where his mother. Mother would come from the main house because she was living in with him in the house. And what she'd do is in perfect old rich lady form, she'd sit there and just shake her head. And every single time she'd go, she'd just be like, I don't know why you're so obsessed with this, why you're doing this. And so I actually do think there was a relief when she was gone.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Because now he can really do whatever he wants and not have to hear word one from his stupid old mother. Who doesn't get.

[Ed Larson]

Hold on. You don't think she was nice?

[Henry Zebrowski]

No, she just didn't get it, dude.

[Ed Larson]

She.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Daddy swerve, man.

[Marcus Parks]

But Mark, however, eventually had enough of foxcatcher farms. By 1990, he called up his brother Dave to help him move out. And after enduring one last paranoid rant from John Dupont, Mark broke free of Foxcatcher Farms forever. But while Mark was packing up his shit, John brought Dick Dave Schultz over to his house to have a conversation. And just a few months after Mark Schultz left Foxcatcher, his brother Dave Schultz moved in and took a job coaching wrestling for John Dupont. Dave Schultz was, by all accounts, a good man. He was popular, easy to talk to, and it was said that he was not only the only wrestler who could communicate with John in a way that John would listen. He was the only person on earth who could get John to do something that John didn't want to do. As such, Dave had a pretty easy time on the farm in the beginning. He was married with kids. So rather than living next to John in the chalet, which he knew is a bad idea. He and his family moved into a house on the estate about a mile away from John's mansion boundaries. And despite John's behavior, Foxcatcher Farms had established a reputation for creating champions. And as I said, there were already several other top notch wrestlers living on the property. By the time Dave Schultz moved in,

[Henry Zebrowski]

all that donated money started doing its trick. Like it started really building the reputation and they started getting wins and they started getting like more like world championship wins. Because I think that's what Mark said is that he won against the Russians again and that was like a big deal. And they were like it was starting to actually get the momentum.

[Marcus Parks]

And John also understood the number one way to really give something a little bit of cred. Merch. Oh yeah, like, and, and John started making the Team Foxcatcher merch. Like he, he started using pictures of Mark Schultz, you know, in front of the American flag with his goat, with his championships, and underneath it said Team Foxcatcher.

[Ed Larson]

If I, as much as I don't like this man, the merch was kind of cool.

[Henry Zebrowski]

That's what he figured out.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, yeah. Soon after Dave's arrival, John built the largest wrestling facility in America on Foxcatcher Farms, complete with an Olympic sized swimming pool and a mural of John Dupont competing in pentathlons. John, however, was becoming more eccentric now that he was building his own little world on his estate. He had taken to calling himself the Golden Eagle of America, or the Eagle for short. And he began theming his personal spaces to reflect his new chosen nickname. He had a plaque engraved and mounted on the door of his office that said the Eagle's Nest, which is incredibly douchey. But the bizarre addition to this office was a big round bed that John surrounded with sticks which made it appear as if it was a literal eagle's nest.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yes. And you would be surprised at the lack of egg.

[Ed Larson]

Just imagine like getting up in the middle of the night, just cutting your feet on sticks and being happy about it.

[Marcus Parks]

Oh yes, I'm an eagle.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Oh yeah, I forgot car. I like that.

[Marcus Parks]

Now, Mark Schultz kept in touch with his brother Dave and all his other wrestler friends out at Foxcatcher Farms. So while the information we have from here on out is secondhand, the wrestlers still in John Dupont's thrall were still very forthcoming about John's increasingly erratic behavior. By the early 1990s, John had become convinced that the mansion was full of so called spirits and spies. Which sounds like a great bar name.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yes.

[Marcus Parks]

I'd go to Spirits and spies. Yeah, yeah.

[Ed Larson]

Whisper.

[Henry Zebrowski]

You'll never go to the bathroom alone.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, John hired a psychic to identify the spirits. He brought in laborers to check the walls and floors for spies. And he had all the mansions, columns and walls x rayed for listening devices. John openly talked about his fear of interlo with his wrestlers, telling them that they should stay on the lookout for Nazi spies hiding in the trees of the estate.

[Henry Zebrowski]

You know, if I was that much, be like, I caught three yesterday. I got three yesterday. You can't believe it. Man, oh man. I spent about 1500 Uber blacking them into the prison in town. So if I could get 1500 back to be great.

[Marcus Parks]

They get one of the other wrestlers to dress up as a Nazi soldier. You put like a mustache. I'm like, yeah, my name's Gunter.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I'm sorry. We go clunk. He hits in the head just once with a stick and they all go, done. We did it.

[Marcus Parks]

They're all gone. John also became convinced that spies had built a network of tunnels underneath the mansion. And he hired people to look for these fucking tunnels. But of course nothing was ever found. John then started removing things from the training facility like treadmills. Because John claimed that the clocks in the treadmills were transporting him back in time.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Get it? I got. Honestly? Fuck yeah they do. They do. It's once you start on that treadmill, it's like you're there for a fucking week. Huh?

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Come on, y'. All. Come on. Come on now. You know how it is being fat. Oh, I'm not fat, I'm just fluffy. Remember that? I remember that.

