Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, so this is stuff you should know.
Oft requested edition. I knew someone had asked for this, so I did a little Google or not Google, but an email search, and seven people requested this over the last four years.
What are their names?
Shannon Mendonka, Megan Delfino, Josh Cronin, come on down, Michelle Roberts, Alec Cole, Jonathan, Mark Wan or Mark Vin can't remoone writing? And then Micah p Micah. I don't know how to pronounce your name, p e g u e s p at you. I'm sure there's a pronounce pegoose. I'm in a m couldee my old buddy. I think Michael was the first one, dating back to twenty twenty, or at least as far as my email went back to search for doctor Bronner.
Yeah, that's who we're talking about, doctor Broner. And if you're like that name sounds familiar, you might be familiar with Doctor Broner's eighteen and one Magic Soap, which Doctor Broner the company has been selling since at least the nineteen forties. And if you just said what I've only known that since the sixties, or the seventies, or the eighties, or the nineties or two years ago, It's true. This
stuff has been around for a very long time. And doctor Broner himself is enough of a character to warrant an episode. We're not really talking about the soap today, no.
But one thing you probably have, there's no way you cannot notice it is the iconic labels on the soap, which have twenty seven hundred and twenty nine words printed in five point font making up what we'll talk about later, the moral ABC and we'll get to why all that happened. But it's a unique company in a couple of ways, and many many ways. But one is they have never
spent money on advertising. That's amazing, not a penny. And it started out as a well, we'll get to the origins, but now it's it's one of the top selling organic soaps on the market, with revenues approaching two hundred million dollars.
Yeah, and it went through quite a circuitous route to get there, because not very long ago you bought that at like your local health food store that smelled like, you know, Valerian root everywhere.
Yeah, incense.
Yeah, and they've just kind of blown up. And what's neat is they they've continued to grow under successive generations. So I say we talk about doctor Brauner and where he came from in the first place.
All right, if you like you said, if you look at the label, it will say family soap makers since eighteen fifty eight, and that is when the Heilbranna family in Germany started making soap. They were a Jewish family in Laupiem, Germany, and the doctor Barner himself would later drop the hile part of his name because of obvious reasons in World War Two. But in the eighteen nineties the heil Branos were making tons of soap in three
factories in Germany. He came from a very well healed, kind of legendary soap Casteel soap making company.
Yeah, I was gonna say he was trained by his family to make casteel soap, which is kind of soap made originated I guess around maybe the Mediterranean that uses vegetable oils instead of animal fats, and it's softer and it does less drying on the skin, and it's a true soap. It undergoes to ponification. It's not a detergent like a lot of other soaps. It's a genuine, true soap. And he learned to make that back in the early
nineteen hundreds. He was born in nineteen oh eight, so sometime after that he learned how to make Kessial soap.
Yeah, he was born Emil E. M I l Heilbroner. Like we said, that's the less obnoxious way to say it.
I like how you've been saying. I was going to compliment you, honestly, Alblanna.
Yeah, he you know, in Germany and a lot of well a lot of people that are a lot of places that have the sort of apprentice model. That's what he did. He was an apprentice and then a journeyman, and then eventually he was a master soap maker. Only formal education he received was that the doctor was self bestowed and completely made up.
And that totally fits him, as we'll see absolutely.
But he and his parents were at odds. His wealthy family were more just sort of old school, politically orthodox Jewish family. They didn't want radical politics in their house, and so Emial's belief in national homeland for the Jewish people in Zionism did not jibe with what his family wanted to do, so they basically said, hey, enough of that, or get the heck out of here. So in nineteen twenty nine, in December of that year, Emil went to the United States.
Yeah, at age twenty one, and he went essentially like without a plan, without much money. He just showed up in New York City. And he chose a particularly terrible time where I should say his father chose a particularly terrible time. Showed up just after the stock market crash of nineteen twenty nine that kicked off the Great Depression. So he immediately found trouble or found getting work troublesome.
