The Real Johnny Appleseed was SUPER WEIRD (and Pretty Cool)

Summary

Ridiculous History

Episode: The Real Johnny Appleseed was SUPER WEIRD (and Pretty Cool)

Hosts: Ben Bowlin & Noel Brown
Date: June 16, 2026
Podcast by: iHeartRadio

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Episode Overview

This episode unpacks the legend and true story behind Johnny Appleseed, revealing how the historical John Chapman was both stranger and more impressive than the American myth. Ben and Noel explore his eccentric lifestyle, religious beliefs, business savvy, and the surprising real reasons those iconic apple orchards dotted early America. The episode also discusses how Johnny’s legacy intersected with U.S. history, from frontier expansion to Prohibition, drawing out the hilarious, bizarre, and surprising threads of his tale.

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Main Discussion Points & Insights

1. Johnny Appleseed: American Myth and Reality

• Mythic Figure (05:37-06:29):
  The hosts reflect on how Johnny Appleseed sits alongside legends like Paul Bunyan and Davy Crockett, with a story filtered through children's books and Disney’s 1948 cartoon Melody Time.
• Ben Bowlin: “It’s classic Americana. We’ve got a noble nomad on an exotic quest to spread produce… but the actual story here is even more ridiculous than the legend.” (07:41-06:57)
• Noel Brown: “He was kind of a proto-hippie, but like, he wasn’t. He was good for something.” (07:29-07:41)

2. The Real John Chapman: Origins and Family

• Early Life (12:36-15:33):
  John Chapman (b. 1774, before the U.S. existed) faced early hardship—his mother died post-childbirth, his father remarried, and the family struggled through the post-Revolutionary War period.
• Eccentric Upbringing:
  Overcrowded conditions likely fueled Johnny’s love of the outdoors and wandering.
• Wandering West (16:39-17:58):
  At 18, Johnny took his younger half-brother Nathaniel and began their hobo life on the frontier, seeking freedom on the move.

3. The Hobo Spirit & Apprenticeship

• Romanticizing the Hobo (18:33-19:44):
  The hosts discuss ‘hobo’ as a term for travelers who worked for their keep, not “bums,” celebrating the ingenuity and resiliency of such figures.
• Apprenticeship with Mr. Crawford (25:17-25:40):
  Johnny learned the techniques of apple nurseries and orchard creation from a mysterious Mr. Crawford, seeding his life purpose.

4. America’s Frontier, Land Deals, and Apple's Role

• Land Policy (27:32):
  The Ohio Company encouraged settlers by granting 100 acres if they could plant 50 apple and 20 peach trees within 3 years—motivation for Johnny’s business.
• Johnny’s Business Model (29:56–33:14):
  Chapman moved just ahead of settlers, planted nurseries, built fences, and sold mature orchards—an entrepreneurial approach that made him wealthy and famous.
• Noel Brown: “He’s doing like a distribution service and a warranty service. Pretty forward thinking.” (33:14)

5. The Truth About Johnny’s Apples

• Seed vs. Graft (35:12–36:25):
  Modern apples are grown via grafting for consistent fruit. Chapman planted seeds due to religious beliefs (Swedenborgianism), believing “grafting causes unnecessary suffering.”
• Bad Apples for Booze (37:35–39:06):
  Most apples he grew were bitter “spitters” unsuitable for eating but perfect for making hard cider, the most common beverage at the time.
• Noel Brown: “That’s a real myth killer right there. I’m picturing this just bounty of delightful treats… but they’re gonna become useful though… for other purposes.” (37:41–38:02)

6. Cider: America’s Frontier Drink

• Frontier Cider Culture (41:08-43:59):
  • Cider (hard and soft) was America’s staple—safer than water, consumed by all ages.
  • Estimates: in colonial Virginia or Massachusetts, each person drank 15–35 gallons a year—roughly a can daily (49:58–51:08).
  • “It was the soda pop or Coca Cola of its day.” – Ben Bowlin (41:08)
• Noel Brown: “Historians … describe life on the frontier as being lived through an alcoholic haze.” (43:59)

7. Chapman as a Missionary and Eccentric

• Lifestyle and Values (52:32–55:13):
  • Dressed in rags, wore a tin pot for a hat (“mush pan”), barefoot year-round.
  • Combined apple selling with Swedenborgian religious tracts; made deals for floor space in homes in exchange for storytelling and preaching.
  • Befriended animals, including a supposedly tamed wolf; eventually became vegetarian.

8. Legacy, Prohibition, and the FBI’s War on Cider

• Aftermath: Prohibition’s Impact (56:59-61:59):
  • After Chapman’s death, the apple industry thrived, blending his "wild" apples with new varieties suited for eating.
  • Prohibition (1920–1933) led the FBI to destroy cider orchards—which were mainly Chapman's, as they "weren’t good for eating, only for making booze."
  • “This wrecked the cider market... it does honestly suck.” – Ben Bowlin (61:59)

9. Modern Apple Culture and Lasting Influence

• Apples Shift from Drink to Snack (62:21–62:52):
  • Prohibition catalyzed the marketing of apples as a healthy snack, turning focus away from cider.
• Diversity Boon (57:05, 57:56):
  • Johnny’s insistence on planting by seed helped preserve apple genetic diversity, preventing the monoculture that would later plague banana crops.
  • Cider is now back as the U.S.'s fastest-growing alcoholic beverage category (63:01).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On American Mythology

• Ben Bowlin: “We all become myths over time, right?” (01:05)
• Noel Brown: “The most wholesome act of terrorism that ever took place.” (05:58)

On Business Savvy

• Ben Bowlin: “He would set up this share system … like a distribution service and a warranty service.” (33:14)
• Noel Brown: “He’s a bit of a Pied Piper type figure. Or a reverse Pied Piper, I don’t know.” (29:56)

On Apple Grafting

• Noel Brown: “Johnny said, oh, no, no, no, no, no. God wouldn’t like it.” (36:25)
• Ben Bowlin: “He was a devout member of the Swedenborgian church ... they said grafting plants is a huge ‘No.’” (36:39)

On Boozy Apples

• Ben Bowlin: “These pioneers are not excited to see the Apple Man because they love eating fruit... They're excited about apples because of something else. They absolutely love housing hard cider.” (39:06)

On Prohibition

• Ben Bowlin: “So before that point, apples were primarily known as a source of cider rather than an edible snack.” (62:21)

On Johnny's Life Philosophy

• Noel Brown: "He did never marry. He reportedly told people that if he didn’t find his soulmate on earth, she’d be waiting for him in heaven.” (56:02)

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Key Timestamps

• 05:37 – The Johnny Appleseed myth as “wholesome terrorism”
• 07:41–08:07 – Britannica’s description: cheerful, gentle, deeply religious, and kind to animals and Native Americans
• 09:45–10:25 – Disney’s animated version in Melody Time
• 12:36–15:33 – Chapman’s early life, family, and hardships
• 16:39–17:58 – The great family escape and Johnny’s beginnings as a wanderer
• 25:17–25:40 – Mr. Crawford and the start of Johnny’s apple apprenticeship
• 27:32 – How land-grant homesteading and apple nurseries worked
• 35:12–36:25 – Apple genetics and Johnny’s refusal to graft due to religious beliefs
• 39:06 – The real goal: apples for hard cider, not eating
• 41:08–43:59 – Cider as the original American beverage
• 49:58–51:08 – Cider consumption stats and comparison to today’s beverage drinking
• 52:32–55:13 – Rosella Rice’s vivid description of Chapman’s appearance and lifestyle
• 56:59–61:59 – Prohibition and the FBI’s war on Johnny’s legacy
• 62:21–62:52 – How marketing and prohibition shifted apples from booze to snack food
• 63:01 – The cider renaissance: “as recently as 2022, cider is the fastest-growing alcoholic beverage in the U.S.”

