Grubstakers - [Patreon Unlock] Episode 157: The Hearst Family (Part 1) feat. Eli Sairs

Episode Date: April 18, 2020

In our 2 part series on one of the richest families to ever exist, the basis for the Orson Wells classic Citizen Kane and a man who was kicked out of Harvard for shenanigans involving mailing his poop we discuss the illustrious Hearst Family. Covering George Hearst, the father of the megalomaniac William Rutherford Hearst the man of the hour. We cover in this our his involvement in the Spanish American war, how his father made his riches from grubstaking and the legacy his life leads. In our second part we discuss Patricia Hearst, the corporate maneuvers to maintain their wealth and of course Chris Hardwick. We are joined the hilarious Elie Sairs! He hosts the podcast of Roast Ghost and has an inside look at a Hearst owned corporation. Links to follow his work below. @elisairs https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/eli-sairs-the-roast-ghost/id1455875406?mt=2

We'll be right back. I don't like, you know, I don't like what I read about. We are more than just one coin. We create the world around this coin. Cop. Invention. Cop. Cop. All right. Take four. In five, four, three, two. The evil has gone. Hello. Welcome to Grubstakers, the podcast three, two. The evil has gone. Hello, welcome to Grubstakers, the podcast about billionaires. My name is Sean P. McCarthy, and I'm joined today by my co-hosts.

Steve Jeffries. Andy Palmer. Yogi Paywall. And so we're talking today about one of the running themes on this podcast, capital accumulation. What I hope we've been able to show with this podcast is that people who are rich in the 1700s and the 1800s, their descendants are almost all even more rich today just based on simple annual return on passive investment capital. And so we're talking today about the Hearst family, who many listeners might know for William Randolph Hearst, the inspiration for the movie Citizen Kane,

who helped start the Spanish-American War and all that. But what I hope we can show is that his descendants are still running the United States today. According to Forbes magazine, the Hearst family has a combined net worth of about $28 billion U.S. dollars as of 2016, divided among 67 family members. And joining us today for this discussion on the Hearst family, one of our favorite comedians, our guest is the host of the Roast Ghost podcast. He's a champion roast battler featured on Comedy Central's Roast Battle. He's a very funny stand-up comedian, and he is a former employee of a Hearst company. So Eli Sayers is joining us.

Eli, thank you for being with us today. Hey, what's up, Sean? Thank you. And so I guess I wanted to just start by asking you what, if any, impressions of the Hearst family and William Randolph Hearst did you have coming into this podcast? Coming of the Hearst family? All I knew was Citizen Kane. That's what I knew about the Hearst family, all I knew was Citizen Kane. That's what I knew about

the Hearsts. So I just always thought he was just this really overrated dude. Rosebud. He's good. Citizen Kane's good. I didn't know anything. Until like

very recently, I was very like I don't know, not like this not like like with rich people i think a lot most people in the country's attitude is not that they're good but that they're just oh they just are the way there is the sky and there are mountains there are rich people what are you going to do about it why would we even why would we even think about changing that and so i just thought he was one of those entities that you'd hear about like i'd hear rockefeller too he seems seems like he did pretty well for himself as well but i never looked into that shit did is there a citizen kane of rockefeller uh there will be blood maybe

not that i'm aware of oh yeah a fucking watchable movie thank god yeah orson wells is like the only guy who got famous for a biopic and then proceeded to have a much weirder life than the guy he portrayed in his biopic look he was really good in the transformers animated movie he was so good in that yeah third man is sick though that's a great movie and citizen kane's great too i'm just shitting on it but no i didn't i didn't know shit about hearst i still don't. I'm here to learn, honestly. From what I know about Wells, like, during the

Transformers movie, it seems like they just stuck a microphone in front of him at his favorite restaurant that he refused to leave. Just to, like, say these words. Eli, I did want to ask you, just working for a Hearst company, how accurate was the movie citizen kane oh dude there are just sleds everywhere and they all represent something

not it's not that's the misconception is that it's just childhood not just childhood there's an adolescent sled there's a first kiss sled there's so many fucking sleds uh it's just i don't know dude i didn't i didn't see nothing i was just like in this room off to the side doing bitch work so like i didn't see the goings on i just there's like a trickle down chilling effect that made the entire place sad and miserable like the entire like just the atmosphere there i worked at well i was a door greeter in walmart in uh ohio at Walmart. And this place was the saddest work environment. And I don't know, dude, it it was just dreary, man. No one there was happy. The fucking again, I told you, like, I'm progressive ish, but I grew up in Bama and I grew up pretty conservative and like, maybe this is my own like stupid gender shit, but like every dude who worked there,

I don't know what the fuck they did, but you shouldn't eat salad like every day. Like you shouldn't buy it. That shouldn't be your, if you're a man, I'm sorry. How I don't care if this makes you sound regressive every single day, you should not be buying a fucking salad for lunch every day.

That's just every day they do that man yeah it's psychopathic that's like some straight like if i don't have my grass every day i won't become the master i desire you know yeah i don't i don't know dude it was just a it was just a real uh sad miserable place i wish i knew i wish i got to see more of the higher ups the higher ups would you like be mean to everyone or like snub everyone usually except for they'd be nice to me for some reason. I don't know why. I think just like the way you're nice to like a dog. I definitely noticed that when I was when I was like a receptionist at this ad place that it was it was kind of the same sort of attitude where they were all nice to me probably because they didn't see me as someone who was trying to get something from them like i was

just there to like check in and get my paycheck and leave yeah yeah yeah yeah definitely but there is that like fucking rich guy shit there was this one dude who just like would walk around he was like tall like he was a super confident like would not thank you for holding the door for him would not acknowledge your existence and it's like dude why are you so fucking that's the first time i realized that like i used to be all like ah the white male whatever but like this dude like dude you were born white and tall and literally just think you're a fucking god right because of that he was the poster child for your eye opening that was the white male privilege myth. Hey, he was a beautiful man.

