July 30, 2024 • 40 mins
You may have his soap in your shower, but what do you know about the man himself? Buckle up, here comes Dr. Bronner!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck
and Jerry's here too, so this is stuff you should know.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Oft requested edition. I knew someone had asked for this,
so I did a little Google or not Google, but
an email search, and seven people requested this over the
last four years.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
What are their names?
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Shannon Mendonka, Megan Delfino, Josh Cronin, come on down, Michelle Roberts,
Alec Cole, Jonathan, Mark Wan or Mark Vin can't remoone writing?
And then Micah p Micah. I don't know how to
pronounce your name, p e g u e s p
(00:54):
at you. I'm sure there's a pronounce pegoose. I'm in
a m couldee my old buddy. I think Michael was
the first one, dating back to twenty twenty, or at
least as far as my email went back to search
for doctor Bronner.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Yeah, that's who we're talking about, doctor Broner. And if
you're like that name sounds familiar, you might be familiar
with Doctor Broner's eighteen and one Magic Soap, which Doctor
Broner the company has been selling since at least the
nineteen forties. And if you just said what I've only
known that since the sixties, or the seventies, or the eighties,
or the nineties or two years ago, It's true. This
(01:32):
stuff has been around for a very long time. And
doctor Broner himself is enough of a character to warrant
an episode. We're not really talking about the soap today, no.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
But one thing you probably have, there's no way you
cannot notice it is the iconic labels on the soap,
which have twenty seven hundred and twenty nine words printed
in five point font making up what we'll talk about later,
the moral ABC and we'll get to why all that happened.
But it's a unique company in a couple of ways,
(02:05):
and many many ways. But one is they have never
spent money on advertising. That's amazing, not a penny. And
it started out as a well, we'll get to the origins,
but now it's it's one of the top selling organic
soaps on the market, with revenues approaching two hundred million dollars.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Yeah, and it went through quite a circuitous route to
get there, because not very long ago you bought that
at like your local health food store that smelled like,
you know, Valerian root everywhere.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
Yeah, incense.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Yeah, and they've just kind of blown up. And what's
neat is they they've continued to grow under successive generations.
So I say we talk about doctor Brauner and where
he came from in the first place.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
All right, if you like you said, if you look
at the label, it will say family soap makers since
eighteen fifty eight, and that is when the Heilbranna family
in Germany started making soap. They were a Jewish family
in Laupiem, Germany, and the doctor Barner himself would later
(03:15):
drop the hile part of his name because of obvious
reasons in World War Two. But in the eighteen nineties
the heil Branos were making tons of soap in three
factories in Germany. He came from a very well healed,
kind of legendary soap Casteel soap making company.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
Yeah, I was gonna say he was trained by his
family to make casteel soap, which is kind of soap
made originated I guess around maybe the Mediterranean that uses
vegetable oils instead of animal fats, and it's softer and
it does less drying on the skin, and it's a
true soap. It undergoes to ponification. It's not a detergent
(03:55):
like a lot of other soaps. It's a genuine, true soap.
And he learned to make that back in the early
nineteen hundreds. He was born in nineteen oh eight, so
sometime after that he learned how to make Kessial soap.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Yeah, he was born Emil E. M I l Heilbroner.
Like we said, that's the less obnoxious way to say it.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
I like how you've been saying. I was going to
compliment you, honestly, Alblanna.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Yeah, he you know, in Germany and a lot of
well a lot of people that are a lot of
places that have the sort of apprentice model. That's what
he did. He was an apprentice and then a journeyman,
and then eventually he was a master soap maker. Only
formal education he received was that the doctor was self
bestowed and completely made up.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
And that totally fits him, as we'll see absolutely.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
But he and his parents were at odds. His wealthy
family were more just sort of old school, politically orthodox
Jewish family. They didn't want radical politics in their house,
and so Emial's belief in national homeland for the Jewish
(05:06):
people in Zionism did not jibe with what his family
wanted to do, so they basically said, hey, enough of that,
or get the heck out of here. So in nineteen
twenty nine, in December of that year, Emil went to
the United States.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
Yeah, at age twenty one, and he went essentially like
without a plan, without much money. He just showed up
in New York City. And he chose a particularly terrible
time where I should say his father chose a particularly
terrible time. Showed up just after the stock market crash
of nineteen twenty nine that kicked off the Great Depression.
So he immediately found trouble or found getting work troublesome.
(05:46):
He did manage to kind of keep himself afloat by
making soap or teaching others how to make soap, and
he's routinely considered a genius. There's a I think either
a police report or a mental institution poured on him
that says he very clearly seems to have a wealth
of scientific knowledge in his head. So he knew what
(06:07):
he was doing with chemistry, even though, like you said,
his only formal education was in soap. Making. He understood
the chemistry of the whole thing and what adding this
to it or that to it, what changes that would have,
So he was able to kind of keep himself going
through soap making for essentially his whole life starting about now.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Yeah, he got married nineteen thirty to another German immigrant
named Paula Voldefought. She has an interesting backstory and tragic
in that she was born from an affair between a
Catholic priest and a nun, and that nun very sadly
(06:48):
took her life and put I don't know if it
was she put her up for adoption before or if
that de facto put her up for adoption, but either way,
the nun took her life. Paula was adopted. Obviously wasn't Jewish,
which would not endear herself to Emil's family as you know,
(07:09):
as well as Emil himself. And in nineteen thirty five,
Emil made his first batch of peppermint oil soap, which
today is their biggest seller. Sill as a diaper cleaner.