[Marcus Parks]

John also believed that Rocks talked to him and he became convinced that there was a device in his mansion that would spray a magical oil that could make people disappear.

[Henry Zebrowski]

That's what happened to all my friends and loved ones.

[Ed Larson]

It's like a hundred year old mansion.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Ed Larson]

So he thinks there's like microphones inside of the columns of the hundred year old mansion.

[Marcus Parks]

He thinks that people have broken in while he wasn't there and drilled into the columns and put microphones in there and then repaired them while he was gone.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And this is also the rise of him filming trees.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. Oh God, he feel so much footage of him filming trees.

[Henry Zebrowski]

He would film a tree for an hour, right. And then he'd become convinced that the tree could move on its own. And then he'd invite people into the main house to watch his movies of the trees and he'd go, you see that? What move? You see that one move? And they're all like. Yep,

[Marcus Parks]

the guy said that they were. That was sort of like this weird thing that they were constantly faced with. Like, okay, do I tell him that I see it and feed into the delusion or do I tell the truth and risk his wrath? And. And he's. He's going to sit. He's going to make me sit here for an hour until I say, yeah, I see something. John.

[Ed Larson]

I bet he actually made some very peaceful videos that will never be able to take. Be taken that way. Dude, no, no channel. Remember when HD first started, there was a channel that was all sunrises.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Dude, it's not like sunrise channel. Close up shot. It's like not scenic. No, it's not well shot. It's like a st. It's like a shot of a branch

[Marcus Parks]

for like 45 minutes and it's him mumbling in the background.

[Ed Larson]

Ah, so it was annoying.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, it's asmr.

[Marcus Parks]

But the paranoid delusions were not John Dupont's only fantasies. See, by this point, a Bulgarian wrestler named Valentin Yordanov had moved to Foxcatcher Farms to be a part of John's team. And Valentin began setting up John to compete in wrestling matches in Bulgaria for the 50 and up crowd, the senior

[Henry Zebrowski]

wrestlers, what's called masters.

[Marcus Parks]

Masters. That's very. That's a nice way of putting it. See, Bulgaria had been added to John's hall of obsessions. And he therefore made up stories that his mother had sex with a Bulgarian soldier and that made him Bulgarian. He was truly Bulgarian at heart. At times, even claimed to be the president of Bulgaria. He was also very fond of claiming to be the president of Bulgaria. Sometimes he'd say he was the president of the Soviet Union.

[Ed Larson]

Do you think anything but French, anything.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Does Bulgarian does bul. Bulgaria have like a specific tie to the wrestling world? There's like a thing where they're making.

[Marcus Parks]

Bulgarian wrestlers are known to be quite good, but I don't think it had anything to do with that. I think it had to do with the fact that he like had a man crush on Valentine Yordanov and he

[Henry Zebrowski]

wanted to connect with him.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, he really wanted to connect with him.

[Ed Larson]

He also wasn't an eagle, to be honest. What a letdown.

[Marcus Parks]

Jon also had affection for Bulgaria because the matches that Valentin set up for John in Eastern Europe were fully rigged. These Bulgarian wrestlers made more money throwing matches to John Dupont than what they made wrestling in matches for an entire year. And they went to great lengths to make sure that John won. And these were not private matches. These were held in Large auditoriums with big audiences. In one match, a Bulgarian wrestler had scored a bunch of points, but John was too tired by the end of it to even pretend to try to fight back. But the Bulgarian wrestler knew that he couldn't beat John Dupont. So the Bulgarian just threw himself onto his own back and pinned himself. The ref called the fight for John, and the other wrestlers following this guy's lead, hoisted John up on his shoulders in celebration, even though everyone in the room, including John Dupont, knew that he had fully paid for this fantasy.

[Henry Zebrowski]

You know, though it does start to. This is where the chipping actually kind of begins, it seems is when he starts doing these fake competitions that he's winning and sitting up to win and he's starting. This man that has no experiences of other people's emotions or thoughts is starting to understand, are they making fun of me?

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, maybe.

[Ed Larson]

Well, this guy who wants to own people starts calling himself the Master, you know, like.

[Henry Zebrowski]

But the problem is, is that this is what we're seeing right now, right? In our current country. These guys get ridiculous, and then when they get rid of ridiculous, if you laugh at them, they'll fucking kill you. Like, they'll get rid of you. Like, these guys are hyper serious about stuff. That sounds really ridiculous because he's a madman.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. And he's buying his way into the. Like, He. He's trying to find a way into being a champion. He can't do it on his own. He. He can't do it just by training. He's just. Just doesn't have it.

[Henry Zebrowski]

But he actually. He actually did get it. Like, if he allowed himself to feel it because they started to win. Like, Team Fox catcher.

[Marcus Parks]

But him. I'm talking about him. I'm not.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Team.

[Marcus Parks]

Team Fox catcher is doing great. I'm talking about John dupont wrestling another human being and actually winning.