I'm not going to lie. What, Sean? Yeah, I wish I had more. I wish I saw a lot of sneaky shit happen, but I didn't. I wish I saw the real evil shit happen. Well, Sean... Why is Sean not even here? Yeah, for those listening, Sean is still reporting from Connecticut,

where he has brought the coronavirus in force. They've surpassed Washington State in total number of infections now, and deaths, I believe. Really? They passed the deaths too, huh? Yeah, yeah, 971 inicut versus 567 in washington wow sean how do you feel being responsible for the tragedy that is people dying in the state you're currently in well i do want to say that apparently a listener hit us up on twitter to say that she unsubscribed from our patreon over me fleeing the state. So I am happy that I was able to take some money out of Andy and Yogi's mouths.

I think she was just a regular subscriber. I think the Patreon people are used to your shit. But I wanted to push back on this because I am sheltering in place, whereas you and Yogi are going out every day. And I think that this is actually a more dangerous behavior than leaving once. am sheltering in place whereas you and yogi are going out every day and i think not true first of all first of all i'm not going out every day that's that's never been the case the fact that you presume i would ever leave my hovel shows your incompetence and knowing my lifestyle sean

yeah i also just get on a bike and don't interact with anyone whereas you also said you went to connecticut explicitly so you could go outside no i mean walk around the yard i do not leave the house i i do think it's it's it's it you you do earn i think the title of the king of irony where after the last i would say year and a half you've been railing against leftist support of open borders. And then when faced with the most mild travel restriction, just a suggestion that maybe don't leave where you are because you could spread a virus to anyone. You're like, that doesn't apply to me. I'm out. No.

Sean told me that just as a goof, he was going to nursing homes and sneezing on the doorknob. Now, this is where I push back because under Cuomo's voluntary restrictions, you're supposed to shelter in place and not leave your house for non-essential anything except for the grocery store and the pharmacy. Don't leave your house. And Yogi and Andy are going out, coughing in people's mouths on the hiking trail, rubbing up against public signposts. You don't get those signposts. I'm sick of it, Andy. I like how Sean thinks an Indian person is hiking right now. What are you, fucking nuts? Well, to be fair, Sean, and I i'm gonna say this about me and you we both have this

where people see people see you and they assume you have the virus me too though me too look at me look at me i mean i look fucking sickly exactly we are automatically we are automatically practicing social distancing with an u Uber driver for two hours. You couldn't even rent a car. You had to subject a third party for two hours. Oh, he took an Uber? Yeah. He told me he took an Uber pool.

Cuomo, though, that dude's just like a less endearing Scaramucci. Oh, yeah. I would much rather have Governor Scaramucci. Oh, yeah. I would much rather have a Governor Scaramucci. But, like, look, I'm willing to admit that what I did was morally wrong, but I think Cuomo should be invited as a guest on this podcast to explain under New York social distancing stay-at-home orders whether or not what I'm doing is more morally wrong than what Andy and Yogi are doing by leaving the house.

There's actually an explicit provision in the PAWS Act that you are encouraged to leave the house for solitary exercise. So, yeah. But, yeah, let's get Cuomo on. Let's see what he thinks. I think you're finding a loophole. Nah, fuck Cuomo. Yeah, I don't like Cuomo.

He looks like his favorite book is Goodfellas. The movie Goodfellas is his favorite book. He just puts the subtitles on and he's like, oh, I read it. I read Goodfellas. I don't think he's read a book in quite some time.

One last point, though. Shaming and attacking me for doing this is actually a way of individual is actually a way of individualizing blame and excusing the failures of the cuomo administration because the only reason there's 10 000 dead in new york is because this guy didn't lock down the city you know two or three weeks when we all before when we all knew we should have when we all saw what was happening in italy so actually attacking me is a way of uh making blaming individual choices rather than government inaction for the mass death event we are all experiencing i mean we can i would like an apology personally we can still attack you for being a dumb ass

without drawing broader societal conclusions i'm just clowning on my buddy. Do you think that in New York City, do you think that little Italy has it the worst? Yeah, probably. Is it like correlate to regular Italy? They did say like early on that Europeans were the one bringing it to the U.S. and in Russia from Italy. So if Little Italy's got a large Italian population, which by the name it does, then I don't know. And it's right next to Chinatown? Come on, guys. No, this is fucked up.

This is fucked up because I remembered that there's not a lot of Italians living in Little Italy now. I was like, oh shit, no, a lot of Chinese people live there. And then I'm like, oh fuck, it's probably way worse than that. Little Italy is like if you took two different anger problems and stacked them on top of each other. I did want to ask you, Eli, when you were working at the Hearst company, did you see like a room full of interns where they provide the pictures that they used to start the wars or any other overlap with the the movie citizen kane no dude no none of that i uh i answered the door for fedex a lot i i boxes came back and forth shit like that was there any crazy cat apparently

hearst fucking loved crazy cat the comic comic strip? Yeah. No, no. No, a lot of... More Cats and Jammer Kids than you'd think. Sorry, that was a reference. I don't know who the fuck got that joke. There will be like three people listening who are like, nice, nice. I'm going to tell you, whoever got that joke, I probably wouldn't hate to hang

out with them. You know what Cats and Jammer Kids is and Tin Pan Alley. What's your problem? I was going to say, apparently Hurst, William Randolph Hurst, was like a big animal rights guy. Not people, but every other animal. But yeah, and you know, I mean, it is interesting, Eli, you know, working for a Hearst company today because, you know, what I want to do with this episode, we follow the usual formula. We'll kind of talk about the Hearst family in loosely chronological terms. But I'm going to I'm going to do a very truncated version of the original William Randolph Hearst and his father, George Hearst.