When they had cloth diapers, it was a diaper sanitizer,
and hey, my god, can you make this smell any better?
Kind of product?
Speaker 1 (07:29):
So in nineteen thirty six, he became a naturalized citizen
and this is when he changed his name from Emil
Heil Brauner to Emmanuel Theodore Brauner. And most people call
him doctor E. H. Brauner. Again, he's not a doctor.
He just decided to call himself a doctor. Although people
cite his master chemist status as a soap maker to
(07:52):
at least, you know, kind of justify it all. But
there's no getting around the fact that he bestowed the
doctor on himself. And they think that the H and
eh is kind of a nod to the hile from
heil Bronner that he dropped. Okay, but that's not me.
I'm not making that up.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
Previous to World War Two, he was doing okay, he
was making soap, doing pretty well. He had his wife,
he had his family. What do you have? Three kids?
Is that right? Two boys and a girl. After the war,
everything had fallen apart for him in his life. Basically,
(08:31):
Hitler of course, came into power. He and his siblings
were begging his parents to leave Germany, which they would
not do. And you know, the worst thing happened that
they were afraid of. They were forced to hand over
their business. They were sent to concentration camps and they
were both killed.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
Yeah, And I was reading a blog post from Lisa Broner,
who's doctor Broner's granddaughter, and she was explaining that they
there was a forced sale of their soap making business
to the Third Reich, to the German state because they
were Jewish, they were not allowed to own businesses like that,
and that would be obviously like a clear signal everybody
(09:12):
like probably should leave the country now. But the Germans
also at this time had a law that well healed,
Jewish people could not leave Germany with capital. You could leave,
but you could not take a penny of German money
outside of the country with you. And so if you
were wealthy and Jewish, it would be kind of tough
to just be like, you know what, forget it, my
(09:32):
entire family fortune. I'm just gonna forget about it just
to get out of Germany, because I still don't think
like the German people are so crazy that they're going
to let this guy just keep going. And it got
to the point where it became too late. And there's
a part of family lore is that doctor Brauner got
a last postcard from his father after his detention in
(09:53):
the concentration camp, and it says, like everything else is redacted,
but at the very end it says you were right,
your loving father, which is that's about as heartbreaking as
it gets. But that was a big, big deal to
doctor Brauner, as his sister would later attest.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
Oh, of course, another tragedy and big deal in his
life is when his wife suffered a fall after they
had their third kid, and that was kind of it
for her. She became depressed, she stopped eating, she had
suicidal ideation. Eventually died in a state mental hospital outside
(10:33):
of Chicago. And I tried to find out more and
more about maybe what happened with her, and there's just
not a lot out there. I suspect that maybe there
was some sort of head injury. It just sort of
tracks along those lines maybe in that fall. But either way,
he was left a widower with three young children, and
(10:54):
as we'll see, was not much of a dad. He
was not around much and did not dad much.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
No, No, there's one thing that everybody agrees is that
he was a terrible father in almost every way, not always,
but almost every way, especially on paper, like when you
just read about how what kind of father he was
it's crazy that his kids ever, you know, embraced him
or stuck around with him.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
You know, yeah, well, I mean we might as well
go ahead and talk about it. I believe that they
were at various times in orphanages and placed with other families,
and he kind of straight up said, and you know,
as we'll see, he becomes a bit of a zelot
for his ideas and kind of a kind of a
(11:39):
manic street preacher type. And he would literally say, like,
who has time to parent kids when I have to
like spread spread my word around. And he made no
bones about it, you know, that just he wasn't going
to parent these kids.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
Yeah no, And he would come back once or twice
a year and visit them, but yeah, he was like,
I have to go out and do this. I have
a much bigger mission than raising you kids. And yeah,
that's a really tough thing to swallow, I'm sure as
you're a kid, and then even as an adult when
you're looking back. But again, astoundingly, his kids stuck with
(12:15):
him and learned to just kind of deal with the
fact that their father had abandoned them in about the
most overt way a father can abandon a child and
spent the rest of their lives with him once they
grew up and were able to basically get out of
the foster and orphanage systems.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
Yeah. Absolutely, so mentioned him being, you know, having these
big ideas. I mentioned the moral ABC and kind of
like the manic street preacher shout out to the band.
This all came from this idea of post World War two.
He had sort of a either a breakthrough or a
breakdown in his mind about that this could be it.
