Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Live: The Kellogg Brothers’ Wacky World of Health

Episode Date: January 22, 2019

There’s no way you haven’t had one of their breakfast cereals, but we bet you don’t know the story behind the two brothers who brought the world corn flakes. Buckle in for a lot of talk about poop, religion and masturbation, live from Sydney, Australia. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant.

Jerry's not here, but who cares? Because we are at the beautiful and more theater and get this Sydney, Australia. Wow. Wow. Holy cow. Pretty good. Not, not a bad start.

Pete, the hell out of Perth. Well, we gotta cut that part out. Jerry cut, no, they were very appreciative because they said, people don't come here. They literally said that. Yeah. So to start this show, usually with the live show, we like to go back in time

because we like to treat the audience to a free ride on the way back machine. That's right. Which unfortunately doesn't exist, it's imaginary. Be quiet. Come on. I just need you all to use your imaginations, okay? Like put on your thinking caps or your imagination caps,

some sort of cap that will help you get into the way back machine. Maybe close your eyes, go like this, get in the lotus pose. I don't care. But we're all on the way back machine now. We're going to ironically go to, we're gonna go to America.

We came to Australia to bring you back to America in 1876. So that's where we are right now. The funny thing is, we don't even rehearse this stuff. Can you tell? All right, so it's 1876 in America, where we come from. We're just 11 years removed from the Civil War, the American Civil War.

Let's see, Thomas Edison had just given us the, oh I'm sorry, Alexander Graham Bell had given us the telephone. Thomas Edison was still just a big loser. And he couldn't get the light bulb to light up. It would still be three years away from that. Jesse James is robbing banks. This is old timey America basically.

Right, right. And the whole reason we're in 1876, because we want to point out just how terribly, horribly people ate back then. I mean, they, well you'll see. Let me give you an example. For breakfast, if you were sitting down for a normal breakfast,

somebody would bring out a whole live pig and butcher it in front of you, salt it and make you eat the whole thing in one sitting. That was just the first course. Not too far out. The potatoes would be fried and the congealed fat from last night's pig. That actually sounds very nice.

There were, well I'll give you this. Breakfast, okay, hasn't changed all that much. All right. There were eggs, that kind of thing. But this was what people ate every single day. There was no breakfast on the go. It was heavy breakfast every morning. Granted, they were all farming and stuff like that.

But still, it was pretty heavy breakfast. Even if you lived actually out in the sticks, you may eat a little healthier, things like gruel and mush. But number one, you were eating gruel and mush, which is terrible. And then secondly, it took you hours to prepare this gruel and mush.

So either you were eating really, really unhealthy or you were eating food that took a very long time to prepare. Yeah, so that's breakfast. We won't even get into lunch, but it's probably more the same. But I found a dinner listed online from Delmonico's in New York City, and granted,

this is a very fancy sort of celebratory dinner that was planned out for a politician. But this is how that went down. First course, a raw oysters, a choice of two soups, an hors d'oeuvre, and a fish course. That's the first course. There's a course in a course.

There's four courses in the first course. The next course, a saddle of lamb, which I don't even know what it is, but it makes me sad. Filet of beef, all right, not bad. Followed by chicken wings, and peas, and also lamb chops with beans and artichokes, because you need some veggies in there, I guess.

All right, that makes it healthy. What came next? What came next was a casserole, terrapin on casserole, all of Maryland, which is turtle. You guys say turtle, huh? And that's Australia saying this. I figured you guys would be like, yeah, we eat turtle.

All the time. So that's the next course. Then you have a sorbet, and you're like, okay, well, that's the end of the meal. No, no, that is to cleanse the palate before the roast course comes out, which was, I'm not lying, which was canvas-backed duck and quail,

and then finally you get your dessert. Heavy creamed ice creams, whipped cream, jelly dishes, banana mousse, pastries, petit fours, liqueurs, and then a little fresh fruit at the very end, because why not? In between courses, they would smoke cigarettes to keep from puking everywhere,

and then they would finish the whole meal off with a big, fat cigar, and then they would die. So there was actually a Walt Whitman, the poet Walt Whitman, called something called dyspepsia, which is constipation, diarrhea, and by the way, settle in for a lot of poop talk in this episode. Constipation, diarrhea,

somehow both at the same time, indigestion, just basically wanting to die because you ate so much. That was called the Great American Evil, dyspepsia was, or the Great American Stomachache, because everybody ate so terribly, everyone just walks around going like, ah, good to meet you. Ah, how's the stock market doing today?

It was just like, everyone felt terribly all the time. Yeah, but it wasn't unusual, it's just how people ate. Everyone just figured this is how you eat. You eat nine courses of meat, a meal. Saddle of lamb, what is that? And you feel like crap afterward. So in the midst of all this flatulence, in Michigan, a state in our country,

there were two brothers born who would go on to revolutionize health and diet, go on to do a lot of weird stuff too, but there were decades and decades ahead of their time in many, many ways, and their names were John Harvey and Will Keith Kellogg. And, right. Oh, got a clap for the Kellogg brothers, huh?

That's awesome. And if you're thinking, did these guys just fly across the world to talk about cereal, we did. Yes. Yes. But it's also about poop and masturbation, believe it or not, and religion,

and somehow all of things coalesce in this kind of strange story. Yeah. And oddly, they coalesce around the Seventh-day Adventist Church too. Yeah, do you guys have that here? Yeah. Are there any members here?

Probably. Oh, all right. Probably. We're gonna make fun of it a little bit. I just wanted to make sure. That's good-natured ribbing tops. Goonies level. So the brothers Kellogg, John Harvey and Will,

they didn't like each other very much, even though they spent all of their life together, practically. John Harvey was the older one by eight years, and he was abusive to his younger brother, and just about every way an older brother could be as they were growing up. And then once they became adults,

John Harvey hired Will so that he could abuse them further into adulthood. Pretty much. And he did things like John Harvey would ride his bike, which is very unusual at the time, to ride a bike just for exercise. But he would make Will jog alongside him and take dictation.

Because that's what a jerk does. That's only half of it. He would also, he was obsessed with his poop, and he would go into use, to go number two, or I don't know what you call that here. Is it number two? Okay. Oh, really?

The universal language. No comforting. He would go in and take number two, have a little brother come in, and take notes about his stools, and keep a log, keep a log. I didn't even mean that. Oh, boy.