I'll do a short version of their biography because mainly what I want to talk about is what they're doing today. Because I guess, you know, people, again, they have this idea, famous rich people, the Rockefellers, Hearst, you know. I think they have this idea that these are great men who, you know, rose from nothing to make their fortunes. And then they're not relevant they're not their kids aren't still rich and aren't still running the world the exact same way they were and you know just the fact that you work for a worked for a hearst company uh and you know probably are gonna try and get a reference from there is uh is indicative of the amount of control this fucking rosebud guy still has on the world we all live in yeah i never thought i didn't even think about i had no idea until i was fired i didn't hear uh

i didn't know it was a hearse company because they gave i guess every um every uh every uh every hearst uh every hearst person like this guy frank uh frank benak i guess is like the what do you call it a ceo president he like he like fucking the king of hearst he was the king of the hearsts and he um he uh gave he wrote a book and he gave everyone, all employees in every Hearst company, a free copy of this book. And it's called Leave Something on the Table. And it's got this faddle rich fuck on it. And it's like a like how to become rich for yourself or like it's like supposed to be like a memoir that's like motivational. And I got that like two days before they fired me. So that's fucking hilarious. I have the book there's no way

in the fuck i'm ever reading this book but uh i do want to find uh i don't know if y'all can still hear me i took a screenshot of a couple excerpts from the book that i thought was kind of funny let me uh scroll back and try to find him real quick. Sorry. Oh, sure. Yeah, I'm scrolling, scrolling. Sean, if you want to do some amazing banter. Is chapter one on his book on how to get rich, is it like step one, have a great grandfather who kills gold miners for trying to unionize? Just really kill the shit out of some gold miners in the 1800s. Well, what he did was he talks about this lady who ran like Vogue or Cosmopolitan or some shit. And here's an expert from it.

And this is just like indication of how these people are. Here's what he says. Helen and David Brown had luggage and would travel on any free trip, that is. Helen was notoriously cheap she was known to regularly go back to the table at restaurants and retrieve part of the generous tips jay david would leave and this is he's like trying to compliment her i think right like oh isn't that frugal of her like isn't that uh this is like what people who inherited that's not incredibly rude yeah it was like she's like the owner of Cosmo or something like that,

or president, king of Cosmo, king, queen, whatever you want to call it. But I just, that was the first thing I just opened up. I was just like,

how full of fucking out of touch, terrible monsters is this memoir? He's the, he's the king of Cosmo, cosmopolitan. He gets to do pre-monoctus and all the 37 orgasm tips. Hell yeah. What's that word

that you said? Pre-monoctus? The rite of first night. I'm so retarded, stupid. Now, what does pre-moniscus mean? The rite of first night. Yeah.

In the book, by the great Frank the great frank benack leave something on the table changed my life uh was uh he wrote about uh helen uh she was not available for hire and she would kind like hold on sorry while david was retrieving their luggage at the airport helen rushed outside and jumped in a cab the The driver, thinking he was finished for the day, told Helen that he was not available for hire and would she kindly leave his cab. She refused. She refused, the police were called, and they actually booked Helen

for disturbing the peace or some such offense. She had an unresolved record with San Antonio police from years ago, blah blah blah. But this is all him, Kamala. She's just like fucking abusing this fucking worker, basically was just trying to go home right to his family that he's gonna lose any minute like why the fuck like the cops like he's trying to compliment her spunk like oh what a what a fucking firecracker this lady just harassing the working class for not being at her fucking whim

the taxi driver's like please miss i have to drive sean to connecticut but that is how backwards these billionaire families can be where they take you know general uh courtesy as fucking weakness why would you give a tip to a person that's decent literally just inheriting money and then like being a frugal saver by uh stealing tips from the wait staff and you know being a piece of shit who doesn't tip 20 or whatever if you can go back two generations or more and they're still rich like the 100 chance you're rich right that's a great point dude it's so that's why i don't like when like i i am not uh full-blown i i wanted bernie to win i can't i i fucking canvas for him in massachusetts i'm not a full-blown i can't tell him a full-blown socialist

but i don't like when people say like oh socialism uh promotes laziness and capitalism promotes hard work like these generate like kids inheriting their what's more lazy what's more promoting laziness than these fucking dynasties where kids just inherit this money without having to do shit for it yeah capitalism now maybe it used to work i don't know but now it does not encourage hard work hard work is the fucking people i work with at walmart who also worked at fucking burger king to make ends meet yeah those are the fucking people under capitalism and they get i know i'm not saying anything fucking new here but i'm a dummy who's just realizing all this so well you know it's

important though you like because it's very easy to come off as like, you know, obviously, I think a lot of fucking leftist socialism rhetoric is like, obviously, any person has observed these things of the world. And it's like, no, people are in the dark and poor people are poor. Being a normality that's existed in this country has been something that all of us at one point had to be like, no, this shit's fucked up. This is wrong. Yeah. Yeah. Right. I used to be real conservative. I grew up in Alabama. I was real conservative.

I was all about, like, capitalism, free market. Because I was just like, oh, like, I don't want to get rich, but what are they taking from me? Why would we not let them be as free as possible? But, like, under capitalism and, like, property, all that shit, like, the freer the people at the top, like, restraints come down to people below. Like, it does inhibit the freedom of people underneath. I mean, I know you regret that greed is good to tattoo now, but when you got it, you loved it.

Right. And, you know, and this is something we've talked about on the podcast, or, you know, anybody could just read Thomas Piketty's book or the Cliff Notes or a Vox summary of it, is basically this idea that if you have a chunk of money, a chunk of capital, you're going to be able to get four to six percent annual return on passive investment, and then that'll just go on forever. So, you know, William Randolph Hearst gets a big chunk of money and his kids cash, you know, 4% to 6% annual return every year forever, and they're still worth combined about $26 billion, $28 billion today, according to Forbes. And we'll get into it a bit later, but like William Randandolph first actually very specifically constructed the trust that he gave to his kids so that they wouldn't be able to

fuck it up right it was basically like yeah you'll you'll have these mansions and you'll have enough like play money and you cannot do anything with it i'm gonna have professionals who will have like you know the will just make sure that you still get that passive income, but I'm not going to allow you to basically work with that money. Right. Jesus. Yeah, yeah. And like we said, we'll get more into it, but I think we should just kind of explain the Hearst, briefly explain the Hearst company today, and then we'll start the chronological biographies. The company is called Hearst Communications,

just according to the Financial Times. It owns newspapers such as the Houston Chronicle. It owns the magazine Cosmopolitan. You might know Cosmo. It has stakes in A&E Network, ESPN. It has some television stations in Boston and Sacramento. It apparently also made investments in BuzzFeed and Vice. Oh, really? I think they also invested in the Vice, their cable channel, Vice News or whatever it was. Viceland. So, you know, it has all these different fingers and different pies. They own Fitch Ratings, one of the big three securities ratings agencies, we'll talk about a little bit later. But, you know, like Andy was saying about the trust, just according to just Wikipedia, the way it was basically set up was that—sorry, fuck, I've got to find this. Well, in the meantime, I have one of my patented book excerpts to read.

