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

Robert explains how H. L. Hunt became the richest man alive through simple hard work and also gambling and pimping. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Robert Evans?

  Oh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the worst people in all of history. And this week, we are about to start part two of our episodes on the former richest man in the world, H.L. Hunt. And when we left him off, his dad and his beloved older brother had just died. He had been saved by a magical prostitute after proving supernaturally good at sex. And he's in Arkansas, starting a farm, you know, using the money he'd inherited and the money he'd taken from fleecing all of his friends at poker. He is going to try to make something of himself.

• 0:49Speaker 01

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• 0:54Robert Evans?

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• 2:50Robert Evans?

  So by the start of 1912, our boy Haroldson Lafayette Hunt had opened his very own cotton plantation. Again, this is probably inspired by the fact that his father had kind of talked endlessly about how beautiful the South was and how great cotton farming was. Unfortunately, he's going to learn a lesson, which is that cotton farming sucks ass. And it's really hard to like get rich doing unless you own a bunch of people who you can make work for you for free.

• 3:19Speaker 04

  Yeah. Empire of cotton history taught me that lesson very clearly.

• 3:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yes, yes. When you have to like do your own work and pay people to help you sucks way harder, way harder. And he's going to learn that over the next few years, right? He's also going to learn that the cotton market itself is incredibly volatile, right? And so from year to year, your harvest might not be worth what you put in to make it. And also like bad weather can fuck you, you know, if you don't have enough of a nest egg to survive it, right? It's just a very hard lifestyle. And this is where the fact that he starts, he starts farming and immediately learns, oh shit, it's really hard to make money cotton farming. This is going to show evidence of one of his most valuable traits, right? Which is that he is not dissuaded by failure. A couple of times in his life, he's going to lose everything, like three different times.

• 4:10Robert Evans?

  He loses everything and like makes it back, you know, to ultimately get crazy rich. And if I were writing a LinkedIn post to appeal to a bunch of wannabe founders and CEO bootlickers, I didn't there, right?

• 4:21Speaker 04

  Right.

• 4:21Robert Evans?

  Hunt, you know, bankrupted himself three times and he, you know, never let it, never, never let it, you know, convince him to stop. He never backed down. He just grew right back on the horse and made the money up again, you know?

• 4:32Speaker 04

  Should be president.

• 4:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah, right, right. It is true that like confidence in the face of failure is important. You're certainly not going to make it as an entrepreneur unless you can't, you can handle some failure. But it's a separate characteristic of Hunt's that's going to contribute a lot more to his future success than the fact that he's fine with failure. The thing that actually keeps him going through all these failures and particularly through the failure of his cotton business is that he also owns a casino, right?

• 4:59Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 5:00Robert Evans?

  That has a lot more to do with it than the attitude. I mean, casino is putting it a little far. It's not like a full-on Vegas casino, obviously. Those don't exist yet. But he owns a gambling den, right? An article that Anita Davis wrote for EBSCO notes that Hunt opens a gambling parlor right alongside his cotton plantation. He starts them both basically at the same time.

• 5:23Speaker 04

  Two for one.

• 5:24Robert Evans?

  And while the plantation doesn't really work out financially, the gambling den is a good investment, right?

• 5:29Speaker 04

  He's like, you know what? Slavery does suck. Let's get the gambling.

• 5:34Robert Evans?

  Gambling, though. Nothing problematic about that, baby. Put it all on red. So one constant of Hunt's early life is that when he suffers a reverse and like loses all of his money, he's able to, it's weird because before I learned this, I would just be like, okay, but he lost all of his money. How does he a year later have like $8,000 to invest in this new business? Well, it's because he keeps gambling. And whenever he runs out of money, he just gambles until he makes more money because he's like, it's a superpower for him. Like he just, as far as I can tell, anytime the man sits down at a table, he walks away with money, right?

• 6:07Speaker 04

  Disgusting.

• 6:08Robert Evans?

  And if you have that, it's like, it's like fucking Lieutenant Commander Data, right? Like he's just gonna win when he sits down to play cards. So every time he goes bankrupt, he gets his money back because he's like a gambling freak, right? In 1914, he marries Lyda Bunker and the newlyweds get to work having the first of what will ultimately be six children. Their first child is a girl, Margaret. They have her in 1915 and two years later, they have their first boy, who he names Haroldson Lafayette Hunt. Technically, he's the third, right? Lyda calls him Hassy. She also calls her hus- Husband Hassy, so it's kind of confusing in the book at this point because you'll hear the to sell will refer to both of them as Hassy.

• 6:52Robert Evans?

  I'm only going to call his son Hassy. When I say Hassy, I'm talking about our Harold Hunt, the future richest man in the world's kid. Now, he is going to cheat constantly on his wife. He is cheating on Lyda as early as 1917, probably earlier than that, but at least by that point. And he is not subtle about it. So Lyda has to deal with hearing endlessly about like, oh, your husband sure has an eye for the ladies, huh?

• 7:19Speaker 04

  Ew.

• 7:20Robert Evans?

  Which she does not like, not does not make her feel good. His tell is like, the way that she can tell he's cheating on her is he'll point out a lady in town and be like, you know, she's a really good person. And that, that, that means light is like, okay, so he's fucking her or he's, he's gonna try to fuck her. Right? Sometimes it just means that he's got the hots for somebody. Right, right, right.

• 7:43Speaker 04

  Her personality really shines through, you know?

• 7:45Robert Evans?

  What a great personality she's got. You're just like casually bringing that up to your wife.

• 7:52Robert Evans?

  And yeah, it's, it's one of those things where like, she's never okay with it. She kind of, I think, accepts it just because the world is the way it is. She doesn't have any, there's nothing she can, not much she can do about it, right? But it makes her sad. And also his kids can tell that he's cheating on their mom and they don't like it. Like his, his first two kids especially are going to really hate him for the fact that he is just, he makes, he makes their mother miserable. He treats her so badly. I really, I cannot exaggerate what a bad husband he is. Hunt suffers ups and downs over the first three years he spends farming, but World War Dunn, Dunn, World War One finally does his, his cotton plantation in. The cotton market collapses kind of not long after the outbreak of war.

• 8:38Robert Evans?