Keep a log log, a poop log. So they didn't get along. John Harvey was a jerk, and he was not paid well later on when they actually worked together. His little brother never got a formal title. So it should come as no surprise that later in life, the two brothers would go on to countersue one another

time and time again, and basically not speak to each other. Right. It's pretty sad. Sad and interesting. Yes. That should be the name of our show. So the,

I like that. It's a good idea to go in there. Maybe that'll be the spin-off. So John Harvey and Will Kellogg were raised in a little town called Battle Creek, Michigan, and Battle Creek, Michigan became the seat of the Seventh Day Adventist Church. And Seventh Day Adventism grew out of something

called Millerism, which was a religious movement that was formed around a guy named William Miller. Appropriately enough. And William Miller had a knack for incorrectly predicting the second coming of Christ. Like, he was really good at that. He was really good at that. Yeah, not being accurate.

Yeah. So he had some followers and he said, yay, brothers, on October 22nd, ancestors, sorry. On October 22nd, 1844, God will come back again. The world's going to end and it's gonna get real. That's Goonies level. He didn't say that though.

And October 22nd, 1844 came and went and nothing happened. And his followers went, you get one more chance. One more Miller, what's it gonna be? And Miller said, April 18th. They said, all right, we'll give you till then. April 18th came and went and they said, that's it. We're done, Millerism is done. We're gonna name this April 18th, 1844,

the Great Disappointment with like the G and the D capitalized, which I think they were trying to send William Miller a message with them. So Millerism crumbles. However, Millerites would go on to say, you know what, I like kind of the vibe of what we got going on. Miller's out.

Why don't we just reform under the leadership of the whites, Ellen White and her husband, sort of gathered everyone together and reformed as a new band to tour the world, called the Seventh-day Adventist. They got the band back together. They did. In the 1860s.

But without the lead singer. I know. Which actually, I was lead singer in a band like that once. No, no, they broke up and reformed without me is what I'm saying. It's not worth cheering. Don't cheer for that band. I was gonna ask if you were gonna clarify that

because you just had a little bit of glory there for a second. Right, I got to cheer after all these years. Yeah, but look at you now. That's right. Where are those guys? Take that. Sarah's greatest fan.

That was the name of this stupid band. All right, so what was it? I don't know. Okay. You can listen to the episode. So Ellen White, what she did was connected religion to personal health in a very kind of, well, not weird, but it was,

no one else was quite doing what she was doing. No, no, she said, so your body and your soul are intertwined. So if you really take care of your body, you're also taking care of your soul as well. And if you do that, then it will be easier for you to get into heaven. It's one thing we haven't told you

about Seventh Day Adventists. What they believe is that there's a finite number of slots in heaven, basically. It's like a zero sum game getting in. If you get in, somebody else didn't kind of think. So getting into heaven is obviously very important. So you can get into heaven more easily if you eat vegetarian.

If you avoid vices, like making the saints cry, I think is what you guys call it here. No, they don't call it. What do they teach us in Perth? Wanking. You want to steer clear of wanking. Yeah. I mean, fried food, greasy food,

wanking, pickled foods. Which is, that's just crazy. Yeah. Somebody spoke up and was like, even olives? She's like, are olives even pickles? And they're like, I think so. And she's like, yep, even olives, no pickled food. And they said, what does this have to do with God again?

God hates pickles. That's what I heard. Ladies, you should not wear binding corsets. You should not wear wigs. You should not wear tight dresses. Someone just went, woo wigs. Because that led to the physically destructive self-vice of masturbation and the less lonely

and more fun vice of excessive sexual intercourse, which is to say any intercourse not for procreation and that's it. Like if you weren't making a baby, then you just don't do it. Right. So this was the town, this was the community that the Kellogg brothers were raised in.

And from a very early age, John Harvey kind of proved himself kind of a sharp adventist. He caught the eye of the whites who hired him as a devil's apprentice, which is a printer's apprentice. I don't know why they called it that. And then in very short order, he ended up becoming the editor of the monthly magazine in Battle Creek, Michigan, The Health Reformer,

which under his editorship came out strongly in favor of olives and repealing the ban on it. But he caught their eye is what I'm trying to say. And the whites had, they were actually followers of another guy named James Caleb Jackson. I don't believe he was actually a Seventh Day Adventist. He was into health himself. He was a health reformer.

And he opened a spa or what you would call like a health spa in New York in the 1850s. And Ellen White and her husband went and visited this place and they were just struck. They were like, this is it. This really dovetails in with like this whole idea of like treating yourself really well. We should open one of these in Battle Creek and they did.

They opened the Western Health Reform Institute and it was a total flop right out of the gate. Yeah, it was, they didn't do it right. They served, it's basically where you would go to eat really cruddy tasting food and have quack doctors give lectures. And it was like you said, it was not popular. People would go and check it out,

but they wouldn't come back. But the important thing is they kind of stole that original idea from James Caleb Jackson because he's gonna come around later again. Yeah. So this is where John Harvey, they were like, the writing's on the wall. We need, if we want the thing to succeed,

I think we need like a real doctor to actually run this thing. And so young John Harvey was there. The writing was on the wall. They saw how bright he was and he was going places. He was interested in medicine and health. So they paid for him, asked his parents, is it okay if we send your son to medical school, your oldest son?

And they said, yeah, just don't send Will. And Will was kind of a jerk too. Yeah, a little. But John Harvey went to medical school for real, became a real doctor and returned to Battle Creek, Michigan in 1876 and was appointed director of what would become the Battle Creek Sanitarium. They changed their name.