(12:57):
We're on the brink of destruction as a people. Mankind
needs a big shift in our perspectives, how we think
about politics, how we think about our time on earth
in the afterlife. He basically was like, the only way
forward for us, if we're going to survive as a species,
is to become the United States of the world and
(13:19):
to be all together as one people. And you know,
it wasn't the most radical idea. There have been plenty
of people that talked about stuff like this, but he's like,
we are all children of the same God, and the
only thing that can save us from that is if
we all get together and come together as one.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
Yeah, I'm glad you said that he either had a
breakthrough or breakdown because his sister Louise, who will play
a big role in a minute. She traces the origin
of his zealousness and his need to like spread this
message to the time when both of his parents were
killed murdered and his wife died like all within basically
(13:58):
a year, and that he changed after that. And depending
on who you talk to and how you look at it,
he changed either for the better and like became the
person who was supposed to be or his ideas were
just super kookie and he managed to support himself just
by the grace of making soap.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
Yeah, so I mentioned the moral ABC. This is basically
the end result of his sort of an end result,
meaning it was still a work in progress to the
day died. He was always tinkering with his moral ABC,
which is the thing printed on that soap label. All
one is the big rallying cry, which is what I
(14:39):
was kind of alluding to earlier with his thoughts. But
that is what he I mean to secondary to selling soap.
He was worried about this label and the words on it.
It's seemingly his entire life until he died.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
Yeah, he figured out that he could use the soap
as a way to get the word out there, which
is pretty genius actually, and that's where the label came from.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
Did we take a break, all right?
Speaker 1 (15:28):
Okay, Chuck. So after some period of time, he ended
up in Chicago, and like you said, he became a
manic street preacher in Chicago and he attracted an adherent
This is this is kind of like a little side story,
but it's worth telling because I think it really kind
of gets the point across about Brauner and who he
(15:48):
was and the people he hung out with at the time,
because he came out as like the reasonable one out
of this one. But one of his devotees was named
fred Walker, who he had attracted, and Fred Walker Poker
he would turn out to be a Nazi sympathizer, but
before that was clear, he was an Austrian immigrant who
had created his own universal brotherhood movement called American Industrial Democracy,
(16:12):
and he really was vibing on what Brauner was saying.
And at some point, I guess either he or they,
it's not clear, got the idea of creating a publicity
stunt to get their ideas out there to more people,
and apparently Fred Walker submitted or suggested that he be
(16:33):
crucified to get this message out as a publicity stunt,
and he was crucified.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
Yeah. This is in outside of El Station, a train
station in Chicago, March ninth, nineteen forty five. Cops were
called down there and like dude on a cross with
nails the whole nine yards. It wasn't like a show,
and he was tied up there. It was a real
crucifixion that he survived. At some point mentioned Bronner's name
(17:03):
and the cops went and talked to Bronner and said, hey,
do you have I think he mentioned the peace Plan
or something like that. Walker did to the cops and
they said, are you a Bronner And they said yeah,
and he said do you have this a peace plan?
He went, sure, I do, and even have a pamphlet.
They're like, well, why don't you come talk to us
then about what happened to your friend? Nothing ever happened.
(17:26):
I guess everyone just clammed up about how he was
actually literally crucified. But in the hospital room with like
reporters and everything in there with this guy, Bronner was
in there with his peace pamphlets like passing them out
to people.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
Yeah, but apparently people were like, this is not the
kind of thing I want to associate with crucifixion, you know,
like I now think that your ideas are related to
this man being crucified in Chicago. So it wasn't the
best publicity stunt of all time, but it does kind
of get across the kind of stuff and the kind
of people that doctor Broner was hanging out with in
(18:02):
Chicago in the mid forties, And he developed a reputation
pretty quickly because within a year he was arrested by
the Chicago police and his life completely changed. At this point,
he was known for not taking no as an answer.
He was known for not knowing the meaning of the
word can't again. Lisa Broner described him. And there was
(18:27):
the International Center, a college at the University of Chicago.
They would have like seminars or presentations or lectures, and
doctor Broner is like, I've got a perfect lecture for
you guys. Let me get up there and talk and
tell everybody my all one sermon and that moral ABC
And they said, no, we don't want you to do that.
