Phineas T. Barnum

Maddie, what you just said to me is: if you're still in costume, stay in costume.

Well, we're trying, I'm just explaining to Riley that Halloween is an incredible time to realize that you need to transition your gender.

And it's Halloween was yesterday at recording time, but it's Friday night, and there's still time to get in drag once and feel the back of your brain on fire.

There is still time to dress up for Halloween.

Yeah, I'm painting that like fluorescent chalk on the street outside your house, just in case you're in any doubt about this.

Yeah.

Well, it's Friday night.

I could get to the club

and maybe I could try on some different costumes.

You're going to go back to the club.

But ultimately,

ultimately.

Do you think your one year of transition entitles you to outroom the wretches of my Amazonian

My transsexual mind, dear, dear listener, what's happened here is you are hearing the, I would say, last 5%

of the conversation that I have with Matty in November now, pretty much weekly.

Yeah, I mean, this is, this is, it just happens naturally, right?

We, we, we sit down to record and we don't start recording immediately.

Like, usually, Matty and I all need to talk to each other for about a half an hour about like Oreos first.

That's right.

Yeah, what's your Oreo conversation that you

conversation is that we are drift compatible for Oreos because I don't like the I don't like the stuff inside the Oreo.

I like the like biscuit, but not the filling.

Yeah.

And I like the filling, but I love to twist off the top and have one open-faced bottom Oreo.

Ah, the Scandinavian Oreo or the or the Oreo.

Yeah, we're going to sit cross-legged on the floor in the Swedish style.

And we're going to, we're going to, we're going to each twist off the part of the Oreo and we're going to feed it to each other through crossed arms.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

What you're suggesting is you are going to, you're going to eat Oreos so hedonically efficiently that you're going to actually be able to double the overall utiles that you're able to enjoy from one bag of Oreos.

Yeah, because previously I was just I was just like twisting off the Oreos, scraping the goop off them.

You know, it was, it was like sort of borderline agricultural labor, right?

I was coming in from the field with a big, a big bushel of like, you know, half Oreos.

you're you're scraping the goo into your corded wear culture pot exactly exactly you know and and people theorize i think just clap like a child at the zoo look if you're gonna if there are a few ways reliable ways to get me to clap mentioning kurgan's mentoring the cordedwear mentoring the bell beaker horizon that's right rightly have you ever considered going back to school for anthropology No, whatever.

Have you considered ever standing outside Patrick Wyman's house with a boombox?

Trying to get him to transition.

Yeah, that's right.

You could be the world's foremost transsexual expert on like Mayan step pyramids if you wanted to be.

You don't have to be a podcaster.

They haven't yet banned trans women from the Mayan ball game.

Getting my head cut off, and I'm being like, damn, this is so funny.

I'm just, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm walking to the big stale in 10-inch teeth land

where they like advertise all of the opinions.

And then someone,

and this one lady whose father is like a temple priest and is in charge of like 50 hectares of cornfields.

And she never says that, by the way, it doesn't matter that her parents' link on the informational giant stone stele is blue.

Yeah, right.

They paint the special ones blue to indicate their ritual significance.

Yeah, that's right.

It's just, and is that her father is profiting off flower and Star Wars?

It's, you know.

Well, this one who hosts a query hour at the

has actually said to a temple priest who wanted to be a little bit more generous with the coin redistribution, was like, oh, are you going to nationalize llama sausages?

Are you going to nationalize maize?

Gonna nationalize maize.

Anyway,

that opinion writer on the big stele at the front of the temple pyramid,

she's like making a whole bunch of like complaints now about

how, oh,

you capture women in the women's flower war and make them fight, but actually, a bunch of the people that you're capturing in the women's flower war were born as men.

And it actually means that the sacrifice is not considered a right, it's not considered by Quetzalcoatl to actually be ritually significant.

The woke temple priests are like, you know, using my pronouns.

Imagine the cover of irreversible damage, but it's the mind ball game who

anyways speaking of history do you want to start the podcast uh i'm just going to use google's translate google translate phrase to see if i can find the the nahadl um pronunciation of what is a woman

okay yeah please do that briefly uh translate

uh-huh it's going to google's translate no it's going into a lingo Jam Aztec Translator by Nopalston.

Okay.

This is a very web 1.0 site.

Beautiful.

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

This is great radio.

And that was asked by

the Aztec Empire's most hatable temple priest.

Yeah, he

paints his beard on with Nopal cactus thorns.

It's really, it's really embarrassing how

Aztec Matt Walsh uses guy liars.

Oh my lord.

Okay, we got to stop.

We can't do this to a second podcast, Riley.

It's kind of, it's my fault, I think.

I can and I will and I have to.

Is this going to like keep happening until he starts a podcast about like Messo America?

Yeah.

Anyway,

it can be called Mess O America.

Hello, everyone.

And welcome to

making a Mess O America and I can start it after this.

No, gods.

No, mayors.

I'm the mayor of this episode.

I am Maddie, and I'm joined as ever by my deputy mayors, Nova and Riley.

Hello to you two.

Where you say deputy mayor, it assumes more of a ritual significance.

You know?

I'm going to throw you off the top of a step pyramid, and it's not going to count because your heart is not beating anymore.

It's going to suck to fall down a step pyramid as well because

you're getting like a multi-hit combo built up.

You're getting the Homer Simpson in the canyon.

What has essentially happened is that gravity and the Earth are doing Penchak Salat to you.

Yeah, where essentially if you fall down a Kurgan, like that's fine, you know, or a barrel.

You fall out a Kurgan for fun.

That sounds great.

If you're hurled from the Tarpeian Rock, for instance.

Kurgan boarding?

It's an Olympic exhibition sport next year, but it's really difficult to build all the Kurgan's in time.

It sucks that that one Australian just managed to make herself the most important Kurgan border in Australia and then like fucked it up on purpose.

Yeah, it's that the Kurgan Association actually is kind of like not really a strong international force and she was allowed to game the system and just sort of like her husband builds Kurgan's or something.

Her husband builds Kurgan's.

What is her husband?

Like a step warlord?

Yeah, her husband commands like, like, her husband commands like 200 horse, but they count in base 20.

So it's like a thousand.

I feel like all the time, all the time, I'm at a party and I'm like, well, what does that guy do?

And you're like, oh, he's step warlords.

You know?

Step warlord.

Get a real job.

Yeah.

You can always tell that the step warlord is at a party because the chariot he steps at him is really ornate.

Yeah.

Or I hate their

TikToks, which is, of course, when they carve what they're doing on a woodboard.

We're step warlords.

Of course we burn the entire city

to pull toast it into the river.

We're step warlords.

Of course we use a composite recurve bow that's easy to fire from a horse.

God damn it.

Okay.

So two big fox pops in Ulaanbaato with a little microphone.

Sorry, who are we talking about today?

Well, I'll get to who we're talking to in a minute, which is our first mayor of history, which is great because we've been talking.

We're already in history mode.

But as tempting it is, I can't go back immediately to the New York City well.

So I'm picking someone close to home for me personally, which is, of course, Phineas T.

Barnum, who is the mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut.

Inventor of statements that you may find relatable, leading to you, leading you to trust me because I made them.

That's correct.

But he was the mayor of Bridgeport

from the years of 1875 to 1876, late in life.

I mean, in this sense, sort of related to a lot of our other mayors and the concept of mayor generally, because he's most famous for kind of administering clowns.

That's right.

Yeah.

Would you say he would, Maddie, can I ask you a question?

Yeah, go ahead.

I mean, this is kind of unusual, but yeah, go ahead.

Would you say that

if P.T.

Bardham was to be a mayor of an American city now, that he should be the mayor of Washington, D.C., the District of Columbia?

I don't understand why.

Why would that be?

Oh, thank you.

Okay.

I think I should be clear because of the clowns who are in Congress.

Who the mayor is in charge of.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's a great question, but I think the people in Congress are actually still technically constituents of where they live, not Washington, D.C.

Okay.

So I don't quite understand what you're asking.

I really like the idea of doing electoral reform by keeping everything, but making all of Congress represent D.C.

Like every block in D.C.

gets like a senator and like two representatives.

And then city-state of D.C.

And then put a wall around it.

I'm Chuck Schumer.

I'm the senator for New York and also from like 100 square meters.

No, no, no.

Not New York.

Not New York.

But also New York.

No, no, you get New York Avenue.

Yeah.

Okay.

So he's New York State as well as like New York Avenue in D.C.

And it's like, you get whatever bit is most associated.

You just get D.C., right?

That's your sole constituency.

And then the rest of the U.S.

is administered by step warlords, of course.