He did manage to kind of keep himself afloat by making soap or teaching others how to make soap, and he's routinely considered a genius. There's a I think either a police report or a mental institution poured on him that says he very clearly seems to have a wealth of scientific knowledge in his head. So he knew what he was doing with chemistry, even though, like you said,
his only formal education was in soap. Making. He understood the chemistry of the whole thing and what adding this to it or that to it, what changes that would have, So he was able to kind of keep himself going through soap making for essentially his whole life starting about now.
Yeah, he got married nineteen thirty to another German immigrant named Paula Voldefought. She has an interesting backstory and tragic in that she was born from an affair between a Catholic priest and a nun, and that nun very sadly took her life and put I don't know if it was she put her up for adoption before or if that de facto put her up for adoption, but either way, the nun took her life. Paula was adopted. Obviously wasn't Jewish, which would not endear herself to Emil's family as you know,
as well as Emil himself. And in nineteen thirty five, Emil made his first batch of peppermint oil soap, which today is their biggest seller. Sill as a diaper cleaner. When they had cloth diapers, it was a diaper sanitizer, and hey, my god, can you make this smell any better? Kind of product?
So in nineteen thirty six, he became a naturalized citizen and this is when he changed his name from Emil Heil Brauner to Emmanuel Theodore Brauner. And most people call him doctor E. H. Brauner. Again, he's not a doctor. He just decided to call himself a doctor. Although people cite his master chemist status as a soap maker to at least, you know, kind of justify it all. But there's no getting around the fact that he bestowed the
doctor on himself. And they think that the H and eh is kind of a nod to the hile from heil Bronner that he dropped. Okay, but that's not me. I'm not making that up.
Previous to World War Two, he was doing okay, he was making soap, doing pretty well. He had his wife, he had his family. What do you have? Three kids? Is that right? Two boys and a girl. After the war, everything had fallen apart for him in his life. Basically, Hitler of course, came into power. He and his siblings were begging his parents to leave Germany, which they would not do. And you know, the worst thing happened that they were afraid of. They were forced to hand over
their business. They were sent to concentration camps and they were both killed.
Yeah, And I was reading a blog post from Lisa Broner, who's doctor Broner's granddaughter, and she was explaining that they there was a forced sale of their soap making business to the Third Reich, to the German state because they were Jewish, they were not allowed to own businesses like that, and that would be obviously like a clear signal everybody like probably should leave the country now. But the Germans also at this time had a law that well healed,
Jewish people could not leave Germany with capital. You could leave, but you could not take a penny of German money outside of the country with you. And so if you were wealthy and Jewish, it would be kind of tough to just be like, you know what, forget it, my entire family fortune. I'm just gonna forget about it just to get out of Germany, because I still don't think like the German people are so crazy that they're going to let this guy just keep going. And it got
to the point where it became too late. And there's a part of family lore is that doctor Brauner got a last postcard from his father after his detention in the concentration camp, and it says, like everything else is redacted, but at the very end it says you were right, your loving father, which is that's about as heartbreaking as it gets. But that was a big, big deal to doctor Brauner, as his sister would later attest.
Oh, of course, another tragedy and big deal in his life is when his wife suffered a fall after they had their third kid, and that was kind of it for her. She became depressed, she stopped eating, she had suicidal ideation. Eventually died in a state mental hospital outside of Chicago. And I tried to find out more and more about maybe what happened with her, and there's just not a lot out there. I suspect that maybe there was some sort of head injury. It just sort of
tracks along those lines maybe in that fall. But either way, he was left a widower with three young children, and as we'll see, was not much of a dad. He was not around much and did not dad much.
No, No, there's one thing that everybody agrees is that he was a terrible father in almost every way, not always, but almost every way, especially on paper, like when you just read about how what kind of father he was it's crazy that his kids ever, you know, embraced him or stuck around with him.
You know, yeah, well, I mean we might as well go ahead and talk about it. I believe that they were at various times in orphanages and placed with other families, and he kind of straight up said, and you know, as we'll see, he becomes a bit of a zelot for his ideas and kind of a kind of a manic street preacher type. And he would literally say, like, who has time to parent kids when I have to
like spread spread my word around. And he made no bones about it, you know, that just he wasn't going to parent these kids.