  And then in 1917, his farm gets flooded out and just kind of the mix of these two factors together. He can't keep it going anymore. He has to give up. Somehow he goes from this, from his, you know, going bankrupt and his farm failing in 1917 to investing in his first. Oil well in 1921 and there's a little bit of mystery as to how he gets his first oil well. Here's how that pro oil and gas industry website Oklahoma minerals describes this part of his career. So this is like the, this is like the, this is the approved propaganda line that Hunt wanted people to believe. With a borrowed $50, he began trading oil leases, employing a strategy of buying and selling that almost simultaneously

• 9:21Robert Evans?

  to profit without significant capital investment. This approach allowed him to amass considerable wealth in a short period. Right? So basically he's just doing the kind of trading people do on computers now, but with his super smart brain. And he doesn't need much money. It's just a borrowed $50, you know, he's able to turn that gradually into enough of a fortune to start buying his own oil fields. That's not quite accurate. That is like, it accurately describes one of his strategies, which is that once he gets going after he has this first successful oil field, he'll start buying and selling leases and he is doing this thing where he's like doing it in such a way that he doesn't have to actually put much money down. Right? Because he's just kind of switching, shuffling assets around. It's a little bit of like a show game type deal.

• 10:06Robert Evans?

  But this does leave out something important about how he got his first oil well. And to describe that, I'm going to go back to his FBI report. From the FBI, quote, "He was reportedly a professional gambler who won an oil lease in a card game and is alleged to have operated prostitution activities in Arkansas." So this is something you'll find, first off, it's not just a gambling den. He's also a pimp. Right? That's especially, I think that he gets more into that as the farm fails. He's like, well, crime will make money for me and he uses the proceeds of both gambling and prostitution in order to make the money that he invests in oil fields.

• 10:46Robert Evans?

  And it's very possible. We don't know entirely if it's that he literally won his first oil field in a card game. That was a rumor and it seems very possible. But if he didn't win his first oil field in a card game, then he bought it with the proceeds from crime. Right? And I think it's probably true. He probably won. First oil field in a card game and then invested in other leases and got into the trading leases game with money he made from crime, right? I think it's probably a mix of those, but this guy has to become a criminal to get rich. Right? That's not emphasized enough in the hagiographies of him, but like he's, he's a, he's, he's a pimp, you know?

• 11:27Speaker 04

  So he's gonna do all of this and then end up becoming like a far right.

• 11:32Robert Evans?

  Super right, super right wing, yeah.

• 11:35Speaker 04

  The hypocrisy.

• 11:36Robert Evans?

  He's not a religious right wing guy initially. Yeah, he's, it's very much a hypocrisy thing, but like all these guys.

• 11:42Speaker 04

  They're all hypocrites, all big tits in the fucking.

• 11:46Robert Evans?

  Anyone whose whole thing is like attacking and wanting to like harm people using the state for violations of a moral code is always in violation of the moral code that they are trying to push on other people, one way or the other. When you dig enough, you find it out, right?

• 12:01Speaker 04

  Right.

• 12:03Robert Evans?

  That's just a, as far as I'm convinced, a pretty universal truth with these, these kinds of assholes. Uh, I found an article from The Nation from 1964. The author of that article claims, "The explanation that he like gambled to get his first oil field got into print for the first time in 1950 in a British newspaper, but it has been repeated many times since. Hunt denies it all." And I don't know what the truth is here. Whatever the truth, Hunt is gonna continue operating gambling establishments for the next couple decades. He makes a fortune on the Arkansas oil boom and is said to have been worth $600,000 by the time he's 25, which, you know, by the standards, like if you turn that into modern money, he's a multimillionaire pretty much by the time he's in his mid twenties.

• 12:47Robert Evans?

  Now, he's gonna lose all of that money not long after this, Bill make even more back, right? He's not what you'd call a good father at any point in time, especially in this period.

• 12:57Speaker 04

  I can imagine all that cheating.

• 12:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah. All the cheating, he gambles constantly. Instead of, he doesn't like spend time raising his kids. Like when he has free time, when he's not working on the farm, he's gambling, right? And then when he, eventually he's gambling or he's speculating on oil leases, oil field leases, right? But he never, he never just has downtime with the kids. He's always gambling, right? During the early years before he leaves Arkansas to pursue oil fields in Louisiana and then Texas, his kids tell regular stories of him just being gone all the time and like mom needing to find someone to watch them when she had to do something because he's playing poker, right? And she hates him gambling. She thinks that him gambling is the root of all of their problems.

• 13:39Robert Evans?

  Now, to be fair, she's not right. Like she blames him gambling on them going bankrupt like two or three times and he goes bankrupt because of legitimate businesses, like first because of his farm and then I think like a couple of times as he's not quite bankrupt, but he loses a lot of money on like oil speculation. Gambling is a really reliable way for them to make money. Or at least I should say the card gambling is not what is bad for their finances. His gambling on oil speculation fucks them over a couple of times, right?

• 14:10Speaker 04

  But his ego is fed by the gambling and that's the thing too. It's like that makes him reinforce that he's the most special and what makes it feel like, yeah, I can go out and sleep with whoever I want and do whatever because I can just.

• 14:20Robert Evans?

  Exactly.

• 14:21Speaker 04

  Boom.

• 14:22Robert Evans?

  The rules don't apply. Yeah. Um, pocket sand. Yeah. So he takes all of his money. There's a couple of occasions where he'll just like take all of the money and like leave his wife with the kids nearly destitute for like a year and just go down to another state to speculate on oil fields. So she like, the kids don't like, this is a scary time for the kids. They don't know if he's ever coming back and neither does she, right? And he doesn't like, I don't think he makes it clear that he's coming back. I think he's like, I'm gonna go see what I, if I can make a fortune and he's kind of like, and if I die out there or whatever and leave you guys destitute, well, that's how it goes, you know?

• 14:58Speaker 04

  I've been doing this since I was 12 years old, guys. Don't worry about me.

• 15:01Robert Evans?

  And like by the time, by the time he's worth 600 grand at 25, he could have like retired and put all of that into, you know, a couple of safe investments or just, you know, like fucking bonds or whatever and lived and supported his family comfortably for the rest of their lives and like been a father. He chooses to then gamble all of that money again and leave his family. He does not need to. He has a point where he's like, you could choose to be a father and raise your kids, and you would all be wealthy for the rest of your lives. And he takes all of that money and puts it all on black and loses it. And is gone for like another year or so to make it back, right?

• 15:40Speaker 04

  Right.

• 15:41Robert Evans?

  So this is not good for his family.

• 15:44Speaker 04

  And I'm sure he, in the back of his mind, he's like, listen, I'm not bothering you guys. I'm not harassing you about how much breast milk you guys are getting. So why should you be upset?

• 15:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 15:55Speaker 04

  I'm giving you unlimited mom time.

• 15:56Robert Evans?

  Nobody wants their dad around. It sucks.

• 15:58Speaker 04

  Dads are terrible.

• 15:59Robert Evans?

  I'm doing you a favor.

• 16:03Robert Evans?