Right, and they chose sanitarium because at the time sanatoriums were places where you went like to die when you had tuberculosis. And they're like, well, we really want to distance ourselves from that. We're going to change the O to an A and I think that'll really get our point across. Like scratching that out, writing it and being like,

huh, what do you think? As you will see, John Harvey Kellogg was not the best businessman ever. Nor was he the best doctor ever really. No, but it was important to him that it, I mean, he said, I'll come back and I'll run your joint here. But aside from the religious principles, which I'm down with,

it needs to be a medical institution. I want the science to be good. And that's kind of one of my requirements. And then he went on to not follow good science for a lot of his career. Yeah, he also said my younger brother, Will, has to come on for my own personal reasons. And Will came on as the head of HR,

very quickly instituted all of Fridays at the sanitarium. I love that all of spit, man, doesn't do very well. Yeah. However, this is when things started to flourish. They really did it right. This place was super luxe, very nice. They figured, hey, let's give them better food and make people want to come here

and have marble floors and banana trees in the lobby and palm trees and just, it would be today what you would think of as like a super deluxe kind of health resort spa. Right, yeah, and like you said, it flourished. It went from like this house basically to a four story structure in just a few years. And then a few years after that,

they built it into like a 15 story, huge, enormous structure. And at this time in the US, if you had like a 10 story building in a major city, that was the pride of your city. They built a 15 story, huge complex into a health spa in Battle Creek, Michigan, which would be like building the same thing

in Gunda Windy or something like that, right? Is that a good example? All right, we do our research here. Is anyone from Gunda Windy? No. Gunda Windy, sorry. I knew he'd mispronounce it. Yeah, of course.

So in order, and it's kind of like it would be today if you wanted people to really take note, it really helps if celebrities pay attention to it. And they did. People like Amelia Earhart went there, President William Howard Taft, Thomas Edison went there. I guess he was still working on the light bulb,

but maybe he did that there, who knows. Johnny Weissmuller, who played Tarzan in the movies, he had a knack for going into the dining room and doing his Tarzan call, is sort of like ringing the dinner bell, I guess. And it was a big deal. Like people took note, but Middle America, they still weren't on board.

They called them battle freaks. They thought it was completely weird because this was the 1870s after all. It was not the time to talk about soy milk and vegetarianism. It was a time to eat a saddle of lamb while you were riding a cow that you were then going to eat after you ate the lamb. That was what was done.

And wash it down with some turtle. So when you went there, wait, I got no problems with turtle. You would eat turtle? Sure. Don't judge me. Would you eat penguin? No.

Someone just gasped out there. No, gasping, yes. No. Nobody. I wouldn't eat kangaroo. Once you've laid with the kangaroo, tough to imagine eating it, you know, I found that out. Yeah.

In either sense of the word, I think, you couldn't eat the kangaroo after that. All right, where are we? I'm already lost. Well, then I got this. All right, so the sand, they called it the sand, the sanitarium. Like you said, it was huge.

There were more than 1,000 employees there. They had physicians and nurses, masseuses, bakers, bell hops, waiters, orderlies, attendants. It was like a really super deluxe place where you would be examined, I believe every patient for a while at least, was treated personally by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg. Yeah, each person who came through,

and we're talking tens of thousands of people a year, was seen by John Harvey Kellogg, and he would give them each like a personalized regimen to follow. And a lot of this stuff was like real common sense things that what we think of as common sense now, like go get some exercise. Right of bike.

Would it kill you to get on a bike? Fresh air, sunshine. That was one of the first lectures. Would it kill you to get on a bike? Right, 10 a.m. in the East Lobby. Right, quit smoking, stop drinking, cut out the caffeine, which is madness. Just common sense stuff that we think of as health

that really kind of originated out of this area. Yeah, out of this era. Yeah, and area. So things are going pretty well. Common sense treatments and also really crazy, crazy gizmos and contraptions. Yeah. You can look these up online when you get home.

Do you have Google here? Yeah. But we call it googly goo. You totally do too, don't you? Love your accent so much. I really, and you know what I even did? I changed my map's voice to a female Australian to drive me around wine country,

and it really was just a cherry on top. Sure. It's very lovely. I'm gonna go home and Emily's gonna be like, who's that? What happened down there? Get rid of her. Put on the robot voice.

That's Sheila. Good one. Yeah. Josh is in rare form tonight, everybody. Look out. Look out, Sydney. All right, one was called a kneading machine, like as in bread kneading,

and they would treat you like a loaf of bread dough. You would lay down and it had these mallets that would grind into your body and people would turn cranks and things, and it was all in an effort to get you to poop. Right. That was everything. So we gotta tell you a little something

about John Harvey Kellogg and his medical views. He subscribed strongly to this idea, and now discredited theory called auto intoxication. And auto intoxication says that, sure, you poop, we all poop. Like the book says, everybody poops, but none of us are really good at pooping. We don't poop quite enough,

and a little bit gets left behind each time, and as it builds up, that left behind poop poisons the rest of your body, and this results in things like diabetes or high blood pressure or stroke, or like getting hit by a bus, whatever. It all comes back to the poop you're not getting out. So everything, walking in the sunshine,

riding a bike, would it kill you? Quitting smoking, the kneading machine, and all the other machines that he came up with, all of it was to get that extra little poop out of you and get the toxins associated from that. You better use to be saying poop, and getting the toxins associated with that poop out of your body.

That's right. He also invented something called the Electric Light Bath Cabinet, which sounds like an Elton John album, but it's not. It was basically an early version of the tanning bed. If you look this thing up, it's a huge box that you would sit in

that kind of came up to your neck and it had a nice little seat inside, was lined with mirrors, and the light bulb, remember, had just been invented, so they had no idea about wattage, and there was just light bulbs everywhere. I think the quote is, it would boil the toxins, I'm sorry, boil the poisons out of the pores of the body,

and he believed in light, not only sunlight, which does make sense, but light bulbs curing you. So he would fire up light bulbs all over the place and said it'll cure gout, it'll cure typhoid, scarlet fever, diabetes, obesity, scurvy, gastritis, and constipation. Because why not? Light bulbs.

Sure. Some of these things though, like this guy must have made a mitt on these machines, because you could find them outside of the sanitarium too. There's actually a couple that were on the first class gymnasium on the Titanic, which means some of John Harvey Kellogg's weirdo contraptions are at the bottom of the sea

in the Titanic, with some skeleton on the kneading machine, like please, can I just ride a bike? It's like your chance for riding a bike is long over. Oh, what else did he had? He had the electric bed, which sounds like a lot of fun, to be honest. The foot vibrator, which also sounds lovely. And then our favorite machine, our favorite machine.

Sure. The Kalanik machine. You guys are familiar with Kalaniks? Has anyone ever had a Kalanik? Just laugh, just laugh. Yeah, yeah. Good one. I've actually had a couple of Kalaniks before.

Have you really? I have. And they're like, it's hit or miss. I can tell you, sometimes you get off of the Kalanik machine, you feel like a million bucks. Other times, you're like, you know what it means to feel gray. Miss.