(18:47):
Thanks for offering, And the University of Chicago thought that
was that.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
Yeah. So in March of forty six, he comes back
pretty hot headed. He's yelling out his fellowsipes, he's kind
of yelling out his moral ABC and a couple of
cops come out and say, hey, your car's parked illegally
out there. Why don't you come out with us and
we'll get it moved. And I guess this was just
(19:12):
the old cop thing to not cause a big scene inside,
because they get him outside, immediately arrest him, hit.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Him with a blackjack.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
Yeah, he's in jail for about a week, and his
sister Louise eventually came from Rhode Island to sign committal
papers to have him sent to Elgin State Insane Asylum,
where he says, and you know, we don't We've talked
before about how hard it is to get any hard
facts about what happens and what happened in those places
(19:40):
back then. But Bronner himself said that he was he
had to sleep on a concrete slab that he was
chained to every night. He was forced us into solitary
confinement and electroshock therapy. We don't know which parts of that,
if all of it or none of it is true,
but that's what he said happened, and in fact, if
(20:01):
you see pictures of the older doctor Browner, he's always
got on these these dark glasses. That's because he lost
his eyesight very slowly over the years, and he credits
that or blames it rather on the shock treatments that
he got in at Elgin.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
Yeah, he would later on say he would call Elgin
a concentration camp and say that he was put to
hard labor mixing concrete. And he probably was put to
work because they did use inmates for labor back then,
but they, like he would say, like in the concentration
camps I did. Is what he was talking about was
(20:37):
the mental institution that he was committed to by his sister,
and he wasn't very happy there, as you can guess,
So he escaped. He escaped three times, and the third
time was the charm. He finally got away. It's always
the last escape attempt, you know, Well.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
Didn't he just kind of get up and leave. When
his sister visited, she.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
Was allowed to make him out to lunch. She went
to the bathroom, he stole five bucks out of her
purse and took off and made it. He made it
all the way to Vegas. He hitchhiked to Los Angeles
and apparently he had a ride all the way there
and he made the mistake of mentioning to the driver
that he had just escaped from a mental hospital, and
the drivers like, I'm gonna let you off in Las Vegas,
(21:20):
how about that? And he took that five dollars or
whatever was left of it, and I want to say
it was a roulette spin and managed to make enough
money to get him the rest of the way out
to Los Angeles and rent a room while when he got.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
There quite a story. So what we're saying is his
big successful attempt was he was taken out to lunch
and he got up and left.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
Yeah, yeah, I guess so for sure.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
Amazing.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
Yeah, I mean there was no like barbed wire or
climbing over stuff or searchlights to anything. There was probably
a hot beef.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
Right, So he ends up in Los Angeles. The company,
the real company that we know is doctor Browner's Soap
Company was founded then in nineteen forty eight. That's when
the company started. In Earnest he would go to Pershing
Square in downtown LA where people would manic street preach
(22:17):
and he would literally stand on a soapbox and preaches
moral ABC to people. I keep wanting to say ABC's
but it's ABC. Yeah, just like Scorpions, Yeah exactly. And
he would preach and then sell bottles of this liquid soap,
and people loved the soap so much they would go
back and just buy the soap. So that's where he
(22:38):
was like, no one's even listening to preach anymore. And
that's where the idea hatched, was to actually put the
message on the soap, bing bang boom. Didn't even have
to stand around in that soapbox anymore.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
Right, So again, like this, I'm trying to figure out
how to get him across. If it's not coming through,
maybe this will do it. Throughout the nineteen fifties, he
became obsessed with the idea that communists were secretly running
the United States and ruining it, and he used to
call the Los Angeles Field office of the FBI every
(23:11):
day to tell them how to root out communists or
suggest ways of finding communists and getting rid of them,
and they eventually created a file on him because he
called so much.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
That's a good way to get on the FBI's list
is to call them every day.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
Yeah, just call them directly. You want an FBI an
FBI file, just start calling him every day. And then
he also was really concerned that fluoride that was in
the water had actually been put there to poison us.
And that's a pretty interesting idea that the whole I
guess theory that fluoride is detrimental to us came from
doctor Brauner, possibly because he seems to be one of
(23:50):
those pop culture influencers that you just had no idea
that something you thought or think can be traced directly
back to him and his ideas. But there's a few
examples of that, and this could be one of them.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
Yeah, for sure. You mentioned early at the very beginning, like, oh,
I just heard about that soap in the nineteen sixties,
or maybe my parents did. That's because in the nineteen
sixties things were going bad, and then they started going
really well. He was in trouble with the irs. He
had registered the company as a nonprofit. The FEDS were like, no,
(24:27):
it's not a nonprofit. So he said, all right, I'm
going to stop selling soap all together. I'm going to
concentrate just on my preaching on the fluoride issue. And
as it seems, you know, these stories are all I
think taken a little bit with a grain of salts
as far as the timing, sure, but supposedly that's when
a couple of hippies walked up to the door with
(24:50):
a bunch of money and said, Hey, we want a
couple of fifty gallon drums of your soap. And this
idea was like, wait a minute. These hippies in San
Francisco Summer of Love one of those years, they loved
this soap, and all of a sudden they had like
a like a willing audience. Who I think the hippies
(25:13):
were perfect in that they they liked the soap, of course,
but they also liked it being all natural, and they
liked this kind of wacky guy had all this stuff
on the label. It just really fit with that whole
sixties thing, and that turned the company around.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
Yeah. I saw that I described as the world was
finally ready for doctor Browner and his ideas, because.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
It sounds about right. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
Yeah, he'd been like espousing eco consciousness and brotherly love
and a lot of the stuff the hippies were into
since the forties, probably a little earlier, but definitely since
the mid forties. And yeah, so they kind of became
followers of doctor Barner. They would hang out at his
house which was also the factory in Escondido, California, and
(25:57):
he would also he put his phone number on the
his home phone number, and he had a bunch of
different phones I guess the same phone number went to
a bunch of different lines, and would answer calls from
customers like all day and all night and just start
talking to them about the moral ABC and talking to
them about how to use his product and just basically
(26:19):
anything that was on his mind. Because he loved to talk.
