Hey, everybody, want to talk to you about our old friends from Squarespace, you need a website, everyone. It's like the future. And if you don't have your own website, then what are you doing in Squarespace is the best way to do it. It's the All-In-One platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business. And right now, when they have a new feature, email campaigns say more and sell more with Squarespace email campaigns. It's really great.

It's again, the All-In-One platform that makes it easy to unify your brand and voice from your home page to your emails. Pretty great, everyone. And right now, check out Squarespace Dotcom slash short stuff for a free trial when you're ready. Launches to offer code short stuff to save 10 percent off your first purchase of a website or domain.

My name is LOEL Berlanti and I created the podcast Prodigy to find the answer to a very complicated question. Can genius be created? I asked academics, researchers, scientists and the prodigy's themselves to gain a better understanding of intelligence, skill acquisition and expert performance. So disregard all simple explanations because complex questions require complex answers. Listen to Prodigy every Thursday on the I Heart radio app Apple podcasts or ever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know. A production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles to be Chuck bright and cheery here. And this is stuff you should know, the long awaited Frank Lloyd Wright edition. Sort of, yeah.

I mean, you know, it's not a full biography, but it is definitely covers some of his a very dark period of his life.

Oh, yeah.

One of the darker periods that any artist could have. And make no mistake, Frank Lloyd Wright was an artist. He was an art artist of architecture. Yeah. Have you ever how many houses of his have you seen her buildings?

I've seen a bunch. I've been to Hollyhock in Los Angeles, have been to a Sony, and I can't remember which one in Washington by the one of the I can't remember what other historic house by they moved it. I've been to there's a you Sony and an Alabama chuck in Florence, Alabama, which is really neat. Fallingwater been totally awesome West. I think that's it. Yeah, I've been to a handful myself, I've been to one in Tulsa and a couple in L.A., of course, the Guggenheim.

I think we've both been there. And I have not I have not really. Yeah. All the times you've been to New York and all the museums, you never step foot in the Guggenheim. It's true. I've never been in the Guggenheim. Sadly enough, I saw a movie where there's a shoot out in the Guggenheim. I highly recommend going to the Guggenheim.

It's great, OK. I thought as George Costanza that designed the Guggenheim, not Frank Lloyd Wright, hmm. That's right. He always wanted to be an architect. That's right.

He's my favorite line for that episode is when he talks about the redesign plans of the Guggenheim. And they go, really? He goes, yeah, I really didn't even take that long. That's right. Yeah. He's saying that he he was the one who redesigned it. Like, it's impressive that it was just a really quick job, right? Yeah, that's a classic. But we're not talking about the Guggenheim today, Chuck. We're not even talking about Hollyhock House.

We're talking about specifically Taliesin, which is widely regarded as Frank Lloyd Wright, genuine, bona fide masterpiece like his greatest work ever, I think it was.

It said that it's his autobiography written in Wood and Stone, that it's just him and not just him in a specific time and place, but for like decades, where the work, his earliest work to his latest work all showed up and appeared over time at Taliesin.

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot there. It was his home at times. It was his studio, a school, an 800 acre estate. Mm hmm. This was family land. It was it was his favorite hill in Wisconsin and the river valley there where his Welsh grandparents originally homesteaded. Yeah. And so it was very personal to him. So he did things like make the roof so it doesn't leak water into the offices below like some of his other properties.

Exactly. Yeah. He wasn't one to just move his desk. Right. Right. So this this particular house.

And it was and it still is. It's a huge, enormous house. The thing is twenty one thousand square feet. It's a classic example of what's called the prairie style, which is a style of architecture considered to be the first genuine American style of architecture that Frank Lloyd Wright founded back in the late 90s, maybe the late 90s. And it has it takes its inspiration from the surrounding environment. It's meant to blend in with the environment, work with the environment, rather than to dominate it.

So there's a lot of horizontal lines, a lot of natural materials, a lot of woodworking. And Taliesin is very much in that style. I think it is 524 windows, which is a lot of windows, and it also has no gutters. There's a lot of cantilevered roofs which kind of overhang pretty far. So there isn't necessarily need for gutters. But I read that Frank Lloyd Wright specifically didn't want gutters because he wanted icicles to form on the sides of the roof so he could look out of those five hundred and twenty four windows in the Wisconsin winter and see all the icicles hanging.

How do you like the prairie homes that style? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I do. My problem with Frank Lloyd Wright work is that it's so dated in old timey that it almost like it almost makes me a combination of scared and nauseous. You know, I'm talking about make sure.