Yeah. When it's a miss, it's a bad miss, it's not fun. Yeah, so, and I don't think we mentioned this whole four bowel movements a day thing that he had. He went to Africa on a safari. This is the level of science this guy was operating at. He went to Africa on safari and saw gorillas pooping four times a day.

And he literally said, well, they seem happy. We came from them. I don't know, actually, he probably didn't believe that at all, but we all know now that we did. And he said, so that's what we should all shoot for as humans is for a day. And if you need a little help and the kneading machine isn't doing it and the light isn't boiling it out of you,

then just have a seat on the Kalanik machine and hook yourself up to the spigot. Yes. Turn on the water and see what happens. Water moves things along great. If not, it was followed by a yogurt treatment. You would eat half of the yogurt and the other half, seriously, he would shoot yogurt up people's butts.

I never did that. I have principles and rules. I draw lines, places. I drew a line right through the yogurt. The little fruit on the side, though, I have done that. That's called a parfait machine. That's right. It's very nice.

So he actually had a couple of patents for this thing, for the Kalanik machine. The first one, I don't know what that said, but we looked up the improved patent because we were like, sure, why not see what he got wrong? He said for the improved version, he wanted an irrigating apparatus, particularly adaptable for Kalanik irrigating, sure,

but also susceptible for other irrigation treatments. So I guess after the people got on, he was like, well, we could water the lawn while we're at it, or there's a fire in the kitchen. If you reuse this gray water, it's just going to waste. You're in that mood tonight. I didn't realize it was such a classy city. And also, the improved patent called for one

where you could actually measure the amount of liquid entering and exiting the body. So before that, it was just a wild ride. And one of them, one of these Kalanik machines had multiple spigots on it, which meant you could fit more than one person on at a time. And I got to tell you, having done Kalaniks before, you do not want anyone anywhere near you

or in the same room even. You do not want to look over while you're getting a Kalanik and somebody else getting a Kalanik because you don't want to connect with another human being like that. Yeah, no. So it must have been a little weird. Listen to some Elton John.

Sounds like fun. So I don't know about you guys, but I think this is going pretty well. So far, so good. All right. OK. Good, good, good. Well, then we have bad news because that

means we have to take a message break. But we also have good news because we're not reading an ad. We have something very special. Yep, we have a fellow, a local guy named Alex Sefton, who you might recognize in a second, who's going to come on out and help us. And we will be right back right after these messages. My friends out there in podcast land, it's time for your favorite show.

Oh, and Charles, stuff you should know. Yeah. Yes. Thank you, Alex. Yes. Thank you. Wow. Oh, man.

That does not happen everywhere, everybody. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough,

or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you.

Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say, bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And we're back. Yeah. Man. That was amazing.

He was one of the, one of the early jingle writers that sent one in. He was number seven. Yeah. And he wrote us and said, I live in Sydney and how about if I come up on stage and do that in front of people? And we said, that's a great idea. Yes. One of the greatest. Wonderful.

Wow. I know. That really classed this show up. It really did. It erased like eight poop jokes. Poop and wanking everyone. Let's get back to it. So, so one of the things about John Harvey Kellogg is yes, he had some weird contraptions and yes, he, um, he, he did weird stuff with yogurt.

But there were some things where he was actually pretty ahead of his time. Like we said, what we think of as health, like was cutting edge and was brought to America and the world by guys like this. And in particular, mostly by John Harvey Kellogg. Um, one of his earliest books was called Tobaccoism. And in it, he writes about how tobacco is really bad for you. And this was at a time when people didn't think that way. Now doctors would literally smoke while they treated. Right.

They'd be like, I have good news. You're pregnant. So I'm going to need you to move to camel lights during, during the term. Let me look at your chart. All right. You have lung cancer. I don't know what to say. I do too.

Everyone does. Yeah. A saddle of lamb. It was a crazy time when people just thought it was normal to do that. But he was on the anti-tobacco train way, way early. It was one of the first doctors, especially in the United States to champion probiotics. And obviously with the yogurt, uh, acidophilus, um, eating the yogurt that is and gut flora. And people just didn't know about this stuff.

People doctors at the time tried to treat disease, not prevent disease. It was just accepted that they didn't call it healthy eating. They just called it eating and dying. Yeah. That was the progression. You get to your fifties, maybe your sixties and you get diabetes or heart disease or stroke and you just keel over dead. And John Harvey really to his credit was like, wait a minute.

I think if we take care of our bodies, you could live longer. Right. And they said, who are you, which He also, he was actually, so when you went to the battle Creek sanitarium, one of the things they had was food and he actually came up with a substantial amount of food. He's one of three people listed as an inventor of peanut butter, which I mean, you can like die with that one and be pretty happy. Um, he invented a lot of nut based meat substitutes, which today it's like, how many can you find

to those at the grocery store? A lot like toe furky. It's not nut based, but you get what I'm saying. Um, what else did he come up with? Oh, I've got one. Remember how you weren't supposed to eat or drink caffeine? Uh, he had a coffee substitute that was made from toasted grains and molasses with no caffeine. So you wouldn't drink it.

You would throw it in somebody's face when they served it to you. But that's what you would get for coffee in the mornings at the sand. So you're having a great show. Thank you. So are you, so are you guys. All right. This next section we're going to call sexy time. Oh no, it's really bad and awful.

It's actually the antithesis of second. Yeah. And this, this next part is tough everyone, but we all got to get through it together. Hold hands with your neighbor if you want. This is tough. But here it goes. Uh, again, not for wanking very much against it. Wrote about it a lot.

He was, he was obsessed with poop and masturbation. Wrote about it in a book called plain facts for the old and young. About half of which were facts. Maybe. And this is one of the things he wrote about how to kick the habit. Okay. So before Chuck reads this, I want to point this out. This is coming from one of the most famous, most revered physicians in the world.

Okay. Bear that in mind when you're listening to what he's about to prescribe. A remedy which is almost always successful and small voice is circumcision. The operation should be performed by a surgeon without administering an anesthetic. That's the correct response. Yes. You're right. They pass.