I saw it didn't matter whether it was a tape recorder,
a reporter, a customer calling in, or a a child,
one of his kids. Like he just he just went
off constantly on his thoughts and his tangents and his
moral ABC and what it meant and how to live.
(26:41):
And the hippies definitely vibed on that for sure.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
Yeah, I think the word narcissist has probably been used
more than once with doctor Browner.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
It's entirely possible. But if you watch him interact with
his family, he's in his old age, he's very kind
of tender and relaxed and calm and doesn't seem like
he's manipulating them or anything like that. It's strange. I
think he has his own condition, a unique condition.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
He has Doctor Bronnerism.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
Yeah. But he was not a good business person. Like
we've mentioned quite a few times. He would not sell
his soaps because he was working on that label. He
would not deliver his soaps and orders. He owed a
lot to the I R. S In back taxes, like
millions of dollars. And even though they did pretty well
in the sixties, by the eighties he had kind of
(27:38):
run the company back into the ground there on the
brink of bankruptcy. And that's when his son, his oldest son, Jim,
turned the company around. He turns out Jim was a
great business person. He was great at making the manufacturing
process more efficient. He balanced the books. He even took
the moral ABC and was like, Hey, we've got a
(28:01):
thing here, but maybe we should craft it into a
and just something that makes a little more sense, Like
just sort of shape it and give it more of
a story so it doesn't sound like a Mannick Street
preacher just babbling things on the corner.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
Right, I say we take a break and come back
and talk about what they did with that.
Speaker 2 (28:19):
Let's do it all right. So when we left, we
(28:44):
talked about eldest son, Jim Bronner, sort of shaping and
forming the Moral ABC into what we see today on
the label. And he did that through and it got way.
They really leaned into the hippie stuff too, because a
it seems like I don't know as much about Jim,
but Ralph, his brother, was total hippie, still is. And
(29:07):
they started saying things like, all right, the Moral ABC
are now the six cosmic principles. Stuff like that.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
Yeah, because they went through, they rooted through his philosophy
which they'd been harangued by and probably knew by heart
since they were little kids. That when he came to
visit them, and they basically mined it for the best ideas,
and they boiled it down to those six cosmic principles.
The first is ourselves, work hard, grow our customers, do
(29:37):
right by customers. It's a good one. Our employees treat
employees like family, and as we'll see, they definitely live
up to that one. Our suppliers be fair to suppliers,
our earth, treat the earth like home. Our community fund
and fight for what's right. And this is like their company,
their corporate ethos, and they legitimately stick to it. This
(29:59):
is in no way, shape or form a gimmick greenwashing marketing.
It's it's exactly what this family company lives by.
Speaker 2 (30:10):
Yeah, yeah, it's pretty remarkable they I mean, we'll just
list off some of the things they do as a
company and you can decide for yourself whether you feel
good about supporting them. But during Jim's tenure, he passed
away not long after his father, which you know we'll
get to, but they introduced a basically one hundred percent
coverage for health insurance, zero deductible health plan, a fifteen
(30:35):
percent profit sharing plan. Ten years after that, they said,
all right, as a company, we're going to have a
five to one compensation cap. So that means, at no
point in our company's history or future history, I guess,
will the highest played, highest paid employee be more than
five times compensated what the lowest paid employee is, which
(30:59):
is remarkable to do.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
Yeah. So that means that like the people leading the
company or making about I saw about three hundred grand
a year, and I mean they could be making so
much more than that because the company pulls in tens
of millions of dollars now, but rather than funnel it
out of the company, the kids and grandkids decided to
(31:22):
invest it back into the company by paying the workers
really well, by funding political causes, and essentially just making
their product better and better. That's I mean, you just don't.
You don't see that anymore. It was remarkable back in
the day. Now it's like mind boggling, you know.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
Oh absolutely, if you you know, get like fair trade
coffee or any kind of fair trade product, or a
cosmetic or soap or something that it says is made
with fair trade ingredients, he was way or the company
was way ahead of that. I mean, they've kind of
done that to start. Their raw materials have always come
(32:03):
from fair trade partnerships, back when people didn't even know
what that meant. They donated, and this is a few
years ago. In twenty twenty two, they donated close to
nine million bucks, which was about a third of their
net profits, to three hundred more than three hundred nonprofits.
And like you said, they you know, they're heavily involved
(32:23):
in progressive politics. They published an election guide that basically
say here's who these candidates are, here's what causes they support,
and how it aligns with the causes we support or not,
and I believe over the past two decades as a company,
they've donated more than one hundred million dollars to their
various charities and activism or activist organizations.
Speaker 1 (32:47):
Yeah. I want to say typically progressive, but I think
it's one hundred percent progressive.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
One of the things they fought for for years was
legalizing hemp. Industrial hemp the stuff you can't get high
off of, but you can use a million different ways,
and they helped get that pushed forward just from agitating.