Oh, so you're saying like basically what you're talking about is like when the Roman Senate moved to Ravenna

to form a more equitable society.

No, no, no.

That didn't happen till later.

This was going to Ravenna

and then basically only administered Ravenna.

is what you're talking about.

Yes.

Or I'm talking about the fascist Italian Social Republic, where they administered like a tiny bit of northern Italy and they made the movie sallow about it.

Yeah, that, yeah, okay, I see.

All right, that clears it up for me.

Thank you.

Good, good.

I'm glad.

I was in the bathroom.

Um,

what happened, anyways?

Before we get started, I'd like to introduce a new segment that we are calling Municipal Roundup.

It's just some recent uh goofs, floops, and bloops from around the mayoral globe.

First,

our friend and yours, Rudolph Giuliani, or as I call him, Julie.

Uh-huh.

Friggin Giuliani.

Friggin Giuliani.

I'm reading here from a CNN article.

Rudy Giuliani must give control of luxury items and Manhattan apartment to Georgia election workers he defamed.

Judge rules.

I love this shit.

I cannot get enough of it.

More punishments like this from the judicial system, please.

Yeah, they've given him the Jerry Seinfeld, you have to be his butler.

Yeah, you falsely accused like three women of like doing electoral fraud, and now they just have your apartment.

You have to sell your apartment and give them the money.

I don't think you should be allowed to sell it.

I think they should have to live in that apartment.

They also have to live in that apartment.

All three of them together, yeah.

And then Rudy has to like be their like singing butler.

Yes, well, four days a week.

He has to like contribute like life lessons in like a heartwarming way to

relate to their like, you know, weekly storylines he has to be their mrs doubtfire

he's kind of getting dragged we've already seen him do it like he's become a beautiful woman again

my court ordered drag queen

yeah he's or or like um he has to i think he should it's not enough that like he has to just like sell all this stuff to pay them I agree with you, November.

I'm curious about the luxury items.

What items is he being deprived of?

So it appears that the items are a collection of several watches,

which again, they will be wearing.

Yeah, including ones given him by European presidents after

September 11th.

So you can always remember what time it is.

That's right.

It's 9-11 time.

I would love to know what any of the watches were.

Like, were any of them just like a Mickey Mouse time?

That's right.

Given to you, yeah, given to him by the president of Italy.

If

Mr.

Mayor, Berlusconi has given you a swatch.

It was very valuable.

Mr.

Mayor, the president of Andorra has given you a watch with candy inside.

You know, I'm eating, I'm, you know, I have way fewer watches with candy inside now than I used to.

That's true.

Because you ate all the candy?

Like, if you graph the number of watches with candy inside in my life, it was like a spike in my kind of childhood years and then like down to zero for the rest of it.

I think that's a grave shame.

I mean, I think you can tell the world's a lot worse for it.

I think that was the, we could trace it back to that.

A signed Joe DiMaggio jersey and other sports memorialia.

Which they'll be wearing.

They'll be wearing the signed Joe DiMaggio jersey while they're living in the flat.

They're making him sell his signed Joe DiMaggio jersey like kinds of kindness.

That's right.

Uh-huh.

And because it is a New York rich guy, he of course has to be a weird bitch for some reason.

And the last thing is a um, he has to turn over a Mercedes-Benz that was owned by Lauren McCall.

That's the gayest thing I've heard in my fucking life.

So, this is the thing: is if you are from New York City, you are a little gay because you're into musical theater, so it makes you a little

like Trump, who's like a failed musical theater producer.

But all these guys who are like, there's a like, you'll, a thing around here is you'll just see a very, very tough guy, and he's got a very little dog, and he loves the man of La Mancha.

And it's just like, these are tough things to do and be

tough guys don't dance, but they do drive around and learn because

Mercedes.

I was half expecting the next item on this list to be like a cigarette holder that was used by Audrey Epper.

I'd like to revise my earlier punishment.

Rather than Giuliani having to dress like as Mrs.

Doubtfire and like work for these ladies, I think he should be forbidden from dressing in drag.

I think that would be a horse punishment.

Yeah.

Yeah, you've really been able to get into his mind there, Riley.

That's interesting.

Hey.

Hey.

Anyways, he's also got some other stuff like he's got a Yankees World Series ring,

but they're like, maybe he has to give that up.

All of this stuff is stuff that Howie would have had in Uncut Gems.

All of this, except for the Lauren Bacall Mercedes.

Everything else, Howie would have had in Uncut Gems.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He would have like,

you know, like Patrick Ewing's Mercedes.

But

he's also, yeah, he says he has to also pay like $2 million in fees to these women.

It's insane that his life continues to get worse.

We don't, obviously, this is coming out after the election.

I don't know how that's going to go, but he appeared at Trump's big fascism rally.

I've been making predictions, but like scattershot.

Like I've done one in, I think, every direction possible on different podcasts.

Okay.

So let me, let me just throw one in here.

You know, it's crazy that Rudy Giuliani is president now.

That's right.

Didn't he see that, you know?

Yeah, my only prediction, and I made this on Twitter the other day, is no matter what the outcome of this upcoming election is, I know the 2028 election will be a Joe Biden-Donald Trump rematch, no matter what.

And they're both going to be carried around like mummified Sappa Incas.

The romance between those two men is so strong.

I want to see, you know, fuck this like Will Farrell shit.

I want to see a movie or like a show about those two driving across America in Lauren Bacall's Mercedes.

I think that could heal the country.

You know, I think, I think that, you know, that's the real like rally to restore sanity.

I think Americans have more in common than they think they do.

Yeah.

You know, and these two weird,

racist, slightly gay old men can probably like demonstrate that too.

That's me.

That's correct.

See, again, I have a different thing, which is I think instead of doing a show where they travel across America, I think they should recreate famous movie scenes together, starting, of course, with De Niro and Pacino and Heat at the diner.

They should be doing the calendar of classic movie scenes like the dogs at the end of Best and Show.

I know it was you, Fredo.

You broke my heart.

By the way, you've completely fucked me here by mentioning Lauren Bacall's Mercedes because I'm focusing in on it as a kind of like tulper.

Right.

I'm rotating a kind of like olive green, like W170 Mercedes in my head for some reason.

And it won't stop.

That's beautiful.

Next up in the invisible roundup

is a man I'm told is called Eric Adams.

Things continue to nosedive for our friend and former guest.

Last we left him, the NYPD commissioner and evil twin brother of an evil twin brother, Edward Caban, had just stepped down in September.

His replacement, interim commissioner, Tom Donnellin, has also now said he is stepping down.

Uh-huh.

He wants to give everyone a go.

Yeah.

I got a beautiful sentence from a political article here.

Not long after Donlin accepted the commissioner job, federal agents also searched his home.

And also, Donlin, who served as FBI agent, an FBI agent before becoming NYPD commissioner, said at the time those materials, quote, came into my possession 20 years ago and are unrelated to my work with the department.

He, yeah.

At press time, he's still in the office, but it appears once a replacement is secured.

He too is.

Is he in the office or in the secret office?

Yeah, he's in the regular office at one police plaza, I assume.

Though maybe there's secret offices in the building, I don't know.

Yeah, down the streets at two police plaza because they don't have a thing to look there.

One not Police Plaza.

Two Police Plaza is just a plain clothes building.

It's the cross street.

Yeah, that's what you have to work after you leave is you go from one police plaza to one not police plaza.

One legally, you have to tell me if you're the police plaza.

Yeah,

it's a big building that's wearing like Levi's jeans.

white trainers.

It's like a badge print in one of the pockets.

And like a New York Yankees hat with like a Jason Bourne type jacket.

And it's just standing around with its phone and a cell phone in a holster for some reason.

And it's just chilling.

I do like at least two of those things a lot of the time.

So

let's not be too quick to judge here.

Yeah.

A bunch more people have entered the fray for Mayer, who's we got like a Bloomberg style technocrat in the race now and also an actual factual socialist.

Zoran Mamdani, who will probably get assassinated by the NYPD if he wins.

Yeah, I saw his ad.

It was good.

Yeah, he's good.

He's good.

He's my local guy.

I don't like his font.

You're anti-resoron's font.

Everybody thinks

since like AOC, you got to have a font, you know, it's like font first.

You got to have the cool font and you got to have the cool like word mark and everybody's going to like follow from that.

But, you know, I've been burned by fonts before and I don't, I don't like the kind of like the dual color thing.

It's like red and yellow, like a McDonald's.

Okay.

Mayors should stop like editing of the spacing and the kerning and like the margins on their papers and just write the whole thing.

Like don't do this stuff at the start.

Like, just write the paper.

Sorry, please go ahead.