They pass the test. You're all right, Sidney. As the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment as it may well be in some cases. The soreness which continues for several weeks interrupts the practice. And this had not been previously become too firmly fixed. It may be forgotten and not resumed. So if I can update this for a minute, if you catch your son wanking, I think as you call it,

you would take your son to the doctor to be circumcised without anesthetic as punishment. That's what he just recommended in that passage. So it's all been kind of fun, but this guy is a monster. Yeah. Oh, yeah. We forgot to tell you. This is where it takes a really dark turn. Another method of treatment consists in the application of one or more silver sutures

in such a way as to prevent erection altogether. Correct. The foreskin is drawn forward over the glands in the needle to which the wires attached is passed through from one side to the other. After drawing the wire through, the ends are twisted together and cut off close. It is now impossible for an erection to occur. This is in a book. And the slight irritation thus produced acts as a most powerful means of overcoming the

disposition to resort to the practice. Monster. Yeah. He was a monster. Okay. And I know he was doing this in the back room. I disagree. We have an ongoing dispute about this.

I swear. He was wanking. I think he never did. I honestly think he never, ever, ever did in his entire life. I think he wanted to. I don't buy it. But I don't think he did. Women didn't get off the hook.

He knew that they masturbated, too. So he had a... No, no, no. Get out of the wayback machine, ma'am. Come to the future. It's okay. And if you were on the fence about John Harvey, you prepared a tip over. He had an easy solution for that.

Just throw some carbolic acid on the female genitalia, or junk, as it's called. Yeah. Think about that next time you eat corn flakes. Yeah. We'll get to the cereal. Trust me, that's coming. He had some other really stupid ones, too. Like tying your hands together.

That's like the Three Stooges remedy. Actually makes it a little easier, to be honest. He was way off base. I don't know about easier. Create more friction. You could still get the job done. What else? Oh, here's one.

He built a sort of an underwear contraption with a cage on the front that went around your genitalia. Just in case you could not be stopped. He built a literal prison around your genitalia. So that means that John Harvey Kellogg invented the tanning bed, apparently. Peanut butter and the d*** in the box. Justin Timberlake. He's rolling over in his grave in the future. Yeah, he's alive.

For now. He's doing quite well. He eats a saddle of lamb a day. All right, so that's a bit of the dark side of John Harvey. It gets even darker because he was also a eugenicist. Yeah. Right. You've heard us talk about this some on the show.

If you don't know what that is, it is sort of this insane belief of racial purity to like the nth degree to where he thought like, not only white is right, but you should, we should have a pedigree system. And it was, it was all tied into like eating and health and stuff too. It was called, he actually had a version called euthenics. Right. And eugenicists made fun of him behind his back. He was so out there. Yeah.

His whole thing was eugenics plus where you could actually be even more racially pure if you were a vegetarian or you sutured your foreskin, you know, for fun on a Thursday. And like Chuck was saying, like even the eugenicists were like, this guy's mine. You heard what he thinks. Which is really saying something coming from eugenicists, you know. Yeah. His eugenic, he never did it, but he proposed the eugenic registry where he created a pedigree of breeding between people like dogs to where you could, you should only breed with certain types to make the Uber race like dogs.

Right. Which I mean, like if that had ever taken whole, can you imagine what Tinder would be like? And Lord, but apparently to John Harvey Kellogg, it went white people and cocker spaniels. All right. Now we're going to get to cereal. Finally. Thank you all for bearing with us. Everybody.

Thank you. You can let go of your neighbor's hand now. We all got through it. You can still hold hands if you want. That's nice. Sure. So as far as the battle Creek Sanitarium goes in the medicine part, John Harvey had an iron grip on things. As it was coming out of my mouth.

Josh is like, he had an iron grip on nothing. I tell you, he didn't. He had a, had a stranglehold on the medicine, but he was not a great businessman. He changed, you know, sanatorium to sanitarium. And it was like, Hey, what do you think of that? Check me out. Luckily for him, he had a little brother around. Remember young will.

He's still around. He was actually a pretty good businessman and turns out a pretty good marketer. And when John Harvey was trying to search for a breakfast health food, which would later become cereal, as you will see. He hypothesized that, you know what, if we like get the digestion going before you even eat it, that's even better for poop. Yeah, the poop comes out that much easier. So they started with double baked biscuits. They were basically these really hard crackers that they double baked. So they were, you know, already sort of digested.

And I don't even think we mentioned that he believed you should chew everything 40 times. Can you imagine chewing tofurky 40 times a bite? Not good. It'd just be like ghost chews after like 20. Yeah, it's like absorbed into my gums. So his legend goes at Battle Creek, a woman and older lady broke her dentures on one of these double baked biscuits. And he was like, This is not good because I don't want to get sued by every old lady or young podcaster who breaks his teeth. Did you get that one?

I got implants. All right. They look great. Thanks. Appreciate that. And so they started to grind them up into little, little crumbs and break up these little biscuits. And that was sort of their first little version of what would become cereal. Right.

That's like the way Kellogg's tells it. The truer story is that they said, We need a breakfast cereal that's, you know, easy on the stomach. What is James Caleb Jackson doing at his sanitarium? And they went and found out that he was making a cereal called granula. And granula was made from gram powder and these little baked little nuggets that are not food. You had to soak them overnight in milk or water, your choice to be able to eat it the next morning. Right. Not good breakfast cereal.

And they said, Let's steal that recipe. And they took James Caleb Jackson's granula and they called their version of it granula. Because again, John Harvey was not a very good business fan. So James Caleb Jackson found out about this and sued them and they were forced to come up with a new recipe and a new name. And they came up with granola because again, they had a real knack for switching a vowel out here or there. That's the old John Harvey Kellogg trick. Yeah. And they swapped out the gram flour for wheat flour and they made something you guys have never been cursed with. We did our research, something called grape nuts.

Has anyone ever heard of grape nuts? Yeah. They're like these little tiny pebbles. Yeah, it's like, oh boy, as a kid, if you ever made the mistake of thinking it tasted anything like grapes, if you were wrong. Or even nuts. It's like, yeah, you're right. Yeah, you're right. It's like if you took a rock and a hammer and broke it up into the smallest things that you could and said, Rocks, go have sex with a cardboard box.

And then whatever that produces is grape nut cereal. Grape nut. It's disgusting. So that is what... And it's still like a popular cereal thing. It's still around today, yeah. In old folks' homes. Yes.

Every kid in America goes through this rite of passage where, you know, when you pour a big bowl of cereal, you're like, Hell yeah, honeycombs. I love these things. Or what do you call them? Like choco pops or something like that. The sugary cereal. Yeah. So you pour like a big old bowl.