Have you ever looked at a wicker wheelchair from, like, the turn of the last century? Yeah. Yeah. It's just kind of get the creeps from for some reason. OK, you get that same I mean, this you know, he did the bulk of his work a hundred years ago. Right. You know, somewhere in that range.

But it was also like it was also very technologically advanced and like he was just doing some really interesting stuff. So the way that a very dated, once technologically advanced piece of work can kind of coal that weird feeling out of you. But at the same time, I'm like in genuine all this stuff you do, like Fallingwater is one of my favorite houses in the entire world. Sure. I mean, just amazing.

What about. Yeah. Peristyle. I like them.

All right. They're fine, some of them. And, you know, I have some here in the neighborhood that pop up every now and then. Some newer builds are in the prairie style. And I like them more than some other kinds and less than some other kinds.

Let's just say that you you like craftsman. Well, sure.

I live in a craftsman. That's that's my favorite. But I like craftsman too. I think they're good.

I, I mean, I love a highly sleek, modern I don't want to live in one but I love them.

I would not want to live in one either. Those are hit or miss with me like some of them are just to just God awful.

Some of them are just when they hit the nail on the head, you're like, wow, that's one of the best houses anyone's ever designed and built. But they miss. It's almost like documentaries and horror movies. There's a lot of them, but only very, very few, like are truly great. That's my that's my impression of modern. Yeah, I mean, we're into architecture, though, as a as a couple, Emelina, and we watch a couple of you hear me great.

Well, as to it's a triad I guess they're union there. And I guess we'd be, of course, dread. But we have a couple of shows that we love to watch that are this one called Grand Designs on Netflix that I highly recommend. And oh, man, what's the other one? There's this cop, not a married couple, but a pair that travels the world, the great British architecture Bake Off.

No, that's it. I can't remember what it's called, but Grand Designs is really good.

I mean, and they follow these, you know, sort of impossibly built houses designed and built by these incredible lunatic dreamers who are obsessed with sort of a thing. It seems to be the common thread is these obsessives, and it leads to something beautiful and great, you know, usually for sure. Yeah.

So what are the things about Frank Lloyd Wright is that he is including during his lifetime, he's considered one of the greatest architects ever live.

Certainly the most popular, popularly well known.

Maybe I guess you'd put it like anybody who's ever heard of any kind of architecture, even vaguely is probably familiar with Frank Lloyd Wright.

Agreed. So when he when he put himself into Taliesin, he was building a home for himself. And I think it was completed in 1911. And like it's worth pointing out, he was returning to his childhood home to the valley where his his clan, like, settled. Like, if you if you look around Spring Green, Wisconsin, everybody's got the name Lloyd in there somewhere, like his maternal ancestors settled that area and he was literally building on this hill, his favorite hill, when he was a child, like you were saying.

But he was doing this in the midst of one of the biggest scandals, like any architects ever gone through.

Yeah. So as you'll see through this show, and if you know anything about the man, Frank Lloyd Wright had a bit of a wandering eye and a bit of a philandering habit, and he had a an extramarital affair with a woman named erm a M.H. Mama.

Mama Borthwick, huh. I don't know.

I've been testing it out too. I said, Mama, Mama.

Sure. Borthwick and she was you know, they met in nineteen of three. Wright was in his mid thirties at the time. He was already really famous as an architect and he was commissioned to design a house for her and her husband, Edwin Chaney. And they were it was going to be built there in Wisconsin, pretty close to Chicago, where Frank Lloyd Wright was at the time. She was pregnant in her mid thirties at the time with her second child and got really involved in and sort of working with Frank Lloyd Wright very closely.

And that sort of, you know, the classic story. At first it starts out platonic. One thing leads to another. And before you know it, they're bumping uglies. That's right.

Smashing is the younger kids say, yeah, I just heard that for the first time other they didn't know that was a thing. So it's a thing now. So Frank Lloyd Wright by this time had six kids of his own and he had made a name for himself, like around Chicago, building homes, designing homes for the well-to-do, especially in the Oak Park neighborhood, apparently just between nineteen hundred. In 1910, he designed fifty prairie houses. So he'd made a name for himself.

But apparently by the time I think nineteen eighty eight was when he now 1967, when they started their affair. By the time 1947 rolled around, he was getting kind of tired of doing the same thing. It's kind of like he was cursed like this. This school of architecture that he'd developed was so popular that he that's all anybody wanted and he had gotten bored with it by that time. So he seems to have been unfulfilled professionally and kind of took it out on his family in about the worst way you could possibly take things out on your family short of cutting them up with the machete.