Yeah, Eric Adams was spotted wearing a very funny hat with both the Mets and Yankees logo on it and it made everybody mad.

That was awesome.

I loved that.

That was the perfect expression of Eric Adams.

He had the X in the middle, like it was a collab between the two, which makes it significantly funnier than the last time this happened, which was Rob Lowe from the West Wing going to the Super Bowl and watching wearing just a hat that just said NFL on it.

Yeah, that's like, because you know why?

Because that's fundamentally, okay, that's a conservative hat.

That's like, I like this institution.

I, I support the institution.

I love the rules.

I think Roger Goodell's great and I love him.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Whereas I think what Eric Adams is doing is something much more radical, where he's saying, what if, like, starting in New York, the city where like the America chooses to link and build, right?

What if the Yankees and the Mets got together and then they could like reinvent baseball as a more cooperative, like entrepreneurial sport.

That's right.

And, you know, it's if they work together, how many runs could they get?

Yeah.

Right.

I have a related thing to this, which is something we didn't cover in the episode, which is another piece of local New York journalism, which is that a journalist called Jeff Colton walked into City Hall wearing a Brooklyn Dodgers hat and got yelled at by Eric Adams for wearing a Boston hat.

So

because he saw the B and he was like

for Boston, I assume.

B means Boston.

Actually, I know, I have insider knowledge.

I know what happened here is that Eric Adams had just come from a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Little Boston.

You know, New York is the

Boston of New York.

Sorry, Little Boston.

Yeah, that's good.

I was trying to find whether or not Eric Adams was a Mets fan or a Yankees fan, and I found an old quote from 2022.

in the New York Post.

He goes, I'm so glad the boys of summer are coming back.

The self-proclaimed Mets fans told a reporter reporter during an unrelated press conference in the Bronx on Friday, I hope in the next year we start seeing the boys and the girls of summer.

It's time to allow women to play professional baseball as well.

Which I say slang.

Thank you, Eric Adams.

Beautiful.

I think Eric Adams' most like prescient adjective there is unrelated.

You know, he said at an unrelated press conference.

Is that how unprompted best captures the essence of Eric Adams, you know?

Correct.

Like, what on earth was this press conference about?

Like, I don't know, like sanitation, yeah, probably

uh,

this mayor Adams, what are you what are you planning on on doing about the fact that um most of the city's garbage trucks are now uh on fire?

Yeah, and you'd be like, first of all, I think it's time for women to play baseball.

Why don't they have a they/thems of summer?

Yeah, I think Eric Adams can only give quotes in the sort of click hole style, which is just Eric Adams, comma, unprompted.

So, a couple more things.

He's got he's got some more uh people related to him accused of fraud, both in an EB5

investment scandal with people's visas that he was doing some scamming.

And then also there was a protege of his that was working on these multi-million dollar leases with, what's the name of the, the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, which is like they, that's who like figures out where city offices are going to go.

And that guy was taking bribes as well.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, the amount of money the NYPD had to give him to get one police plaza, you know.

That's right.

That was going to go to sanitation.

It would have been a whole thing.

You know, look, it's through a complicated series of bribes.

The police are now headquartered at one sanitation plaza.

The garbage men are now headquartered at one police plaza.

The teachers, weirdly, are at City Hall, and City Hall is in Staten Island.

But everyone's rich.

Everyone's got a Lamborghini.

It's 2024.

Policemen are now garbage men.

Streets are now battlefields.

Police officers and garbage men should switch names.

That's great.

Those, he got booed at the New York Liberty Championship Parade, and the mascot made him hold her purse while she danced, which was beautiful.

Incredible.

Women, am I right?

Yeah.

And then one last thing on Eric Adams is: it turns out those rat-proof bins are merely rat-resistant because they can chew through them.

Listen, I mean, I'm never going to hold it against him for underestimating a New York sassy rat.

You know, like those, they evolve faster than people can develop a bin that's right and then last up on our municipal roundup is uh thanks to uh alex hennessy in the patreon comments uh we were turned on to the incredible existence of a reality show called tirana uh also sometimes called wingmen

which was a passion project of the owner of the wild wing restaurant rick smickless who is of course not to be confused with michael kicklis uh-huh

So it's it's wing Tirana was a mockumentary, yes, um, like an office-style mockumentary, but about owning a chain of wing stores.

They should have cast Michael Checkless.

Want to

be a sort of corrupt wing store owner?

Smick nor Kickless.

It's Smickless.

Please.

That's the third way.

Neither Kickless nor Checkless.

But he was good friends with Mr.

Ford, apparently, so he makes a couple of appearances.

Yeah, I've seen some videos.

I've seen a video of Rob Ford lumbering out of a muscle car.

He lumbers into a muscle car in this one that I saw.

I watched it in reverse then.

Like fucking

you watch the Saudi version.

Like Jamal Kashoji, yeah.

The license plate of the, of this, like, this rock of Rob's Mustang is, of course, Tirana.

Uh-huh.

Where they just like peel out and then go to a parking lot where Rick then gives a guy a bag full of water.

It's so much like Rob Ford's real life.

I know.

I liked.

It's just like meeting guys in muscle cars in parking lots and exchanging bags of money.

Yeah.

We'll put the video in the show notes.

It's really beautiful.

What I like most about this clip is that like Rob Ford looks like he is dying because he, I guess he, he is.

It's like Bushido, but for Mayors, you know, you still make the weird thing.

Yeah, he has tagged rhinoceros at this point in his life.

Like he's.

He is terminally ill at this point because he's been mayor and is no longer mayor by the time this is released.

Because he, remember, he suspended his campaign.

He's like, I have terminal cancer.

And so like, um since this is in 2015 when he does this he's like fucking he's on his way out and he he made the time because it was important to him because he's he he can't stop Michael Bitchless or whatever was like I'll make a wish kid to him you know he was like I have I have to make this like wing stop owner's like dreams come true you know he needs to see me like awkwardly climb into a like a Mustang once he sees me lumber yeah

he'll never be the same

so uh that for like one of one of Rob Ford's last living acts was to do a press conference for Rick Smicklis' chicken wing film.

And this is from a Vice article from 2015.

Although Smicklis said that Ford would only be taking a few questions, the former mayor has always been a talker.

After answering some questions from what seemed to be conservative bloggers and or yes men in the audience, and I would love to have heard what those questions are.

Like, do you, what have you written your Ostro acceptance speech already for wingmen?

Your friend Michael

Rick Smickliss.

He says, I cut and asked the question that had been burning me for the whole night.

Rob, with all the stuff that's happening in the last couple of years, continuing with politics, despite the fallout from being mayor, do you ever think this is going to affect your health?

Why do you keep doing it?

Ford said, I just don't think of my cancer.

They say to go home and relax, but that's not my nature.

It's to get out there and help people.

If people call them at their front door, it's about customer service and I sincerely love my job.

He was, he was like actually flatlining, trying to hand the crash team his business cards.

He's throwing lots of business cards at them.

This is canonical.

Just like, if you need anything from me, he's like, with his last breaths, with his last action, raising the supreme money gun filled with business cards and spraying the fucking palliative care facility.

Oh my God.

It's like his last act was to call someone a racial slur and then fire one business card at them.

Just

the one like South Asian worker at the hospice just experiencing an emotional roller coaster in like a minute of like, holy shit, is that the former mayor?

Did he just call me a slur?

Is that a business card?

Is he dead now?

I was also browsing Rob's IMDb page to see if there are more episodes he was on, which he has one.

He's on another episode of Wingman simply called Toronto, the synopsis of which is Rick goes to Chicago to help out his cousin Mickey, who may or may not be terminally ill.

Mickey Chicklis?

Mickey

Smicklis.

Mick's Nickless.

Mickey Micks.

Rick and Mick Snickless.

Mick Snicklis.

Michael Chicklis and Paul Kicklis.

The third brother Nick.

Yeah.

The synopsis of the actual show was just incredible to me because he sounds like very, very 40 in as well, which is the true life story of Rick Smicklis, a successful purveyor of chicken wings who turned $100 into a 100-star chicken wing chain only to lose it all.

There's also, they forgot to put a comma between Smicklis and Uh.

So just in the synopsis.

So it's the true life of Rick Smicklis, a successful purveyor of chicken wings, which is just beautiful IMDb work.

So that, but so I'm sorry we have to, we, I know we have to talk about the real mayor for this one.

That's right.

But the last thing is.

That episode, it was only in the one episode of this show because that was all the same episode.

Somehow,

is that Ford lends Rick Smickliss the muscle car in order to help Mick Smicklis,

who's European.

First, he was like, his cousin, is it European cousin Mick Smicklis?