[Henry Zebrowski]

But you can actually see what he did was he set up Team Fox catcher up to a point where he thought that maybe that would fulfill it. And then as they were winning and it wasn't him, it wasn't cutting the mustard.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, it really wasn't.

[Ed Larson]

It's not like Jerry Jones puts on football pads and goes out there and tries to win a game.

[Henry Zebrowski]

We don't know. We don't practice with them and they don't win.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, make that evil bastard's head fucking explode. I just would love, love, see. Fuck. Get Daryl Johnston, bring him out of retirement, put him in pads, make him fucking hit Jerry Jones.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Make his fucking head explode.

[Ed Larson]

Has there ever been an owner, really? That's a nice guy.

[Marcus Parks]

Never.

[Henry Zebrowski]

No, no. You can't own a football team and be likable.

[Marcus Parks]

Wouldn't the guy who owned the browns for a while didn't people like him until he died. And then when they died, they sold the browns.

[Ed Larson]

I mean, he named the team after himself.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, maybe not then. Yep, maybe not.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, if I was going to name after myself, they'd be called the modeled pinks. Let's move on.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, back at the farm, John was getting more reckless. One winter's day, John drove his Lincoln continental into a pond on his estate, likely intoxicated. A few days later, though, one of his wrestlers asked John, hey, how did you manage to drive your car into a pond, John?

[Henry Zebrowski]

It was the beginning of the fall of my ponzi scheme.

[Marcus Parks]

I was trying to burn down by ponzi scheme for the.

[Henry Zebrowski]

But water doesn't burn well.

[Marcus Parks]

John told the wrestler, get in the back seat, I'll show you. And John proceeded to drive his Lincoln through the estate, through the trees, and directly into the same pond, just like that. John, however, leapt out of the car before it hit the water. The wrestler. The wrestler was still inside the car when it hit the pond. Hey, he didn't know he was going to drive into the water. And this is like in the middle of a Pennsylvania winter. We just experienced Pennsylvania winter when we went to Philly. Great show, by the way. Thank you very much, everyone in Philly. It was amazing show, but God damn, it was cold.

[Ed Larson]

That was cold.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It was cold.

[Marcus Parks]

Luckily, the wrestler got out of the car before he drowned. And although he was cold, wet, and shaken, he was physically unharmed. John, of course, just walked back to the mansion. Without even checking to see if the wrestler was okay, he started walking back to the mansion. And before the guy even got out of the car.

[Ed Larson]

I mean, wrestlers do find this kind of stuff funny, this guy.

[Marcus Parks]

Some of them do. He did not.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was like, john, you really almost got me on that one.

[Ed Larson]

That's a hindsight thing, I'm telling you. In the moment. He was like, this is crazy.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah. What's wrong with this?

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Six hours later, you're like, I almost died.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah. Did you try to kill me now?

[Marcus Parks]

It said that John would hyper fixate on a hobby or an activity until he reached the peak, at least the peak by his standards, or until he got bored. And it is speculated that John lost all interest in wrestling in 1995, and as a result, he began getting far more reckless with his wrestlers.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, this is the. What you were where you described in the beginning. This is a. Now he's sick of his toys.

[Marcus Parks]

Yes, exactly. In October of that year, a wrestler named Dan Shade said that he was lifting weights in the Fox Catcher facility when Jon walked in with an assault rif. John crouched, aimed the gun at Dan and told him he wanted him off the farm immediately. Dan Shade told the other wrestlers what happened, but they shrugged it off like they shrugged off everything else. Dan even made a police report, but nothing came of it. After John committed a murder, however, the police said no, no, he came by, but he didn't file the right paperwork, so he didn't sign this form. So nothing we can do.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Because the problem is that crimes don't exist without paperwork.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

So without them filling out the paperwork, it's like nothing happened.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. So Dan Shade soon after left Foxcatcher Farms. But when he returned just to pick up some of the stuff, John reacted. John was of course extraordinarily drunk and he showed up at Dave Schultz's house looking for Dan. Eventually, John stumbled in Dave's house, slipped and gashed his head open on a windowsill. Dave Schultz and his wife took John to the local ER which of course had a trauma center named after John Dupont. But John, in true entitled rich cunt form, refused to fill out any forms and literally just sat there shouting, don't you know who I am?

[Henry Zebrowski]

I'm asking you, who am I?

[Marcus Parks]

It seems that from this bag my name might be Cocaine Johnson.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Know is my name evident?

[Marcus Parks]

But this incident was important because it caused the first break between Dave Schultz and John Dupont.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Cuz Dave Schultz and him, he didn't really with Dave Schultz the way he with Mark Schultz.

[Marcus Parks]

No, he didn't with Dave Schultz at all.

[Henry Zebrowski]

No.

[Marcus Parks]

Like Dave never put up with anything. And in fact, if, if Mark, if John with other wrestlers, they would actually go to Dave and like, hey, can you talk to John and tell him to stop doing this? And Dave would go on the behalf of other wrestlers and explain it in a way that for some reason listened to. Don't know why, but he did always. But this was the first time that there was a break.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Dude, you know, I wasn't scared of him. You know, we just hit me. You know who John Dupont is?