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Takeaways

• Historical Johnny was weirder—and cooler—than the myth: A devout, barefoot nomad in rags, passionate about apples, faith, and animals.
• He was a savvy entrepreneur: His seed-based strategies enabled massive orchard establishment along the American frontier.
• Most Johnny Appleseed apples were not for eating: They fueled America’s love of cider (both as a beverage and safe water alternative).
• Prohibition nearly erased his physical legacy: The FBI systematically destroyed cider orchards, changing the apple’s place in American diet and culture.
• Johnny’s approach preserved genetic diversity: By refusing to graft, he helped avoid agricultural monoculture plagues.
• Modern relevance: The legacy of cider is making a comeback, echoing Johnny’s original impact.

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Final Word:
Johnny Appleseed—both the myth and the man—left a wild, enduring mark on American culture. He was weirder, wilder, and more important than most of us ever learned in school, and (as Ben and Noel declare) “probably really cool to hang out with—as long as you didn’t talk about religion.” (63:30-63:41)

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Transcript

[Ben Bullen]

Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartradio. Welcome back to the show, fellow ridiculous historians. Thank you as always, so much for tuning. Tuning in. Let's hear it for our own American piece of mythology, our super producer, Mr. Max Williams.

[Noel Brown]

A real American hero.

[Ben Bullen]

Just so that's Mr. Noel Brown. They call me Ben Bullen here for tax purposes. And that's your government name. It's a government's name for a person, for you.

[Noel Brown]

You were assigned this name by a government at birth. Where are you even from?

[Ben Bullen]

All right, well, we all become myths over time, right?

[Noel Brown]

In our own minds at least.

[Ben Bullen]

So if you were a grade school kid in the US Then you inevitably, sometime in your early years, you hear made up stories about folks like George Washington. You might hear about folks like Pecos Bill, Paul Bunyan. Paul Bunyan's a great winner. Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett.

[Noel Brown]

David Crockett killed him a bar when he was only three.

[Ben Bullen]

With his bare hands, apparently. Ooh, get it?

[Noel Brown]

He killed a bar with his bar hands.

[Max Williams]

Let's not forget about those amazing heroic stories you heard about Richard Nixon.

[Ben Bullen]

Ah, yes, Richard Nixon.

[Noel Brown]

He was sort of a Pinocchio story, wasn't he? I think Richard Nixon was once a puppet and then he told lies and his nose got big and then he became a real boy and then got impeached.

[Ben Bullen]

I was gonna say he never quite became a real boy, but we've got a character from this American pan that's fascinated us for a while. You may know him by his street name, Johnny Appleseed. This is an I heart podcast. Guaranteed human.

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[Ben Bullen]

The popular tale will hold that this guy, like some demeter of old, traveled across the United States on foot, planting apple trees. Yeah, bar foot and planting apple trees. Making a bit of mischief along the way. The thing is what I love, the

[Noel Brown]

most wholesome act of terrorism that ever took place.

[Ben Bullen]

You get out of town with your apples, seeds, trees.

[Noel Brown]

I'm going to plant food and shade for everyone as an act of domestic terrorism. Terrorism.

[Ben Bullen]

It's like when. It's like the. How the plot of Footloose, which you taught me, is apparently all about a town that doesn't want people dancing.

[Noel Brown]

And then Kevin Bacon comes in and shakes it all up with his. Literally by shaking his hips.

[Ben Bullen]

And this story of Johnny Appleseed has fascinated us for a bit, folks. You see, it's loosely based on real world events, but it reminded me in the research for this, it reminded me of our earlier conversations about what loosely based or inspired by means. And we're gonna posit to you ridiculous historians that the actual story here is even more ridiculous than the legend.

[Noel Brown]

Yeah. And it even has some crossover with our sister show, stuff they don't want you to know, which is a bit of a twist that I'm not gonna spoil. But, yeah, we'll get there. Most American kids do, you know, hear about Johnny Appleseed in school. You might have seen a version of his story on one of those little children's books with all the historical figures with the giant heads, you know, on the front, who was, I think, is what they're called. Oh, maybe I made that up, but you know what I'm talking about. You've seen him in that delightful little section of Barnes and Noble with the stage and all the woodland creatures on the wall.

[Ben Bullen]

Story time in the afternoon.

[Noel Brown]

Story time in the afternoon with Johnny Appleseed. He was, in a way, kind of a proto hippie, but, like, he wasn't. He was good for something.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, yeah. Think about this. It's classic Americana. We've got a noble nomad on a exotic quest to a. To spread produce, specifically apples, throughout the still forming emergent United States. And we know Britannica is a British source, but they're really good for this one. So maybe we give you their description of our boy John.

[Noel Brown]

Yeah, they described him as being cheerful and generous in nature with an affinity for the wilderness, a gentleness of spirit that extended to the animal kingdom and all those aforementioned woodland creatures. He was also super into Jesus, way into but not. But you know what? That's not a but at all. He also, in addition to his love of the Bible, he also loved all of nature's great bounties and had a working knowledge of medicinal herbs. He also found quite an affinity with the native peoples of this land, the Native Americans, which is not always in line with what you think of as a typical Christian in this. In this day and age.

[Ben Bullen]

Oh, yeah, that's a great point.

[Noel Brown]

No, he's sort of like a live and let Live Christian.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, I could see that. He was known to be the kind of guy who would hang out with anyone. And above all, he's often described in terms of his eccentric appearance. He had very long hair. He, in place of your typical tricorn hat or whatever, he wore an inverted metal pan that he used as a hat and he used it to cook stuff. He was not a fan of shoes. He was basically wearing cast off rags for pants and he had a coffee sack over his shoulders. That's the part of the legend where he would have holes cut out for arms and he would have a bag of apple seeds. It's a fun, wholesome story.

[Noel Brown]

Yeah. If I'm not mistaken, like a lot of these mythical creatures of American folklore, there is an old Disney cartoon that personifies old Johnny Appleseed.

[George Severis]

Yeah.

[Ben Bullen]

Let's play a clip. This. This current image that grade school kids in our country have about Johnny Appleseed comes largely from a 1948 Disney film called Melody Time. It depicts Johnny Appleseed in sort of Cinderella esque fashion. He's surrounded by blue songbirds. He's got a jolly guardian angel. We're gonna play a little clip right now.

[Noel Brown]

And a stew pot for a hat.

[Ben Bullen]

And a stew pot for a hat. So we're gonna play this clip. Here we go. Those are bluebirds.

[Noel Brown]

The lard.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, because. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Noel Brown]

And because of, you know, cooking a mush pan.

[Ben Bullen]

So that's the Johnny Appleseed song.

[Noel Brown]

Voiced like an angel. Like a songbird himself. You know, we didn't use the term. I think I may have said it over the song and you might not have heard it, but the term mush pan is a new one to me. And in looking it up, it is typically referring to a fry pan devoted to making like cornmeal or cornbread, you know, sort of like a cast iron skillet. But I love the term mush pan. That's a lot of fun.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, it does again, sound like a British insult.