  And yeah, like, his wife blames all of this, again, on like the poker. But he is, she is right that like his gambling is what's destroying the family. It's just his gambling on oil wells is what's destroying the family. Cause he, again, they go bankrupt a second time in the twenties because of all this.

• 16:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:20Robert Evans?

  Per the book Kingdom, he gave no thought in the world to security for his family. Right? That is accurate, and that's also how his wife and his first couple of kids see him. Right? Is he does not give a fuck about us. He is willing to gamble all, like our happiness and our survival entirely because it thrills him. When his oldest son, Hasi, turns eight, it's become apparent that he has inherited his father's intellect. Tasi is incredibly bright. Unfortunately, he's also the one who's most hurt by his father's complete neglect. Tussin writes, Hasi felt personally rejected by this strange man who entered his life only now and then, without warning. This man had named him after himself, had given him his looks and quick intelligence,

• 17:05Robert Evans?

  then apparently decided his son was not quite up to snuff. Right? So that's very much how Hasi sees what his dad is doing is like, he named me after himself, he clearly wanted me to be his heir, and then I must have failed him because he wants nothing to do with me.

• 17:22Speaker 04

  Ugh, that's so sad. It's like he's, he, he's just repeating the exact same cycles of harm. And like, I like psychologically, it's interesting, but this is like a human being like, you're a dick. Stop being a dick.

• 17:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah, don't stop, don't do that to your kids. Again, if you, I, I kind of think if you wind up getting lucky enough that you have like a windfall that allows you to never work again and support your kids forever. You kind of have a responsibility to like, be a really involved parent at that point and maybe stop gambling incessantly. You know, you could start a business and like, you know, or you have some small investments, but that's the point at which you should make your family a priority again. You've succeeded, you know? You don't need to keep doing this.

• 18:04Speaker 04

  You have to choose a struggle, like either be broke and present or be rich at nice. Like you can't be both mean and then not present and then always messing with money. Like pick a, pick a struggle.

• 18:16Robert Evans?

  In 1925, he abandons his family yet again to speculate on oil fields in Florida. While he's down, and I, I want to, I want to specify that's Florida, the state, not Flo Rida, the musical sensation. Always there's confusion whenever we talk about those.

• 18:30Speaker 04

  It's important to get these things right.

• 18:32Robert Evans?

  A lot of people know Flo Rida, but don't know that there's a state that's named after him. I just want to make that clear. So while he's down in Florida, he meets a waitress, Franny Atai, who helps him find a plot of land to gamble on near Tampa. It's like, he thinks there might be oil and I think there, it winds up being, there winds up being oil there. But he spends months down in Tampa, you know, searching for more deals, working on that deal and hanging out a lot with Franny Atai, with this waitress, right? She's a wannabe musician, she's like a singer. And so he gets really into writing musicals. He convinces himself that like, he's a great writer. And in fact, that like, oh, all these other writers, all these professional writers are idiots.

• 19:16Robert Evans?

  Like I bet because I'm so smart, I could be the best playwright ever if I just devoted some time to it. So he like, becomes convinced he's going to be like the biggest thing on Broadway. He like goes to a show on Broadway once around this period of time. And he's like, I'm going to make the best musical that's ever been made.

• 19:34Speaker 04

  Has he ever been to New York? Like, what is he talking?

• 19:36Robert Evans?

  He's been once. Yeah, he's been once. He saw, he sees a show on Broadway. That's what convinces him.

• 19:40Speaker 04

  Oh, God.

• 19:41Robert Evans?

  He's gonna be the greatest musician or the greatest playwright of all time. And so for a while, he gets really into that. And he like writes a bunch of songs that sounded terrible. And they're primarily songs for Frania, right? Because he's in love with her at this point. He marries her on Armistice Day, 1925. Now, you may note, he never divorced his first wife. Nor did he break up with her, nor did he tell her that he was done. Frania, by the way, does not know she's, that he's cheating. She has no idea he has another wife. He does not tell her he has a wife and multiple children. He's lying to her, too. She's not, does not bear any responsibility here. She thinks she's met a guy and fallen in love with him.

• 20:25Robert Evans?

  And he marries her and they start having kids together. He buys her a house and he just starts raising a second secret family in Florida.

• 20:33Speaker 04

  Oh, my God. So Jamaican.

• 20:34Robert Evans?

  He and Frania will ultimately have four children. Jamaican?

• 20:38Speaker 04

  I can say that. I'm sure.

• 20:39Robert Evans?

  Okay.

• 20:40Speaker 04

  But it's like, what?

• 20:41Robert Evans?

  A lot of, a lot of people do that.

• 20:43Speaker 04

  I know, but it's just like one family, one neglected family, one neglected family's not enough. Let's just have two.

• 20:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah, two, I gotta really double down on my family neglect. Look, two neglected families makes a non-neglected family. That's the way it works.

• 20:58Speaker 04

  Right.

• 20:59Robert Evans?

  If you neglect enough families, it loops around to you being a caring father.

• 21:03Speaker 04

  Oh, just like a numbers game. It's like his gambling.

• 21:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah, all a numbers game, baby.

• 21:07Speaker 04

  At one point, someone's gonna have to like me.

• 21:09Robert Evans?

  Right, right. I'm gonna eventually find a family I actually want to be there for, you know?

• 21:13Speaker 04

  Exactly. Statistically speaking.

• 21:15Robert Evans?

  It's like gambling. Just keep getting, keep getting new cards, keep dealing.

• 21:19Speaker 04

  Wait, so just to clarify, how many children does he have with the first wife?

• 21:23Robert Evans?

  Ultimately, he's gonna have like 15. He has six, I think, with his first wife and four with Frania. Ultimately, over the course of his life, he has like 15 kids.

• 21:32Speaker 05

  It's too many.

• 21:33Speaker 04

  Ew!

• 21:33Speaker 05

  Lot.

• 21:34Robert Evans?

  And again, this is bigamy. He's bigamously married now. This is a crime. You're not allowed to do this. In 1930, because he also lied to the government, right? About not being previously married.

• 21:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:45Robert Evans?

  In 1930, he takes his money and he moves to East Texas, where he meets a fellow named C. M. Joyner. So now he has abandoned both of his families. He meets a man named C. M. Joyner. He was another oil speculator. Not, sorry, not a speculator. Joyner is one of these guys, I forget the term for it, but he's like, he's like a prospector for oil wells, right? So Joyner identifies some land that's like, I think there's oil on this land. This is like, and I think a lot of it, right? And this well's name is Number One Daisy Bradford. Joyner is like a legend in the oil well prospecting business. This is a big deal. Guys like this who are like really skilled with the geology and stuff to like find. Well, yeah, to like, because this is, the whole oil boom relies on guys like this going out and,

• 22:30Robert Evans?

  because they don't have a lot of the technology we have today. So they're kind of looking at like the geology and whatnot. And like, where do I think there's going to be oil? Because it costs a lot of money to like drill to prove that there's oil.