[Marcus Parks]

Who?

[Henry Zebrowski]

An aristocratic Andy Dick. Literally what he is. Yeah, it's true.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. See, this is why it's fine that Andy Dick's homeless.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yes. Yeah, it's good almost.

[Marcus Parks]

See, John filed a police report of his own and he told police that Dan Shade had hit him with a bag Baseball bat. Dan and John, however, never even saw each other when Dan Shea was on the property. And when the police questioned Dave Schultz, that's exactly what he told him. He told him the truth. But when John found out that Dave had not gone along with his lie, John requested a copy of the police report. And that same report was sitting on John's desk in his mansion when he was arrested for murdering Dave Schultz. Now, Dave, however, had been in the process of trying to get out of the orbit of Foxcatcher Farms when the murder finally came. See, By November of 1995, John Dupont had become deathly afraid of the color black and demanded that anything black be removed from the estate or it had to be painted a different color. John then extended that fear to black men, and he therefore kicked three black wrestlers off Team Foxcatcher because he believed that they were an extension of the evil related to the color black. And this was disturbing for all of the wrestlers. But most of them, including Dave Schultz, they stayed because they were so attached to John Dupont's money.

[Henry Zebrowski]

He was the Dave Schultz. The only way I can support him in this is that he was just like, the Olympics are, like, in six months.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

He's like, I'm training for this. This is my day. Like, I could go win this gold, and then I can be out.

[Marcus Parks]

And he's got a wife and two kids.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

You know, like, it's. At certain points, like, for some people, principals just can't come into it.

[Henry Zebrowski]

He had him over a fucking barrel.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Ed Larson]

It's a lot harder when you have. When your principals not only cause you to lose your job, but move.

[Marcus Parks]

No.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Your house is there. Home is there. Your wife and kids are there. Vulnerable. You have a psychotic who is fucking ready to pop off at any minute. You're now trying to just get this out of. You're trying to get this plane off the fucking Runway.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. And he did announce that he was going to stay only until the 1996 Olympics were over. Because it's like. Like you said, Olympics are six months away. Just let me finish this. Let me do this, and then I'll go back to my wrestling job at Stanford. I'll get out of here.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

And Dave was the best wrestler there. He was the most respected. He was sort of a father figure to a lot of these guys. So when Dave said he was leaving, a lot of wrestlers also decided this. Let's go. And one of the wrestlers planning to leave was John's beloved Bulgarian, Valentin Yordanov.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I just always see why do I see Valentine Yordanov just in a Speedo in a big, giant, like, glass cylinder. Coming up. Complimentary.

[Marcus Parks]

See, another possible motivation for the murder of Dave Schultz. And there were probably a few, considering how addled John's brain was by this point, by mental illness, drugs and alcohol. One of the big motivations, or possible motivations, is that Dave and Valentine had become close friends and John dupont was jealous of their relationship. But Mark didn't believe that John was gay. I don't think he was either.

[Henry Zebrowski]

No, dude, I actually think it's more complicated than being just a gay, like, love affair. I think. It's not that. I think.

[Marcus Parks]

No, I think it's that John Dupont was a highly unstable individual who didn't know how to have a human relationship and didn't know how to handle it if a human relationship ended. You know, he didn't know what friendship meant. He didn't know what companionship met. He didn't know what any of those things meant. All he knew, he could not separate these people from the thought, like, these are objects. These are my objects to play with, and they're going to act how I want them to act.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And if I paid for them to be there, how dare they act any other way?

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, he's paid them for a service, and that service is being his wrestlers, being his guys, and calling him Golden Eagle.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah. Before we say, I want to hear Golden Eagle one last time. That's Golden Eagle.

[Marcus Parks]

That volatility, unfortunately, finally came to a head on January 26, 1996, when John Dupont shot and killed Dave Schultz. Now, the wrestlers at Foxcatcher Farms were, not so coincidentally, throwing a party for Valentine Yordanov's birthday the night before the murder. And that party had lasted well into the morning. And we have absolutely no idea what set John off or what might have been said at that party. But something happened, because when the sun rose the next day, John Dupont asked his security guy, a man named Pat Goodale, to take a ride with John around the estate.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I have one theory. What happened? So it came up in the 30 for 30 I was watching just before. And they posited a theory that was interesting, which is that Dave Schultz, the night of the party, drunkenly, what they used to do, one of the fun things they used to do, shoot off fireworks, shoot off all these things. And apparently. So this is at the height of John saying there's Nazi spies everywhere. Spies, all these people are doing. And he's been interrogating people one by one, who's a spy and apparently he saw Dave funnily shooting out of a. What they called these, like, bazooka things with a bottle rockets in it. And he was shooting it at Dupont's house. House and laughing. And that John Dupont went to his head of security that night and says, I know who the spy is. We're gonna handle it tomorrow.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, that seems pretty cut and dry.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, but that is a version of the story. So I've no. You have no idea what's real or what's not real, man.

[Ed Larson]

And I'm not saying that you should put bottle rockets in PC PVC pipes,

[Henry Zebrowski]

but it is a lot of fun.