My European, it's pronounced Smickler where he's from.

And basically, he gives, and then, like, but he's just doing his normal Rob Ford thing where he like hears someone needs something, and he's like, drives over to give them a muscle car, accept a pile of money, and then wander off into a parking lot.

God.

That's 100% of Ford's appearance in the film.

And then he was in the press conferences about it.

Okay.

Rob Ford.

Rob Ford.

Get along, little mayors.

Okay.

Get along, little mayors.

It's been half an hour of this, so let's dig in.

We fucked up.

To be clear, the research for this, you read a whole book.

I listened to most of an audiobook of P.T.

Barnum's life to try and get some fucking insight on this guy.

And let me tell you, he is a mystery man.

So anyways, let's dig in.

I don't know.

I loaned him some money and I'm pretty sure he's going to be good for it.

That's right.

We'll get to that.

I pointed to the minor city position of wallet inspector.

So here's the thing about P.T.

Barnum, right?

In my research of him.

He was, of course, a con artist and was very good at separating people from their money, but he was really, really committed to people getting an entertainment return on it in a way that a lot of other of his contemporaries were just trying to bilk people.

And his big, like, bugaboo, his entire life was like people not promising or like not following through on their promises for entertainment.

And he would get into lawsuits and shit over this because he's like, the people should be actually entertained while I steal their money and lie to them and exploit people.

It's a sacred trust, you know.

Yeah.

Was P.T.

Barnum like a sort of a fey figure or a demon?

I think he just he occupied like a community role that was evil, but that like had a had a code, like a like a moneylender or a vampire, you know?

Right.

P.T.

Barnum thinks clowns are funny.

That's right.

I believe he actually thinks everything.

He actually is kind of a joker-esque figure, in which the other thing I found is that he loves practical jokes.

And he's like always like...

His fondest memory of is like his grandfather, who

like he was very close to and like he was born a landowner because his grandfather bestowed him land immediately, but the land was like unusable and shitty.

And he's like, and that was my grandpa's first prank on me.

And he loves it.

So he was born in Bethel, Connecticut, which is near Bridgeport outside in 1810.

His father, Philo, ran an inn and his maternal grandfather and namesake.

And according to PT's audiobiography, a big influence on you, he was a sort of like large in-life guy.

PT described him as, quote, a great wag.

There's some really good phrases in here.

Wait, what?

Was he, was he like dating Wayne Rooney?

Yeah, he was dating Wayne Rooney.

The PNPT stands for Philo.

It's Phineas.

His father was Philo.

Oh, I see.

And when I say the sentence, it's Phineas.

His father was Philo.

Every single one of those F sounds is a PH.

I want you to imagine that in your mind's eye.

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

Yeah, he got willed a useless swamp called Ivy Island from his grandpa, who also was apparently a guy who ran local lottery schemes.

Another community figure of evil, the numbers guy.

The numbers runner.

When PT was 15, his father died, and he began his.

We can't keep calling him PT every time.

It makes me think of the boat.

Sorry, should I call him?

What should we call him?

Phineas?

Yes, I guess.

When Phineas T.

Barnum was 15, his father died.

We call him Barney.

And he began to be, he began his long life of the entrepreneur.

I'm really, I'm really stuck on P.T.

Boat Barnum.

That's

it.

Would have been a pretty decent screen name on Twitter like 10 or 15 years ago.

Oh, yeah.

Like someone whose last tweet is 2014 and you're like, ah, but they were so funny.

Yeah, I can't believe that P.T.

Boat Barnum got like killed by the cops after trying to attack them with a sword.

He had some good posts.

Yeah.

Either they attack the cops and die that way or they re-emerge 10 years later and they were trans.

That's the only way for that kind of poster.

So congratulations, P.T.

Boat Barnum, on your transition.

Or commiserations on your suicide by cough.

Was that like a card you can get, you know, like congratulations on your, your suicide by cough.

And on the cover, it's a bunch of like that style of cartoon work of just like terrified cops blazing away with Glocks.

So according to the search, I did a lot, some of the research where I was like,

I missed that genre of tweets so much too as well.

The like, you know, Eagle starts breakdancing type shit.

i have a real weakness for it whenever i see it i'll retweet it and then whenever i whenever i do i'm like damn it's crazy that that guy like you know uh

got killed in botswana or something that's right it's weird it's weird that that guy was killed by mortar fire it's weirder that it happened in indiana

In my research, I ended up a lot on the circusringoffame.org biography of the man.

Uh-huh.

But anyway.

Circusringoffame.org as opposed to as opposed to the circus ring of infamy, which is like designed for the circus as scoundrels.

Yeah.

Well, that's that's the people that charge the money, but don't provide the

entertainment.

Also, I just love that it's circusringoffame.org as opposed to like dot com.

Yeah.

Well, because it's a foundation, you know, like it's a foundation.

So he was, at this point, he owned already at 15, a general store, a book auctioning trade, and had a hand in real estate speculation.

Kids these days just don't want to work.

That's right.

The 19th century Forbes 15 under 15.

It's a short list.

It's a short list.

Practically so.

Yeah.

He also ran a statewide lottery at this point.

And at the age of 19, he started a newspaper called the Herald of Freedom.

And he was writing a lot of editorials about the elders of local churches.

It's this kind of Charles Foster Kane shit, you know, like I think it might be fun to run a newspaper.

Right.

And Connecticut is like old Yankee country, right?

And there's a lot of like, oh, the state should be like run by the church, and that's fine.

Um, and he was writing a lot of op-eds saying, like, we should, we should, but what about the separation of church and state?

Because it's 1829, and he was imprisoned for libel for two months for this.

A place where there actually still can be city fathers and where they can just throw you in jail.

That's right.

Um, at 24, he sold his general store, just narrowly missed being the object of uh, the lottery, Shirley Jackson style.

At 25, he did his first act of weird and evil exploitation.

Is that how he describes it?

That's how I describe it because he bought the scare quotes exhibition of a blind and almost paralyzed black slave woman named Joyce Heff, who was

an acquaintance of his was exhibiting her around Philadelphia.

saying she was George Washington's former nurse and 161 years old.

Slavery was illegal in New York where PT wanted to do.

The PT boat man wanted to exhibit her, but a loophole allowed him to lease the woman for $1,000 a year.

Jesus Christ.

Kenny has worked her 10 to 12 hours a day and hosted, which killed her, obviously.

Yeah.

And then, of course, of course, hosted a live autopsy of her body at a saloon in New York.

Oh, my God.

Where he did it.

Yeah, he's evil.

He's an evil man.

I don't want to do historical mares anymore.

Stop the ride.

But, you know, this is also.

Take us back to the goofy mayors.

Yeah.

I mean, he's pretty goofy.

The circus comes up later.

We're, you know, clowns and stuff, elephants.

Uh-huh.

This is also like part of his weird, I think, like the sort of like his whole thing, right?

Is he hosts this autopsy and says, see, she's been a fraud all along and I proved it because she was only 80 years old at the time was what the autopsy determined.

But it's this thing that he keeps doing his whole life, which is that he like has these exquisite frauds and draws people in.

And then he himself proves them wrong and is like, wasn't that fun?

So he was what, kind of like a 19th century pendulum?

Like kind of, honestly.

And right down to like him hating spiritualists

and like suing them and stuff.

R.I.P.

PC Barnum, you would have loved Reddit.com.

Yeah, he would have.

Yeah.

I mean, but he's basically like an influencer is how he functions.

In New York, around this time, also, there's a thing called the American Museum, which was built under Meralert, the Tammany Society.

Uh-huh.

Love those guys.

Friend of the show.

I'm filing that under future mayors.

Future mayors and future guests.

We're going to get them on to describe, like, to, you know, for something unrelated because we're friends.

We're ready to nightmare.

Yeah.

No, we're going to have the Tammany Society on.

We're going to have the Tammany Society and Andrew Long on and do one more episode of Bones.

You may ask me, what is an American museum?

Well, it's the most 1791 shit of all time, which is when they built it, which is like a room full of curiosities and a menagerie.

Yeah, because like museums, museums used to be like old, rich, weird guy with a hoarding problem has a bunch of stuff in his house.

And he will like, if you slip him like, you know, five bucks, he will let you in to look at it, which is why a bunch of the oldest museums here are like named after one guy, whether that's, you know, like the Pit Rivers or whatever the fuck.

Like

the John Soames Museum, which is just, again, like a guy's house, which was full of stuff.

And now you can go and see the stuff from this guy's house, which is just still there.

I mean, by that, on that basis, I, I could start charging admission to this apartment, you know, if the sole criterion is you've hoarded a bunch of weird shit, you know, like at least none of it's like anthropologically problematic.