Yeah, yeah. By nineteen eighty, it was pretty much well known open secret in Chicago and that high society in Chicago that this affair was going on. And he was sort of looked down on from his friends and his neighbors and his peers, different colleagues. His poor wife Kitty was long suffering because she kind of stood by her side anyway, and he'd realize that he really wanted to leave his family and he did. So he said, I did not know what I wanted.

I wanted to go away. And he did. In September of 1999, Frank left with her, went to Europe, left his wife and his six kids behind. And here's one of the more. Selfish quotes I've ever seen from a husband and father, and this was in his autobiography. So when family life in Oak Park in that spring of 1999 conspired against the freedom to which I had come to feel every soul entitled, I had no choice would I keep my self-respect but to go out of voluntary exile?

Mm hmm.

So he really felt in you know, those were his words in his autobiography. So he wasn't he had no illusions about himself, but he very much felt that, you know what, Frank Lloyd Wright and I'm a man and I deserve this by.

Right. Yeah.

So those are two key points. He's a man, so he deserved it. But more than anything, he was a legend in his own mind, which was sustained and verified by the public at large. But he was Frank Lloyd Wright. So more than anybody, he deserved to to go do whatever he wanted and, you know, whatever the consequences were for other people emotionally. To hell with that. One other thing that I think is worth pointing out is that he had money problems basically his entire life, despite the fact that, I mean, this man designed the Guggenheim.

He designed some of the most iconic buildings and houses in the United States, and he had money just coming in by the truckload. But he would spend it as fast as he could get it and then some. So at this point in time, when he was when he left his family, he apparently left them in financial straits as well. There was there's a biographer named Paul Hendrix and Paul Hendrickson, I'm sorry. And he points out that there is a 900 dollar grocery bill that was laying on the kitchen counter when when Frank Lloyd Wright walked out on his family, which I mean, at least pay the grocery bill.

So the family that you're leaving in a lurch can eat, you know.

Yeah. So his his mistress left her two kids with her husband. She went on a train to New York City, met Frank at the Plaza Hotel. They had a few days there of, I guess, smashing dinner and then went to Europe.

And, you know, he was famous the world over. So it's not like he could lay low. Very famous face, very famous dresser of fine clothing in those hats. So he didn't exactly blend in anywhere he went. So he was found out in Berlin. Chicago Tribune had a headline that said, Leave families semicolon. Nice little switch there, elope to Europe. And this whole time, poor Kitty. She says it appears like any other ordinary, mundane affair with the trappings of what is low and vulgar.

But there's nothing of that sort about Frank Wright. He is honest and sincere. I know him. My heart is with him now. I feel certain that he will come back. And that's that's one of the saddest parts about all this, as she was sort of like he's just floundering a bit and he'll come back to us. Yeah, it is sad.

But also, you know, whatever his kids were thinking, too, like, well, I guess Dad didn't love us enough to stick around another, I think, kind of telling clue about Frank Lloyd Wright, enormous arrogance. Was he called his and what are we going to call her?

Chuck. Mama, Mama, your mama.

OK, his in mama's flight to Europe to after abandoning their their families, he called it a spiritual Hegira era. And I had not seen that were before. And it turns out Hajira or Hegira Hagiwara is what Mohammed's exodus from persecution in Mecca was called. And he left Mecca to go to Medina, where he founded Islam. And to Frank Lloyd Wright, this is what he and his mistress were doing when they abandoned their families and fled to Europe.

Yeah, he thought a lot of himself. He was a so B man, plain and simple.

I don't like he's a classic example of like having to compartmentalize the genius of the work and just to complete horribleness of the person, you know.

I know. I know.

But it can be done. It can be done. I disagree with anybody who who says, you know, there's certain exceptions, I'm sure. But anybody who says, well, this person held some pretty pretty terrible views, so we shouldn't pay any attention to their work from that point on. I disagree with that. I think that there are tons of exceptions to that rule, although there are tons of exceptions to the exception to that rule, too, if that's not confusing enough.

Well, I think it's a personal decision. If someone wants to never gaze upon Fallingwater again, then that's their choice. Totally.

It's not like I'm going to, you know, grab them by their hair and, like, make them look. But I would disagree with them in a lot of cases.