Yeah no, And he would come back once or twice a year and visit them, but yeah, he was like, I have to go out and do this. I have a much bigger mission than raising you kids. And yeah, that's a really tough thing to swallow, I'm sure as you're a kid, and then even as an adult when
you're looking back. But again, astoundingly, his kids stuck with him and learned to just kind of deal with the fact that their father had abandoned them in about the most overt way a father can abandon a child and spent the rest of their lives with him once they grew up and were able to basically get out of the foster and orphanage systems.
Yeah. Absolutely, so mentioned him being, you know, having these big ideas. I mentioned the moral ABC and kind of like the manic street preacher shout out to the band. This all came from this idea of post World War two. He had sort of a either a breakthrough or a breakdown in his mind about that this could be it. We're on the brink of destruction as a people. Mankind needs a big shift in our perspectives, how we think about politics, how we think about our time on earth
in the afterlife. He basically was like, the only way forward for us, if we're going to survive as a species, is to become the United States of the world and to be all together as one people. And you know, it wasn't the most radical idea. There have been plenty of people that talked about stuff like this, but he's like, we are all children of the same God, and the only thing that can save us from that is if we all get together and come together as one.
Yeah, I'm glad you said that he either had a breakthrough or breakdown because his sister Louise, who will play a big role in a minute. She traces the origin of his zealousness and his need to like spread this message to the time when both of his parents were killed murdered and his wife died like all within basically
a year, and that he changed after that. And depending on who you talk to and how you look at it, he changed either for the better and like became the person who was supposed to be or his ideas were just super kookie and he managed to support himself just by the grace of making soap.
Yeah, so I mentioned the moral ABC. This is basically the end result of his sort of an end result, meaning it was still a work in progress to the day died. He was always tinkering with his moral ABC, which is the thing printed on that soap label. All one is the big rallying cry, which is what I was kind of alluding to earlier with his thoughts. But that is what he I mean to secondary to selling soap. He was worried about this label and the words on it.
It's seemingly his entire life until he died.
Yeah, he figured out that he could use the soap as a way to get the word out there, which is pretty genius actually, and that's where the label came from.
Did we take a break, all right?
Okay, Chuck. So after some period of time, he ended up in Chicago, and like you said, he became a manic street preacher in Chicago and he attracted an adherent This is this is kind of like a little side story, but it's worth telling because I think it really kind of gets the point across about Brauner and who he was and the people he hung out with at the time, because he came out as like the reasonable one out
of this one. But one of his devotees was named fred Walker, who he had attracted, and Fred Walker Poker he would turn out to be a Nazi sympathizer, but before that was clear, he was an Austrian immigrant who had created his own universal brotherhood movement called American Industrial Democracy, and he really was vibing on what Brauner was saying.
And at some point, I guess either he or they, it's not clear, got the idea of creating a publicity stunt to get their ideas out there to more people, and apparently Fred Walker submitted or suggested that he be crucified to get this message out as a publicity stunt, and he was crucified.
Yeah. This is in outside of El Station, a train station in Chicago, March ninth, nineteen forty five. Cops were called down there and like dude on a cross with nails the whole nine yards. It wasn't like a show, and he was tied up there. It was a real crucifixion that he survived. At some point mentioned Bronner's name and the cops went and talked to Bronner and said, hey, do you have I think he mentioned the peace Plan
or something like that. Walker did to the cops and they said, are you a Bronner And they said yeah, and he said do you have this a peace plan? He went, sure, I do, and even have a pamphlet. They're like, well, why don't you come talk to us then about what happened to your friend? Nothing ever happened. I guess everyone just clammed up about how he was
actually literally crucified. But in the hospital room with like reporters and everything in there with this guy, Bronner was in there with his peace pamphlets like passing them out to people.