Look, this sums it up. This is from the great Frank Bilek again. Leave something on the table. Available in bookstores. He said, this sums up a lot about these people, I think. It's subtle. This is not like a blatant thing. I learned a lesson from the experience of managing someone as brilliant and motivated as helen she and david became far more than business associates our social lives often overlapped the lesson there is such a thing as getting too close it can make carrying out the

right business decision harder than it needs to be so he's basically just saying like profits over people there oh yeah like to soul, to his very soul, at the core of his personal life, he puts prophets over people. I didn't come here to make friends. Yeah. It's also, I just realized that the reason you have that book

is probably because he was trying to juice his New York Times bestseller numbers by, like, you know, providing a generous gift to everyone. Well, he left it on the table. This is the thing. Left it on the table along with a box for me to put all the stuff in and leave.

But yeah, and so just with the trust that Hearst Communications, that runs, you know, that we just mentioned owns all these properties. The trust that it runs is managed, was set up by William Randolph Hearst at his death in 1951. It was set up so that as long as any grandchild alive as of the time, or as long as any grandchild alive as the time of his death in 1951 is still alive, it's controlled by this private family board of trustees, which is five from the Hearst family and eight Hearst executives. So basically, yeah, before he died, William Randolph Hearst set up this family trust that has been running this company in perpetuity and, excuse me, and will be until all of his grandkids die. So he is still influencing events events you know

all throughout the united states in the world today where they're running cosmo they got a big stake in espn they're running one of the big three uh securities ratings agencies you know it's just they exercise all this power without i guess most people even having any idea that the hearst family is is running so many sectors of the U.S. economy. Yeah, I think if you just tell the average person that they'll just be like, fucking. Go away, I have to work now. Well, just like those words, I'm like interested in all this now, but I would have tuned out. So like like a few years back, right when you started talking and I heard the word board of trustee, like I would have tuned out so like like a couple a few years back right when you started talking and i heard the word board of trustee like i would have tuned out like back then i was like it's not worth it

change is not worth it to have to learn what whatever the fuck equity means but it's boring shit i feel like that do you think they make it boring on purpose just so that like the common the common folk won't look into it oh absolutely a hundred percent yeah well part of it's just it's boring and then another part is like people are just systemically like excluded from that knowledge so i mean you won't you won't encounter that stuff in school like the children of hearst would yeah i mean uh something we talked about is everything that's uh going on with the Federal Reserve and this massive coronavirus bailout. Like all that shit is finance is made boring on purpose where you have the Federal Reserve putting trillions of dollars into what are called, you know, junk bond ETFs or junk bond securities, which we will actually talk about a little bit today in terms of Fitch. But when they say they're buying up trillions of dollars worth of junk bonds,

it's people don't understand this is garbage corporate debt that's not worth anything. And because it's the Federal Reserve, the government is just buying it all up and giving it all these acronyms and making it all seem very confusing. You just don't notice trillions of dollars of public money walking out the back door to bail out a bunch of people who made a bunch of risky investments. And, you know, they're just having the taxpayer get hosed on a bunch of worthless crap that they should take losses for. These people cannot lose money.

And they make sure it's boring to make sure they never, ever lose money. And what people take away from that is, hey, Trump gave me $1,000. I'm going to vote for him. Yes. He put his names on the checks what are y'all gonna spend that shit on uh i paid for a um flight to see my sister graduate from college in 2014 by putting it in my credit card sean you told me that you were gonna use it to hoard a bunch of hand sanitizer I'm gonna I'm gonna use my my check to pay for one-tenth of my coronavirus treatment yeah my shit's going right to rent has anyone had a rent freeze no no wish that's so fucked up that just should have been a thing that should have been the first fucking

thing yeah there's a couple there's a couple movements going on in cities or for that i'm i'm hoping with the airbnb thing that uh i mean the way things are going with the bailouts it probably won't happen but i just i just want the the rent market to explode after airbnb ghost hits up and just have like uh just a 500 single bedroom in new york that's the dream see the problem is though i've been reading some articles about this with coronavirus you actually have a bunch of foreign money rushing into the new york market because you know people in like peru or brazil or whatever whatever rich people around the world they don't want to put their money in the bank they just put it in new york market because you know people in like peru or brazil or whatever whatever rich people around the world they don't want to put their money in the bank they just put it in new york real estate they just buy these fucking overpriced condos that are all money laundering

units because this is considered a safe investment they just know that they're always going to fuck you know renters and uh uh but people attempting to buy real estate residentially in New York are always going to get fucked because there's so much foreign money laundering flowing into the market. Yeah, my little brother works for the TSA at the airport, and he said it's only like,

it's like 70 people a day go through, and it's just the weirdest motherfuckers. Like, motherfuckers who all, they just know that the prices are low, and they don't, they probably don't know what coronavirus is. They're all coughing. It would be sick to be one of these.

Like, I mean, I guess, Sean, you know what it's like. But like, no regard for any of this motherfuckers. Yeah, just like imagine that freedom where you just like don't have a Twitter account where people can roast you for recklessly violating quarantine. You're just completely indifferent to the whims and opinions of the internet. You can just get some $70 flights to Hawaii. Oh, yeah. Eli, do you know what Gore... Another Xer?