[Noel Brown]

Oh, Ben, I was right. And I know that you already knew this, but the Johnny Appleseed cartoon has been released in an edition called American Legends. Disney American Legends. It also includes a cartoon they did about Paul Bunyan and about John Henry, who was a steel driving man. And there's one other little. Let's see. The brave engineer. Oh, okay. About the exploits of legendary railroad engineer John Luther Casey Jones. Casey Jones.

[Ben Bullen]

Ah, okay.

[Noel Brown]

Better slow your speed.

[Ben Bullen]

So we know that some grade schoolers of a certain age, no offense to anybody, may have even dressed up like Johnny Appleseed for class projects.

[Noel Brown]

But it is a costume you can make with stuff laying around.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, all you need is an apple. But when you are learning this myth, this folklore, these kids, you're often going to be missing out on the real story because you see fellow ridiculous historians, the character Johnny Appleseed is based on an actual person named John Chapman.

[Noel Brown]

John Chapman. The app is in there. It's contained within the name.

[George Severis]

If it's not.

[Noel Brown]

If that's not nominative determinism, I don't know what is.

[Ben Bullen]

It's just one p. I know it's true.

[Noel Brown]

It's a reach.

[Ben Bullen]

I agree. He got it. This guy is. He's born before the United States is a thing. It's September 26, 1774. It's a place called Leominster. At the time, it is a province of Massachusetts Bay because they still don't have states yet.

[Noel Brown]

Ben, speaking of Massachusetts Bay, have you been enjoying Widow's Bay?

[Ben Bullen]

Yes. Yeah, I'm read up.

[Noel Brown]

Are you up to date? Did you watch the most recent one?

[Ben Bullen]

I did.

[Noel Brown]

I did, too. I just. I don't think we've talked about it on the show. But it is a really, really fun, Stephen King esque series on Apple tv and there is an episode in it that's kind of a flashback to colonial times on this cursed island. So there's, you know, there's some ridiculous history contained. There's a really creepy muse that has all this like, cannibalism. Cannibalism in the church. Yeah.

[Ben Bullen]

And they also. They also do, from a writing perspective, they do a wonderful job threading the line between comedy and horror. Actually one of the best examples I've ever seen.

[Noel Brown]

Thank you. I completely agree. I was going to say something very. Or I've been. I've been saying something very similar when I'm bragging about. Is genuinely scary at times, genuinely sweet and genuinely funny. And the performances are all just phenomenal. And you never believe that main guy is British as they come.

[Ben Bullen]

And also do check out if you're a fan of what's his name? Matthew Rhys.

[Noel Brown]

Yeah.

[Ben Bullen]

Thank you. Do check out the Americans if you're a fan. He was in there. They don't want you to know.

[Noel Brown]

I never. Okay, thank you, Ben, because I need something fresh right now. While I'm waiting for the next Widow's Bay to drop, I'm going to check out the Americans. Never do.

[Ben Bullen]

Much of John Chapman's early years were lost to history. We do know that he was the second child of a couple called Nathaniel and Elizabeth Chapman. Unfortunately, like so many Families in this time, in this part of the world, childbirth was a hard mortality threat. So his mother passed away when he was very young. It's 1776, so he's at most 2 years old. She passes away after giving birth to a child who also passes away soon after. So John never really got to meet that sibling. In 1780, probably due to economic circumstances as much as due to romance, his father, Nathanael remarries. This time he marries a lady named Lucy Coley. And Nathaniel and Cooley go on to have 10 more children.

[Noel Brown]

Yep, they sure did. And given. Given the aforementioned risk of. Of childbirth mortality, that seems like a risky move in that day and age. But, you know, it was also like, you know, that there was. There was no birth control either, so.

[Ben Bullen]

Or cable or social media.

[Noel Brown]

Anything to do. Much of anything. Yeah, yeah. So we don't know a ton about, like you said, his early childhood, but it was. He lived rough. No question about that. The family didn't have a lot of money becoming a farmer. Nathaniel had fought as a member of the militia, the Minutemen in the Revolutionary War. Their savings were very meager and they were kind of blasted on through, especially in the post war chaos. Government wasn't paying folks like him enough, not nearly enough to raise a family as massive as the one that they had found themselves raising. So there were a lot of mouths to feed, but. And likely not a lot of space, but it would seem that they were happy.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, we can't help but imagine, and that's a romanticized concept, but we can exercise that. We also can't help but imagine a childhood in such a crowded household, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory style. It must have instilled a love of the outdoors in young Johnny, because going outside of this very crowded series of cabins was literally the only time this guy could get some peace and quiet. So it's no surprise, actually, John reminds me a little bit of your brother Alex. According to some biographers, when he's 18 years old, he goes to one of his half brothers who's 11 years old, a guy named Nathaniel Cooley Chapman, and he says, hey, let's get out of this cartoonishly crowded house. It's 1792. Let's go west. And they basically became hobos until 1805. That's when they agreed. That's when their dad moved again. They agreed to meet up with them in Ohio. And Max, we see you popping in and out here. Are we being unfair to our composer?

[Max Williams]

I was going to say, are you calling Alex a hobo?

[Noel Brown]

I'm He's a jolly traveler.

[Ben Bullen]

A jolly traveler. Thank you, Noel.

[Noel Brown]

Now, I also. I don't think it's the pejorative. The term hobo as a pejorative. I don't care.

[Ben Bullen]

Hobo is awesome.

[Noel Brown]

I think it rules. And we often talk about hobo codes and these lexicon of symbols and things and that, you know. But it does seem like people kind of turn their nose up when you say hobo. And I just think to me,

[Max Williams]

a

[Noel Brown]

romanticized kind of type of figure, like a wandering troubadour, you know?

[Ben Bullen]

Well, the difference between. And this is from people I know in the traveling community, even now, the difference between a hobo and a bum. And this was a huge deal during the Great Depression. The difference is that a hobo is traveling to make an honest day's living, to seek not just adventure, but to also be a meaningful, productive part of society. Whereas a bum is just taking.

[Noel Brown]

He's out there bumming.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, they're takers. They're not reciprocators. They'll help you.

[Noel Brown]

The term was originated in the American West. Just makes sense for where we're going with the story as a term referring to itinerant railway workers, which totally lines up with your mention of the traveling community, AKA train kids, which is very much an extension of that. The etymology is like a lot of etymology and fun terms like this. This a little bit debated over, but one would be homeward bound, which I kind of dig. Right.

[Ben Bullen]

I like that. That's hobo.

[Noel Brown]

Yeah.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, I think that's cool. It's interesting. Maybe a retroactively manufactured portmanteau, but I

[Noel Brown]

do love it, you know, 100%. And all of these, like. There's another one that references the city of Hoboken.

[Veronica Roth]

Okay.

[Sam Taggart]

Oh, okay.

[Noel Brown]

Well, yeah, but that's sort of like a chicken or the egg kind of thing, right?