Yeah, but apparently people were like, this is not the kind of thing I want to associate with crucifixion, you know, like I now think that your ideas are related to this man being crucified in Chicago. So it wasn't the best publicity stunt of all time, but it does kind of get across the kind of stuff and the kind of people that doctor Broner was hanging out with in Chicago in the mid forties, And he developed a reputation pretty quickly because within a year he was arrested by
the Chicago police and his life completely changed. At this point, he was known for not taking no as an answer. He was known for not knowing the meaning of the word can't again. Lisa Broner described him. And there was the International Center, a college at the University of Chicago. They would have like seminars or presentations or lectures, and doctor Broner is like, I've got a perfect lecture for
you guys. Let me get up there and talk and tell everybody my all one sermon and that moral ABC And they said, no, we don't want you to do that. Thanks for offering, And the University of Chicago thought that was that.
Yeah. So in March of forty six, he comes back pretty hot headed. He's yelling out his fellowsipes, he's kind of yelling out his moral ABC and a couple of cops come out and say, hey, your car's parked illegally out there. Why don't you come out with us and we'll get it moved. And I guess this was just the old cop thing to not cause a big scene inside, because they get him outside, immediately arrest him, hit.
Him with a blackjack.
Yeah, he's in jail for about a week, and his sister Louise eventually came from Rhode Island to sign committal papers to have him sent to Elgin State Insane Asylum, where he says, and you know, we don't We've talked before about how hard it is to get any hard facts about what happens and what happened in those places back then. But Bronner himself said that he was he had to sleep on a concrete slab that he was chained to every night. He was forced us into solitary
confinement and electroshock therapy. We don't know which parts of that, if all of it or none of it is true, but that's what he said happened, and in fact, if you see pictures of the older doctor Browner, he's always got on these these dark glasses. That's because he lost his eyesight very slowly over the years, and he credits that or blames it rather on the shock treatments that he got in at Elgin.
Yeah, he would later on say he would call Elgin a concentration camp and say that he was put to hard labor mixing concrete. And he probably was put to work because they did use inmates for labor back then, but they, like he would say, like in the concentration camps I did. Is what he was talking about was the mental institution that he was committed to by his sister, and he wasn't very happy there, as you can guess, So he escaped. He escaped three times, and the third
time was the charm. He finally got away. It's always the last escape attempt, you know, Well.
Didn't he just kind of get up and leave. When his sister visited, she.
Was allowed to make him out to lunch. She went to the bathroom, he stole five bucks out of her purse and took off and made it. He made it all the way to Vegas. He hitchhiked to Los Angeles and apparently he had a ride all the way there and he made the mistake of mentioning to the driver that he had just escaped from a mental hospital, and the drivers like, I'm gonna let you off in Las Vegas,
how about that? And he took that five dollars or whatever was left of it, and I want to say it was a roulette spin and managed to make enough money to get him the rest of the way out to Los Angeles and rent a room while when he got.
There quite a story. So what we're saying is his big successful attempt was he was taken out to lunch and he got up and left.
Yeah, yeah, I guess so for sure.
Amazing.
Yeah, I mean there was no like barbed wire or climbing over stuff or searchlights to anything. There was probably a hot beef.
Right, So he ends up in Los Angeles. The company, the real company that we know is doctor Browner's Soap Company was founded then in nineteen forty eight. That's when the company started. In Earnest he would go to Pershing Square in downtown LA where people would manic street preach and he would literally stand on a soapbox and preaches moral ABC to people. I keep wanting to say ABC's
but it's ABC. Yeah, just like Scorpions, Yeah exactly. And he would preach and then sell bottles of this liquid soap, and people loved the soap so much they would go back and just buy the soap. So that's where he was like, no one's even listening to preach anymore. And that's where the idea hatched, was to actually put the message on the soap, bing bang boom. Didn't even have to stand around in that soapbox anymore.
Right, So again, like this, I'm trying to figure out how to get him across. If it's not coming through,
maybe this will do it. Throughout the nineteen fifties, he became obsessed with the idea that communists were secretly running the United States and ruining it, and he used to call the Los Angeles Field office of the FBI every day to tell them how to root out communists or suggest ways of finding communists and getting rid of them, and they eventually created a file on him because he called so much.