• 22:41Speaker 05

  Drill, baby, drill.

• 22:42Robert Evans?

  And a property, right? So the guys who are best at identifying places that they think are worth drilling and have the highest success rate are worth a lot of money. And Joyner's one of the best of these guys. And he picks out this space that becomes the oil well Number One Daisy Bradford. Hunt buys the rights to this oil well. Because that's how guys like Joyner make it. They're not running the wells themselves. They like, they find, they speculate, they find it and then they like buy a bunch of acreage that they think is a good place for an oil well. And then try to find someone else to buy it and actually like prove their, like make the well, right? That's kind of how the business works. I'm yada yada-ing a lot. But Hunt buys the rights to this well and he leases 4,000 surrounding acres from C. M. Joyner.

• 23:27Robert Evans?

  So he doesn't own this land. He's like leasing it and basically buying the rights to exploit the well. So he and Joyner are in business together initially. This proves to be a really wise move. Because Number One Daisy Bradford becomes the largest producing oil field On planet Earth.

• 23:42Speaker 04

  Damn.

• 23:43Robert Evans?

  For years, this is the number one oil field on the planet. Right? That is going to make a lot of money. Now-

• 23:51Speaker 04

  He's gonna be so annoying. He's gonna be so fucking annoying.

• 23:54Robert Evans?

  This is going to really allow him to be a lot more of a piece of shit. And we'll talk about that. But you know who else is a piece of shit? Nope. I love our sponsors. Here they are.

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• 25:44Robert Evans?

  And we're back. Sophie, Sophie didn't notice that, so it's fine. We're good. We're good. We're happy. Everything's fine.

• 26:00Speaker 04

  I am unhappy.

• 26:01Robert Evans?

  Sophie's happy. She just says that when she's happy. She loves saying, "I'm unhappy" to mean I'm happy.

• 26:06Speaker 04

  She's just so beautiful, you can't tell, but she's unhappy.

• 26:09Robert Evans?

  Classic Sophie. So, that piece from The Nation that I've been quoting from outlines some of the weirdness around this oil deal for what's going to become the biggest oil field in the world, number one Daisy Bradford. Quote, "As a matter of mysterious fact, he, Hunt, wound up with most of the land Joyner started with. Nobody has ever figured out how he did it. Hunt says it was simple. He paid $1 million, but Joyner died with little money, and the almost uncountable riches Hunt has taken from Joyner's old land has turned some Texas oilmen sour on him." So, basically, people are pretty sure Hunt did something to screw Joyner out of a lot of money and like, kind of ruin him, but we don't know that that happened. Joyner might

• 26:52Robert Evans?

  have just squandered it, right? Some of those oilmen might have had sour grapes. That said, I think there's a pretty good chance Hunt fucks this guy. Like, he does not have a history of being great with his business partners. Yeah, exactly. He fucks everything else. That said, all these other oil guys probably do have sour grapes because Hunt is not just a good oilman. He is the best oilman of like, the first big oil boom. He is the best at this by a huge margin. He starts making money hand over fist not long after this point, and this is the end of his boom and bust cycles. He will never be poor again. He will never be out of money again. This well makes so much money that he's able to buy up more oil wells. He eventually owns hundreds of oil wells. It's like, more than 500? I forget

• 27:37Robert Evans?

  the exact number, but he owns so many fucking oil wells, and so many that he accumulates an almost impossible seeming percentage of the US oil market. Uh, he lives in Tyler, Texas during this period where he was noted by others as he's like, this is when he's starting to really get rich as a, he's a loner, right? He doesn't like to, the oil well guys, the guys who are like working on these wildcat rigs and stuff, like socialize, like to party, like to go out and drink. He doesn't socialize with any of his colleagues or any of his subordinates. He doesn't like to know them. He likes to work. He spends his free time doing extra work in his office indoors, not outside.

• 28:18Robert Evans?

  Uh, he prefers making deals to doing any labor on any of the claims that he owns. The son of one of his business partners at the time recalled, Mr. Hunt never forgot anything. Maps, statistics, lease data, he's never forgot. So he's got this, he's got this like a dead memory, I think is the, the term for it, right? Where he just, he just doesn't forget things. Um, Hunt has had to abandon his family at least twice to get to this point, but by now he has finally made it. And as the 1930s turned into the 1940s, he is making money hand over fist. Now, the case made in that article in The Nation, which is the best explanation I've seen anyone give as for why Hunt succeeds so far hard, goes like this.

• 29:00Robert Evans?

  He never stops gambling and that's what works for him ultimately. His whole driving intellectual justification for his business practices is the law of averages. He thinks about being an oil speculator the same way he thought about playing poker. As Hunt himself said, quote, "An element of luck is important when you first get started in the business. If you don't get a well fast, you can't accumulate the capital to start operating on a large enough scale. But after you start rolling, what you mainly need is a thorough knowledge of the laws of chance. A wildcatter can expect to bring in one well for every 30 tries and only one man in 30 will do that if you don't have faith in the law of averages. You'll probably get discouraged and quit. In my wildcatting days, I've drilled 100 dry wells, one after the other.

• 29:45Robert Evans?

  Then when prospects looked most pessimistic, the law of averages would go to work for me, just as I figured it would." Now that article goes on to note after Hunt's quote, "The boldness of that statement can be understood only when one realizes that a quarter of a million dollars is not an unusual cost for wildcatting a single well." So when he says he'd have a hundred dry wells in a row, each of those dry wells is costing like a quarter of a million bucks. That's just wasted.

• 30:09Speaker 04

  Crazy.

• 30:09Robert Evans?

  Like that, he is gambling. That's why he loves this, is this is gambling gambling. We're not, we're not putting fucking four grand ass down on a night of poker.

• 30:19Speaker 04

  Right.

• 30:20Robert Evans?

  We're putting a quarter of a million dollars on one roll of the fucking dice.

• 30:23Speaker 04

  This is his kink.

• 30:24Robert Evans?

  And he's doing that hundreds of times. Yes, yes, absolutely.

• 30:28Speaker 04

  It's so bizarre. I also just, I guess I'm just so, I can't imagine growing up, you know, poor, having that be your origin story, and being so casual with risking everything.

• 30:39Robert Evans?

  No.

• 30:40Speaker 04

  Like, I just, I would just want to be so comfortable with my two wives, like.