[Marcus Parks]

It's a lot of fun. Just make sure you put the cap on the end.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah. Because is what private property is for.

[Marcus Parks]

It really is.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, it really is. You can use the same PVC pipe you use to build your potato gun, which is also an incredible amount of fun to build.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Fun to do.

[Marcus Parks]

This is all you need, some PVC pipe, a little bit of hairspray and a match and a few potatoes and. Oh, my God. God is so much fun.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It's fun. It's fun to break rules.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, the security expert that John went and talked to that night, his name's Pat Goodale. And Pat has been criticized for feeding into John's paranoid delusions because Pat did whatever Jon asked him to do. No. No matter how weird it was, Pat was the guy who X rayed the columns. Pat was the guy who dug up the property looking for these hidden tunnels that John swore were there.

[Ed Larson]

It's his fucking job.

[Marcus Parks]

It's his job. Well, that's what Pat says. He maintains that he only did this in an effort to show John that there's nothing to worry about. He thought that if he did it enough and showed him enough evidence, like, look, there's no listening devices. There's no spies that eventually John would drop it. Pat's not really a mental health expert.

[Henry Zebrowski]

No. He has no idea. But I will say.

[Ed Larson]

Say they.

[Henry Zebrowski]

They do say. I've received many emails about this over the years about. You are actually. If someone is like, they say this word, dementia patients, where you should help. You should actually say yes. And yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

You go along with it. Especially in Alzheimer's as well. It helps. But schizophrenia is a different. It's a different animal altogether.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah. You always. To me. I always. Yes. And that it's. Yes. And where's the dragon? Yes. And your blood is butter. Let's cut it out of you. Put it on bread.

[Marcus Parks]

Yes. And wear your pills.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Where are the pills?

[Ed Larson]

Yeah. Any parent listener will tell you how many times they did something completely wrong, knowing they were doing it wrong only so they show their child. This is what happens when you do it wrong. Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Now, John's everyday gun was a.38 Special. Nice solid everyday gun.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

But on the morning of January 26, he grabbed his long barreled.44 Magnum revolver before heading out, out into the estate with security guy Pat Goodale. After surveying the grounds in his Lincoln Continental, John drove to Dave Schultz's house, on the property, of course, the place where Dave lived with his wife and two kids. Luckily the kids were already at school, but Dave was outside trying to fix his car radio. His wife was in the kitchen. John pulled up to Dave, opened the door and said, hi, Coach. John then got halfway out of his car, wasn't, didn't even fully get out, pulled his.44 and shot Dave Schultz. Dave's wife was inside the house and said she didn't think anything of the gunshot because Dave sometimes liked to shoot small game like squirrels with a.22 rifle.

[Ed Larson]

Also.

[Henry Zebrowski]

They were shooting guns all the time.

[Marcus Parks]

Yes. But when she heard a second shot and a scream, she went outside there, she saw her husband lying face down on the ground next to his car while John Dupont was still halfway out of the his Lincoln Continental. She then watched as John Dupont put a third and final bullet into Dave Schultz. For reasons that are still unclear, at least fully unclear, it does seem like it was a paranoid delusion that got out of hand. Now that you say that, it seems

[Henry Zebrowski]

that he was crawling and then he did a final shot to his back.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. As far as what security expert Pat Goodale was doing this whole time because hey, someone starting to fire a gun, you think the security experts expert's gonna know what to do? He testified at the trial that he got out of the car and pointed his own gun at John Dupont. But Pat told police right after the shooting that he was too stunned to really do anything and that the shooting happened too fast for him to react. Based off of that and based on where they found Pat later, seems like Pat just ran from the car and hid behind a metal barrel, which honestly, as long as John Dupont's not shooting, including the wife as well, smart move.

[Henry Zebrowski]

You know, what else are you supposed to do, honestly, if you're going to get shot? Like it's not, he's not the Secret Service, his job is not to be a security guy. Yes.

[Marcus Parks]

John, meanwhile, tossed the.44 Magnum into his back seat and drove away while Dave's wife tried Putting pressure on her husband's wounds. Unfortunately though, the bullets had been hollow point. And this very much speaks towards motive and also speaks towards premeditation. Hollow point bullets expand upon impact. We all know that they're chosen for the express purpose of killing a man. It's the only reason why you use hollow points. So Dave tragically died before the ambulance got there. While Dave was dying, John Dupont drove back to his mansion and walked directly into a windowless steel lined vault on the first floor that his mother had installed as a bomb shelter.

[Henry Zebrowski]

The dream.

[Marcus Parks]

Oh man, this is the dream when houses. The house I grew up in had a bomb shelter. It was great.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Not a safe room. Is it like a safe room?

[Marcus Parks]

No, a bomb shelter. Like it's a, it's a cold war era shed. My, my. The house I grew up in was built in the 50s and so there was an actual bomb shelter out back because I grew up an hour away from Dais Air Force Base, which was on one of the. It was one of the top targets for the Soviets during nuclear war because that's where all the B52 bombers were. So if there was a new. Like I grew up knowing, like if there's a nuclear war, I'm going to die.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I want a bomb shelter.