I never thought y'all would ask. No, no, go ahead. I'm sorry. No, you're all good. Go look up the Xer. I'll tell you this. Did you know that according to Gore Vidal that he says that Orson Welles called it Rosebud because Hearst called his mistress Marion Davis' clitoris that? Oh, that's pretty cool.

Yeah. Rosebud may be the name of her clit, and that's why Orson Welles put it in a movie. Wow. He was like a wow dude. So Hurst was just basically like a bro? Hurst was a bit of a bro. I don't know if he ate butt, but that man didn't give a fuck. I mean, but he's the son of a miner, and he's got money, and he can do whatever the fuck he wants.

He didn't eat butt, but he flicked the bean. Well, what I would say with William Randolph Hearst is, I think people have this idea, or maybe some people have this idea, with regards to the original robber baron American tycoons, that these were all self-made people who clawed their way up from the bottom and became rich that way. And in the case of William Randolph Hearst, it's just not true at all. He was the son of a millionaire miner who went to Harvard.

He actually, William Randolph Hearst, ran the Harvard Lampoon for a bit. You don't mean, like, he owned a mining company? Yeah. Yes. Okay, so yeah, like, you can't be like a, you can't just become a millionaire from like working the coal mines right no i was about to say like you had to own it not unless you learned to code he was a uh grub staker is right yeah right but that's you know like uh literally the story with with william randolph hearst is his senator father bought him a newspaper. His dad had a political career in California, and so you needed, in those times, a propaganda newspaper to support

your political career. So his dad bought one, and then he let his son run it because his dad was almost illiterate. But so, you know, when we talk about Hearst family money, it doesn't even go back to William Randolph Hearst. It goes back even before that to his father, George Hearst. Jesus. Yeah. And yeah, I guess. Well, we had a great plan known as the Bernie Sanders campaign.

And now we're back to the drawing board for a little bit, at least. Just you just drawing different types of snake emojis like what if we did it like this this time like how about a rattlesnake this time yeah but like let's just try you've got like a little knob that says online misogyny so let's just turn this even more to the right and see if socialism appears but um what i would say uh is i'll give you know a brief chronological cliff notes version of um george hearst and william randolph hearst and and we can always if we miss things go back on a future episode you could spend hours talking about their lives and details but the short version is is basically this george hurst was born in 1820 he dies in 1891 but i was going

to ask you know any of our listeners who have seen the tv the hbo tv show deadwood actually are probably familiar with a version of the character ge Hurst, and I believe Eli, you're the only one among us, except for me, who has seen Deadwood. But actually, neither of us have finished Deadwood, but I got farther than Eli. I'm gonna. That's a great-ass show. It was good. I don't know why I stopped. I just got distracted.

Well, you both have time now, so... The way William... It's kind of similar with William Randolph. George Randolph Deadwood was actually the name of his mistress's cooter. uh the way william is kind of similar to with to with william randolph george randolph uh deadwood was actually the name of his mistress's cooter um but yeah so any of our listeners who have um seen deadwood know that in deadwood he actually comes into in the hbo show george hurst shows up at the town of Deadwood and buys a stake in a gold mine, and his employees, you know, kill some miners for attempting to organize a union,

and it's a heavily fictionalized portrayal where he's the villain, but I shouldn't say it's heavily fictionalized, because we know this is actually based on real life. He really did, George Hearst really did go to the town of Deadwood and buy up a gold mine and was absolutely involved in murder there. But even going farther back than that, George Hearst, just from a basic Wikipedia bio, was born again 1820 in Missouri, but his father was a Scots-Irish who came over and he apparently owned three small farms in Missouri George Hearst his

father or George Hearst's father did he owned three small farms in Missouri where they utilized African American slave labor to, uh, what's this? Yes. His, uh, so like the money doesn't even go all the way back to George Hearst. It actually goes back to George Hearst's father who had slaves to work his three different farms. And, um,

apparently they owned, uh, a couple of general stores as well. So they have these farms in Missouri, uh, you know, slaves pick whatever the products are or plant and manage the farms, and then they sell them in general stores. So the Hearst family wealth goes all the way back to its origins at slave labor.

Patty actually atoned for this by taking an M1 carbine to the fascist pigs who oppressed african-americans uh but yeah so george hurst again born 1820 father slave owner uh george hurst was almost illiterate for most all his life because you know public school didn't really exist back then but george hurst early on kind of studies mining he learns about mines he learns about mining, minerals, all this stuff. And George Hearst, in 1850, moves to California for the California Gold Rush, which of course breaks out in 1849. So, you know, he's about 30 years old. He is originally running his dad's general stores, but then he goes west to California to mine and, you know, be a grub staker, as we said. And the basic story there is in 1859, him and one of his partners strike what becomes

known as the Comstock Load. You might have heard of this in U.S. history class. It's basically one of the largest silver deposits ever found in U.S. history is found in around 1858, 1859 in present-day Nevada. I believe then it was part of the state of Utah, though. But this is kind of George Hearst's initial fortune is he's out there in California, gold speculating, then he hears about this massive silver deposit, and him and his partner go over there and they take a bunch of silver bullion out of that and they make a big score. And this is what really makes him a rich person. Okay, this is from the book Leave Something on the Table by the great Frank Binnack.

I like how the book is called Leave Something on the Table, but apparently not a tip. Yeah, you know, something. Listen to this humble brag, dude. He was talking about how Barack quoted him or something like that. Barack Obama, that is, quoted him at some function. And then he says, in 2018, when I got the opportunity to speak to Mrs. Obama on the occasion of previewing her book, Becoming, I told her what her husband had said was perhaps the most flattering and humbling thing ever said about me by a president of the United States.