That's a good way to get on the FBI's list is to call them every day.
Yeah, just call them directly. You want an FBI an FBI file, just start calling him every day. And then he also was really concerned that fluoride that was in the water had actually been put there to poison us. And that's a pretty interesting idea that the whole I guess theory that fluoride is detrimental to us came from doctor Brauner, possibly because he seems to be one of those pop culture influencers that you just had no idea that something you thought or think can be traced directly
back to him and his ideas. But there's a few examples of that, and this could be one of them.
Yeah, for sure. You mentioned early at the very beginning, like, oh, I just heard about that soap in the nineteen sixties, or maybe my parents did. That's because in the nineteen sixties things were going bad, and then they started going really well. He was in trouble with the irs. He had registered the company as a nonprofit. The FEDS were like, no, it's not a nonprofit. So he said, all right, I'm going to stop selling soap all together. I'm going to
concentrate just on my preaching on the fluoride issue. And as it seems, you know, these stories are all I think taken a little bit with a grain of salts as far as the timing, sure, but supposedly that's when a couple of hippies walked up to the door with a bunch of money and said, Hey, we want a couple of fifty gallon drums of your soap. And this
idea was like, wait a minute. These hippies in San Francisco Summer of Love one of those years, they loved this soap, and all of a sudden they had like a like a willing audience. Who I think the hippies were perfect in that they they liked the soap, of course, but they also liked it being all natural, and they liked this kind of wacky guy had all this stuff on the label. It just really fit with that whole sixties thing, and that turned the company around.
Yeah. I saw that I described as the world was finally ready for doctor Browner and his ideas, because.
It sounds about right. Yeah.
Yeah, he'd been like espousing eco consciousness and brotherly love and a lot of the stuff the hippies were into since the forties, probably a little earlier, but definitely since the mid forties. And yeah, so they kind of became
followers of doctor Barner. They would hang out at his house which was also the factory in Escondido, California, and he would also he put his phone number on the his home phone number, and he had a bunch of different phones I guess the same phone number went to a bunch of different lines, and would answer calls from customers like all day and all night and just start talking to them about the moral ABC and talking to them about how to use his product and just basically
anything that was on his mind. Because he loved to talk. I saw it didn't matter whether it was a tape recorder, a reporter, a customer calling in, or a a child, one of his kids. Like he just he just went off constantly on his thoughts and his tangents and his moral ABC and what it meant and how to live. And the hippies definitely vibed on that for sure.
Yeah, I think the word narcissist has probably been used more than once with doctor Browner.
It's entirely possible. But if you watch him interact with his family, he's in his old age, he's very kind of tender and relaxed and calm and doesn't seem like he's manipulating them or anything like that. It's strange. I think he has his own condition, a unique condition.
He has Doctor Bronnerism.
Yeah.
Yeah. But he was not a good business person. Like we've mentioned quite a few times. He would not sell his soaps because he was working on that label. He would not deliver his soaps and orders. He owed a lot to the I R. S In back taxes, like millions of dollars. And even though they did pretty well in the sixties, by the eighties he had kind of run the company back into the ground there on the brink of bankruptcy. And that's when his son, his oldest son, Jim,
turned the company around. He turns out Jim was a great business person. He was great at making the manufacturing process more efficient. He balanced the books. He even took the moral ABC and was like, Hey, we've got a thing here, but maybe we should craft it into a and just something that makes a little more sense, Like just sort of shape it and give it more of a story so it doesn't sound like a Mannick Street preacher just babbling things on the corner.
Right, I say we take a break and come back and talk about what they did with that.
Let's do it all right. So when we left, we talked about eldest son, Jim Bronner, sort of shaping and forming the Moral ABC into what we see today on the label. And he did that through and it got way. They really leaned into the hippie stuff too, because a it seems like I don't know as much about Jim, but Ralph, his brother, was total hippie, still is. And they started saying things like, all right, the Moral ABC are now the six cosmic principles. Stuff like that.