I think it was David Brauner, the grandson. I don't
remember if he's Jim or Ralph's kid, but he's the
(33:12):
Cosmic Engagement Officer CEO. He's actually the vice president, but
he's in charge of activism, and he did a lot
of I guess publicity sends to draw attention to industrial hemp,
like he was arrested in two thousand and nine for
planting hemp seeds outside the DEA headquarters. He locked himself
in a cage with a bunch of hemp outside the
(33:34):
White House. He had to be cut out, I think
with the jaws of life. And finally, when hemp farming
was legalized in twenty eighteen. They sent out this celebratory
press release about how, like what a great day this was.
It's kind of cute to read.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
Yeah, and by the way, that's who I was thinking
of when I talked about kind of what a hippie.
He was, not Ralph, it was David the grandson.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
Oh yeah, he's super hippie. There's a GQ profile of
the company and the I guess they call it the
hero image is David Browner with his tongue stuck out
and there's a hit of blotterer on his tongue, but
it's the doctor Broner's logo on the blotterer and like
they're super into legalizing psychedelics, especially for use in mental health.
(34:20):
And that health plan that they came up with. They're
the first company to subsidize ketamine assisted therapy. Yeah, using psychedelics,
Like that's part of the health plan. You can go
get that and the company covers it with their one
hundred percent coverage health plan.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
Pretty amazing. So I mentioned that Jim Broner passed away
around the same time as his father, Emmanuel Browner, died
in ninety seven from complications from Parkinson's disease, and his son,
his eldest son that turned the company around, passed a
year later from cancer. They were making, you know, like
(35:01):
you said, it's really taking off lately. In the late nineties,
they were doing pretty well. They were making you know,
four or five million bucks a year as a company,
which is awesome, but like you said, it was sort
of hippie dippy. Health food stores is where you'd find it.
It really exploded in the in the teens, in the
twenty teens, that is, and especially after twenty twenty with
(35:23):
COVID when people were washing their hands a lot. I
think they they almost reached the two hundred million dollar
level during COVID, and you know, considering where they started
and then all the ups and downs in between, that's
quite an accomplishment.
Speaker 1 (35:37):
Yeah, for sure. They also sell a bunch of other
stuff too, including chocolate toothpaste, pretty good toothpaste. But the
thing is, the irony of all this stuff is that
you can use the casteel soap for most of this,
not the chocolate, but you can brush your teeth with it,
you can wash your hair with it, you can gargle
with it. Apparently it helps clear up congestion. It does
(35:59):
all sorts of stuff, and I believe it says all
eighteen uses on the label, and you can go read
the labels and get you know, the moral ABC out
of them, and each one's a little different. It has
some other stuff that the other labels don't have, so
you have to buy them all.
Speaker 2 (36:14):
I guess, yeah, And now I mean I don't have any,
but I you know now that Emily is making our
own cast deal soap from her company. Uh you know
it's all bets are off.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
I washed my hair with it this very morning.
Speaker 2 (36:30):
No, we still actually have a big stash of Emily soap,
and she just made some for the family the other day,
so I don't think it will be switching over anytime soon.
But Doctor Browner's is good stuff.
Speaker 1 (36:41):
We can come to my house if you if you
want to use some Doctor Browner's get away.
Speaker 2 (36:45):
Oh good, I.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
Could use some of Emily soap though, just you know, hint, hint, I.
Speaker 2 (36:51):
Bet we could find a squeeze bottle or a misshapen bar. Sure.
Speaker 1 (36:57):
If you want to know more about doctor Browner? Wait,
should we should tell him? Should we tell him the
Mark Spitz thing? Oh?
Speaker 2 (37:03):
Yeah, I forgot about that. What was the deal he
was on the label?
Speaker 1 (37:06):
Yeah, he was held up along with Jesus Thomas Zazz,
the psychiatrist E. L. Zamenhoff, the guy who created Esperanto
as a great example of a Jewish person who helped
change the world, because he had set the record for
the most gold medals in a single event her sport.
(37:28):
I guess. And in two thousand and eight he finally
was like, get me off of this label and sued
Doctor Browner's, and I guess they settled for some undisclosed amount.
He's like, stop venerating me, give me some money instead.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
Yeah, and give me off of that wheaties box.
Speaker 1 (37:45):
If you want to know more about doctor Browner's, you
can go read some doctor Broner's labels and read a
bunch of good articles on them too. And in the meantime,
while you do that, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 2 (37:57):
Well, my friend, it is not, because today we send
a message out that is all a plea to define
people of Atlanta, Georgia. We have a live show and
all the other cities are doing great, and we're selling
We sold out in Indianapolis and we're selling great all
in Chicago, and Minneapolis and almost sold out in Durham. Nice,
(38:18):
but for some reason, our hometown show is lagging.
Speaker 1 (38:21):
Because these are the people who know us, like really
know us.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
Yeah, I like whatever, you're here, you live here.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
We see you at the library, like every week.
Speaker 2 (38:31):
I'll see Chuck at the car watch all the time.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
That's a fifty.