Yeah, like Manson's music. Fantastic. Just beautiful. Really good stuff for sure. So Frank Lloyd Wright. Turns to Chicago in 1910, mama stayed behind. She stayed there in Europe for another year because she was getting a divorce from Edwin Cheney. And so she stayed there wrapping that up. Frank moved back with Kitty. He had no intention of staying. And I think it was pretty clear to Kitty at this point because she said, Mr. Right.

I wonder if he made her color that Mr. Wright reached here Saturday evening, October eight. And he has brought many beautiful things, everything but his heart, I guess, and that he has left in Germany.

Yeah, but he came back a bit of a pariah.

Oh, just a tad. They were they were pariahs before. There was a woman who grew up living next door to Mama and her children. And she years later in her diary, recounted a time when her mom refused to give Frank Lloyd Wright cream when he came over next door from next door to borrow some and said that they were sinners and she wasn't going to help them out at all. So when they left for Europe, made headline news for leaving their families and then he returns, moves back in with his family just long enough to plan his next home for him.

And mama like, yeah, the people in his social orbit did not take very kindly to that professional's neighbors, friends, gossip columnists, basically everybody in the Midwest who had anything to do with anything like were rejected him and mama.

Yeah. And to boot when he gets back because he needed seed money for for his new home, he had a benefactor named Darwin Martin. And he said, hey, listen, I want to build this great cottage and this affair is long over. And this is going to be a cottage for my mom. And I promise it's not going to be our little smash shack. And so give me twenty five thousand dollars to get this project going. He got it.

He moved into the home with his mistress. And I think by Christmas 1911, they were officially living together there in Greenspring.

Yeah. He said, thanks chump, thanks for the money. And because just trashing Frank Lloyd Wright as a person is a lot of fun. I want to add this detail to Darwin. Barton, his benefactor over the course of Frank Lloyd Wright career, lent Frank Lloyd Wright 75 grand total. And when the stock market crashed in 1929, Darwan Martin lost everything like he was flat broke, went from extraordinarily, extraordinarily wealthy man to just flat broke for the rest of his life.

Frank Lloyd Wright never repaid any of that money, but he made sure that when his autobiography came out that Darwin Martin got a free copy.

Oh, that's nice. Yeah, he really he really pulled that up at the last minute, didn't he?

All right. So let's take a break and we'll come back and talk about things. Taking a turn for the worst a few years later in August of 1914.

Stuff you should know. Gosh. And shocking stuff you should know.

Nearly 600 years after the invention of the printing press, the most important book in the history of the world has arrived.

That might be overstating things, stuff you should know, an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. It will change your life forever.

Well, that's not necessarily true. Most scientists agree that stuff you should know an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things is proof that time travel is possible because that is the only way to explain how a book this impressive was possibly made. Why? What stuff you should know. An incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things will regrow hair, white your teeth and improve your love life.

That's just not at all.

Right, well, the love life part, maybe if you find someone who thinks smart is sexy stuff, you should know an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things available for preorder. Now, that's stuff you should know, Dotcom.

Now, that is true. I'm Eleanor Wells, host of the new podcast about a girl. And I want to tell you some stories. David Bowie, Freddie Mercury, Paul McCartney, Bob Marley, Jim Morrison, you probably know these names, but this is not really about them.

This is about the women behind the legends, the ones who inspired, loved and supported and challenged these icons on their way to greatness. Women like Angie Bowie, Maria Austin, Jane Asher, Rita Marley and Pam Carson. Each episode, I'll give voice to one of these women who have remained muted in the shadows for far too long. These are incredible, influential women without whom the landscape of popular music might be very different about a girl whose executive produced by Jack Brennan of Just Graceland, the 27 Club and Blood on the Tracks.

Subscribe now on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

OK, Chuck, so let's just go ahead and get in the way back. Well, I don't want to see this. We'll just talk about it. We'll leave the Wayback Machine out of this one. OK, so on Saturday, August 15th, 1914, around lunchtime, actually, exactly at lunchtime, Mama Borthwick, Frank Lloyd Wright, mistress, long time mistress, was sitting down for lunch on a terrace at Taliesin with her two kids. To his great credit, Edwin Cheney, her ex-husband by this time was not interested in keeping Mama from seeing her children as punishment.

So they went to visit pretty frequently. And this is a time when they were visiting. So the three of them were sitting down to lunch, John, I think it was 10 and her daughter Martha, who was eight. And Mama, Mama, we're sitting down to lunch on the terrace. OK, just put that in your pin, put that put your hat and smoke it.

So, wow. Really mixing metaphors. So they're out on the terrace. Inside in the dining room, there are five of Frank Lloyd Wright employees, Emile Burdell, Thomas Brunker, David Lindblom, Herbert Fritz and William Weston and then Western son Ernest. So they were all sitting down to eat, I think put a pin and maybe both of these scenes.