Dude, what a fucking dildo. What a dumb piece of shit. Jesus. I like the way you put that fear in that child's eyes before you drove the knife into it. We got a lot of great adrenochrome. I do want you all to know, I read four excerpts. I've opened this book four times. I literally found something reprehensible something reprehensible every i did not do i don't want anyone to think i did any research or work for this podcast

i literally opened the book four times and there's something off-putting every single time i opened the book four pages four home runs he's got a batting a thousand uh so george hurst gets his fortune his initial fortune in this uh silver mine the comstock load and then he uses this to invest in other mines because again this is how you become rich it's not mining it's buying up stakes in other mines and mining properties and so again the the thing that really makes him even more wealthy than he was before is the town of Deadwood. And basically, just according to this basic Wikipedia history of George Hearst, Hearst bought a whole bunch of what was called the Homestake property. The Homestake property

is, again, a big gold mine just outside the town of Deadwood. In 1877, George Hearst goes to Deadwood. He takes active control of the mine property. Apparently, him and his partners bought their claim for it for about $70,000 in 1877. Again, the Homestake deposit. And just quoting from Wikipedia, Hearst consolidated and enlarged the Homestake property by fair and foul means. He bought out some adjacent claims and secured others in the courts. A Hearst employee killed a man who refused to sell his claim, but was acquitted in court after all the witnesses disappeared.

Hearst purchased newspapers in Deadwood to influence public opinion. An opposing newspaper editor was physically attacked on a Deadwood street. And, you know, and then within three years, he managed to significantly recoup his investment.

He walks out of Deadwood a very rich man. But this is after murdering a guy who wouldn't sell his claim to Hearst. And then witnesses. Right. And then having witnesses disappear and then, you know, beating up a newspaper editor in Deadwood who was criticizing him. where a lot of great American fortunes of the 19th century and 18th century are kind of based on this just straight up gangster violence. If I disappear, you know who to look at. Go to Hearst.

Look into Hearst if I disappear. Now I'm scared. Nah. Well, it is something where like, you know, we've done episodes about countries like Colombia or, you know, we haven't done any episodes, but you could take a look at Guatemala or Nicaragua. When you see these initial fortunes in, you know, South and Central America today and other, quote unquote, you know, third and second world countries, these initial fortunes are usually based on the exact same kind of violence you see in the original American West. It's just today, you know, the money's been established, the property rights have been established, so you don't need to use private violence anymore. You can just have the U.S. government carry out violence on your behalf. But when these initial fortunes were built, yeah,

you had to be like George Hearst and kill miners for trying to organize unions and kill the people who wouldn't sell their gold stake to you. And this is what the Hearst money, uh, today is based on. Well now, yeah, now the rich people,

they're like more sneaky about it. They're like, now they like convince you unions are bad and shit. Like I went, when I worked at Walmart, dude, uh, they made us,

uh, sit down and watch a video about why unions are bad and what we should how we should react if someone comes up and tries to like ask us about joining a union. Yeah. Did it sound like this? You've made a great choice to work for Walmart and we're glad you're here. But the reality is you're not the only one. Jesus. Yeah.

Like back back in 1850, they would have just hired a pinkerton to kill somebody but now they like they're more sophisticated and they'll sit you down as like a walmart greeter and like tell you about like the whole history of labor unions being a being a door greeter like usually they have the like i i feel like your listeners are probably left-wing, not, I'm like a dumbass edgelord. Like, the people who are usually the greeters were, I don't know what the PC term is, like brain cripples, I guess. It was like, well, like, so when I had to do it, I was kind of a little bit, like, mad. I was like, really? No, I didn't really, I didn't really hate it then.

I didn't kind of, that was before I knew that being a door greeter at Walmart was a punchline. I didn't really i didn't really hate it then i didn't kind of that was before i knew that being a door greeter at walmart was a punch line i didn't know that then i was just like oh yeah just sit here and people tell me to go fuck myself like that's eli when i worked at safeway i was you know uh you would uh my job was to grab the shopping carts and like clean up the shelves and one of my co-workers was mentally disabled and he was actually much better at his job than i was so that was a bit of an ego trip walmart uh walmart felt soulless walmart felt terrible terribly so like it was bleak there man it was weird because i worked at walmart and kmart and kmart was a little bit like less pay and shit but it was just like you felt better walking in there.

Like they treated you like a human being. It was like warmer. Not that Kmart probably, I assume, did bad things too, but Walmart, I assume you already did an episode on the Waltons, right? Yeah, we actually, we invited Eli originally for that episode. The scheduling didn't work out,

but yeah, we did a two-parter on Walmart. It was very interesting. If you ever need any more Walmart content, I'm your guy. For anyone that doesn't know, that's the Walmart hold music. Is that right, Andy? That's right. Oh no, you've got dueling drops. They have their own radio station.

Really? Yeah. They play Walmart radio. They have a. Yeah, they play Walmart radio. They have like a DJ like, whoa, this is Walmart radio. And they play that All Out of Love song by Air Supply at least once an hour. I wish there was a Walmart Alex Jones for the really fun sections of Walmart.

Well, you know what? I'm going to have to give you credit with that when I start my new podcast then. Because that sounds like a great idea. Just play it in the fertilizer section. It is too bad our listeners can't see the Skype video because you could actually physically

see Eli experience PTSD when we played that Walmart video. I don't know if it was a specific that was even the specific one or whatever but I could tell like oh yeah that's in the same genre of what I listened like what I had to hear right

did they tell you like if you see a union organizer try to give you a card like to tell yeah yeah they had to in the video they had the guy come up and try to give you a card yeah yeah yeah you're supposed to like you're supposed to just show the card to the manager or something like that if you see a union organizer they're trying to give you aids and the only way to stop them is to destroy the brain or remove the head dude well i'm saying like we had

to do so many fucking terrible videos like we had to watch like a dumb ass video on why unions are bad we had to watch a fucking video on my sexual harassment i guess is bad that's some fucking bullshit right oh yeah yeah yeah i yeah i'm a fucking terrible place that's a good video that was a good video at my uh old job we had um uh a training on respecting diversity and uh it was like it was kind of like diversity training and it was developed by people at facebook and by the time i'd done it we'd already done our facebook episode and i already knew that facebook had like racial targeting going on like in its algorithm to sell ads and then it was these facebook people saying like yeah you know it's it's good to be

like if you see it happening stand up as a bystander you know you shouldn't i didn't realize my privilege and it's like you probably realized your privilege when you were uh coding your algorithm to tell if someone's black based on how they type their posts an extra muscle in that keystroke thing well dude they uh yeah they didn't even try walmart they didn't even try to sell they didn't even try to push racial diversity on us like they didn't even like it was london ohio dude there was no fucking uh there was my boy in the garden center he was he was a black guy i liked him dude we'd hang out but no if they did a video like if they did a racial diversity video at walmart it would start with like look if there's one thing we hate more than unions it's racial diversity what if uh what if the facebook algorithm can tell if a user is white or black by how much they type in the N word, but it's actually way more for white people.