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Right.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah. And we know that this younger half brother, Nathaniel Jr. When his. When his family shows up to Ohio, he says, look, Johnny, I'm going to stay here with dad. I'm going to help farm the land. And John says, I'm not done roaming. The horizon beckons. So he. This is so weird. He does have like a Jedi apple mentor

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This is Jenny Garth from I Choose Me with Jennie Garth. You know, history is full of surprising little details and laundry. Turns out it's got its own fascinating story too, because not all detergents are created equal. Tide Liquid Laundry Detergent isn't just clean, it's boosted clean for cleaner, whiter, brighter and fresher results compared to Tide simply and those stubborn stains that always seem to show up at the worst times. Tide tackles 100% of common stains for every load every time. Now, if grease is your nemesis, think food spills, cooking splatters. Tide's got 10 times grease fighting ingredients compared to bargain brands. And it works in a machine in any water condition on all your machine washable fabrics. It's no wonder Tide was America's number one detergent in sales last year. So if it's gotta be clean and it's gotta be fresh to be tied, shop now at your local retailer. Tide is a proud sponsor of the Elton John Impact Awards, honoring those who have helped shape a more inclusive and compassionate world with their artistry, advocacy and unwavering commitment to equality. You won't want to miss the Elton John Impact Awards podcast, available on June 1st on the iHeartRadio app. And everywhere podcasts are heard. Hi, it's Karen and Georgia from My Favorite Murder.

[Karen or Georgia from My Favorite Murder]

We cruised around LA in the Hyundai Ionic 5 and dove into the fascinating life of actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr. Want the full story of Take a listen. She starts dating Howard Hughes and in fact she helps him design a faster plane. So she finds the fastest bird and the fastest fish and sketches out a drawing of what the two would look like as a plane. And that becomes the plane that we know today. And he calls her a genius. Check out our new episode spotlighting groundbreaking innovators like Hedy and Lamarr and Billie

[Noel Brown]

Jean King, presented by the Hyundai Ioniq 5.

[Karen or Georgia from My Favorite Murder]

Goodbye

[Kalpen (Cal Penn)]

hey everyone, it's Cal Penn, host of Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. This week on the podcast I'm sitting down with Lily Chu, the author of the Audible original romantic comedy Just Kiss Already. It's a story about a forensic anthropologist who secretly writes mystery novels, an actress who adapts his book into a film, and what happens when a meme and a media tour collide with a slow burn romance. It's performed by Simu Liu and Philippa Su and it is an absolute blast.

[Lily Chu]

When you actually hear the performance, you realize that other people are taking your words and what you thought was kind of a straightforward sentence like the cat in the corner is black. In my head it's the cat in the corner is black. Not the dog, not the Gerber, but someone else might say it, the cat in the corner is black. That's always fascinating to me how they just bring in all these different nuances and really make it fun and interesting and distinctive.

[Kalpen (Cal Penn)]

Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club on the iHeartradio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Okta Advertiser]

These days it seems like AI agents are just about everywhere you turn, every field and every function. But without identity, you can't trust. Trust they'll serve your business instead of jeopardizing it. Fortunately, Okta helps you get identity right by securing your AI agents identities, giving you a single layer of control, a single standard of trust. So whether an AI agent supports a single user or your entire enterprise, with Okta you'll turn risk into opportunity. Secure every agent, secure any agent. Okta secures AI.

[Ben Bullen]

He becomes the Padawan for an apple farmer whose name we don't fully know. He's just listed as a Mr. Crawford. And John becomes an apprentice of this Mr. Crawford. This is where he learns to make nurseries and orchards. This is probably what sets him on his later very apple centric career.

[Noel Brown]

I'm sorry, I'm distracted because it just popped into my head. A song from the movie A Mighty Wind, the Christopher Guest mockumentary about like a folk revival. And there's a group that's depicted in that that Guest himself plays a member of called the Folksman. And they have this song called Never did no Wandering. And the beauty of it, the joke of it is it's this romanticized the verses descriptions of all of these adventures on the highways and byways. But then the chorus is the fact that this person singing it never did any of that it says, my mama was the cold north wind My daddy was the son of a railroad man from west of hell where the trains don't even run. Never heard the whistle of a southbound train or the singing of its driving wheel No, I never did no wondering, never did no wondering, never did no wandering. After all, it's such a. It's such a subtle, dry joke, but Johnny definitely did some wandering.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, John did. And we'll never know. But we'll never know the entirety of the details of his adventures. Some of the specifics are again lost to time irreparably. This is also super convenient for the myth building, but we know that by the early 1800s, by the turn of the 19th century, our guy was on the western edge of Pennsylvania because he wanted to be near the country's rapidly expanding western frontier. At the turn of the 19th century, there were speculators, there were private companies, they were buying up vast swaths of land in what they called the Northwest Territory, and they were just waiting for settlers to arrive and buy it. There is a fascinating economic context here, and we've gotta share it with you, courtesy of the Smithsonian.

[Noel Brown]

Yes, we do. Starting in 1792, the Ohio Company of associates made a deal with potential settlers. Anyone willing to form. There's other versions of this kind of deal where you'd like, promise to settle, they'd give you attractive land, or like a little bit of starting up money. Anyone willing to form a permanent homestead on the wilderness beyond. Ohio's first permanent settlement would be granted 100 acres of land. To prove their homesteads to be permanent, settlers were required to plant 50 apple trees and 20 peach trees in three years, since an average apple tree took roughly 10 years to bear fruit. It's a long game with these trees, man. With these fruit trees, right?

[Ben Bullen]

They're making sure that people aren't just getting land or buying it remotely in, say, Boston. They're saying you have to live here. You have to show your commitment to have future generations live here. And John Chapman clocks this opportunity immediately. So we have to remember that planting a functioning orchard or a nursery, it is a specialized skill set. It's way different from just. From just finishing your favorite fruit or throwing some herbs willy nilly in your backyard and starting an herb garden. John takes again to the road, and he wanders on foot from Pennsylvania all the way to Illinois. He's continually moving just ahead of the settlers or quiet part allowed the colonizers. And he purchases parcels of land. And so before the settlers get there, he has already Cultivated these orchards and nurseries. So when you're like, let's say we're the four of us, you listening? And Nola, Max, and myself, we are traveling, right? And we're going to make a homestead out west. When we show up to this undeveloped land, we see John Chapman, who has already quite some time before, created one of those orchards that we need to satisfy our legal agreement with the government. And he says, look, I'll sell it to you, and I'll be back. I gotta move on.

[Noel Brown]

He's a bit of a Pied Piper type figure, right? And a reverse Pied Piper. I don't know. So wait, the did that not. So wasn't it a little suspicious that the trees were already a little further along than they would have been to satisfy that deal?

[Ben Bullen]

They loved it, dude.

[Noel Brown]

They liked it. They were into it.

[Ben Bullen]

They were like, we already have so much to do. We have to build our log cabin.

[Noel Brown]

Oh, that is a good point. No, I'm sure they did. I guess what I just mean is, like, wouldn't the government be like, well, that's cheating. You got Johnny Appleseed did it for you.

[Ben Bullen]

They actually liked it because it promoted permanence, and it made the settlers more likely to hang out there for that extended amount of time.

[Starbucks Advertiser]

Time.

[Noel Brown]

I'm super excited to talk a little bit about how apples are propagated and the whole idea of how do you prevent monoculture and all that. And if you want a cool visual representation of all this, everything I know about this, other than reading up on this research brief that you put together. Ben came from this new Zach Galifianakis gardening show.

[Ben Bullen]

Yes, I love it.