• 30:45Robert Evans?

  I think that's part of the key is he doesn't grow up poor. He is one of eight kids, inherits five grand, which is a shitload of money.

• 30:53Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 30:53Robert Evans?

  At that point in time, right? That's a, that's a comfortable inheritance. His dad has a 500 acre farm. They are not poor.

• 31:00Speaker 04

  But he wants that, but he wants to have that message for himself.

• 31:03Robert Evans?

  Right, right. Like, I, I am in that kind of boat where, like, I didn't grow up, we certainly weren't dirt poor. We were never missing meals, but like, my earliest memories are all of financial anxiety. Because like, my mom tried to start a business and then another, and they both failed and we, we went fucking broke. You know, our aunt and uncle, who were like business partners, went bankrupt. Like, it was, my dad had to leave for like, almost two years to work in New York, because it was the only place he could get a job, and that wasn't our house. And once I started making money, I don't gamble. Like, I don't gamble and I don't like invest in crazy shit. Like, I'm really conservative with like, in my investments and like finances, like saving for retirement.

• 31:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 31:41Robert Evans?

  I am very risk averse, because I don't want to be scared about money again. Because I've had a lot of my life scared about money.

• 31:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, I used to even make fun of my mom, because she would do like the Lotto tickets every day. And I'm like, Mom, why are you, why are you doing it? Just save your money. Give me it, give me the money, I'll save it.

• 32:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I, yeah, so again, I think that he's like this in part because he doesn't grow up poor, right? So, uh, he also has a superpower. So he knows he can always make more money gambling, which I think really helps too. Uh, that said, you know, obviously this doesn't work smoothly or perfectly. Hunt has his ups and downs, but the ups outnumber the downs to such an extent that by the time the US enters World War II, this is the craziest fact. Do you want to know how rich this guy is? How big a deal he is in the oil and gas industry? At the start of World War II, the start, when the US enters World War II, H.L. Hunt, personally, owns more oil reserves than all of the Axis powers put together.

• 32:41Speaker 04

  Jesus.

• 32:43Robert Evans?

  Like, if you just want to, if you want to like little hint about by the time the US enters, how fucked the Axis is from the start of that portion of World War II, one guy in the US has more oil than all of the Axis powers have access to. One guy. They were, once that, like, they could never have won. Once the US got involved, like, when you got the US and Russia, so like, all of the money and resources and all of the people, like, you're like, they, these people were so fucking fucked. Um, H.L. Hunt has more oil than all of your asses.

• 33:18Speaker 04

  Just drop him on the board, just like, we, we have a Hulk, we have a Hunt.

• 33:22Robert Evans?

  We've got our fucking Hunt, yeah. Now, that also, by the way, should answer the question. I shouldn't have to explain at this point, how did this guy become the richest man in the world? When World War II started, he owned all of the oil. How do you think that worked for him?

• 33:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's my, that's my like, business hack advice, is own all of the oil on earth when a world war starts.

• 33:45Speaker 04

  Write that down, everyone.

• 33:48Robert Evans?

  That'll, well, when that world war starts. Might not help you the same way if a third one kicks off, folks. Um, so, I would be remiss if I didn't point out, though, that owning the most productive oil wells on earth during World War II was not Hunt's only business in the early to mid 1940s. His FBI file notes that, "As of 1943, he was alleged to be the operator of a private horse race and gambling bookie establishment near his office in Dallas." So, he continues running a casino. But at this point, it's just for fun, right? It's love of the game.

• 34:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:20Robert Evans?

  Money.

• 34:21Speaker 04

  Vibes.

• 34:22Robert Evans?

  Like, he absolutely, and he'll get in trouble a couple of times. There'll be some like investigations because he stays involved in a lot of illegal gambling stuff. As an adult, he'll nearly get in trouble a couple of times, but it's just for, it's just for shits and giggles at this stage.

• 34:38Robert Evans?

  Now, obviously, up to this point, this is like a dude who I don't think is very pleasant, but there's not enough to make him a bastard. You know, at this stage in the oil and gas industry, he doesn't know about climate change. Yeah, like, that's certainly not like the widespread scientific consensus. So he can't really get him on that. He hasn't done anything, he's a shitty dad and he's bigamously married and those are bad things. But on its own, I don't do a behind the bastards just because a guy's got a shitty personal life. So now we're going to talk about the stuff that makes him earn his way onto the podcast.

• 35:09Speaker 05

  I'm nervous because it's World War II time.

• 35:11Speaker 04

  I know.

• 35:12Robert Evans?

  He's not too terrible. You know, he's, you get the, he's a, he's firmly right wing by the time World War II starts. I haven't seen any allegations of pro-Nazi sentiment, but he's anti-intervention at the start of the war and opposes US entry into the war, right? Which suggests to me, maybe.

• 35:34Speaker 04

  Some alliance, some mid for the alliance.

• 35:36Robert Evans?

  Sympathies there, yeah. That said, once the war starts, he realizes that because of the way oil depletion allowances work in tax laws, and I'm not going to explain this in detail because I don't know much about taxes, but it's this thing that because of the way it works, you can kind of not pay taxes at all if you're an oil man in a specific way, right? Per his biographer, Hunt began to realize that maybe he had been a trifle hasty in opposing American intervention. So basically, he's like, wait a second, I can sell all of the oil to the allied powers and I don't have to pay taxes on it? No, World War II sounds great.

• 36:13Speaker 04

  I can make this work.

• 36:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah, make as many Shermans as you guys want. What do those things get? A half a mile to the gallon? Awesome. Yeah, keep rolling those fuckers off the line.

• 36:24Robert Evans?

  So his big fear, though, during this period of time is that. His son, Hasi, now 22 years old, might get drafted, right? He doesn't want his boy, his namesake, to go to war and die. So he works out a deal with the US government. Because, you know, Hasi's got to serve. You know, they're drafting everyone they can. So his son joins the army and gets commissioned immediately as a second lieutenant, right? Which is not like, I mean, that, some people do join and are commissioned immediately, the second lieutenants and stuff. That's how you start if you're like an officer. But his son specifically gets commissioned because of who his dad is.

• 36:59Speaker 04

  Nepo baby.

• 37:00Robert Evans?

  And the job, a very nepo baby thing, and he doesn't want to be a nepo baby. By this point in time, Hasi has already established himself independently as a successful oil man, like, separate from his dad. And he hates his dad. And he really does not want to be associated with his father. And his dad forces him, by working with the government, forces him into the situation that now he's made to join the army, and he's made to take a job with the army where he's working in DC and he's basically advising the leader of China's nationalist faction during their civil war. So he's like, working with Chiang Kai-shek's guys.