And we'll tell you a little bit about the handyman of the property named Julian Carleton, who in the weeks and months leading up to this date had been acting really weird.

He was aggressive. He was getting in arguments with other people. He was acting very strangely. He started sleeping with a hatchet in a sack beside his bed. He was married and his wife, you know, verified this stuff. He was talking about killing people. And there was rumor that he was being let go and that there was that he and his wife were already had a basically a train back to Chicago to look for other jobs. So this is sort of the mindset of what's going on with Julian Carleton at the time of this lunch.

Right. So Julian was actually so he was the handyman. But at this point, he he also helped out, helped his wife, Gertrude, when she was cooking. He would serve. So he served lunch to mama and then he served lunch to the five employees in the dining room. And then as they were, they started to eat. He approached William Weston, the foreman of the whole jam. Well, embezzlement was a pretty important guy around Taliesin and asked if he could go get some gasoline out of the shed, I guess because he was going to clean some drugs with it, with gasoline.

With gasoline. Yes, that was the thing back then. Sure. That's some old timey rug cleaning, if I've ever heard of it. But I'm so, so Western. Sure, sure, sure. Of course. Go ahead. And things went really well. Things went downhill really quickly from from that moment on.

Yeah. So appreciate you leaving this part to me. Carlton comes back. Oh, I'll fill in. Don't worry.

He's got the gasoline and he also has an axe and the sequence is a little bit unclear. I've seen both ways of which happen first. But he slaughtered Mama Borthwick, Borthwick and her kids on the porch and then poured gasoline under the dining room doors and trapped them in the room and set the dining room and therefore the house on fire with everyone trapped inside.

It gets even worse than that, though, after he had slaughtered Mama and her kids with the axe and set the house on fire, he went around to a window, a dining room window, where the people who are trapped in the dining room that had just been set on fire were jumping to safety from and as they jumped to safety, he ran after them and killed them with the axe. He would finish them off. Sometimes they were on fire and he would hit them in the head with the axe and killed them.

And there were nine people who were dining that day and he managed to kill seven of the nine. Three people survived the initial assault, the fire and then the picking off with the axe. The first guy who got away was named Herb Fritz. He was a draftsman, a younger guy. I think he's still a teenager who went on to become an architect, I believe. But he he was the first one to jump through the window. And so he was able to get pretty far away from Julian Carleton before Carlton noticed that people were jumping through the window and came around to pick them off with the axe.

That's right. William Weston got out of the window. Carlton hit him with the axe, thought he was dead, but he wasn't dead. In the meantime, Fritz, like you said, he didn't even Carlton, did he know he was gone? So he actually managed to get to the neighbors and contact authorities, which ended up being, you know, ended up sort of saving a lot of the house because they helped put it out. And the other guy who managed to at least get out the window was David Lindblom.

He escaped with Fritz, so Fritz and Lindblom, like when they ran to that house, it was like a half a mile away, which is really significant that Lindblom was able to do it because he was burned so badly that he died from his burns. And yet one of the last things he did on Earth was to run a half a mile to get help at the house, the nearest house with a phone. Yeah.

So, you know, people get there, they put out the fire. Hours later, they Karlton was discovered in the basement of the house and an asbestos lined boiler room. He went down there to to die in the fire, but also doubled up by drinking a bottle of hydrochloric acid to make sure he did the job. And neither one of them work. He actually survived both of those things.

I actually saw that he was in the furnace because he was trying to survive the fire and he didn't drink the acid until he knew he was discovered.

Oh, see, I saw the opposite, that he went down to the furnace because he wanted to die in the home, huh?

Yeah, but the reason the furnace made sense to me was that he was trying to survive in the furnace is that if he couldn't escape from the house, that would be the safest place because it was the middle of August and the furnace was in on. So it would have conceivably protected him or else it would have turned into that that bronze bull torture thing, you know, the bronze bull that you put a human being in and light a fire under the bull.

The bull. Yeah, I remember that sounds like a pretty horrible way to die either way. Yes. It should be restated that Julian Karlton drank what he thought was a lethal dose of hydrochloric acid, like that's how he chose to try to end his life. Yeah. So there was never any motive really rooted out. Clearly, looking back now, he suffered from some kind of mental illness. I don't think you can just all chalk it up to a grudge over being fired because of his behavior over the previous weeks and months.