[Noel Brown]

Very first episode, he talks about apples and grafting versus seeds, grafting versus seeds, and all of that. We're gonna get into that, but really quickly. I just had to ment. I just recently found out on an episode of the Doughboys from the guest Brandy Posey, who's a really great comedian. There's a reality show called Homestead rescue where, like, these, like, real, seasoned, grizzled homesteaders go, like, kitchen nightmare style to families that are trying to live. Live a life on the range and are doing apparently a real bad job at it.

[Ben Bullen]

Oh, wow.

[Noel Brown]

And they swoop in and, like, you know, tell them what they're. Where they're messing up and get. Get their homestead lives back in order. But they are apparently being sued by a couple who claimed that they were told they were gonna be featured on a show promoting homesteading as, like, seasoned homesteaders, and they weren't really Told they were actually rubes, they were gonna be made to look like rubes and pilloried for their bad job at homesteading.

[Ben Bullen]

Oh, man. Well, we do know that John had again, he went into this ten toes down. He.

[Noel Brown]

So he's got a lot of these things planted and he's now figured out a business model?

[Ben Bullen]

More or less.

[Noel Brown]

Yes.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah. He planted his first nursery on the bank of a place called Broken Straw Creek, which is south of Warren, Pennsylvania. And the, the settlers, to be fair, this guy's not a grifter. They got a pretty nifty bargain. He wouldn't just plant the trees in advance of their encroachment. He also built fences to protect those trees from farm animals, from wildlife. And he would set up this share system because, as we said, he travels widely, he's nomadic. Before he leaves for another area, he finds a neighbor, an already established settler, and he says, look, you take care of these nurseries and you as the neighbor, as the person in charge, you can sell, sell the trees and their produce on shares and I will come back every year or two to make sure everything is up to snuff. So he's doing like a distribution service and a warranty service. Pretty forward thinking.

[Noel Brown]

It's very forward thinking. And you gotta wonder like, how big picture was he thinking? Was he really looking at the larger sustainable, like, you know, farming of it all or was he just kind of doing his thing, you know, and just like really into apples? I just gotta wonder if he, if he saw the big picture of what, of how important what he was doing was ultimately going to be.

[Ben Bullen]

That's a great question. It's one that we have to, we have to really dig into because the root of it is the legend versus the man. But we, yeah, but we are happy to report that part of the legend is true. Yes. This guy really did walk all the time, probably barefoot or barefoot, as we said. And he really did like some kind of apple themed Santa, carry around a big old bag of apple seeds. He got them for free. We'll get to this. But Noel, I want to go back to something you teased there earlier. Apples are super strange. The seeds from your favorite apple apple, they don't always result in a tree making the same kind of apples. So you could have your favorite, like let's say you love a Fuji or a Honeycrisp. You could take the seeds from your Fuji or Honeycrisp and let's say you chew it down to the core, you got the seeds. You say, I'm not Going to eat the apple seeds, because I saw Always Sunny in Philadelphia, I'm going to plant these. Those seeds are vastly more likely not to create another Honeycrisp or Fuji tree. To do that, you have to practice something we call grafting. And grafting is pretty much how the apple industry works today.

[Noel Brown]

Yeah, I mean, it's sort of self explanatory in a way because you sort of show shave off a piece of another tree and then just kind of attach it to another tree. Right?

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah. You take that cutting, like you were saying, from an existing tree that makes the apples you enjoy, and then you fuse it onto what we call a root stock. Right. The bottom of the tree. It will adopt the limb because of the great superpowers of apple genetics. And then it will take a little time for your new Frankenstein's monster to start producing fruit. But the investment is worth it. You know, you won't be getting some unpredictable inedible mutant. You'll get your honeycrisp, you'll get your Fuji, because it'll be exactly based on the original tree, the donor tree that you got the graft from. But the thing is. Ah, guys, this is the easiest answer. This is the best answer. This is what the apple industry uses today. But Johnny said, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. God wouldn't like it.

[HIMS Advertiser]

What?

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, okay. Yeah. He was a devout member of the Swedenborgian church, or the new church, as he called it.

[Noel Brown]

He was assimilated by the Swedenborg.

[Starbucks Advertiser]

Yeah.

[Ben Bullen]

This part of their. I think this is one of their oddly specific beliefs. But they said grafting plants is a huge. No. No across the board because it causes the plants unnecessary suffering. So this guy is a faithful congregate, if not a zealot, and he says, I can't graft. I gotta plant all my orchids from seed. Which he also, by the way, he gets these seeds for cider mills back on the east coast. And there are barrels and barrels of these seeds that the cider mills don't want because the produce would be unpredictable. And this means that the apples, Johnny Appleseed, John Chapman plants. The majority of time, if you're a person, you're not going to eat them. They're called spitters. They're like bitter. They're small. Yeah, they're stinking.

[Noel Brown]

Pinky. Oh, no. They're bad apples.

[Ben Bullen]

They're bad, dude. Yes. They're literally bad apples.

[Noel Brown]

Bad apple, man. Which I guess could also mean a rotten apple, but that is. That's a real myth killer right there. I'M picturing this just bounty of delightful treats growing up out of the earth from Johnny Appleseed's, you know, mystical touch. But no, there it is gonna, they're gonna become useful though, if you can imagine, for a other purposes.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, it might sound like his business was doomed from the get go because of his conscientious objection, his religious constraints. But like you said, Noel, this is very much not the case. People wanted permanence over taste. And John's trees, they didn't make delicious fruit the vast majority of the time, but by God, they were tough. They could survive those harsh winters and bad soil. He kept a top secret ledger to arrange his travels. And he checked in with all the nurseries and orchids he created. Nobody ever saw this ledger, but we know he used it because it was always on time. And his clients were incredibly happy to see the Apple man because this is one of our first twists. Right. Like, as you said, Noel, these pioneers are not excited to see the Apple man because they love eating fruit. They're excited about apples because of something else. They absolutely love housing hard cider.

[Noel Brown]

They do, they do. And you don't need necessarily. It's sort of like using a kind of brown avocado to make a smoothie or something like that. Right? Yeah, you know, or like, you know, spinach that's just about to turn, but if you saute it up, you might cream enough, you might not know the difference.

[Max Williams]

So because of the condition, I can't have spinach, so I eat a lot of kale and ooh, that very end of that kale, then it's getting that really nasty, funky smell. You know, you have at most two days left. Boil it up, blend it up and make it, make a kale sauce for some pasta.

[Noel Brown]

Oh, good call.

[Ben Bullen]

Beautiful. Good call. I like, bake kale with some sesame oil.

[Noel Brown]

Oh, it's a great, it's a great sesame oil, though. That is something that you don't really get comfortable with till you get a little older. Learned that from my mom or how she was always like really preserving till the last possible using every part of the unicorn as inverse.

[Max Williams]

With my mom, she wants to like, if the eggs go bad in two weeks, they gotta go, they gotta go.

[Noel Brown]

That's how my kid is. My kid will not eat a yogurt one day past the expiration date. I'm like, kiddo, it's a sell by date.

[Okta Advertiser]

Don't care.

[Noel Brown]

Dead to me. This yogurt is dead to me.

[Max Williams]

And yogurt's kind of one of These things that's getting better with age anyways.