Speaker 2 (38:35):
So we're just asking for some support. This will be
the last show the tour. It's a great show. Josh
put this one together and it's just it's a really
good one and we'd love to see everyone in Symphony
Hall on what is it the seventh or eighth of September.
Speaker 1 (38:51):
The seventh, seventh, it's a Friday.
Speaker 2 (38:54):
It's a Friday night show, everybody. Those are the good ones.
Speaker 1 (38:56):
Yeah, so come see us because we want to see you.
Speaker 2 (38:59):
And it's it's a seventh, it's a Saturday.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
It's a Saturday at the seventh on the seventh.
Speaker 2 (39:04):
Yeah, we're Durham.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
On the fifth that's a Thursday.
Speaker 2 (39:08):
And then the sixth we got the night off right,
Josh's gonna wash my hair and then the seventh of
September at Atlanta Symphony Hall. Tickets are still available, just
go to our website. And go to the Symphony Hall
website and buy some tickets and come see us, because
who knows, we may never do another live show again.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
It's possible.
Speaker 2 (39:30):
Actually that's not true, but come out in net cs.
Speaker 1 (39:33):
Yeah, if you want to go to buy tickets, you
can go to link tree, slash, s ysk Live or
our website Stuff you Should Know dot com and click
on the tour button and yeah, and if you want
to get in touch with this like normal, you can
send us an email. Send it off to stuff Podcasts
at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (39:55):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. M
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck
and Jerry's here too, so this is stuff you should know.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Oft requested edition. I knew someone had asked for this,
so I did a little Google or not Google, but
an email search, and seven people requested this over the
last four years.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
What are their names?
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Shannon Mendonka, Megan Delfino, Josh Cronin, come on down, Michelle Roberts,
Alec Cole, Jonathan, Mark Wan or Mark Vin can't remoone writing?
And then Micah p Micah. I don't know how to
pronounce your name, p e g u e s p
(00:54):
at you. I'm sure there's a pronounce pegoose. I'm in
a m couldee my old buddy. I think Michael was
the first one, dating back to twenty twenty, or at
least as far as my email went back to search
for doctor Bronner.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Yeah, that's who we're talking about, doctor Broner. And if
you're like that name sounds familiar, you might be familiar
with Doctor Broner's eighteen and one Magic Soap, which Doctor
Broner the company has been selling since at least the
nineteen forties. And if you just said what I've only
known that since the sixties, or the seventies, or the eighties,
or the nineties or two years ago, It's true. This
(01:32):
stuff has been around for a very long time. And
doctor Broner himself is enough of a character to warrant
an episode. We're not really talking about the soap today, no.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
But one thing you probably have, there's no way you
cannot notice it is the iconic labels on the soap,
which have twenty seven hundred and twenty nine words printed
in five point font making up what we'll talk about later,
the moral ABC and we'll get to why all that happened.
But it's a unique company in a couple of ways,
(02:05):
and many many ways. But one is they have never
spent money on advertising. That's amazing, not a penny. And
it started out as a well, we'll get to the origins,
but now it's it's one of the top selling organic
soaps on the market, with revenues approaching two hundred million dollars.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Yeah, and it went through quite a circuitous route to
get there, because not very long ago you bought that
at like your local health food store that smelled like,
you know, Valerian root everywhere.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
Yeah, incense.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Yeah, and they've just kind of blown up. And what's
neat is they they've continued to grow under successive generations.
So I say we talk about doctor Brauner and where
he came from in the first place.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
All right, if you like you said, if you look
at the label, it will say family soap makers since
eighteen fifty eight, and that is when the Heilbranna family
in Germany started making soap. They were a Jewish family
in Laupiem, Germany, and the doctor Barner himself would later
(03:15):
drop the hile part of his name because of obvious
reasons in World War Two. But in the eighteen nineties
the heil Branos were making tons of soap in three
factories in Germany. He came from a very well healed,
kind of legendary soap Casteel soap making company.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
Yeah, I was gonna say he was trained by his
family to make casteel soap, which is kind of soap
made originated I guess around maybe the Mediterranean that uses
vegetable oils instead of animal fats, and it's softer and
it does less drying on the skin, and it's a
true soap. It undergoes to ponification. It's not a detergent
(03:55):
like a lot of other soaps. It's a genuine, true soap.
And he learned to make that back in the early
nineteen hundreds. He was born in nineteen oh eight, so
sometime after that he learned how to make Kessial soap.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Yeah, he was born Emil E. M I l Heilbroner.
Like we said, that's the less obnoxious way to say it.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
I like how you've been saying. I was going to
compliment you, honestly, Alblanna.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Yeah, he you know, in Germany and a lot of
well a lot of people that are a lot of
places that have the sort of apprentice model. That's what
he did. He was an apprentice and then a journeyman,
and then eventually he was a master soap maker. Only
formal education he received was that the doctor was self
bestowed and completely made up.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
And that totally fits him, as we'll see absolutely.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
But he and his parents were at odds. His wealthy
family were more just sort of old school, politically orthodox
Jewish family. They didn't want radical politics in their house,
and so Emial's belief in national homeland for the Jewish
(05:06):
people in Zionism did not jibe with what his family
wanted to do, so they basically said, hey, enough of that,
or get the heck out of here. So in nineteen
twenty nine, in December of that year, Emil went to
the United States.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
Yeah, at age twenty one, and he went essentially like
without a plan, without much money. He just showed up
in New York City. And he chose a particularly terrible
time where I should say his father chose a particularly
terrible time. Showed up just after the stock market crash
of nineteen twenty nine that kicked off the Great Depression.