You do not do that with grape nuts because they are denser than a neutron star. But you don't know that as a kid and you pour a big old bowl and by the time like you realize your horrible mistake, your mom's like, you already put milk on that. You have to finish that whole thing. Finish all that grape nuts and you have to finish it and you never make that mistake again. It's a bad day when that happens. They should call it Large Hadron Collider Cereal. Right.

But the thing about grape nuts is grape nuts came out of the Kellogg Brothers Stealing Granula from Caleb Jackson. Grape nuts is made by the CW Post Company and CW Post was a patient at the Battle Creek Sanitarium and he stole the recipe from grape nuts from the Kellogg Brothers. What a time to be alive. It really was. You just steal everything. It doesn't matter. Change a letter.

It's fine. Yeah. All right. So they're experimenting. They still didn't have these lovely little flakes that we know is corn flakes or frosted flakes. They were experimenting with flavor. They were experimenting with like gram flour, with wheat flour. Finally they tried corn and they thought they were on to something with corn.

Yeah. And it depends on who you ask, but either John Harvey, Will, his little brother, or his wife, Ella, John Harvey's wife, found out that if you... Is that a subway? I think it's an earthquake. Okay. Are we good? Is this normal?

Do you guys have earthquakes here? It's a rat parade, mate. There they go. And Angus Young is out in front. Yeah. They're all like doing their top best. It's a rat parade, mate. Jerry, leave that in.

Yeah, Jerry, leave that in. Where was I? Okay. So either Ella, Will, or John Harvey realized that one of the key things was to roll it out really, really flat. So they were getting there. They were double baking it. They landed on corn.

They were rolling it out flat, but it still wasn't quite right. No. So John Harvey, there was something else we didn't mention. If you couldn't poop and the colonic machine wasn't working, he would just take out part of your colon in surgery. That was another thing he could do, right? Too much tubage in there, sir. Maybe toss in a silver suture for free while he was at it, while you were under, right?

So he was called away to surgery one day while he and Will were experimenting down in the basement in the sanitarium, and Will was notoriously frugal. So rather than throw away the dough they'd been working on that hadn't worked, he just kind of set it off to the side for later. And when he came back, he found that something had happened, something called tempering, where the dough gets just a little bit moldy. Not like you gross moldy, but kind of like, this is delicious moldy, right? Like the air in the water just kind of spreads evenly around it.

And the upshot of all this is that when you bake mold or bake dough that's been tempered, it turns into perfect little flakes. So that's how the flaked breakfast cereal was accidentally discovered in the Battle Creek Sanitarium by Will, who was too cheap to throw away the dough. That's right. So John Harvey was thrilled, not because he wanted to become a cereal magnate. He was like, I'm a doctor, I want this for my patients. And now we can just easily pour this breakfast cereal into a bowl, and for the first time

people can eat a very simple, nutritious, what we think at least is a nutritious breakfast. And Will was like, I don't know, big brother, he said in his head, because he dare not speak aloud. He said, the way I see it, and this is all in his brain now, the way I see it, you don't have to be ill to eat breakfast cereal. I think healthy people might just like a special little simple breakfast that they can pour out of a bowl. And he was sitting over there going like this, and John Harvey said, what are you doing over

there? He went, nothing big brother, nothing. Pay no attention. Are you thinking about wanking? No. Put on the cage. He's got a silver suture. So in the end, however, the patent for flaked cereals in process of preparing same was

issued on April 14, 1896, to John Harvey Kellogg alone, not his wife, nor his brother, just to him. Right. And it did pretty well for a little while. It did. They sold something like 180,000 cases in, no, I'm sorry, they sold this stuff for about 10 years, and they sold enough that they were making their money back. They were selling it outside of the sanitarium, but not much.

Not much. But people figured out that they would probably sell a lot more of the cereal if it didn't taste like shit. So he said, I've got an idea. It's a radical idea, but I think this might just work. Let's add a little bit of salt and sugar to this cereal recipe. And John Harvey went, get out demons, salt and sugar as bad as olives. And he'd had to change a part about olives by this time.

And Will said, no, no, I really, I think this is a good idea. And if you stop and think about it, everyone's had like Kellogg's cornflakes, right? How much sugar do you have to put on those things to make them taste decent? Imagine what they must have tasted like before. What we're all eating is the improved taste version, right? I can't imagine how bland they were before. You can just cry eating these things. So still better than grape nuts.

Grape nuts are the worst. Captain Crunch peanut butter. Do you have that here? Captain Crunch? Oh, what? You've had it? Isn't it the best? It's the best sugary cereal.

When my wife goes out of town, that's my vice. Some guys are like, I don't know, I don't know what guys do when women go out of town, their wives. I get cereal. He's like, oh, I don't know what this is. And she comes back, she's like, do I smell breakfast cereal? How could you? Let me smell your spoon.

It sounded dirty for some reason. Oh, where are we? Oh, okay. I don't worry. I'm sorry. So John Harvey goes out of town, he goes to Europe to do some lecturing, and back then I guess it takes like a month to go to Europe and a month to come back and a couple of months to go on tour and do his lecturing.

He was gone long enough for a little brother to build a manufacturing plant. Will was like, I hope he doesn't notice the mass production plant that I built while he was gone. With big vats of sugar and salt. And John Harvey came back and he was really pissed off and he said, you're going to pay for this out of your own pocket, out of your allowance that I give you, out of your chief allowance that I give you. And Will was done.

He was like, I'm done. I'm tired of you, big brother, I've been working for you and getting abused for all these years. He said, if it's everyone listening, please note, I just made a friend's reference. Do you have friends here? Sure. We called it mates. Which apparently mate either means, like, I love you or you're about to get your ass

kicked. I had, thus this whole time, I've been like, all right, are we hugging, are we fighting? Just hugging. Just hug. That's it. That's our motto. Just hug and wank. So the sanitarium, Will had had enough.

The sanitarium actually burned down in 1902 from an accidental furnace gone wrong. And Will was like, all right, I'll help you rebuild this, because we've all kind of put everything into it. And then after that, I'm really gone. Trust me. He was genuinely spineless. Yes. He was a spineless brother.