[Ben Bullen]

We also clearly, like so many of our fellow ridiculous historians, got to a point where we became more boy scout level thrift when we had to pay for stuff that's a big part of it. And look, guys, cider is great. It's not for everyone. That's fine. Not everything is for everyone, as my mother used to say. But both the non alcohol and the boozy version, the hard cider, they could have a sweet crisp tang. It's perfect on an autumn night. You know, I'll have a cider once a year. I'll check it out. But what may surprise a lot of us is back in the 17 and 1800s of North America, cider was so much more popular. It was like the soda pop or the Coca Cola of its day.

[Noel Brown]

A soft cider for the ladies. Right? I'm joking. But that is said often in like westerns, you know, with the lady, like a soft cider or a sarsaparilla.

[Ben Bullen]

In Tombstone.

[Noel Brown]

I think probably in Tombstone in. In Deadwood.

[Ben Bullen]

Okay. What is sarsaparilla?

[Noel Brown]

Sarsaparilla, it's a non alcoholic kind of root rooted soda.

[Ben Bullen]

Okay, okay, that makes sense. So we.

[Noel Brown]

Sioux City Sasprel is apparently a good one. It tastes a lot like root beer.

[Ben Bullen]

I like that as a southern not insult, but compliment. Oh, you little Sioux City sassy, sassy jump in here.

[Max Williams]

That's one of the best jokes. And Fallout New Vegas, where it's like the only game that doesn't have Nuka Cola. It's got Sunset Sarsaparilla instead.

[Noel Brown]

That's right. Sunset, yeah, for sure.

[Max Williams]

But in Fallout 4's Far Harbor DLC they have the Fallout version of Tab and nobody likes it. I think there's commentary about people not liking it, but it's the only sort of they have.

[Ben Bullen]

Oh well, yeah, you get in situations

[Max Williams]

and that's the Max of the fan.

[Ben Bullen]

Max, who's that sneaking in the phone? It's Max and he's full of knowledge just for you right now.

[Max Williams]

Here he comes.

[Ben Bullen]

It's Max with the facts. No doubt that's a reach, but we'll. Yeah, we'll do it. So since we, we know that the, the people in the frontier also didn't have a lot of choices for beverages, so. So water sources could be full of all sorts of bacteria or feces or other contaminants. Cider was actually a safe, stable source of hydration, similar to how other civilizations across the pond often drank wine.

[Noel Brown]

Drank wine or drank mead. Even further back Than that. A lot of times it was out of necessity because water was gross. And so at least you knew that if it was fermented, yeah, it'd give you a little buzz, but would also quench your thirst. That's why they would typically drink what we might consider lower ABV beverages. You know, they'd still be drinking it all. The live long day. They had to have been soused on the regular, dude.

[Ben Bullen]

The cider was all. It all had some content of alcohol. But to your point, Noel, it didn't have nearly as much alcohol as, say, like a hard liquor that they'd be familiar with, like rum or whiskey. But it was booze and people did, again, drink it like water. So let's just diplomatically say that probably adds up over time, I would think. Yeah, the kids drank it too. And if your parents were really strict, they would water it down a little bit.

[Noel Brown]

Sure would.

[Ben Bullen]

What we're saying the kids were also day drunk.

[Noel Brown]

They were at least day tipsy. So much so that historians like Howard Means, who wrote Johnny Appleseed, the man, the myth, the American story describes life on the frontier as being lived through an alpha alcoholic haze. That's history for you, though, right there. I mean, again, to the point about the, like the Vikings or the Middle Ages, any of these eras, people were boozed up.

[Ben Bullen]

It reminds me of one of those favorite apocryphal or one of my favorite apocryphal statements from historians in Ireland who would. They would say, you know, it's interesting. The Irish were doing really great. Great. And then one of them invented whiskey and they went into. It was all over.

[Noel Brown]

It was all over from there. What if we had a thing like this cider stuff, but you only had to drink a couple sips of it to get wasted?

[Ben Bullen]

Or what if we just had safe water? To be honest, like scholars.

[Noel Brown]

No, no, no, no, no, no.

[George Severis]

Get that.

[Ben Bullen]

That guy's not fun. Get him out of here.

[Noel Brown]

No, let's just. Let's drink more of this wood juice.

[Ben Bullen]

We'll drink wood juice.

[Jenny Garth]

This is Jenny Garth from I Choose Me with Jennie Garth. You know, history is full of surprising little details and laundry. Turns out it's got its own fascinating story too, because not all detergents are created equal. Tide liquid laundry detergent isn't just clean, it's boosted clean for cleaner, whiter, brighter and fresher results compared to Tide simply. And those stubborn stains that always seem to show up at the worst times. Times. Tide tackles 100% of common stains for every load every time. Now, if Grease is your nemesis. Think food spills, cooking splatters, Tide's got 10 times grease fighting ingredients compared to bargain brands. And it works in a machine in any water condition on all your machine washable fabrics. It's no wonder Tide was America's number one detergent in sales last year. So if it's gotta be clean and it's gotta be fresh, it's gotta be Tide. Shop now at your local retailer. Tide is a sponsor of the Elton John Impact Awards, honoring those who have helped shape a more inclusive and compassionate world with their artistry, advocacy and unwavering commitment to equality. You won't want to miss the Elton John Impact Awards podcast, available on June 1st on the iHeartRadio app. And everywhere podcasts are heard. Hi, it's Karen and Georgia from My favorite Murder.

[Karen or Georgia from My Favorite Murder]

We cruised around LA in the Hyundai Ionic 5 and dove into the fascinating life of actress and inventor Hedy Lamar. Want the full story? Take a listen. She starts dating Howard Hughes and in fact she helps him design a faster plane. So she finds the fastest bird and the fastest fish and sketches out a drawing of what the two would look like as a plane and that becomes the plane that we know today. And he calls her a genius. Check out our new episode spotlighting groundbreaking innovators like Hedy and Lamarr and Billie Jean King, presented by the Hyundai Ioniq 5. Goodbye.

[Kalpen (Cal Penn)]

Hey everyone, it's Cal Penn, host of Irsay, The Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. This week on the podcast I'm sitting down with Divergent author Veronica Roth to talk about her sprawling new novel, Seek the Traitor's Son. It's a sci fi fantasy epic about two protagonists on opposite sides of a war and a prophecy neither of them wanted.

[Veronica Roth]

My first book was Divergent and one that came came out like, because it was so popular. I think it attracted like mostly positivity, but the negativity I sucked in like a sponge. And I think it was like critiques of things I liked when I was like, you know, I was 23 and I wrote this book and it had all my like dorky little cheesy or maybe unrealistic loves in it. And I started to feel a lot of shame about those things. And so for the rest of my career I steered away from those little things that like make you feel pleasure when you read. But I also was like saying no to these parts of myself that I then was like, screw it. Yeah, so that's this book.

[Kalpen (Cal Penn)]

Listen to Irsay, the Audible and iHeart audiobook club on the iHeartradio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Okta Advertiser]

These days, it seems like AI agents are just about everywhere you turn, every field and every function. But without identity, you can't trust they'll serve your business business instead of jeopardizing it. Fortunately, Okta helps you get identity right by securing your AI agents identities, giving you a single layer of control, a single standard of trust. So whether an AI agent supports a single user or your entire enterprise, with Okta you'll turn risk into opportunity. Secure every agent. Secure any agent. Okta secures AI.

[George Severis]

This is George Severis and Sam Taggart from Stratiolab. Okay, okay. Picture your apartment after a Saturday workout. The gym bag, the couch, maybe even the car. Mi amor. It's a full novella of odors, and not the glamorous kind.