I don't have any shit I stole from like, you know, Polynesia in here.

Yeah.

And you just like stand outside your apartment saying, come look at my stuff.

And they give you a dollar.

Yeah, exactly.

What would they come and look at?

Just like, this is my office chair.

These are my too many pairs of shoes.

That's too many pairs of shoes.

They all start screaming.

It's the pair of boots that I bought in like the same size that I thought would fit me, and it turned out not to.

And I don't really know what to do with them.

It's on a pedestal with a plaque that says all of that verbatim.

Yeah.

So at this point, a 31-year-old Barnum in 1841 buys the attraction, which is then owned by a guy called Scudder.

It is Scudder's American Museum at this point, but he renames it Barnum's American Museum.

I would love to go to Scutter's American Museum and be horrified at the lamb with two heads that they had.

Yeah.

But he renames it Barnum's American Museum.

And this is like, you know, contrary, like the circus only comes up way later in his life.

Like for most of his life, he is famous for his museum.

That is his thing that he is famous for.

P.C.

Barnum, American exhibitionist.

That's right.

I can't think of the word for a museum guy.

Curator.

Curator.

So this is also a couple of years into the panic of 1837, which is a major depression that lasts well into the 1840s.

So people were like looking for cheap entertainment and he had just a weird house where you can go look at a bison.

Isn't that crazy?

I want to talk about what he did to promote the American Museum because

He really didn't want to let you walk past the American Museum.

No.

He kind of invented like a a lot of, a lot of sort of early marketing, right?

Yeah, he put a lighthouse on the roof, shining up and down the street.

But what do you want?

Boats to crash into it?

You want a PT boat to crash into it?

Would have been the 19th century 9-11, a boat crashing into a museum in New York City.

Some of those

scurrilous Barbary pirates.

19 brave Ottoman Empire hijackers have seized control of a schooner.

It would be 19 Barbary Barbary Corsairs have seized control of the Queen Mary and they decided to plow it through lower Manhattan

to get the American Navy out of the Mediterranean.

I was reading like contemporaneous stuff about like how they were getting people to the museum and they were like, everyone was like, he did something really crazy.

He put a bunch of flags all over it and that drew the eye.

It's like advert, like, it's just one of those things where it's like, oh man, no one thought to do this before.

No one thought to put a flag on that building that said, come inside.

oh my god it's the keys are jingling before my very eyes he he got to do all of the most obvious stuff yes first

yeah he actually invented the concept of a sign yeah i mean basically and then but then he gets creative right in 1842 he introduces the famous fiji mermaid um which was the head and torso of a quote blue monkey which is most likely a baboon attached attached to the tail of a large fish most likely a salmon oh just starts sewing shit together like the human centipede.

Truly, but apparently, this is a very popular thing that was sold to sailors in

like the Pacific.

This was bought in most likely in Japan or Jakarta, which is crazy because I looked up and it said they paid $5,000 or $6,000 for it, which is the like $150 grand today, which is crazy.

Awesome.

Just to pay for a skeleton.

Yeah, you could buy like, you could get like Lauren Bacall's Mercedes for that.

Yeah.

Well,

P.T.

Barnum did suggest that some of the blue dog Democrats from Georgia

were, in fact,

miscounting votes in a way that was not even allowed by 19th century standards.

And so had to give the three

spinster aunts control of his Fiji Mermaid.

That's right.

There we go.

I got there.

The Fiji Mermaid was living in a Boston museum.

There's a sort of Boston P.T.

Barnum named Moses Kimball.

But he rented it from him.

Second P.T.

Barnum with a worse accent.

Yeah, every city seemed to have a P.T.

Barnum at this time, basically, but he was just the most successful P.T.

Barnum and absorbed most of the other guys.

And then

Boss Tweed came out and was like,

P.T.

Barnum is the Moses Kimball of the Boston of America.

Of course, Boss Tweed had a Boston equivalent.

Boston.

Boston Tweed.

Yeah.

Boss Tweed being sort of lithographed, walking around his son's room saying something as simple as a laudanum bottle.

Why am I envisioning a top hat with the Yankees and Mets logos embroidered onto the front of it?

That's tremendous.

Did we sell those?

Do we know anyone who makes a top hat?

Yeah.

I normally say don't write in, but if you make top hats, write in.

Yeah.

If you are an honest-to-god haberdasher or a milliner, excuse me, if you're an honest-to-god milliner and you're willing to embroider a top hat for the fans of this show,

an Abraham Lincoln stovepipe hat that has the Yankees and the Mets collaborating on it, then I think we could invent the most confusing and upsetting garbage of all time.

So, yeah, here's like the first instance of him doing this, but he never, he never says the hoaxes are real, but he would call them advertisements.

A quote from him here is, I don't believe in duping the public, but I believe in first attracting and then pleasing them, which is very forward.

Uh-huh.

Doing like pickup off this shit.

Yeah.

What he did is he invented the advertorial, basically.

Yeah.

Right.

Of like, no, no, no, this is a, this is an

this is actually an advertisement.

I'm not saying it's a Fiji mermaid.

I'm just saying, look at this Fiji mermaid thing.

That's weird.

Why don't you come in and enjoy the museum?

Draw your own conclusions about what any of this means.

I think he is interesting as a mayor, which is, we're many years away from him becoming mayor still, but like.

the idea this idea of how a politician functions in america is actually very common now i feel like it's like we're all supposed to be doing like, oh, what they're saying isn't what they're really saying.

What they're saying is a secret thing that they're communicating to me magically.

Or, but the way that like politicians worked at the time was very different.

Like it was, um, it was something you kind of did for a couple of years here and there if you were a businessman or a lawyer, but it was not like a career.

But the idea of like politician as showman, I think, is an interesting concept.

And there's, there's, there's one guy who's still doing this.

Uh, that's right.

That's the Donald, you have to say.

I like a little bit.

In 1843, he debuted General Tom Thumb, real name Charles Stratton, who was then five years old, but only 26 inches tall.

He was billed as an 11-year-old, and Barnum took him on the tour of the country after teaching him how to do impressions, to sing, to dance, and to mime.

He was on the Forbes 5 under 5.

This is funny every time.

Barnum at this point was in business with Stratton's father,

which sounds awesome and normal.

just like hey you got a short son yeah

you got a little guy i'll make him famous i'm gonna take him under my wing teach him to do my my like irishman act you know people will love it i'm going to dress him up like napoleon for real i mean dressing dressing a short guy up like napoleon led to like at least one good movie so that's right

he took him on a three-year tour of europe where he met Queen Victoria and he started to play in a Parisian theater company and was for a couple of years the most famous person alive was Tom Thumb.

Incredible.

He had stands.

Yeah, entertaining.

Entertainment back then was fucking crazy.

It's so cool.

Just like back in the day, you're like, I saw a really short kid.

The kid was,

guys, really short and he could dance.

The success of the tour allowed Barnum to like buy a bunch more museums and curiosities.

And then also while he was on tour, he convinced the Swedish nightingale, jenny lynn to tour america with him and he made another cool half a million off that which is like 18 million dollars today and but an important thing also about the theater at this time is that it was considered like a very low art form like it was not fancy right like the theater was lumping and barnum is convinced that he himself can get people to take it seriously so he buys he builds the biggest

you know what he did he invented prestige theater

he like yeah he did prestige tv but for theaters he absolutely did because he builds the biggest theater in New York City and he calls it the moral lecture room and he hosts matinees there of a thing called the drunkard, which is like a temperance lecture disguised as a play.

HBO stands for home Barnum Office.

Like

for real, it is prestige TV.

It's just like thinly veiled moral play about temperance, but like done up fancy.

But it does really well.

The idea of a daytime play is like a huge hit because people are like, oh my God, I'm not scared of crime during the daytime and I can go into the city.

It's so crazy that everybody thinks that

The Drunkard was about the drunkard.

But actually, what's cool is that The Drunkard is more a show about like memory and the false promise of like what America is.

Yeah, although I don't really like that one account that's like leftist the drunkard memes, you know, because I think they're getting kind of weird.

Yeah, I mean,

it's annoying when everyone's like, oh, I'm, I'm like, I'm like the leftist leftist drunkard.

And it's like, no, you're just like saying that because it's popular.

The drunkard is not like an aspirational character.

No,

everyone thinks the drunkard is

cool because he's in charge.

But what is he in charge of?

Yeah.

What I hate about it is that it took almost like 10 hours before he finally got a drink.

It's crazy if you remember.

There was that

one spinster aunt who was like, oh, I just butt-mogged some, I just butt-mogged Tom Thumb.

Who was like, oh, yeah, I do a left.