And, you know, it was just one of those things. It was a time where they weren't diagnosing things like that. So he clearly had some form of mental illness, I think, and they never conclusively determined a motive. But like I said, his wife testified that said, you know, we were headed to Chicago, we were going to get work, and he ended up dying, but he couldn't eat, basically because he had torn up his stomach lining and his throat so badly with that hydrochloric acid.

He died seven weeks later in jail from starvation. Yeah.

Another interpretation I saw was that he had purposefully starved himself because the acid didn't work, that it wasn't just that he couldn't eat, but that he wouldn't eat and that he he died from self-imposed starvation. Either one's pretty pretty terrible stuff. Just a brutal, brutal crime. Yeah. And I mean, I agree with you. I think he clearly was mentally ill, not just from the act that he carried out, but also the the fact that he'd been ranting and sleeping with an ax for weeks leading up to it.

But I think his perceived treatment or outright treatment around Taliesin, coupled with the idea that they had been dismissed and that was going to be their last day is, I guess, what drove them over the edge.

Yeah. So, Frank, you mentioned you've noticed we haven't mentioned him. He was in Chicago at the time. He was working, kind of finalizing everything on the construction of Midway Gardens there in Chicago, working with his son, John Lloyd Wright, who is his second oldest, and the autobiography of John Wright called My Father, Who Was on Earth, said he remembered an unnatural silence when the phone call came in except for his father's labored breathing. And then he came back in the room and said, he said, what's happened?

Dad and his father said, John, a taxi, Taliesin is on fire.

Right. And if you're not too big on Frank Lloyd Wright, you you might be like, well, what about the people who were murdered in his defense? He apparently hadn't learned about that yet. And he learned that there were some gruesome, grisly murders of a lot of people he cared about from reporters who were shouting questions to him as he was going to the train station to take the train from Chicago over to spring green.

Yeah. So Chicago newspaper headline reads The end of Lawlis loves, you know, sort of a.

Sort of a sensational and cold way to treat these murders, I think. Yeah, but they had been you know, they had been all over their affair for years now and then.

Chuck, one other thing about Julie and Carlton. Have you ever been on that site find a grave dotcom? Yeah, sure. OK, so I was on find a grave dot com part. Part of the purpose for those who don't know is like to kind of memorialize like leave a tribute or something to to the person of the dead person. And sometimes it's very sweet, but other times it's very awkward. And this is an awkward case because there was like a little icon that clearly shows up on every page on Find a grave.

But it said, what's one thing you'll always remember when you think of Julian? Like probably the ax murderer slash arson killing of seven people, see, I would always remember he could really get a stain out of a rug.

Right. With gasoline. Yeah, very, very good at that. You want to take a break? Yeah. Let's take a break and we'll talk a little bit about Franck's later years right after this. Stuff you should know.

Gosh, shocking stuff you should know in the summer and autumn of twenty twenty, the city of Portland, Oregon, became the center of a vast media blitz. Thousands of viral videos showing marching federal agents and police officers tear gas, black clad anarchists and fires went viral all over the Internet. What didn't go viral was the truth, because the story of Portland's Black Lives Matter movement and of the Portland protests of 20 is so much stranger than I think the mainstream media would ever be willing to cover.

I was there.

And more importantly, the people that I talked to for my new show, Uprising, a guy from Portland were there through their experiences.

You'll learn the truth both about Portland and about what's coming for the rest of the United States in the next few years. Listen to Uprising, a guide from Portland on the radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. See that? Hey there, it's LeAnn Rimes. You know, these days, it's pretty easy to feel way too overwhelmed and disconnected not only from each other, but ourselves. My new podcast, Wholly Human Focus, is on living our best fullest lives by expanding into our most complete and whole selves.

I'd love you to join me as I sit down with people who I've found to be some of the world's most inspiring and enlightening motivators. Healers and wise souls together will make more sense of this crazy existence. We all share ourselves and each other. Listen and follow. Holy Human with me. LeAnn Rimes on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. So this murder really and of course, the fire really, really took a toll on Frank Lloyd Wright for the next, you know, 20 years, he really struggled with his work.

He struggled for for his freedom from the press, obviously. I mean, he was always in the press, but it was worse now than ever.

And he did not suffer long. Romantically, though, he took up very quickly with a woman named Miriam Hicks, Noel. She went by Miriam and she was an artist. She was a morphine addict. She was a fangirl.

She they had a terrible, terrible, abusive relationship. It seems like kind of both ways, like a bit of acid, Nancy, type thing going from everything I could read.