[Ed Larson]

Don't bomb shelters go underground? Yeah, this was on the first floor.

[Marcus Parks]

Probably very thick walls.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Very thick walls.

[Marcus Parks]

But usually John used this vault as both his library and his cocaine layer.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Wow.

[Marcus Parks]

Where he snorted lines and met his dealer.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Honestly, cocaine layer, you have to have.

[Marcus Parks]

You really do. If you're, if you're rich and you don't have a cocaine layer.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Are you rich?

[Ed Larson]

Yeah. An all cocaine layer belong with books that you won't read.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Definitely books with a lot of naked girls in them.

[Marcus Parks]

It's paired best with books that you take off the shelf, open, flip through, put back on, take off the shelf, open, look.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Nah, that's not the secret.

[Marcus Parks]

Nah. Books. After putting the gun away on a high shelf, dupont stepped out of the vault and told the three house staff members that were remaining in the house, you better not let the police inside because the police are definitely coming.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yes. And you will each sacrifice yourself to me and your God. You'll find Pharaoh and we will burn this place to the ground. And I know that we will all judge each other in the afterlife when we are done.

[Ed Larson]

Okay?

[Marcus Parks]

Sure, John. And come they did. Before long, 75 police officers from 10 departments and 30 SWAT officers were outside John's mansion. They show because they.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Cuz you know why the UEs. UEs and machine guns.

[Ed Larson]

And a tank.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. That he let the local police train on his gun range. They knew how many guns. Guns he had. But in the end, there was no shootout in John's future, no massive last stand. Instead, John just sat there and made phone calls to lawyers and wrestlers.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Hey, there's this gold dust. You don't know am I gay? I figured I'd ask you, you know. All right, well. Oh, ask Jake the snake. All right, Jake.

[Marcus Parks]

Hello, Is this Big Foley? Would your dude love. Do you wish you were Cactus Jackson?

[Henry Zebrowski]

Do you ever think about that? Or is that. Are they the same guy? Are they cousins? Or are they different entities all together?

[Ed Larson]

Oh, I should be calling Dusty Rhodes.

[Marcus Parks]

Specifically, John called Valentin Yordanov over and over, leaving messages, begging the Bulgarian to come visit him in his hour of need. But Valentin did not answer. And after the staff left, one by one, without incident, they just all kind of snuck out the door when he wasn't looking.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I can then repeat like. So I'm gonna leave.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. Okay.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Come up. Yeah, I'm gonna go.

[Marcus Parks]

John Dupont, by 6:45pm was left all alone in his mansion. Now, the police, of course, treated John Dupont with the utmost respect, despite the fact that he had just killed a man in cold blood in front of his wife. This was much to the criticism of the media. Who knew how much money John had given the local police department and definitely asked them about the money every time there was a press conference. The standoff, therefore, lasted for days, until the police finally shut off the mansion's heater in the middle of the a Pennsylvania winner. John, however, simply built a fire for himself, using copies of a book he'd written and self published that if this was in a movie, you'd say it was stupid. It was called Never Give Up.

[Henry Zebrowski]

You know what I gotta say, Johnny? There's not a lot of things they're proud of us for. But that's a great title.

[Ed Larson]

Remember what Sandusky's book was called?

[Henry Zebrowski]

Touched.

[Marcus Parks]

Oh, my.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Oh, wow.

[Marcus Parks]

Are you serious?

[Henry Zebrowski]

It's better than sucked.

[Marcus Parks]

Here's my new book. Boys don't cry.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Boys never cry.

[Marcus Parks]

Before long, the cold got to be too much. And when John asked the police to bring out a repairman for the H vac, an opening emerged.

[Henry Zebrowski]

You will bring to be your finest Yelped. Exactly.

[Marcus Parks]

And don't bring me anyone who has to give me a subscription to be

[Henry Zebrowski]

a part of their service. Sick of putting out reviews, the police

[Marcus Parks]

told John that it was too dangerous to bring a civilian into the situation. But John was more than welcome to exit the mansion and check on the boilers himself, just so long as he promised to not bring a gun.

[Henry Zebrowski]

That's a great idea.

[Marcus Parks]

And amazingly, John did what he was asked. And he exited the mansion unarmed, wearing a Bulgarian wrestling team sweatsuit with a team foxcatcher T shirt underneath. Bizarrely, he has a love of lanyards like you do. He slept, slipped a lanyard from the 1995 World Wrestling Championships over his neck before going out.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Guy can't be all wrong. Yeah, I love lanyards.

[Ed Larson]

You do love lanyards like every other person. Like, I always put mine in my pocket, you know, and like, have it ready if someone needs it. You, you're on over whatever nice thing you got.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I like my lanyards. Yeah, that's like a lanyard. I like a badge.

[Ed Larson]

You know what I mean?

[Henry Zebrowski]

I'm. No, I'm a police officer in many ways.

[Ed Larson]

Ways.