[Sam Taggart]

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[George Severis]

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[Sam Taggart]

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[George Severis]

Because home should smell like you. Fabulous. Fresh, Unforgettable.

[Sam Taggart]

Febreze is a proud sponsor of the Elton John Impact Awards, honoring those who have helped shape a more inclusive and compassionate world with their artistry, advocacy and unwavering commitment to equality.

[Max Williams]

Quality.

[George Severis]

You won't want to miss the Elton John Impact awards podcast, available June 1 on the iHeartRadio app. And everywhere podcasts are heard,

[Ben Bullen]

Scholars estimate that this spiked apple juice was consumed to the tune of. Let's see, in the 1700s, people living in what we call Virginia, Massachusetts. Now, each of them, every man, woman and child, was guzzling down between 15 and 35 gallons of hard cider per year. If you're on the frontier, you're drinking an estimated. This is a dodgy one, but an estimated 10.52 ounces of hard cider a day. So I guess your typical soda pop can will be what, 12 ounces?

[George Severis]

I think that's.

[Noel Brown]

That's right.

[Ben Bullen]

Okay, so we're drinking a little bit less than a full soda can of hard cider with Booze. The children are drinking it too. For comparison, as of 2020 or so, the average modern American resident drinks 20 ounces of water a day. Honestly, we should all be drinking more. Not to judge, but this might be the top time to, you know, go get a cold glass of water, I think.

[Noel Brown]

So. I recently got a big old like mutagen tank looking thing that I fill up with water and try to drink it two or three times over during a day. And Ben, I got a picture that they were consuming this stuff out of these giant jugs with three X's on them.

[Ben Bullen]

You know, that's funny. I wonder if they. If they were, they were definitely reusing the jug. The. The historian you mentioned there, Noel Means, goes on to describe hard cider. Not as a treat, not as like a fun beverage like how we would grab a soda, but instead as a staple of the frontier diet. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. As much a part of the dining table as meat or bread, which means business. Wise old Johnny Chapman nailed it. And churches loved him too. They described him not as a businessman, but as a missionary. Because they said, you know, he's walking around, he's not just sowing apple seed and teaching people how to make booze, but he's also passing out religious tracts. And this is where. Okay, this is where we have one of our peak descriptions of the real life John Chapman. It's from an author named Rosella Rice. She writes about this in a publication from 1863 called the History of Ashland County, Ohio. It's a little bit long, dude, so I suggest we round. Right, Robin, it.

[Noel Brown]

Oh, I completely support this notion. I'll start. His personal appearance was as singular as his character. He was a small, chunked man, quick and restless in his motions and conversation. His beard, though not long, was unshaven and his hair was long and dark and his eyes black and sparkling.

[Ben Bullen]

He lived the roughest life, often slept in the woods. His clothing was mostly old, being generally given to him in exchange for apple trees. He was barefooted and often traveled miles through the snow. In that way, he wore on his head a 10 utensil, which answered both as a cap and a mush pot.

[Noel Brown]

Why not? Why? Why have two when you. When you could just do both things with one?

[Ben Bullen]

I agree with it. I love a multifunctional device.

[Noel Brown]

I do too. I do too. A real character indeed. And he is known as the world's most successful apple themed hobo. That's what your awards, Ben. Or a bit of a proto hippie, as we had mentioned earlier. You Know, he knew what he liked, he knew how he wanted to live. He dressed the way he did out of preference and also out of utility.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah. Not out of necessity. He reminds me a little bit of Gabe Newell, the creator of Steam or the co founder of Valve. Just because Gabe Newell, you're never going to see that guy in a three piece suit. It's not that he can't afford a three piece suit suit. This is one for the gaming nerds. It's because he wants to dress comfortably and Johnny seems like a pretty cool hang. He isn't hurting for money. A lot of people didn't know this at the time, but he ultimately accumulates about 1200 acres across three states for his nurseries and his orchards that he would buy up before the settlers arrive. And if he's visiting a settler settlement and he doesn't feel like sleeping out in the woods, which was his usual habit, then he would make a deal, a side bet, you could say a parlay. And he would say, I'll tell stories to your children and I'll proselytize to you about the new church if you let me just sleep on the floor inside. And you know, sometimes, but not always, they give him supper. He loved animals. Animals. He, he even. I don't know how true this is, but multiple historians said that he befriended and tamed a wolf, he fixed up its injured leg and it just followed him around afterwards forever until it died.

[Noel Brown]

Like a familiar.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, just so, I mean we know he, we know there are other accounts that are. This is kind of the myth making stuff because we can't prove it. But there are other accounts of him seeing mosquitoes flying over his campfire and immediately putting out the fire because you want the mosquitoes to burn.

[Noel Brown]

The Sweden Borgian of it all, they, they would do no harm, you know.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, yeah. And you know, he preserved the peace of Ben. He would see somebody about to put a horse down and he would save the horse. And obviously, predictably later in the life he becomes a vegetarian. Some of us know. I'm a former vegetarian myself, a lapsed vegetarian, I could say it's objectively the right thing to do. But man meat though, right?

[Noel Brown]

And as you can imagine, living the traveling life is not really one to settle down. He did never marry. He reportedly told people that if he didn't find his soulmate on earth, she'd be waiting for him in heaven. That's real sweet.

[Okta Advertiser]

Yeah.

[Ben Bullen]

And we unfortunately don't know exactly when he made it to the pearly gates. Multiple contemporary sources Report different dates of his death. To give you the quick summation, most people agree it was sometime in March of 1845. He went out well into old age. Apparently went peacefully in his place. His legend blossomed. But that's not quite the end of the story, because you might be asking ridiculous historians. Hey, what were the guys teasing earlier? If this dude planted so many trees, where the heck are they now? We've got a conspiratorial twist for you.

[Noel Brown]

What's the FBI think of all this?

[Ben Bullen]

Right, the FBI that never existed during his lifetime.

[Noel Brown]

I know. How does this figure into prohibition? You may be asking.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, we're gonna tell you that's the best question there, Noel. So after Johnny Chapman passes, settlers keep his nurseries and orchards going. Over time, they cultivate specific varieties of apple. Kind of tailor made to the climate of the United States, including stuff you can eat, not just grind down into cider. So thanks to John Chapman and those who follow after him, the apple grows and changes in step with the growth of America. It turns out it's a big win for him to insist on planting seeds instead of grafting because he avoids, like you said so brilliantly at the top of this episode, he avoids the dangers of monoculture, which is what wrecked the good bananas.

[Noel Brown]

Right, right. And I think we've either done. We certainly must have talked about it in our Chiquita Banana episode or. No, was it dole, the thing about the overthrowing the government?

[Ben Bullen]

Oh, right, yeah. United, free.

[Noel Brown]

That's right. Exactly. Yeah. Original bananas tasted different. And banana candy supposedly tastes more like the gross.

[Ben Bullen]

Michelle.

[Noel Brown]

Yeah, what the original bananas tasted like. Some of these clever growing techniques led to, you know, what you refer to delightfully been as successful mutants or hybrids. Right. Things like the Golden Delicious or the Red Delicious, which I'm not an apple guy, by the way. I don't want to eat an apple. I like an apple car crisp, an apple crumble, an apple pie. But it is my understanding that the basic of apples is the Red Delicious.

[Ben Bullen]

It's mushy.