They were terrible people on both sides.

Yeah. So they he met when she was very young. She said he hadn't been with me ten minutes before. He said, you're mine. And they had a ten year courtship that was very, very dysfunctional, very miserable. And when he got divorced in nineteen twenty two from Kitty, he decided at some point to marry I think about a year later to marry Miriam with that old mistake, thinking things would be different once they get married.

And that's not at all how when they ended up splitting up I think six months later, something like that. Yeah. He said that to oppose her now in the slightest degree violence, that's how bad the relationship had become. So it was I get the impression from this biographer, Paul Hendrickson, the book he wrote, by the way, is called Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright. And it's like 600 pages, I believe. But he he does not paint a very flattering picture of Miriam at all.

No, no, not at all. And like I said, they were not good for each other. It seems like in nineteen twenty four after his divorce from Miriam, he gets married a third time to all given her name was Olga Lazarevic Hindenburg.

She was married. She was a dancer. They met at a ballet where she was performing and they actually had another kid. Frank had a seventh child with her, a little girl in 1925. And Miriam comes back though and kind of tries to wreck their marriage, too.

Yeah. She like when they had their baby, she showed up at the hospital and made a scene, which is a pretty nasty move. She refused to give them a divorce. She, like, would talk to the papers about him. She she teamed up with Olga's ex-husband or soon to be ex-husband. She she definitely worked against him. But I guess eventually either got bored or was bored off or just kind of went away, because from what I can tell, Olga and Frank managed to carve out a happy married life for themselves from the 1920s.

Yeah, 1924, when they got married onward, I guess. Father, once Miriam left the picture, they were able to kind of settle in until Frank's death in 1959.

Yeah.

And Miriam actually got him arrested at one point under the Man Act and which was a law, federal law that prohibits transport of women and children across state lines for the purposes of debauchery or prostitution. Yeah, and I'm not really sure how that happened. It did not stick. Obviously, he spent a couple of nights in jail and then the charges were dropped, but he went into a long, dry spell. Workwise did not get hired a ton over a certain period of time.

And then from the 30s to 59, when he died, he did some of his best work, maybe perhaps of his career. Absolutely.

He it was during that time he did Taliesin West, which, like I said, you mean I went to we went out to Scottsdale and visited with our friends, Blair and er and out there who are Scottsdale peeps. And we went to Taliesin and it was just Chuck dude, have you been to that one. Haven't been to Taliesin West.

Now it's it's really, really cool. Just the little just so many details about it. And there's a lot of fountains which is really refreshing in the desert. It's just a really great neat little place for sure. And a little I use that in the absolute wrong way. It's it's pretty big, but it's a very it's a charming place for sure. Yeah. And of course he did the Guggenheim after that Fallingwater water. Yeah.

So it was a very productive period of his life. Maybe we do more Frank Lloyd Wright in the future.

Is this it. No, no. We'll we'll do the intro stuff you should know style and just chip away at different parts about his life and then do a full biography on him years down the road. All right. Sounds good. I thought of another place I went to Frank Lloyd Wright place. There's a Florida Southern College or university. I'm sorry, is Frank Lloyd Wright design campus? It's amazing. Now, to check that out, too, you should check it out, there's like this really great covered walkway that you walk around everywhere and it's just it's really neat.

You just feel immersed in Frank Lloyd Wright. It's not just, you know, one building or one house.

It's a whole campus.

I love it if you want to know more about Frank Lloyd Wright and just go out after the pandemic ends and start visiting some of his houses. And since I said after the pandemic ends, let's optimistically go on to listener mail.

No, no, sir. No listener mail today. I think today we should take a little bit of an opportunity to talk for a few minutes about our book. Everyone's been really patient while we've plugged the presale of this book. I think by the time this comes out, the book will be out.

Is that right?

Uh, after the twenty fourth, probably, uh, Jerry can make it so.

I think it is, but if not, it's just before and I finally got the books delivered to my house in hardcover edition and I got to hold it in my hand as have you. And it's great. I'm really I'm really proud of the work that we did along with Flat Iron or cowriter Nils, who's just an amazing dude.

Yes. In our illustrator Kali Manado, who died just an amazing job throughout the book of bringing like just passages that you didn't even think of is suddenly kind of came to life through or illustrations.

Yeah, I mean, there's an illustration of Momoh. There's an illustration of my daughter there, a nice little Easter eggs in there. You know, we haven't talked a lot about the contents of the book.