Yeah, because they went through, they rooted through his philosophy which they'd been harangued by and probably knew by heart since they were little kids. That when he came to visit them, and they basically mined it for the best ideas, and they boiled it down to those six cosmic principles. The first is ourselves, work hard, grow our customers, do right by customers. It's a good one. Our employees treat employees like family, and as we'll see, they definitely live
up to that one. Our suppliers be fair to suppliers, our earth, treat the earth like home. Our community fund and fight for what's right. And this is like their company, their corporate ethos, and they legitimately stick to it. This is in no way, shape or form a gimmick greenwashing marketing. It's it's exactly what this family company lives by.
Yeah, yeah, it's pretty remarkable they I mean, we'll just list off some of the things they do as a company and you can decide for yourself whether you feel good about supporting them. But during Jim's tenure, he passed away not long after his father, which you know we'll get to, but they introduced a basically one hundred percent coverage for health insurance, zero deductible health plan, a fifteen
percent profit sharing plan. Ten years after that, they said, all right, as a company, we're going to have a five to one compensation cap. So that means, at no point in our company's history or future history, I guess, will the highest played, highest paid employee be more than five times compensated what the lowest paid employee is, which is remarkable to do.
Yeah. So that means that like the people leading the company or making about I saw about three hundred grand a year, and I mean they could be making so much more than that because the company pulls in tens of millions of dollars now, but rather than funnel it out of the company, the kids and grandkids decided to invest it back into the company by paying the workers really well, by funding political causes, and essentially just making
their product better and better. That's I mean, you just don't. You don't see that anymore. It was remarkable back in the day. Now it's like mind boggling, you know.
Oh absolutely, if you you know, get like fair trade coffee or any kind of fair trade product, or a cosmetic or soap or something that it says is made with fair trade ingredients, he was way or the company was way ahead of that. I mean, they've kind of done that to start. Their raw materials have always come from fair trade partnerships, back when people didn't even know what that meant. They donated, and this is a few
years ago. In twenty twenty two, they donated close to nine million bucks, which was about a third of their net profits, to three hundred more than three hundred nonprofits. And like you said, they you know, they're heavily involved
in progressive politics. They published an election guide that basically say here's who these candidates are, here's what causes they support, and how it aligns with the causes we support or not, and I believe over the past two decades as a company, they've donated more than one hundred million dollars to their various charities and activism or activist organizations.
Yeah. I want to say typically progressive, but I think it's one hundred percent progressive.
Yeah.
One of the things they fought for for years was legalizing hemp. Industrial hemp the stuff you can't get high off of, but you can use a million different ways, and they helped get that pushed forward just from agitating. I think it was David Brauner, the grandson. I don't remember if he's Jim or Ralph's kid, but he's the
Cosmic Engagement Officer CEO. He's actually the vice president, but he's in charge of activism, and he did a lot of I guess publicity sends to draw attention to industrial hemp, like he was arrested in two thousand and nine for planting hemp seeds outside the DEA headquarters. He locked himself in a cage with a bunch of hemp outside the White House. He had to be cut out, I think with the jaws of life. And finally, when hemp farming
was legalized in twenty eighteen. They sent out this celebratory press release about how, like what a great day this was. It's kind of cute to read.
Yeah, and by the way, that's who I was thinking of when I talked about kind of what a hippie. He was, not Ralph, it was David the grandson.
Oh yeah, he's super hippie. There's a GQ profile of the company and the I guess they call it the hero image is David Browner with his tongue stuck out and there's a hit of blotterer on his tongue, but it's the doctor Broner's logo on the blotterer and like they're super into legalizing psychedelics, especially for use in mental health. And that health plan that they came up with. They're the first company to subsidize ketamine assisted therapy. Yeah, using psychedelics,
Like that's part of the health plan. You can go get that and the company covers it with their one hundred percent coverage health plan.