I'm out of here after I help you rebuild the 15 story sanitarium. But John Harvey actually refused to get on that sugar train. And he sold the sweetened version to his brother. He actually bought the patent from his brother of the decent tasting version. And on February 19th, 1906, at the age of 46 years old, I'm a little older than that even. I'm not. He's a late bloomer.

Yeah, yeah, we get it. Will Kellogg founded the Battle Creek Toasted Cornflake Company and became a very, very, very rich man. So at this point, John Harvey and Will Kellogg have now gone their separate ways for basically the first time in their lives. And we're going to take a message break again right here. So Alex, if you will come out one more time, Alex Sefton, everybody, we will be right back right after these messages, learning stuff with Joshua and John Oh, to get the now everyone

stuff you should know. Yeah. Nice work. Thank you, Alex. Wow. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and

dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips?

Is that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you get your podcasts. I'll be there for you. And so will my husband, Michael, and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. If so, tell everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never ever have to say bye-bye-bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And we're back, everybody. Thank you. It's like we practiced this or something, you guys are good. So Will struck out on his own with the recipe that he bought from his brother, and now he started selling 180,000 cases of corn flakes in the first year, first year after he separated from his brother, less than the first year because they separated in February.

So in less than a year, he sold 180,000 cases, and there's like four or five boxes to a case of corn flakes because they, okay, there's like six or seven boxes to a case because he put a little salt and a little sugar in it started to take the world by storm, but he realized he was never going to make it a national product unless he took New York. Because you know, if he could make it there, he could make it anywhere. So we started something, that's pretty good. An average. Thank you.

I just came up with that. I like that. That should be a t-shirt. It should be. We should totally license that and get our suit off for it. So he started an advertising campaign, he threw me off. He started an advertising campaign specifically for New York called Wink Wednesday, which was pretty risque actually, especially for Will Kellogg, but also for 1906.

It was basically, he might as well have been asking women to show a little ankle because he advertised in all the New York papers on Wednesday when you go shopping ladies, wink at your grocer and your grocer will give you a free box of corn flakes. And you know, obviously people would do anything for free corn flakes, including winking at a strange man. Not wanking. No. That was a different ad campaign.

But it was a big deal to give away a free box of cereals. You didn't have to enter stuff as your code or anything like that. Just a wink and you get your free cereal. So it was a big deal. Another few dominoes started to fall to help this thing really explode. In the 1910s, pasteurization of milk finally happened, so it was no longer dangerous to eat cereal, I guess. What else did they come up with?

Oh, like kids, like cutting out box tops and mailing them in for sort of cruddy prizes. That was a big marketing thing in Battle Creek, Michigan. If you grow up, even at our age in the 1970s and 80s in America, you knew like Battle Creek, Michigan was an address where they would send you things if you send in cereal. Right. I want a crappy whistle. It's going to break after three blows. But I got it for free because they sent in a box top.

That was the whole thing. They started expanding into new markets in 1914, they went to Canada. They started brand flakes in the 1915s and 16s. They finally in the 1920s built a plant right here in Sydney, Australia. Right? Sexy. And oh, what else? They invented the awesome little single serving boxes that are still one of my favorite things

because I like small things. I think the little single serving cereal box that you can actually open up and eat out of is like the pinnacle of human technology. It's pretty good. I love it. Large Hadron Collider, mini box that you can eat out of cereal. Who knew the Large Hadron Collider was going to make two appearances in a 19th century Kellogg's episode?

Oh, and the other thing we'll did was very revolutionary during the Great Depression when people were, I mean, a lot of people were going out of business, businesses were not doing well, or they would just really kind of go down to bare bones. He doubled down on advertising because he thought, I've actually got a pretty cheap, easy to eat food, and he made money during the Great Depression. Yep. It was remarkable. He was extraordinarily successful.

He founded the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. He endowed it with $50 million, this is back in like the 1910s, just a tremendous amount of money. It was worth like $9 billion today. So he was extraordinarily wealthy, and all of this happened the moment he stepped out from his brother's shadow, and his brother didn't like that one bit. So John Harvey said, well, I don't care at all about cereal myself, but I really don't like my little brother being successful, so I'm going to make my own cereal.

I'm going to make corn flakes. And I think I'll call them Kellogg's corn flakes. Now, he said corn flakes with an M. Right. And people, they were like, are you saying corn flakes or corn flakes? And he was like, yeah. You tell me. All right.

So he made these things, and Will was like, well, big brother, I'll see you in court. And he sued John Harvey, and John Harvey said, oh yeah, well, I'm suing you back because that's the American way. And they went to court with dueling lawsuits. And what was that issue was who had the right to use the Kellogg name? Yeah. I mean, what was really at heart was ego, let's be honest. They were both named Kellogg.

That's part of it. But also, John Harvey was like, I'm the famous John Harvey Kellogg. I'm the Dr. Oz of my day. And he was like, who is that? He's like, just wait, you'll see. It's a sensible reference. Do you know who Dr. Oz is? OK.

I didn't know if you'd talk to Dr. Australia. I was like, wait a minute. Did they get that? Dr. Australia. I'd go to that guy. So on the other hand, Will was like, well, wait a minute, wait a minute. Yes, my brother is the most famous doctor in all the land. But I have built this Kellogg's brand over the last couple of decades.

And I've actually eclipsed his fame. So there was like, like you said, a lot of ego at stake here, the family name, but also which was the more famous Kellogg? And it turns out that the court said Will is. He wasn't a good guy either, by the way. He didn't silver suture things. But yeah. He was a very unhappy, unfulfilled man.

He would spend a lot of evenings at home kind of longingly looking at the cage that his brother had built around his genitalia and just think, why? Why did I let him talk me into that? And does anyone have any wire cutters? I don't know about that. So after these lawsuits, they rarely ever spoke again and was really, really sad. If you've ever had a good brother or a good sibling, you know how wonderful that is. They were not tight at all.