There are we had a lot of fun with the with the notes at the bottom, the footnotes. It's really became kind of a fun part of the book we mentioned. I don't even know the lost count, how many podcast we mention, but we've notate those in the end. Yeah. And there were plenty that we we missed like I did. And other like I shouldn't have done this, but I did another like, um, like fine tooth comb.

They just scraped through of every word in the book. Of course you did. To see, you know, what, what podcast we needed to link to. And I was like, oh man. I found like fifty of these so far. And I emailed them was like, is it too late to add footnotes or podcast footnotes? And they're like, yes, that time has come. So that's in addition. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Can we get these reprinted.

But I have the number here actually we have listed in the book, we are referenced in the book. We have two hundred and seventy four references to other podcasts. But here's a few of the chapters we did one on Murphy Beds, uh, one on back. I'm asking one on aging, one on donuts. That's a great chapter. I love that chapter. Uh, what else? A kamikaze demolition derbies. It's like stuff you should know in book form.

It is definitely. And as we've said, like, none of these are just like an entire podcast. It's more like, you know, we took maybe the history of something or, you know, one just one aspect of one of the things it kind of delve into it and flesh it out like that. So hopefully we'll be able to turn these into full sized, like, podcast episodes one day. That's kind of our intent. But even if we don't, I think the book like really covers them in an enjoyable way.

Totally. Jack Kevorkian, that was a good one to keeping up with the Joneses. That's one of my favorite ones. Yeah. Yeah. There's like twenty seven just amazing chapters in there. Each one's better than the last. And then astoundingly it starts back over and somehow chapter one is better than chapter twenty seven. But you know, if you haven't bought it yet, I highly encourage you to. It makes a great gift even if the person doesn't even know who we are.

It's in the great tradition, I think, of the great bathroom readers. You can pick it up at any point in the book and read any chapter. And it's and it's just a lot of fun. My daughter even likes it because the pictures and she loves looking at the back and going, There's you and Josh.

I know. It's very cute. It is cute. So one other thing I want to say is like we really appreciate you guys who have already preordered the book or who will buy the book. We bought the audio book that's available to you. But if you can't if you're like, I just don't have the money right now or I don't feel like spending money, I just like the podcast. That's fine, too. Like, we're not mad at you now, but we appreciate the people who have supported us by buying the book.

So thank you very much to everybody who has their will buy our book, because that's that's very kind of you. And it means a lot to us.

And you can look forward to a kid's version coming soon. Yes. Right. Yeah, eventually we're taking the same twenty seven chapters and codifying it, but without being patronising.

So yeah, that's really swearwords. Right now we're taking the swearwords out of the chapter on Mishaal. Didn't make the cut in the kids. But I know, I think I mean I think this book is appropriate for kids as young as like probably twelve years old.

It's not like it's. Oh, yeah. It's not like it's dirty or anything, it's it might just be a little advanced for younger kids, but we're going to we're going to make sure that the younger kids have their version, too.

Yes. It'll make every 12 year old who reads are the adult book really want midscale?

So anyway, thanks to everyone who's bought it, it's called Stuff You Should Know, an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. You can get it wherever books are sold. Of course, we encourage you to buy from independent bookstores, if you can, to try and keep them in business.

Yep, for sure. I guess that's it, huh? That's it. OK, well thanks everybody for hearing us out about our book spiel. And if you bought the book or the audio book. Thank you. If you can't. Again, we love you anyway, so don't worry about it. And if you want to get in touch with us, you can send us an email to Stuff podcast and I heart radio dotcom.

Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio for more podcasts, my heart radio, is it the radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows?

Nearly 600 years after the invention of the printing press, the most important book in the history of the world has arrived, there might be overstating things, stuff you should know, an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things.

It will change your life forever.

Well, that's not necessarily true. Most scientists agree that stuff you should know an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things is proof that time travel is possible because that is the only way to explain how a book this impressive was possibly made. Why? Why stuff you should know. An incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things will regrow hair quite in your teeth and improve your love life.

That's just not at all. Right.

Well, the love life part, maybe if you find someone who thinks smart is sexy stuff, you should know an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things available for preorder. Now at stuff you should know Dotcom. Now, that is true.

Did you know the original Mr. Potato Head was an actual potato? Did you know that all tequila's are Mesko, but not all mesoscale in tequila? Did you know some goats climb trees? Did you know there really was a Jones family that everyone in New York was trying to keep up with or that Pablo Picasso was a child prodigy who could draw before he could talk? You will stuff you should know. An incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. Preorder now.

It's stuff you should know dotcom or wherever books are sold.