The sole description of this episode is just going to be no caps, no punctuation, just butt-mogged Tom Thumb.

Anyways,

Barnum is at this point very rich.

No, I'm talking about P.T.

Barnum.

We're talking about P.T.

Barnum.

I'm going to cry on Mike.

Barnum is now a very rich guy, and he decides that his next big project is to develop the eastern part of Bridgeport, which is where he's got his mansion.

Uh-huh.

I'm sick of living in this swamp.

Yeah, but he's made all this money from his lectures and also dog shows and something called baby contests at the theater.

But all of these are, I think, you should leave, benefit.

I mean, the baby contest is directly one.

Yeah.

He issues a massive loan to the Jerome Clock Company to move them to the area he was developing, but they go bankrupt and so does he.

This is 1856.

He is mired in lawsuits.

Everyone is like, loves his downfall, actually.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said of this period that his public humiliation, quote, showed the gods visible again, which is some shit to say to some guy you hate.

That's really the riches of his Emersonian mind, right there.

That's right.

He's got a big, gaudy mansion at this time called Aranistan,

which is like a Moorish revival.

It looks exactly like you think it looks.

Yeah.

In Bridgeport, did P.T.

Barnum, a stately pleasure dome, decree.

Yeah,

it looks like

the state capital from the alternate history novel where the Shriners won World War II.

So look at him with holy tread, for he on booze hath not fed.

But eventually he does another tour of Tom Thumb of Europe.

And he himself goes on a lecture tour, mostly speaking on temperance.

And by 1860.

Yeah, they're already playing out the Tom Thumb thing.

It's like, oh, Tom Thumb's in Paris now.

He's still short, right?

You're talking about that Netflix show, Tom Thumb in Paris.

It's actually just for Americans.

It's actually pronounced Tommy in Paris.

Yeah, like Eugene Vidoc

being like, we are going to get Tom Thumb back to Paris from Rome.

We do not see kids having a good time now.

Tom Thumb is the most important young worker at our branding agency in uh paris people really have like a parasocial relationship with tom thumb and it's it's really kind of sick when you think about it you know the unrealistic expectation it's like it's like also it's like the tom thumb is not your real friend No.

Right.

It's important to just like let him like, you know, live a normal life as the most famous small child in the world.

Yeah, it was actually very hard for him to get through the plays that he was in back then because people in the audience kept standing up and pointing at him and saying, it me.

Yeah.

Because because that's how it worked back then it's like so many people who joined the uh silver standard party would not have done that if tom thumb had just replied to them

um

by 1860 barnum now 50 is rich again somehow and he builds a new mansion in how does that always happen how does that always happen he's not just keep getting rich over and over you cannot lose i it makes me want to believe in like a calvinist concept of the elect you know yeah um the elected mayor.

Yeah, that's basically it.

He expands his museum again and introduces his new Tom Thumb called Commodore Nut.

Oh, there's always another, there's always another short kid.

It's really like all about Eve going on in the back in the fucking dressing rooms back there, you know?

He's doing, what is it, vertigo?

It's like I'm giving you a creepy makeover.

Doesn't a general outrank a Commodore anyway?

Like, what's the fucking chain of command here?

It's different branches of service.

Tom Thumb has like seniority, you know?

He's like hoisting his flag.

Who's got to salute who when General Tom Thumb and Commodore Nutt hang out with each other?

And let's never forget that.

Oh, and we got also.

Maybe what happens is Tom Thumb got to, and I say this advisedly, big for his boots.

And then P.T.

Barnum had to remind him there's always a shorter kid.

You're not so special.

You're a replaceable Tom Thumb.

At least he doesn't outrank me.

Listen, there's short kids lining up out there to get you a job.

Yeah, it was so, although I thought, and again, it's like, you know, there was that show about Tom Thumb and his friends like living in New York, being celebrities.

And everyone thinks that like, you know, the first couple of seasons, it's all fun.

It's like them partying in Iranistan and stuff, you know.

But then, you know, in the third season, when they introduce Commodore Nutt, then there's actually drama because you're like, oh, shit, Tom Thumb's not going to be able to provide a sweet life for uh eric turtle and johnny drama anyway

um

so he introduces a bunch more attractions at his museum including a 7'11 woman named danna swan to which i say hello the uh he convinced chang and ang the siamese twins to come out of retirement uh and of course um because he's a weird racist

uh a guy named zipped the pinhead which i don't like to say no a man with uh microcephaly that barnum invented a new language for and made him speak at the museum uh-huh he was he was all sorry just just to sort of like break into this here aside from all the like horrifying uh human exhibition man was a con lang guy as well he was just like you know just cooking those up in his spare time he was like a tolkien yeah he was like a mean a meaner spirited talking

I doubt it was that developed.

What if it was?

What if it had like

an internal grammar, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah, I hate going to the mayor convention and those guys are consisting to speak to you.

He also

at this time developed something.

I was listening to his autobiography.

He developed something that I can only call gorilla madness, in which he is obsessed with getting a gorilla to display live.

Like he's just like, I want to display a gorilla.

I want a gorilla.

He's like looking around for a gorilla for you.

It's just like, at this point, nobody has captured a live gorilla, I think.

It's just like, it's too, think about it.

Think about trying to capture a gorilla in the 1850s.

Yeah.

In the 1860s.

It's hard.

Yeah.

You have like a, I don't know, musket or whatever.

Meanwhile, the gorilla has its gorilla powers, same as it does now.

Gorilla power is constant.

We already have air power and sea power, but we're ruling with gorilla power.

And there's your dude update for the day.

Let's fucking go.

You need a combined arms force of land and sea power.

You need a commodore commanding multiple ships, transporting troops, the commanded by the general, who will be able to take this beast.

So Barnum hears of a guy who has a gorilla and is like, great, I'll buy your gorilla.

And the guy comes with the gorilla and it is

a baboon chained to the floor in such a way that it cannot stand up.

Oh, Jesus.

And Barnum's like, hey, man, why can't the, he's not concerned at all, but he's like, hey, why can't this ape stand up?

And the guy is like, so no one can see his tail.

And Barnum's like, okay, it's a a bit of humbug i guess right so he he puts the baboon on display but he writes a letter to a naturalist he knows who's staying in new york that is like one of the only westerners alive to have seen a gorilla imagine being p.t.

barnum's naturalist right well you know he's a naturalist that he knows oh imagine yeah imagine being the only naturalist p.t barnum has on like in short notice you keep getting letters that's just like hey is this real is this real how about this one is this real well he gets a letter saying, hey, we got a gorilla in and much more exciting than the gorillas you've drawn and described.

This gorilla has a tail winky face.

So the naturalist comes to the museum.

He's like trying to get this naturalist to come to the museum to debunk it in front of everybody.

So it's just this weird push and pull that he keeps having, which is like, I'm going to hoax people, but isn't it fun?

Isn't it a little winky fun?

Like, that's such an odd thing.

That's just like, so it's like what the show is like, yeah, I got hosed by a fake gorilla salesman.

You know?

But I, but his point is like, oh, but now you're in the door, right?

And you're looking at all the actual cool stuff that is real.

Like that woman's actually seven foot 11, right?

And you're saying hello to her.

And you're saying, and you're looking up and you're saying hello.

Yeah.

But, you know, it's 1864 and the museum is doing great.

But there's something called the American Civil War happening.

Yeah, which, which, which side of that was P.T.

Barnum on?

Barnum is a staunch unionist and he and he's an abolitionist and he's hosting like pro-union union.

Didn't he have like autopsied

a woman that he enslaved?

That's correct, November, but he is a, at this point in his life, a staunch abolitionist.

He also, I think something happened to him in Europe because he came back a teetotaler and an abolitionist.

He saw three ghosts or something.

Or alternatively, I mean, like, that's the thing with guys like this is they will just, all of their beliefs just flex the, they flex the world around themselves, right?

where all of their beliefs are always consistent all the time yeah i was always an abolitionist says guy who likes making money he never owned her he merely well he leased her yeah you know that's what he would say probably which in many ways makes him like a tenant which is you know an exploitative relationship so or also just that like he he's like well no my job as an entertainer i entertain with the stuff that's like available to me to the maximum degree I don't think that should be available to me, but if it's there, I'll take it.

Yeah, you give me a short kid, I'll put the short kid on a stage.

You give me a slave, I'll put the slave on a stage.

You give me a shorter kid.

Doing the Oppenheimer thing of until somebody builds a shorter kid.

This kid's so teeny tiny.

But, you know, I, and who knows how genuine it is, but in his right, all of his writing about himself, all he says is he just wants to make people happy and entertained.