[Henry Zebrowski]

In many ways I'm. I'm a cop. Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

I think it just comes from you remembering the moment in Wayne's World where they had the backstage passes and they're showing them everybody and so excited.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah. Is there anything that you could show to somebody and they let you into a place where there's bad food in like, little waters. Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Within moments, though, John decided to make a run for it. A SWAT officer stepped out from behind a tree.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Tree people.

[Marcus Parks]

And he told John to stop. And John did freeze for a moment. He put his hands up, but he decided, fuck it,

[Henry Zebrowski]

rabbits, come to my aid.

[Marcus Parks]

The SWAT officer, of course, chased John down, tackled him to the ground. But it took a whole swarm of SWAT officers to finally take down the dupont heir and put the cuffs around his wrists. Now, John Dupont naturally tried an insanity defense for the murder of Dave Schultz.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I was crazy for wrest.

[Marcus Parks]

Also cocaine.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Cocaine was a bit of the insanity as well.

[Marcus Parks]

And even though John was a reasonably well kept man prior to the trial, he grew out his beard and gave himself a purposefully disheveled appearance in court to bolster the insanity defense. All these guys do this.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Harvey Weinstein brought out the walker and

[Marcus Parks]

is just like, oh, John dupont showed up in a wheelchair. Like they all do it. But after all the arguments were heard and the jury deliberated for a week, they, they came back with a verdict of guilty of third degree murder, but mentally ill.

[Henry Zebrowski]

But you crazy.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

You know that all right, you crazy as well. We just want to tell you that

[Marcus Parks]

that meant that while the jury believed that John did have paranoid schizophrenia, he had still fully understood that he was doing something wrong when he killed Dave schultz. So John Dupont was sentenced to 13 to 36 years in prison, which was basically a life sentence because John was nearly 60 when he was put in jail. Dave Schultz's wife soon after won a wrongful death suit against John Dup. And while we don't know the amount, it was reported to be the largest settlement ever paid to one person.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Good.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Every once in a while it's lucky when your husband gets shot, you know.

[Marcus Parks]

Jesus. Jesus fucking Christ.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I know. Humans are. Men are expendable. Yeah, that's what I'm talking.

[Marcus Parks]

John, meanwhile, spent three months in a state hospital before he was transferred to state prison where he shared an eight foot cell with another roommate in a wing foot. Older prisoners and child molesters.

[Henry Zebrowski]

This guy's hilarious.

[Marcus Parks]

Do you think he got put in with an older. Another old guy or a child molester? I bet they pair them. One old guy, one child molester.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I think they need to have their. That's the balance. Yeah, that's the Batman and Robin of it. You need the two.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. Because if you got two child molesters in there, they're just gonna talk shop all day.

[Ed Larson]

What's the age that you're like, all right, you're 65. In with the kid.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Look at. You're like. They look at like your legs and your knees and stuff. Be like, he's got the tensil strength of a child molester. I think we can. Maybe they serv this little workers.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, it was with the old men and the child molesters that the Dupont Heir died in 2010 at the age of 72, making John Dupont, as far as I know, the only Dupont to truly pay for the crimes he committed. He was embarrassingly buried in a Red Team Foxcatcher wrestling singlet. And the remainder of his estate was. Was left to who else but his favorite Bulgarian wrestler, Valentine Yordov.

[Ed Larson]

How American.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, yeah. Multi millionaire. Breaking off a piece to the Russians. Yeah, yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

No Valentine, definitely. The interviews he gave during the documentaries were. The house was quite nice. Yeah, Quite, quite nice.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Now why do I feel like the grossest thing of all is that he was buried in a wrestling zinglet?

[Marcus Parks]

I think it is the grossest thing that happened.

[Henry Zebrowski]

There's something about that because they're like, even just. It's an old man. You're going to go open casket. You're going to see his bulge in this thing.

[Marcus Parks]

No, you don't see the lower half in an open casket.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Not for my grandmother. We opened the whole thing. We saw all of that.

[Ed Larson]

And cut off her dress.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Let me take. Yeah, you dead bitch.

[Marcus Parks]

And that is the tale of the Dupont. We have done it in three episodes. The crimes of the Dupont and the crimes of one single Dupont. Thank you very much for coming along on this journey with us. Been a lot of fun in the midst of the Epstein files has been very fun, but it was actually very edifying. Once the Epstein files came out and we, you know, read all this stuff, a lot of stuff in Epstein started making sense. And it's like I said at the beginning of this whole thing, like, if you really want to understand how. How we got to this point, people like the Dupont, you have to understand how this world works and what these people do. You know, you have to understand how people like John Dupont work. You know, like, that's. These systems are set up for these people to behave in this manner.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And we did this. We did this specifically in this way, as we said last episode, because of where we are in the country and how we personally feel as creators. So this was. This meant a lot to us as a series. But next week, it's going to get a little, little bit less important. I'm coming back to me. I'm going to be doing a thing. We're going to True crime.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. Henry's first True crime.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yes. It's going to get real gross, and I'm excited for it.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Ed Larson]

I watched a part of a documentary about it and I didn't care for it.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah. So we're getting back to the Sloppy Bloods next week, you animals.