Yeah, the black users barely use it at all. But yeah, so like we said here, George Hearst dies in 1891 after, you know, literally murdering people to get a massive gold mine in Deadwood, South Dakota. And this is the bulk of his fortune. After he gets, you know, after he secures all this profit from the mine, he moves back to California. He's elected to the California Assembly. He's later appointed as a Democrat senator from California back when the governor would appoint senators before they did direct elections of senators. So he's a senator from California for a bit.

And despite being basically illiterate for his entire life, as a senator, he needs a newspaper. So he buys the San Francisco Examiner. And then in 1887, he lets his son, William Randolph Hearst, run it. And William Randolph Hearst is, of course, the most famous Hearst, the inspiration for Citizen Kane. He's born in 1863, dies in 1951, and like we mentioned earlier, he's born rich. So he's taught in private school he tours europe as a child he attends harvard he's an editor i think he handled the finances at the harvard lampoon the harvard comedy paper which yeah he did he actually made so much money at the lampoon they kept having to throw like

dances and shit so that they wouldn't have a surplus of money and according to one thing i read apparently his signature move would be to take a shit in these these like pots and then send it to professors and so after two years of dealing with that harvard's like fuck this shit we gotta kick this kid out wow now you're trying to make me like i was gonna say compared to like every every Harvard lampoon editor who goes on to write for SNL now, that's actually pretty funny. Yeah, that's hilarious, dude. That's the funniest thing I've ever heard come out of Harvard. I mean, between guys like Gates and Hurst, I don't know if you're financially better off finishing Harvard or dropping out of Harvard. I'll tell you this.

Once when I worked in Walmart uh someone took a shit in a urinal and that guy is funnier than anyone who ever went to fucking harvard what if it was like one of those antifa black block guys just masked up like we're taking direct action against the waltons shitting in the urinals baby it's gotta be black it is too bad that uh uh william randolph hearst did not write for the harvard lampoon in uh the year 2000 or 2010 because he would just go on to uh write for an unwatchable sitcom instead of become a media tycoon uh but that career pathway was was not available yet uh but yeah he'd be an elizabeth war Oh, yeah, 100%. Absolutely. Elizabeth Warren with a Buttigieg backup. It's funny because William Randolph Hearst was apparently a major FDR supporter in his original run for president.

And it was entirely – he then, after FDR became president, he turned and shit on him constantly in his papers. And the entire reason that he supported FDR is because Fdr was opposed by this uh new york politician al smith and hearst just fucking hated that guy so he supported fdr to piss off al smith you know it's kind of uh insensitive to say that fdr ran for president yeah fdr rolled for president he definitely trDR rolled for president. He definitely rolled. Trundled for president. He crippled his way there. He crawled across the kitchen floor for president. His legs didn't work for president.

Take that, you dead bitch. Fucking retardedarded ass legs. FDR, like, totally unable to walk, going, well, at least I'm not Catholic, like fucking Al Smith.

But yeah, so, Hearst, William Randolph Hearst, takes over his father's newspaper, and, again, you know, rich kid.

He won reelection three times to make fun of the Holy Trinity. Yeah. So William Randolph Hearst takes over his dad's newspaper. Again, he's not a self-made man. He's got money that goes all the way back to slavery. He grows up rich, but he is successful as a newspaper man he's one of the founders interestingly enough along with thomas pulitzer of what's called yellow journalism which was not just called that because it was a violently racist against chinese and japanese

people which it was but uh it's uh just for its sensational style, where they just print, you know, rumors as fact, and they have all sorts of, you know, stuff we're familiar with with modern tabloids, where you have sex and violence on the front page, all sorts of gossip and rumors, and this is actually a style that makes the San Francisco Examiner very popular, and it eventually becomes the best-selling paper within San Francisco. Say what you will about the racism, but Crazy Cat Goes to an Opium Den was one of their best subplots. So yeah, William Randolph Hearst, off of the success of the San Francisco Examiner, goes to New York City. he buys a newspaper there. And what's called the yellow journalism era is started by the competition between Thomas Pulitzer and William Hurst's papers

within New York City, but also around the country. Was Pulitzer a good guy? He's kind of the same deal. I mean, they were both pushing for the Spanish-American War, both printing a bunch of racist half-truths and uh general innuendo uh but you know pulitzer is i guess more sanitized because the prize for great journalism is named after him now there is actually a a nice little connection between the spanish-american war and the um adventures of patty hearst that we'll get into in a little bit but like you know the the basic story with the Spanish-American War,

it's covered in the movie Citizen Kane. It's, of course, in 1898, Cuba tries to get independence from Spain. And Pulitzer's papers and Hearst's papers are all publishing, you know, constant stuff about atrocities committed by the spanish um i'm forgetting the name there's some incident where a uh a woman is strip searched by um the spanish like and then the hearst papers all write about how like men male spanish people you know man handled her and uh felt her up in this uh search, but it was actually conducted by a female Spanish officer. And it's really all just played up and hyped in the most-