Like, that's actually like.

On some level, it seems sincere that he does care about that a great deal, that people feel satisfied with what they've seen, seen, you know?

But yeah, so he's a staunch unionist.

He's got like a former spy for the U.S.

government in the South, like lecturing about her escapades.

He's got like pro-union exhibits and stuff.

And I think a lot of people don't think about this because it is, it seems so, you know, like liberal now, but like New York was actually like a real hotbed of Confederate sympathy.

The draft riots.

The draft riots, for instance.

Like, but if you haven't watched Gangs of New York or Reddit or I don't know like i think just people it kind of gets elighted a bit in history but new york had a lot of confederate uh sympathizers in it and one of them burned the museum down well just like fuck you and your giant lady and your little boy and your mermaid that's right yeah but then he rebuilds it because he's still rich and that one burns down too

same same guy again yeah i think that one was more of a freak accident but then he's like

existed in a cat and mouse existence with the confederate arsonist

Just

a mischievous guy dressed in gray wool with a lot of matches.

It's the Confederate arsonist,

another guy killed by mortar fire.

That's a pretty good post.

Oh, yeah, it was weird.

He like joined the like State Department Diplomatic Security Bureau and then died in Benghazi.

It was like,

what was he doing?

You know, but he was at this time, right?

Like still.

Oh, he then, after the second museum burns down, he's like, I'm done.

I'm done with museums.

I am retiring.

Fuck museums.

Yeah, well, you know, he's 58, which is pretty old for that time, maybe.

But anyways, he's

he retires.

But he was at this time also very, like I said before, very anti-outright, very anti-outright fraud.

He famously offered a $500 reward to any medium that could prove they were actually a medium.

Yeah, because he was only interested in the smalls and extra smalls.

hey you're only a smedium

um

he testified against there's that spirit photographer uh william mumbler who was um put on trial for fraud yeah quite hard to make out those photographs

mumbler uh an audible hr mummler

he was he but he testified against this guy in court at his fraud trial And his philosophy seems to be, again, from his writing, which can be trusted only, I don't know, 10%,

but he seems very serious about like people should be entertained and not defrauded

it's like if defrauding them is part of the entertainment that's fine but they should come away with something they should come away like smiling not frowning you know like they shouldn't be feeling if they've been had they should feel delighted yeah he's america's number one frown inverter by any means necessary

pc barnum wearing the top hat with the yankees mats logo and the by any means necessary puffer jacket That's right.

And he's he's releasing the Joker gas into the water supply.

All right.

Well, I know what the first t-shirt's going to be.

That's right.

We say that every episode.

Number one frown inverter.

I can't use the supreme by any means necessary jacket on the first t-shirt for two podcasts.

No,

I rebuke this.

I'm rebuking you.

So anyways.

So he was actually fairly involved with politics.

In 1854, he left the Democratic Party over their support of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which is some complicated 1854 politics shit.

But basically what it did was it

repealed the Missouri Compromise, led to bleeding Kansas and all that.

It was basically a pro-slavery act in Congress was the

effect of it.

And he joined the then-fledgling Republican Party because they were anti-slavery.

It's so funny that the Connecticut Republican Party is like, you go to what it is now and the founder member is like P.T.

Barnum.

Kind of.

And now the Connecticut Republican Party is like, you know,

maniacs only.

Howling maniacs.

Howling maniacs who are like, who like work at Chase Bank and don't want me to play the mind ball game.

So, you know, he said during the signing of the 13th Amendment, a human soul that God has created and Christ died for is not to be trifled with.

It may ten into the body of a Chinaman, a Turk, an Arab, or a Hottentot.

It is still an immortal spirit.

That's the least racist you could be as a white guy in like the 1850s.

Like for real.

But he enters the Connecticut General Assembly.

He's genuinely doing his best.

I'm at the like, you know, pre-war Republican convention.

We've got a progressive stack.

We're all doing the like finger snaps.

P.T.

Barnum said famously, sight, don't bite.

He entered the Connecticut General Assembly in 1865, representing the town of Fairfield, which is just next door to Bridgeport.

And not much is available here about his tenure in the assembly.

I was trying to read a bunch of this.

He did not mention it in his autobiography that he was in the General Assembly for three, for four terms, which of course was three years because 1865 is a nonsense time.

It's just a side hustle, you know?

Yeah.

I mean, I guess you could say, like, what

you wonder if he, like, tried to not mention it or just like he was like a kind of like a carpet bagging absentee.

I think maybe because he is in Europe a lot during this time.

With his two shortcuts.

His two shortcuts.

Well, no, he's made, he's marrying his friend's daughter, which we'll get to.

But he was in the legislature, yeah, for four terms for three years.

He was the sponsor of the law that was overturned in the very famous Griswold v.

Connecticut Supreme Court decision making contraception illegal in Connecticut.

That was him.

Because he was, I think, he was one of those very like paternalistic kind of,

I guess you'd call them like classical liberals.

I don't know what you'd call them really, but like this sort of like philanthropist who was like, well, poor people don't know anything.

And I'm going to help them by trapping them in a cage, you know?

Yeah.

Of course.

Like so much baboon.

A little bit like

Peabody,

an American financier who came to the UK and like started building social housing, but was like, of course, the social housing must be morally reinforcing.

If you wear a color other than black or gray, you get kicked out of the social housing kind of thing.

Yeah, yeah.

Weirdly, still a huge property developer in the UK.

Huh.

Yeah, he never died.

Yeah, Peabody also has, is also was in Connecticut a bunch.

He's got the Museum at Yale is the Peabody.

I'm assuming it's the same Peabody.

If I'm wrong, don't write it.

Yeah, it's cool how all of these like weird guys left the cultural imprint that we all still have to live in.

Uh-huh.

At this point, he runs for Congress and loses to his own third and cousin, William Henry Henry Barnum.

Tonesca moment.

Yeah.

It's real.

Like, I think there's only seven guys at this time in history.

Yeah, and five of them are like, yo, is that Tom Thumb?

Like, one of them is Tom Thumb.

The other one is Commodore Nutt.

His autobiography here is pretty sketchy on the timeline, but after his assembly ship, he finally starts the thing we all know him for, the Barnum and Bailey Circus, which is like a big traveling show and Hippodrome.

I've just Googled Commodore Nut.

Man, that's a tiny kid.

Yeah.

So here's the thing about the Barnum and Bailey Circus is that they were actually doing the fucking thing.

Like all the people there were actually doing the acts that you saw, you know?

There was like the freak show, which was evil and exploitative and bad, but like no one was getting scammed at the circus really, right?

Like you go to the circus and the acrobats are actually flipping around.

Those elephants are real, you know.

The lion tamer actually is interacting with a lion in front of you.

Like it's a show.

It's a real show.

I've found a little human tragedy in the first paragraph of Commodore Nutt's Wikipedia page.

Whoops.

So Nutt was in love with Lavinia Warren, who was also like performer at the museum.

And she swerved him and married Tom Thumb.

And Nutt had to be his best man and hated it and resented them both.

Yikes.

I don't like that.

No.

That's sad.

Yeah.

Oh, man.

Okay.

Anyways, he's off in Europe during a lot of his

time in the

legislature.

Before we move on past like sort of like the these guys is there is one kind of it does end nicely in one way, which is that like they kept those those two guys and the women they eventually like married did keep touring and got incredibly rich in their own right off of touring.

in like Europe and stuff.

Yes, Tom Thumb like died like a rich man.

Yeah.

As did Commodore Nut.

They all ended up actually making quite a bit of money for themselves.

Yeah, which is at that point, Tom Thumb was like no longer under the thumb of Barnum.

Like he was independent.

Yeah.

Which is like, I don't, I can't say the same thing about the freak show, which was called, and I'll repeat, the freak show.

You know, but he's off in Europe a lot.

And while he's in Europe, his wife dies.

In his autobiography, he says that he just goes to England to chill with his bros for a month because he's so sad, but he doesn't go home and instead marries the daughter of his friend, friend John Fish, who owns a cotton mill in Manchester.

So he marries Nancy Fish.

And I looked into it.

And unlike Lord Guppy, nobody here has invented the fish.

It's a shame.

She didn't discover.

It was all mermaids until Nancy Fish figured it out.

Yeah.

It is.

So now in his autobiography, it's 1875.

He says that he was drafted to be the governor of Bridgeport by the local Republicans.

He says that he doesn't even want it.

He says that the local businessmen nominated him and he thought it was a joke and checked with the Democrats locally.

And they they said it was not a joke.

So he said, okay, and then won in a landslide.

Man who is constantly thinking he's being pranked.

You know, you prank me again, sir, by electing me mayor of Bridgeport.