[Marcus Parks]

And we've got some really fun ideas for this year's March Madness, which will be coming up in of weeks.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Couple.

[Marcus Parks]

A couple of weeks very soon. And then after that, going to return to the Mount Rushmore of Eva. We got a lot of cool coming up. It's coming, but we got to get to the airport. Yeah. Let's go.

[Henry Zebrowski]

So thank you for your money. Go to patreon.com podcast on the left and give that money. You can get ad free episodes. You can also see last stream on the left live, 6pm PST each week. We might be changing it to five.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, I think we should change it to five starting next week. I thought we said we were doing it.

[Ed Larson]

We're doing it.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It's 5pm Decision's been made. That's for us.

[Marcus Parks]

Daddy needs to eat dinner.

[Henry Zebrowski]

We like to not be hangry during the episodes. That's what we're gonna do. So that's done. Also, you're gonna go over To LP on the left for all the stupid social media. I don't know why. And you're gonna go to YouTube channels, someplace underneath. LPN Romanticy. No. Dogs in Space. LPN TV, the Foreign Report. Who's the Bee? All on YouTube. Go check that out. We'll be back next week. Good work, Marcus.

[Marcus Parks]

Thank you. Great work to both of you as well. Thank you for coming along with me on this journey.

[Ed Larson]

Hell yeah. Next week we're going to be in Indianapolis at the Egyptian Room. Come check us out. And next night on March 14th, Henry and I are going to be in Urbana, Illinois.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Can't wait, can't.

[Ed Larson]

The Canopy Club. We're going to have a lot of fun there. And then after that we got Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Grand Rapids, Tulsa, Oklahoma City, a bunch of side story shows. Go to last podcast in the left.com to find out where we're coming to

[Henry Zebrowski]

see you and Eddie. I got to take you to the Slippery Noodle.

[Ed Larson]

You're. I'm.

[Henry Zebrowski]

You're disgusting. Dude.

[Marcus Parks]

Don't take him to the Slippery Noodle.

[Henry Zebrowski]

He's got to stick.

[Marcus Parks]

Don't take him to the Slippery Noodle.

[Henry Zebrowski]

He's gotta see it. Just because the music performances alone.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

The last time we went when there was that weird 70 year old man with just the fan on him so his hair would blow back.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Do you remember that? And up in the jazz part, but that's also where the man showed up.

[Marcus Parks]

No, I wasn't. I don't remember that because I was in. I was stuck in the hotel room dying of long Covid.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah. You almost died that day.

[Ed Larson]

Indianapolis.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Indianapolis. Yeah. That's when the doctor came to see me at the hotel room to do a house call. And she told the. The told me that even though her husband died of COVID she still did not believe in Covid. And then she just handed me a whole lot of steroids, which a doctor back in New York told me was not the right thing to do.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It almost killed him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'll always remember that because, yeah, it was a rough time. And then we also met a weird met. It's very strange. I watch. I watched a nurse cheat on her husband.

[Ed Larson]

Oh, that's nice.

[Henry Zebrowski]

You love the Slippery Noodle.

[Ed Larson]

I've been to Indianapolis. I had a good time there. Was. I watched some ghost hunters and ate a bunch of sausages.

[Henry Zebrowski]

We're going to go to. We're going to go see some. Some bad jazz and we're gonna have someone flash us their penis in the men's room.

[Ed Larson]

As long as I can get sausages and stare at murals of Kurt Vonnegut, I'll be okay.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, no, definitely. If anybody at the Kurt Vonnegut, like, if anybody can give us some, like, curve. Kurt Vonnegut's my dude, you know, has been forever. So if anybody can give us like an inside track to some Kurt Vonnegut stuff in Indianapolis, side stories. LPOTL gmail.com Get a hold of us, we'd love to see it.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Please and thank you all. Hell sake.

[Ed Larson]

Hail Dave Schultz. Yeah, dude, really is.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, seriously, like, Dave was a. He's a what you want from an American athlete. He's a true American athlete.

[Henry Zebrowski]

He's a true American hero.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And it's sad what happened to him.

[Marcus Parks]

It is

[Ed Larson]

fine. By order of the Peaky Blinders Academy Award winner Killian Murphy returns alongside an all star cast including Rebecca Ferguson, Tim Roth, Sophie Rundle. With Academy award nominee Barry Keoghan and Emmy award winner Stephen Graham. In Netflix's upcoming film Peaky Blinders, the Immortal Man Tommy Shelby must face his own demons and choose whether to confront his legacy or burn it to the ground. Peaky Blinders the Immortal man is in select theaters March 6 and on Netflix March 20.

[Marcus Parks]

Rated R. A cancer diagnosis can turn life upside down. If you or a loved one drank alcohol and was later diagnosed with cancer, you may have legal options and could be eligible for compensation. Get a free confidential claim review today. It only takes a few minutes. Visit cancerclaims.info again. Cancerclaims.info prefer to call. Dial 866-986-2429 again 866-986-2429. Attorney Advertising.