Pretty amazing. So I mentioned that Jim Broner passed away around the same time as his father, Emmanuel Browner, died in ninety seven from complications from Parkinson's disease, and his son, his eldest son that turned the company around, passed a year later from cancer. They were making, you know, like you said, it's really taking off lately. In the late nineties,
they were doing pretty well. They were making you know, four or five million bucks a year as a company, which is awesome, but like you said, it was sort of hippie dippy. Health food stores is where you'd find it. It really exploded in the in the teens, in the twenty teens, that is, and especially after twenty twenty with
COVID when people were washing their hands a lot. I think they they almost reached the two hundred million dollar level during COVID, and you know, considering where they started and then all the ups and downs in between, that's quite an accomplishment.
Yeah, for sure. They also sell a bunch of other stuff too, including chocolate toothpaste, pretty good toothpaste. But the thing is, the irony of all this stuff is that you can use the casteel soap for most of this, not the chocolate, but you can brush your teeth with it, you can wash your hair with it, you can gargle
with it. Apparently it helps clear up congestion. It does all sorts of stuff, and I believe it says all eighteen uses on the label, and you can go read the labels and get you know, the moral ABC out of them, and each one's a little different. It has some other stuff that the other labels don't have, so you have to buy them all.
I guess, yeah, And now I mean I don't have any, but I you know now that Emily is making our own cast deal soap from her company. Uh you know it's all bets are off.
I washed my hair with it this very morning.
No, we still actually have a big stash of Emily soap, and she just made some for the family the other day, so I don't think it will be switching over anytime soon. But Doctor Browner's is good stuff.
We can come to my house if you if you want to use some Doctor Browner's get away.
Oh good, I.
Could use some of Emily soap though, just you know, hint, hint, I.
Bet we could find a squeeze bottle or a misshapen bar. Sure.
If you want to know more about doctor Browner? Wait, should we should tell him? Should we tell him the Mark Spitz thing? Oh?
Yeah, I forgot about that. What was the deal he was on the label?
Yeah, he was held up along with Jesus Thomas Zazz, the psychiatrist E. L. Zamenhoff, the guy who created Esperanto as a great example of a Jewish person who helped change the world, because he had set the record for the most gold medals in a single event her sport. I guess. And in two thousand and eight he finally was like, get me off of this label and sued Doctor Browner's, and I guess they settled for some undisclosed amount. He's like, stop venerating me, give me some money instead.
Yeah, and give me off of that wheaties box.
If you want to know more about doctor Browner's, you can go read some doctor Broner's labels and read a bunch of good articles on them too. And in the meantime, while you do that, it's time for listener mail.
Well, my friend, it is not, because today we send a message out that is all a plea to define people of Atlanta, Georgia. We have a live show and all the other cities are doing great, and we're selling We sold out in Indianapolis and we're selling great all in Chicago, and Minneapolis and almost sold out in Durham. Nice, but for some reason, our hometown show is lagging.
Because these are the people who know us, like really know us.
Yeah, I like whatever, you're here, you live here.
We see you at the library, like every week.
I'll see Chuck at the car watch all the time.
That's a fifty.
So we're just asking for some support. This will be the last show the tour. It's a great show. Josh put this one together and it's just it's a really good one and we'd love to see everyone in Symphony Hall on what is it the seventh or eighth of September.
The seventh, seventh, it's a Friday.
It's a Friday night show, everybody. Those are the good ones.
Yeah, so come see us because we want to see you.
And it's it's a seventh, it's a Saturday.
It's a Saturday at the seventh on the seventh.
Yeah, we're Durham.
On the fifth that's a Thursday.
And then the sixth we got the night off right, Josh's gonna wash my hair and then the seventh of September at Atlanta Symphony Hall. Tickets are still available, just go to our website. And go to the Symphony Hall website and buy some tickets and come see us, because who knows, we may never do another live show again.
It's possible.
Actually that's not true, but come out in net cs.
Yeah, if you want to go to buy tickets, you can go to link tree, slash, s ysk Live or our website Stuff you Should Know dot com and click on the tour button and yeah, and if you want to get in touch with this like normal, you can send us an email. Send it off to stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. M