You pranked me just like my grandfather pranked me.

Man who's been pranked two times in his life and is like constantly vigilant for more.

Also, that's an amazing thing for me.

He doesn't know what a prank is.

First prank,

inherit a swamp.

Second prank, become mayor.

Neither of those is really a prank.

One of them actually just isn't.

And he's like, ah, I understand what a prank is, and nothing is changing that understanding.

Yet another practical joke of which I have been the victim, says the mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut.

They call me practical joke, T.

Barney.

Also,

this is a very cool thing, but it's like, hey, it's the 19th century.

You can just be made mayor of a place without really trying to be.

How to become mayor without really trying.

Yeah.

I love that book.

You can't let the electorate think you really want want to be mayor.

You have to go in and be like, oh, nice town.

Nice town, I guess, for somewhere that's this close to the swamp.

And then they're going to try to make you like them.

I'm going to drain my own swamp.

He, I think it, I think it speaks to the sort of attitude around like being a politician at this time, right?

Like it was just sort of like, like literally like civil service, if you were rich enough, like you should just go do it for a little while in this like paternalistic way, right?

So anyways, but as mayor, he serves from 1875 to 1876.

His main concerns as mayor seemed to be adding gas lamps to the city streets and enforcing blue laws.

And then he would turn down the gas lamps and say to the residents of Bridgeport, what are you talking about?

There's still a maximum bright.

Correct.

Connecticut to this day has really massively oppressive blue laws, like anti-liquor laws.

And

him and his ilk were responsible for a lot of this.

He engages in a lot of what he calls, quote, profitable philanthropy.

This is Darren Lyons.

That's just what Darren Lyons was trying to do, but

he didn't have the grounding that P.T.

Barnum did.

He never had no follow-through.

I mean, if P.T.

Barnum had access to fake abs, who knows what he could have done.

You know, he spends a lot of money and time improving the infrastructure and beautifying Bridgeport.

Like he builds a road through his own property that'll help people out.

He co-founds the ferry company that still runs to this day between Bridgeport and Port Jeff on Long Island.

And he's, you know, his whole thing is like, I'm going to make Bridgeport a city, which he kind of does do

because you can do that if you're just just a rich guy.

At this point,

he gets his surface off his circus off the ground, not his surface, circus.

He becomes very obsessed with building a Roman Hippodrome in New York City, which he also does.

Megalopolis again.

He's doing mega.

He is Caesar Catalina in a lot of ways.

He like builds an actual Hippodrome where every night there is like a parade of nations.

and horse racing.

In his autobiography, he talks so much more about what goes on at this fucking thing than he does about being mayor.

He talks about being mayor for two seconds.

He talks about hanging out with the king of the sandwich islands at the Hippodrome for like 10 minutes.

He's so cool.

People seemed very easy to entertain back then, I guess.

He then, of course, causes an international incident trying to get Jumbo the elephant from England.

The elephant doesn't want to leave the zoo.

and they have to trick it.

It's really horrible.

There's this story that he relays in his autobiography about like having to trick the elephant into getting into a rolling cage was like the worst thing I've ever heard and such horrible mistreatment of the animals.

And everyone in England is like, oh, no, Jumbo, the biggest elephant in captivity, we love you so much.

Why'd you sell him to P.T.

Barnum, the zoo?

It's because they did austerity.

Yeah.

Maybe.

Original austerity.

Is it really?

Yep.

Why?

They're like, we're selling.

It's like, you know, we're allowed to have publicly owned elephants.

They just have to be owned by another country.

Yeah.

Would you nationalize elephants?

Doing elephant diplomacy.

I absolutely would nationalize elephants.

Yes.

Thank you for asking.

That's right.

This is just a little fun fact that I think about a lot is at this point he becomes a board member of Tufts University in Boston.

And when Jumbo dies, the corpse ends up at the college, and the foot, which I think the corpse burned in a fire.

But

the football team at Tufts is still to this day called the Jumbos.

It's bizarre how these things will shake out.

Yeah.

Like he was because he was like an original trust.

It's fun to have a football team basically called the Big Fellas.

That's pretty good.

The Toughs Big Boys.

So at this point, it is towards the end of his life.

A mayor lifestyle, mayor-lived.

And

he, on his deathbed, asks the paper to print his obituary early so he can read it before he died.

Okay, that's kind of a cool move.

Which he then read and then died.

Must not have liked it.

Yeah.

It's he was, he ended up actually being in that vaudeville show called Bridgeport where an oyster,

like an oyster seller, guy who got really rich owning a lot of oyster sellers, was like, hey, can you cameo in my mockumentary play about Bridgeport?

Peace out getting into a carriage.

Yeah, okay.

How about this?

I'll lend you

my

really awesome carriage with it drawn by a Mustang horse.

that you have to like take to Chicago in order to give to your simpleton cousin who's visiting from Portugal about that.

But yeah, that's P.T., which he lives a sort of like, I think he's interesting because he lives a sort of like Forrest Gumpy existence of the 19th century.

I feel like I've just watched Barry Linden.

A little bit.

I also,

let's fold him into our larger theory of mayors, right?

Which is that,

and I think the theory of mayors here with P.T.

Barnum is that

he was an odd and obsessive man.

And so people who could make him mayor sort of conspired to do so.

The fact that he had no desire to be mayor was immaterial.

He was clearly a, he was clearly a mayor waiting for office.

He was mayor material.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He was mayor material.

He might have also wanted to be mayor and just had to lie about it because it was like considered gauche to want to be a politician in America for a really long time.

Yeah.

In fairness, it would be a fantastic prank to get any of us elected as mayor of anything.

I think that would, okay, don't do that, first of all.

No one is allowed to do that.

It's been pranked again.

Okay, if readers of this show, readers, if listeners of this show want to somehow conspire to make me the mayor of New York City, I'd like to see it happen.

If you could do it, I'll take it.

The current mayor of Bridgeport, I looked into this before we did the recording, like the guy, Joe Gannon, spent seven years in prison before being re-elected on like federal corruption charges.

It's most, most normal mid-sized New England city mayor.

Like

fully, like we'll get to Buddy Siancy one day, as we will do every mayor.

But like, like, I think it was just like Bridgeport did have it's also like weird rise and fall as a city.

Like now it is sort of like a post-industrial struggling place.

And it was basically because of people like Barnum was very prosperous for a long time.

But like, what's that built on the back of is sad to think about.

I have, I have one, one little factoid about PC Barnum that I I want to end with.

I have no idea if this is true.

There are a lot of things said and written about him, which are not true, including that he coined the phrase, there's a sucker born every minute, which is, as far as I know, not one of his.

However, I like this story.

This is about the American Museum.

He noticed that people were like staying too long in the museum.

And so he had signs put up saying to the egress.

And people not knowing what an egress is were like, I don't know.

I assume it's some kind of big bird or something.

I'm going to go see the egress and find themselves outside.

But you know what?

They were entertained.

That's a yes.

That's right.

They were smiling.

They were smiling the whole way.

Oh, boy.

I loved this one.

This one's a lot of fun.

Yeah.

And I, yeah, and I do, I do think he is an interesting.

He does kind of slot into like the history of the mayor as a thing in an interesting way, just in terms of his like, sort of his relationship to the truth.

You know?

Yes.

Yeah.

Slippery guy.

And a showman, as we've said, and that's something that being a mayor particularly lends yourself to, you know?

It's a good job for a showman in a way that even other politicians' jobs might not be.

That's right.

You're forcing a showman to be an administrator, and some showmen rise to the occasion better than others.

Yeah, like name recognition will get you to the mayorship pretty easily, it seems like.

But once you're there, you better be operating the gas lamps correctly.

Or incorrectly, as the case may be.

Or incorrectly, but not telling me about it.

Another beautiful mayor.

Another mayor of the books.

We close the book of mayors until next week.

Our next mayor, I believe.

I'm excited for the next mayor.

Our first standalone bonus mayor.

Yes.

We have gotten Shanti Singh on to talk about.

Gruesome Gavin Newsome.

That's right, baby.

I'm going to be talking about the first wine American mayor, and I'm very excited.

Thank you for listening to the free feed that'll be next week on the Patreon, no godsnomayors.com, $5 a month.

Wait, what?

No gods, no mayors.com is our Patreon?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, it redirects?

I didn't know we registered that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, cool.

Riley, this has been the case for three months.

Oh, cool.

Awesome.

Check out nogodsnomayors.com.

This way to the mayors.

Hey, everybody, to the egress.

Okay, okay, okay.

Raising my glass.

To the egress.

All right.

To the egress of all of us.

Bye, everybody.

Bye.