• 37:36Speaker 04

  Whoa.

• 37:36Robert Evans?

  Specifically, I think, on like, oil, a lot of oil-related stuff. And he's doing this because his dad makes this job for him. He doesn't want this job, and he's really unhappy to be forced to, once again, live in his dad's shadow. This like fucks him up a lot. In the book, Kingdom to Sill writes about how Hasi has the, like, if he'd wanted to, this would have been a great opportunity, if he enjoyed being a nepo baby, to spend the war partying and hitting on all the hot ladies who are lonely because the men are gone. That's how to Sill writes. And then he adds this, just yet another fascinating passage from his biography. "The variety of females was enhanced by the Chinese nationalist government, which

• 38:20Robert Evans?

  staffed its embassy heavily with nubile young beauties from the Asian mainland. Willing young females have always been one of the earth's most readily accepted forms of currency, and currency was required to purchase power and influence."

• 38:32Speaker 04

  Jesus Christ.

• 38:35Robert Evans?

  Grow like, yeah, you're not wrong. I'm sure the Chinese nationalist government did staff their embassy with hotties because they know that that allows them to like, you can use hot girls to help you spy on people.

• 38:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:47Robert Evans?

  And you can use them to gain blackmail stuff. But like, that's a gross way to write that. Also, the variety of females.

• 38:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:54Robert Evans?

  Hesse always uses females that way, like a fucking Ferengi.

• 38:57Speaker 04

  The females are nubile. It's like, please, I'm vomiting.

• 39:00Robert Evans?

  It's weird. It's weird to sell. It's weird. Um, so, but you know, I don't doubt also that like, that is basically what's going on, right? Um, Hesse is very unhappy, uh, in this situation. He had been starting again. He'd been living independently. He was like, starting to succeed on his own. And then his dad uses the US government to trap him and force him to take the job his dad wants him to have. Like, it's the most controlling thing that you could possibly do as a father. And this is very in line with how he is as a dad. He's never there. And he never provides any emotional support, but he also has a very specific idea of what he wants his namesake to do for a living. And he will like berate him and scream at him anytime he does anything different or anytime he falls short.

• 39:45Robert Evans?

  And now he's like, oh, you want to live independently and do your own thing? No, fuck you. You're taking this job that I've made the government give you and you're gonna do it. And Hesse is deeply uncomfortable. And he has what sounds like a psychotic break one night after a party at the Chinese embassy, and flies into a violent rage, destroying all of the furniture in the room and like fighting people. And when hotel staff approach him, he starts screaming, "I've been betrayed, betrayed by the Rockefellers, betrayed by my father's enemies. They're all out to get me." So, maybe, it's kinda hard. I don't know what's going on with him. It may have been like paranoid schizophrenia. Cause he's like, never going to get better. He's mentally ill the rest of his life.

• 40:28Speaker 04

  He broke him. He broke his boy.

• 40:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 40:32Speaker 04

  I, I do love that the Rockefellers come up that way all the time. Betrayed by the Rockefellers. That's what I was laughing at. At the scene of every crime.

• 40:41Robert Evans?

  But in this case, they are literally in play.

• 40:43Speaker 04

  But I love, like, I do love how it's like, they have, like, his son ends up doing like a rival oil company the same way, like his brother and his dad had the rival banks. It's just like, fathers and sons.

• 40:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah, great.

• 40:56Speaker 05

  Succession.

• 40:57Speaker 04

  Exactly. It's so Murdoch coded, the way that he was like, uh, yeah, I'm just gonna absorb you into the coalition, whether you want to be independent or not. It's so Murdoch.

• 41:07Robert Evans?

  Oh, you don't have any choice in this. Yeah.

• 41:09Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 41:09Robert Evans?

  So he winds up, Hassie winds up in a military hospital. And when his dad comes for a visit, Hassie like charges him and tries to beat him up. Like, he basically rushes his dad. As soon as his dad like walks into the room and tries to assault him, he has to be restrained by guards. H.L. Hunk tells his wife after this, "The boy's too high spirited, too sensitive. He's always been too sensitive and reckless. Why? There's nothing wrong with the genes in that boy. He comes from the finest stock."

• 41:39Robert Evans?

  Problem is, he's too s- his genes are good. They come from me. It's gotta be that, you know, he made his personality. He made choices to be too sensitive, you know? That's what's wrong with him. And when he says this, his daughter Margaret, his oldest child, who's there, turns to him and replies, "You destroyed Hassie. Nobody but you. You've gotten away with a kind of murder, and it's time you faced up to that."

• 42:00Speaker 05

  eldest daughter.

• 42:02Speaker 04

  That's some good fanfiction right there. That's it. That's-

• 42:05Robert Evans?

  Got his ass.

• 42:06Speaker 05

  Oh, living up to the Margaret name. We love it.

• 42:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah, living up to that Margaret name. And you know who else is named Margaret? Not the sponsors of our podcast, maybe, but we don't know. They could be.

• 42:18Speaker 05

  What if it's a promo for Cool People Do Cool Stuff?

• 42:21Robert Evans?

  Again, they could be. Could be. Not impossible. No way to know. Here's that.

• 42:25Speaker 05

  It's possible. It'd be cool.

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• 44:22Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So, speaking of being a great parent and husband, back in 1934, Frania, his second wife, had figured out that he had another secret family, right? I don't know exactly how, but she finds out that they've got another secret family. And they drift apart after that. She's not happy about this. Per the Texas State Historical Association, Hunt apparently shipped her off to New York and in 1941 provided trusts for each of the four children. A friend of his, John Lee, married her and gave his name to the children. For an idea, he's so rich now. When his second family gets pissed and leaves in order to like hide what he's done, he gets, he basically, I'm sure pays his friend to marry the family and pretend to be the father of those kids.

• 45:08Speaker 04

  That's so weird.

• 45:09Robert Evans?

  Crazy stuff.

• 45:10Speaker 04

  That's so weird. Some people have too much money. Like, is this like, you could just be a dad. You could just have...

• 45:17Robert Evans?

  Everyone who's ever been the richest man in the world has had too much money. We can start there.

• 45:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, period.

• 45:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 45:24Speaker 04

  It's just like, ew.

• 45:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah, gross shit. In 1946, right after the war ended, a coal strike hits the east coast. So there's this strike for the same reason people always strike and it's causing this like energy shortage and Hunt breaks the strike by supplying huge amounts of natural gas to the southwest. Basically, you guys don't need coal from these coal miners. I've got all of this union free natural gas and he winds up supplying 85% of the fuel needs of the east coast.