They didn't speak. If they ever did, Will would make sure he had a witness there just to hear the conversation. You know, things are really bad when you have like a stenographer in the room at Thanksgiving. So today, most nutritionists agree and obesity experts agree that they actually had it kind of wrong as far as cornflakes go. Yeah. So I mean, the whole reason they made cornflakes in the first place was to aid in digestion because everybody showed up like, oh, I feel so terrible and they would feed them cornflakes

or bran flakes or whatever. But in doing this and predigesting the food for the patient by baking it a couple of times, they actually stripped away a lot of the actual healthy stuff from the grain, right? If you just strip away the outside of corn or a wheat or something like that, that's the stuff that allows you to kind of slowly digest something and keeps your blood sugar from spiking. So back then and today, if you ate something like cornflakes or like any kind of breakfast cereal, your blood sugar would spike and it would crash and you would get ravenously

hungry very early. Whereas if you ate like whole grain, like gruel or mush, it might have sucked and taken three hours to make, but you would stay fuller longer. So yeah, today, breakfast cereal is poison, I guess is the message of all of this, ironically. So the Sanitarium and Battle Creek was driven out of business eventually for a few reasons. The Great Depression was a big one. When there's a recession or a depression in the country, the first thing to go, still today, are these sort of luxury items.

And so this hippie-dippy, like Uberlux health spa in the early 1900s and the 1920s and 30s, it was not like celebrities even stopped going there. That's how bad it got during the Depression. Like even Amelia Earhart stopped showing up after a while. Really? Is it too soon for an Amelia Earhart show? Some people clapped at that awful, awful, mean-spirited joke. So yeah, he had to lay off workers, Will was getting rich and John Harvey was going broke,

well not broke, but he was getting more poor. Maybe he would have to sell off the building itself to the U.S. government. They converted it into a military hospital. And Battle Creek, though, was somehow, because of the cereal boom, became the home of breakfast cereal around the world. So there were 100 different cereal companies, I guess they thought this was the only place you could make it. Right.

Like, oh, I guess we got to go to Central Michigan to make cereal. Oh, that sucks. Sorry, we want to make cereal. We got to move there. But I mean, still today, it's still the cereal capital of the world, and in his twilight years, John Harvey became very, very much eccentric, even more eccentric than his younger days. Yeah, he would have like two hour long meals a couple of times a day, ended up putting on a lot of weight, and he was a vegetarian, bear in mind.

But during these meals, he would have guests, and he would say, excuse me guests, I'll be right back. And he would pick up a pail on his way out, and he would come back with a pail filled with his own poop, and he would say, get a whiff of this. Seriously, that's not a joke. He said that his stools were as sweet as a nursing baby, or the nursing baby's stools, I should say, or that they were no more offensive than warm biscuits, which if that's true, that's actually kind of worth showing off at dinner to tell you the truth.

I might actually be like, seriously, smell it. Smells like warm biscuits. I've thrown a lot of dinner parties, but no one like that, not like that. So finally, he approached death, and we have to point out these guys, I mean, they were kooky, but they lived into their late 80s and 90s at a time when people didn't generally live that long. So they were doing something right, diet wise. And in 1943, as John Harvey approached death in his late 80s, he started to feel a little

bit bad about little brother Will after 88 years of being a dick. And he wrote a letter of apology, and part of it said this, I earnestly desire, brother, to make amends for any wrong or injustice of any sort I've done to you. I'm sure you were quite white in regards, sorry, Jerry cut that part out. I realized it just said quite white, which he probably meant that too. You're like such a cocker spaniel, brother, I realize you were quite white and right. In regards to the food business, your better balance judgment is doubtless, saved you from a vast number of mistakes of the sort I've made and allowed you to achieve great success

for which generations will come to owe you gratitude, PS, what's it like to have sex? I bet it's great, right? So he closed this letter and gave it to his secretary, and his secretary took it and read it and decided not to mail it. Secretary found it just too demeaning to John Harvey and decided, no, this isn't going anywhere. But John Harvey didn't realize this. So he just sat around waiting to hear back from Will and then died while he was... You feel bad for this guy?

Did you forget the carbolic acid in the white supremacy? Jeez. No, that means you have feelings. He lived in the future, it's fine to judge people who lived in the past. So Will eventually did get that letter though, five years after John Harvey's death when Will was 88 and he was getting on up there in age, he got that letter and finally at the end of his long career, he realized that he had gotten his brother's approval, granted he didn't get to say thank you or you're welcome back.

But he got this letter, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation that he started, it's now a $9 billion fund that guides the belief that children, all children have an equal opportunity to thrive and they do really, really good work here all over the world actually, but especially in the United States. It's a good organization. So Will Harvey died and like Chuck kind of alluded to earlier, he wasn't the greatest guy ever. He was that little brother bitterness that only a little brother can have when they have

an older brother that they've never resolved their issues with. And so that means that he took it out on everybody else except for John Harvey. So he was kind of an overbearing father and husband and when he died, his grandson, and this is his grandson, right? Even kids are supposed to just love their grandparents unconditionally, not this one. Will's grandson wrote when he died at age 91 in 1951, nobody really showed a tear. Most felt a great sense of relief as if a heavyweight had been lifted from them. Family, am I right?

Cornflakes. Yeah, but the grandson was like, but I really appreciate the $10 billion inheritance grandpa left, right? He can rot in hell, but I really like the month. Thank you, grandpa. All right, bring us home, brother. So if you go to Oak Hill Cemetery in Battle Creek and a lot of people do, you've been on the tour before, haven't you, the cereal tour?

Seriously, people go to Battle Creek to tour cereal factories. But when you're there, when you're there, you can go to Oak Hill Cemetery and you can visit Will Kellogg's massive burial plot. It's like made of blue slate. It's got black rod iron vents around it with the iconic Kellogg's K on the case. That was his signature, by the way, that Kellogg's that you see is Will's signature. And it's a pretty big tourist stop in Battle Creek because there's nothing to do in Battle Creek.

But what most people don't realize is that years before Will Kellogg bought that burial plot, he and his brother had adjoining burial plots side by side with little simple tombstones, just enough for names and dates of birth and dates of death. It was weird for brothers to have adjoining plots. We have adjoining plots, but we're friends, so it makes a little more sense. But when people are visiting Will Kellogg's grave, what they don't realize is that just about 10 spots away, his original grave site that he had moved from because he hated his brother so much, his brother, John Harvey, is still buried there.

So when they're visiting Will's grave, just a few steps away, one of the most famous physicians who ever lived in America is buried there in a very simple little headstone. That's right. Even in death, little brother finally is giving his brother the finger. And that's the story of the Kellogg's brothers, everybody. Yes, it is. Thank you. Good job.

Good job. Good job. You too, buddy. Wow. Wee, Sidney. All right. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.