[Noel Brown]

A little overrated.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree with you. It's. It's okay. But it's often overrated. That's a positive note, however, for everybody who is sipping a cider. As you're listening to this, we do have an unfortunate, fascinating tale. Like you said, the. The FBI eventually set their sights on old Appleseed's legacy way after he actually died. It's because that from 1920 to 1933, Uncle Sam was pushed by a crisis of conscience with its long History, if we're being honest, its long history of normalized alcoholism. They enacted pro amendment prohibition. Prohibition makes booze illegal. If you are the average person, you can no longer make booze even at home for yourself. You cannot import it, you cannot transport it, and you cannot sell anything that has booze in it.

[Noel Brown]

Right. And creates pretty overnight a thriving black market.

[Starbucks Advertiser]

Yeah.

[Noel Brown]

As typically happens when any kind of probing is involved, people don't like to be told what they can't do.

[Ben Bullen]

That's exactly it, man. Because we also talked about this in stuff they don't want you to know. The US government was a bad guy here several times. They killed innocent people by poisoning alcohol supplies, ethanol.

[Karen or Georgia from My Favorite Murder]

Right.

[George Severis]

Yeah.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah. And it quickly became a law that a lot of people would break just on principle. Even if you're your average American, like, like the Maxes or the Nulls or the Bens, and you don't particularly love drinking booze, you might still crack a cold one because, hey, this is America, buddy. You, I won't do what you tell me. Thanks for the beat, Max.

[Noel Brown]

Thanks for the lyric rage.

[Ben Bullen]

Thanks for the lyric rage.

[Max Williams]

Yeah.

[Noel Brown]

And so at this point, Johnny Appleseed has already achieved the status of a real American hero. And he was starting to get maligned a little bit because during prohibition, the FBI started to target his orchards.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, they destroyed a lot of those Appleseed descended trees. Because those trees, again, the majority of them produced sour bitter apples that you would not want in your kid's lunchbox, but that you would use to make hard cider. A standard apple tree. Depending on the various factors, in ideal circumstances, it can live for well more than 50 years, up to 100. So a ton of these trees that were murdered by the FBI, they either descended from John's earlier trees or were even physically planted by John Chapman himself. This wrecked the cider market. Luckily, at the same time, water sanitation is improving, so that's not a death sentence. But it does. Does honestly suck.

[Noel Brown]

Yeah, it does. It's not great for John's legacy.

[Ben Bullen]

It's not great for the FBI either. Can you imagine? Wouldn't you be a little irritated or wouldn't you feel a little sidelined? If there's this great war against alcohol and they're like, agent Brown, your job is to go out there and cut down a bunch of trees.

[Noel Brown]

I see what you're saying, Ben. So before that point, apples were primarily known as a source of cider rather than an edible snack. You know, that you might dip in a peanut butter. Prohibition definitely caused that pivot changing. The perception of the apple and it resulted in the apple industry that we really do know. And like some love others today, it did create the whole notion of the apple as a healthy snack.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah. Yeah. And this actually may be about to change because history is ruboristic. If I could churchify a word.

[Noel Brown]

Okay.

[Ben Bullen]

Thank you. You did. We made it happen, folks. As recently as 2022, cider has become the fastest growing alcoholic beverage in all of the United States. There we have it. Johnny Appleseed. Modern myth. Incredibly different from the real John Chapman happen. But I think it's safe to say they were both probably really cool guys to hang out with. As long as you didn't talk about religion.

[Noel Brown]

Yeah, best not, you know, with Johnny Appleseed or at the dinner table or, you know, over the holidays. This is sticky subject. No good can come of contentious religious debates.

[Ben Bullen]

That's what the pedagog said recently. Oof. Everybody's catching strays, folks. Thank you so much for tuning in. We hope hope you enjoyed this as much as. As what? Much as we do. If you haven't checked it out yet, do check out our history of the hot dog. If you like more food history courtesy of our own Noel Brown. I've been our research associate for this. And big thanks to Our super producer, Mr. Max Williams, who can probably also not yet eat apples.

[Noel Brown]

For sure.

[Kalpen (Cal Penn)]

Apples are clear.

[Max Williams]

I can have apples.

[Ben Bullen]

Nice. Oh, I know what someone's getting for their birthday.

[Max Williams]

Is this the first time we found a food I can eat on air?

[Noel Brown]

This is it will be. You're gonna get Max a case of apples, Ben.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, we're gonna get him a case of apples.

[Noel Brown]

Get him his own orchard. Is that Johnny Appleseed style? Yeah. Love it. It's a cute gift. Huge thanks to Alex Williams, our very own Johnny Appleseed and composer for this bangin bop that you're hearing in your ears right now. Christopher Odis and Eve Jeffcoats here in sports spirit. Thanks to to them too.

[Ben Bullen]

Thanks to Jonathan Strickland, AKA the Quizzter, who is probably chopping down a child's apple tree right now.

[Noel Brown]

My apple tree.

[Ben Bullen]

And he goes scenario.

[Noel Brown]

Because he's also French.

[Ben Bullen]

Yes, he's also French in this bit. Big thanks to a non Frenchman. We love AJ, Bahamas Jacobs, Dr. Rachel, Big Spinach Lance, and of course, the rude dudes of ridiculous crime.

[Noel Brown]

We'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'm U.S. transportation Secretary Sean Duffy we

[Ben Bullen]

all get distracted when we drive, but

[Noel Brown]

how we handle these distractions can be

[Ben Bullen]

a matter of life.

[Noel Brown]

Or please put your phones on silent and take a mental note to focus on driving. Paid for by NHTSA hi, it's Karen

[Jenny Garth]

and Georgia from My Favorite Murder.

[Karen or Georgia from My Favorite Murder]

We cruised around LA in the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and dove into the fascinating life of actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr.

[Noel Brown]

Want the full story?

[Karen or Georgia from My Favorite Murder]

Take a listen. She starts dating Howard Hughes and in fact, she helps him design a faster plane. So she finds the fastest bird and the fastest fish and sketches out a drawing of what the two would look like as a plane. And that becomes becomes the plane that we know today. And he calls her a genius. Check out our new episode spotlighting groundbreaking innovators like Hedy and Lamarr and Billie

[Noel Brown]

Jean King, presented by the Hyundai Ioniq 5.

[Karen or Georgia from My Favorite Murder]

Goodbye.

[George Severis]

This is George Severis and Sam Taggart from Stratiolab. Let's be real Home comes with a lot of odors. Cooking, pets, everyday life. That's where Febreze comes in.

[Sam Taggart]

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[George Severis]

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[Sam Taggart]

Febreze is a proud sponsor of the Elton John Impact Awards, honoring those who have helped shape a more inclusive and compassionate world with their artistry, advocacy and unwavering commitment to equality.

[George Severis]

You won't want to miss the Elton John Impact Awards podcast, available on June 1st on the iHeartRadio app and everywhere podcasts are heard.

[Kalpen (Cal Penn)]

Hey everyone, it's Kalpen. I'm inviting you to join the best sounding book club you've ever heard with my podcast Podcast Hearsay, The Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. Every episode I nerd out with amazing guests and dive into the best new audiobooks available on Audible. It's the book club for your ears. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club on the iHeartradio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Noel Brown]

Honestly, honestly, honestly.

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[Ben Bullen]

Sponsored by Gilead this is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.