That doesn't sound like the United States media. But so there's all this innuendo going on. But what actually brings the U.S. into war against Spain is the explosion of the ship, the USS Maine. And this happens in papers are, you know, they have illustrations of the explosion. They're all writing about how this was a mine planted by the Spanish or this was sabotage planted by the Spanish. You know, we can't wait for any investigation. We have to go to war now. And it's since come out in like the 1970s. There was an investigation that determined most certainly this was an internal explosion within the ship it was I forget the

exact circumstances but it was like I think one of the engines blew up and then that ignited a munitions supply on the ship so it was completely not well yeah Goldberg cartoons were very popular back then so even the tragedy if 9-11 had happened back then, it would have been

really wacky. There would have been like the plane hit one building, which hit another building. Triggered a mousetrap type ball rolling down. That hit the Pentagon. I cannot shut up. I'm so sorry. Right. Sorry. So it was the USS Maine

blew up most certainly because of a boiler explosion within the ship. But that didn't stop all the newspapers from running with, oh, this was a dastardly Spanish attack and we have to go teach the Dagos a lesson. And that kicks off a massive war. Look at Sean, loose with the slurs in Connecticut. Really, really fucking coming into his own with his new neighbors. Yeah.

Once you become a Connecticut Blue Blood, you get your Dago pass. And you can call your waiter a Dago and then take 10% of the tip back as you leave. Now, am I wrong? I thought Dagos were Italians. It's both. To Sean, it's both.

Yeah. Have you seen Fawlty Towers? Yeah, that's a good show. Yeah, it's a funny show, but they call the Spanish waiter a Dago like every episode. Oh, my only reference is, what noise does an Italian flat tire make? Dago, wop, wop. Oh, nice, dude. Speaking of the woman that Sean was mentioning a moment ago that was manhandled by the Cubans,

apparently Hearst would fly her to New York and put her up in a hotel and put her in, like, princess garb, and it became a sensationalized piece of the paper at the time because it was such a huge news story. I mean, Hearst really kind of figured out that people are willing to read trash and believe it at this era of newspaper boom more than they are willing to read, you know, dreary journalism that we know today. And it's partially because of the implosion that would happen a few decades later after these events. Let's say they sold the Gulf War gulf forum the same kind of shit where they uh got this uh young woman in front of congress to say that the iraqis when they invaded kuwait they pulled babies out of incubators and threw them on the floor to die and uh then it was

later revealed that she was the daughter of the ambassador from kuwait to Washington, D.C. Wow. Yeah. I remember that clickbait article. These hoes be lying. That fake news. Right. And then, of course, you have the Gulf of Tonkin for Vietnam and everything with the Iraq War. I mean, this is a pretty common media playbook that he really helped set up with the Spanish-American War. And like Yogi was mentioning, this lady who was searched by Spanish officials, she was like a paid spy for him who was like

reporting on, you know, supposed atrocities committed by the Spanish and going back and forth. So it makes sense that the Spanish would like search her for whatever if she's leaving. And then it gets played up into you know she was groped and sexually assaulted by these devious uh uh pussy crazed dagos but so one last thing uh regarding the the Spanish-American war in the USS Maine there's this famous story of a Hearst photographer named Frederick Remington, or he was an artist, excuse me, an artist hired by Hearst. He went to Cuba and Hearst hired him to provide illustrations for the paper to accompany articles about the Spanish Revolution or the Cuban Revolution against Spain. And he telegraphs Hearst in 1897.

Everything is quiet. there is no trouble, there will be no war, I wish to return, to which Hearst's alleged reply is the famous quote, please remain, you furnish the pitchers, and I'll furnish the war. And this is, of course, quoted in Citizen Kane as well. But it's the idea that you just get an email. Tomorrow never dies.

Yes. But it's the idea, and in this case, it turned out to be true, that you just get a big picture of a ship blowing up, and then you get illustrations of all these atrocities, and you just splash them across the front page of every major newspaper, and the US public will be primed and ready to go for an imperial war. I like how dumb people were in the 19th century where they just look at a drawing and they're like, yeah, that must be real. Yeah. Apparently, after the USS Maine blew up, Hearst started with an article that had an illustration of a Spanish torpedo, plant it beneath the USS Maine and detonate it from the shore. He then followed it up with an article containing diagrams and blueprints of the secret torpedoes used by Spain.

And, you know, this is all just completely made up. Even the... Oh, they're made with aluminum tubes. It's just like proof by picture, basically. Right. Right. Like you just hire... This this was back in the days you just hire an artist to like draw fucking blueprints of like torpedoes and people will be convinced yeah that can never happen now though the news consumer is much smarter today in a lot of uh videos of on historians talking about yellow journalism they are very very very quick to be like this is not a racist term the yellow part of yellow journalism is not at all asian it just refers to the fact that it's tabloids and

sensationalism it's not about asians and the quickness to deny that something is not about Asians is very funny to me. Why does it have to be yellow? You all right, Andy? Yeah, water went down the wrong tube. He has the virus again. Yeah, yeah. This time rabies. It's hard to keep the water down.

Yeah, fortunately, news consumers are much smarter today, and they know that you can just cure coronavirus by destroying a 5G cell tower. But so, you know, there's, of course, with the help of Thomas Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, there's this Spanish-American War. The U.S. ends up occupying the Philippines. It's, you know, depending on the source, either one in every four or one in every five Americans were reading a Hearst paper. And, you know, people will talk about how the way he would use his power is he would have his reporters go after every U.S. congressman and like stake out their house and then just demand they answer whatever questions he had. So he had a very big platform in terms of shaping public opinion because he could just demand Congress answer his issues. And one in every four people

in the country was reading his paper. So, you know, and we're going to kind of cut this into two parts. We will continue with the present Hearst family. But this just gives you an idea about this guy who inherited this slave and gold miner money and, uh, then used it to become one of, uh, if not the most powerful media barons in the United States,

the first real media tycoon and use that to shape the agenda of the U S government. And with that, this has been gross stickers. I'm Yogi paywall. I'm Steve Jeffries. I'm Eddie Palmer. I'm Eli Sayers.

I'm Sean P. McCarthy. We'll be back in just a second with more on the Hurst family. Rosebud.