• 45:53Speaker 04

  Jesus.

• 45:53Robert Evans?

  Um, again, he's not surprising that in 1948, I think Life Magazine names him the richest man on earth. He has an estimated net worth of $263 million, which would be the equivalent of like three and a half billion dollars today.

• 46:11Robert Evans?

  But he can't rest or sit on his laurels. The United States was only able to win World War II by partnering with the communists. And he came to believe that a vast conspiracy was at work to destroy the United States from the inside. And H.L. Hunt knows a communist uprising would be very bad for H.L. Hunt, right? He, he really does not want to, want to see any of that go down. His businesses, he doesn't think will do well.

• 46:38Speaker 04

  He's like, these are my money. This is my money.

• 46:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. Oh, they're not gonna like me. Uh, by the start of the 1950s, Hunt had figured out his own path out of the dangers of socialism. He begins envisioning and sketching out the dimensions of his ideal utopian state, which is this kind of like dream libertarian capitalist republic where votes are assigned in elections based on how much you pay in taxes.

• 47:00Speaker 04

  Oh, my God.

• 47:01Robert Evans?

  That's the primary thing that determines how many votes you get. Yeah, we'll talk more about that later. Some might call an idea like this fascism adjacent, but Hunt doesn't care. His life has taught him that reality would mold to fit whatever he wants. So he decides to brute force his dream utopia into being. He's going to like make America become this country. He's very much like a proto Peter Thiel type. He has this dream after he gets rich of how to reorganize society so that he doesn't have to listen to anyone else. And he then begins putting his money into supporting a variety of causes and making media that will convince- All of the dummies who were everyone else in the United States that what he wants is

• 47:41Robert Evans?

  best for everybody. He becomes a vocal supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who he saw as a patriot protecting the nation from a vast cabal of secret communist agents who had infiltrated every level of society. Hunt decides to fight back against this, you know, left wing infiltration of all of our, our cultural and social governmental organs by funding one of the first explicitly right wing media organizations in the country. The Facts Forum, founded in 1951, was immediately the best funded propaganda outlet in the United States. On paper, the Facts Forum was nonpartisan and educational. It has to be nonpartisan.

• 48:22Speaker 04

  Always nonpartisan. We just care about the country. We just care about the facts, baby.

• 48:27Robert Evans?

  Just facts and education. Because if you're, if you're nonpartisan, if you're balanced and educational, then your content, your, your radio and television is tax exempt, right? You don't have to pay taxes on it. Basically, you get a tax write off for whatever you put into the media, which will allow Hunt to not pay taxes, right? That's the big benefit of this is that it doesn't actually cost him money. The money that he spends on this is basically what he does instead of paying taxes because of how the tax system works. So his choice is basically either pay taxes and fund like society, or put it all into right wing propaganda. And he's like, well, I would much rather put it all in the right wing propaganda.

• 49:09Speaker 04

  He's like, I'm gonna bet on red.

• 49:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. In one early letter, Hunt describes the vision behind the Facts Forum as "a kind of projection of the old New England Town Hall meeting idea. We have no axe to grind and no funds to raise." Now, that last bit was tactically true. He was the richest man in the world. He does not beg for donations, right? But he does beg his listeners to organize in person, advising them to set up discussion groups from seven to 42 members and like read books together and talk about the ideas that he's putting out through the show. And in doing this and suggesting this, he's ripping off of what Understood as the playbook, the Bolsheviks had used to take power. If you, if you listen to that, there's all these like reading groups, like socialist

• 49:52Robert Evans?

  reading groups all throughout the Russian, uh, the like czarist Russia that wind up being the core of all, not just the Bolsheviks, all of these different like left wing revolutionary groups, right? The start, a lot of them start as book clubs. And he's very much, and a lot of anti-communists in this era, post-World War II, like that's the John Birch Society too, is like, what if we take the tactics these leftists are using, but we turn it towards basically pro-fascist bullshit, right?

• 50:21Speaker 04

  What if we give them the books that we like?

• 50:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 50:24Speaker 04

  And then we make them read it and we write the books.

• 50:27Robert Evans?

  Right. Maybe we can make people be like, you know, violent militant revolutionaries in favor of us not paying taxes. Yeah. Uh, so the Facts Forum has a membership list and a newsletter, which was free, uh, to be outright partisan in a way that the radio show could not. But for whatever reason, the newspapers and stuff that he puts out don't have to abide by any of these rules. Every three weeks, members were polled on current affairs and the results, this is really interesting to me that he figures this out, is he has his membership answer polls that he writes, and then he sends the results to newspapers as if they're real polls that are evidence of like how Americans feel about issues. And a lot of newspapers publish this as if it's the news, as if these polls are like, represent

• 51:11Robert Evans?

  how Americans feel about things, as opposed to what Hunt's really doing, because he's coming up with the polls and it's his set group of people who are answering them. This is a way of laundering his talking points and what he believes about politics into the mainstream media and disguise that as, no, no, this is just how the masses feel.

• 51:29Speaker 04

  Right.

• 51:29Robert Evans?

  This is how the average American feels. This isn't just H.L. Hunt's opinion, obviously.

• 51:34Speaker 04

  Right. And then he can also present himself as like, I'm not getting anything out of this. I'm just trying to inform people about how everything is going on. He's just helping

• 51:42Robert Evans?

  out. What Americans think. Right. And this is a major propaganda thing today. A lot of people do this now. Hunt is very much like a trailblazer in this. He made his thinking on how this worked very clear in a pamphlet published by the Facts Forum. What you believe and say is public opinion. Public opinion is a constant immutable force which can be altered or changed only by itself.

• 52:05Speaker 05

  I don't like him.

• 52:06Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 52:06Robert Evans?

  When you're literally writing public opinion, yeah. Interesting. So from the jump, the only opinion Hunt's interested in was his own. He is not organizing with other conservatives.

• 52:17Speaker 05

  Because he's so special, Robert.

• 52:19Speaker 04

  Right.

• 52:20Speaker 05

  He's got the best penis ever. He's got all that, that breast milk in him.

• 52:26Robert Evans?

  Hunt's breast milk way more than you've got.

• 52:28Speaker 05

  Special.

• 52:30Robert Evans?

  But this is interesting. He's not like, you know, a lot of like these modern conservative groups are funded by multiple people. And you have like groups coming together to fund these organizations that have their own thinkers in them too, who have like their own, and they're all pushing an agenda. But it's like an agenda that's a mix of multiple people like working together. Hunt's propaganda is just Hunt. He does not talk to anyone else. He doesn't organize with anyone else.

• 52:54Speaker 05

  He hates people.

• 52:54Robert Evans?

  He doesn't need to. He hates people, right? He is not interested in the facts for him being a place where other conservatives can express their opinions. Right?

• 53:03Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 53:03Robert Evans?

  It exists so H.L. Hunt can convince Americans to adopt his politics. Because his belief, it's almost a religious belief to him, is that he's so right about everything that if everyone just hears what he believes, everyone will adopt his political beliefs immediately. Obviously.

• 53:18Speaker 05

  The narcissism.

• 53:20Robert Evans?

  Now, the only issue for Hunt, and the reason, like this is a problem when he starts creating radio and TV propaganda, is that he's terrified of public speaking. He hates talking to people. He doesn't, he has no charisma and he knows it. So he picks a spokesman.

• 53:36Speaker 05

  That's interesting. The man who apparently is so unbelievably fuckable.

• 53:42Speaker 04

  Right.

• 53:42Speaker 05

  Has no riz.

• 53:44Speaker 04

  He can, he can make a sex worker do whatever, but God forbid he has to sell his ideas.

• 53:49Robert Evans?

  Nah, nah, can't convince Americans about his tax policies.

• 53:53Speaker 05

  He's like, he's like, yeah, I'm a certified sex god, cannot put a sentence together publicly.

• 53:59Robert Evans?

  Cannot, cannot put a sentence together. Can't talk in front of a crowd.

• 54:02Speaker 04

  I'm like in helicopter while telling you about my tax policy. It's just not gonna work.

• 54:06Robert Evans?

  I'll write it on my dick. Yeah.

• 54:08Speaker 05

  There you go.

• 54:10Robert Evans?

  So he picks a spokesman, Dan Smoot. And I don't have time to do a BTB on Dan Smoot, but he's, he deserves one. Smoot was orphaned at 10 years old. And then as a young adult is rejected by the army for medical reasons at the start of World War II. And so he joins the FBI in order to serve his country that way.

• 54:31Speaker 05

  There you go.

• 54:31Robert Evans?

  He's in the FBI until 1951, when he resigns to work for Hunt. And what's fair on the-

• 54:37Speaker 05

  Is he what Greasy Wheel would call a side bastard?

• 54:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he's definitely a-

• 54:44Robert Evans?

  So in What's Fair on the Air, Heather Hendershot writes of Smoot. He was willing to temper his arch conservatism by giving two sides to the political issues discussed. So that's like a major thing. Smoot has to be able to pretend to want to discuss fairly what the other side believes. Now, he, his face and his vote, it's always clear what he actually believes and what he doesn't like saying. But as long as he says it, that's all that matters. Now, these were still the days in which the fairness doctrine held sway. The fairness doctrine is a 1949 FCC policy that required broadcast license holders to present controversial issues in a manner that fairly depicted differing views. Individual shows didn't have to abide by this, but license holders did.

• 55:28Robert Evans?

  So if you have a right wing show, you're supposed to have like a left wing show too, right? And because that's very expensive, networks are always looking for balanced news programs to fill the air, where you don't have to have a second one to counteract the bias of the first one, right? So this is, they're always desperate for balanced content. And the fact that he's, Hunt is making this and giving it to networks for free, makes it really attractive to them. Like they're going to give it free airtime because it's free. In 1951, the Facts Forum benefited from about 5 million per year in free public service airtime. And again, I think there's tax benefits to the networks for running balanced educational content too. So that's also makes this attractive to them.

• 56:13Robert Evans?

  One estimate I've seen is that in 1954, Hunt benefited from the modern day equivalent of- Half a billion dollars a year in free airtime. Which is, the calculation is that in 2016, in that election, Trump got about a billion dollars in free airtime, just in terms of like, because of how like, many, how much coverage the news gave, everything he said. So the fact that Hunt's getting half a billion a year for that, for years, is significant. It's a lot of free airtime, right? It's about 25,000 hours of free right-wing propaganda on the radio and TV per year. That's marketed and billed as nonpartisan. Interesting.

• 56:55Speaker 04

  Heat crossfire energy. It's like, we're just having a conversation. Yeah.

• 56:59Robert Evans?

  Right. He's invented Fox News. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. His shows all air on struggling networks that need free content, which at that point meant the Mutual Radio Network and ABC. This quote from What's Fair on the Air gives you a good idea of how episodes of Facts Forum tend to go. One episode of Facts Forum asked whether those advocating the violent overthrow of the US government should be subject to the death penalty. On the pro side, the answer was yes, of course, such a conspiracy was worse than murder. On the con side, the argument was that such conspirators were only dupes or communist sympathizers. Dangerous, yes, but those were just misguided pawns, whose civil rights should be respected. Thus, as one critic described it, "A negative argument

• 57:41Robert Evans?

  against the death penalty for communist conspirators turns into a positive affirmation that nation is in imminent danger of collapse from subversion," a favorite Facts Forum thesis. Right?

• 57:52Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 57:53Robert Evans?

  So that's how, even though they're kind of pretending that this is nonbiased, everyone, even the left-wing argument, pushes a right-wing narrative. And there are critics who noticed this at the time. In 1954, Ben Bagdikian, which is a real name, wrote a takedown of the Facts Forum.

• 58:12Speaker 04

  I love him.

• 58:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Complaining that when it used the terms "pro-soviet" and "un-American," it meant, quote, "Those terms include the Roosevelt and Truman administrations and the people who supported them." Right? So, yeah. And when it refers to "American freedom," the show means, among other things, "a total absence of government regulation and business and a withdrawal from the United Nations."

• 58:33Speaker 04

  Let's say fair.

• 58:34Robert Evans?

  So they're referring to these things as things everyone believes and agrees with, even though they're very much not.

• 58:41Speaker 04

  Right.

• 58:41Robert Evans?

  Right? Yeah. Um, and we'll talk more about these, uh, his shows, the facts for him, the shows that follow that and Hunt's bizarre personal life and the things he comes to believe about health and wellness. But I think that's all we've got for part two. So I, this is, I'm guessing it's gonna have to be a three parter. Um, Princess, how you feeling at the end of this?

• 59:05Speaker 04

  I'm so ready. I, I wanna know more about this guy. I feel like I'm watching the origin of so much evil.

• 59:11Robert Evans?

  Yes. Uh, well, good stuff, everybody. Good stuff. Um, so that's, that's it, everybody. We're, we're done for the day. Why don't you go and, uh, I don't know, love yourself.

• 59:25Speaker 04

  Touch grass.

• 59:26Robert Evans?

  Love yourself, love me, love someone else.

• 59:29Speaker 04

  Love your two families.

• 59:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 59:32Speaker 04

  Or four.

• 59:37Speaker 05

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

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