So he immediately found trouble or found getting work troublesome.
(05:46):
He did manage to kind of keep himself afloat by
making soap or teaching others how to make soap, and
he's routinely considered a genius. There's a I think either
a police report or a mental institution poured on him
that says he very clearly seems to have a wealth
of scientific knowledge in his head. So he knew what
(06:07):
he was doing with chemistry, even though, like you said,
his only formal education was in soap. Making. He understood
the chemistry of the whole thing and what adding this
to it or that to it, what changes that would have,
So he was able to kind of keep himself going
through soap making for essentially his whole life starting about now.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Yeah, he got married nineteen thirty to another German immigrant
named Paula Voldefought. She has an interesting backstory and tragic
in that she was born from an affair between a
Catholic priest and a nun, and that nun very sadly
(06:48):
took her life and put I don't know if it
was she put her up for adoption before or if
that de facto put her up for adoption, but either way,
the nun took her life. Paula was adopted. Obviously wasn't Jewish,
which would not endear herself to Emil's family as you know,
(07:09):
as well as Emil himself. And in nineteen thirty five,
Emil made his first batch of peppermint oil soap, which
today is their biggest seller. Sill as a diaper cleaner.
When they had cloth diapers, it was a diaper sanitizer,
and hey, my god, can you make this smell any better?
Kind of product?
Speaker 1 (07:29):
So in nineteen thirty six, he became a naturalized citizen
and this is when he changed his name from Emil
Heil Brauner to Emmanuel Theodore Brauner. And most people call
him doctor E. H. Brauner. Again, he's not a doctor.
He just decided to call himself a doctor. Although people
cite his master chemist status as a soap maker to
(07:52):
at least, you know, kind of justify it all. But
there's no getting around the fact that he bestowed the
doctor on himself. And they think that the H and
eh is kind of a nod to the hile from
heil Bronner that he dropped. Okay, but that's not me.
I'm not making that up.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
Previous to World War Two, he was doing okay, he
was making soap, doing pretty well. He had his wife,
he had his family. What do you have? Three kids?
Is that right? Two boys and a girl. After the war,
everything had fallen apart for him in his life. Basically,
(08:31):
Hitler of course, came into power. He and his siblings
were begging his parents to leave Germany, which they would
not do. And you know, the worst thing happened that
they were afraid of. They were forced to hand over
their business. They were sent to concentration camps and they
were both killed.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
Yeah, And I was reading a blog post from Lisa Broner,
who's doctor Broner's granddaughter, and she was explaining that they
there was a forced sale of their soap making business
to the Third Reich, to the German state because they
were Jewish, they were not allowed to own businesses like that,
and that would be obviously like a clear signal everybody
(09:12):
like probably should leave the country now. But the Germans
also at this time had a law that well healed,
Jewish people could not leave Germany with capital. You could leave,
but you could not take a penny of German money
outside of the country with you. And so if you
were wealthy and Jewish, it would be kind of tough
to just be like, you know what, forget it, my
(09:32):
entire family fortune. I'm just gonna forget about it just
to get out of Germany, because I still don't think
like the German people are so crazy that they're going
to let this guy just keep going. And it got
to the point where it became too late. And there's
a part of family lore is that doctor Brauner got
a last postcard from his father after his detention in
(09:53):
the concentration camp, and it says, like everything else is redacted,
but at the very end it says you were right,
your loving father, which is that's about as heartbreaking as
it gets. But that was a big, big deal to
doctor Brauner, as his sister would later attest.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
Oh, of course, another tragedy and big deal in his
life is when his wife suffered a fall after they
had their third kid, and that was kind of it
for her. She became depressed, she stopped eating, she had
suicidal ideation. Eventually died in a state mental hospital outside
(10:33):
of Chicago. And I tried to find out more and
more about maybe what happened with her, and there's just
not a lot out there. I suspect that maybe there
was some sort of head injury. It just sort of
tracks along those lines maybe in that fall. But either way,
he was left a widower with three young children, and
(10:54):
as we'll see, was not much of a dad. He
was not around much and did not dad much.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
No, No, there's one thing that everybody agrees is that
he was a terrible father in almost every way, not always,
but almost every way, especially on paper, like when you
just read about how what kind of father he was
it's crazy that his kids ever, you know, embraced him
or stuck around with him.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
You know, yeah, well, I mean we might as well
go ahead and talk about it. I believe that they
were at various times in orphanages and placed with other families,
and he kind of straight up said, and you know,
as we'll see, he becomes a bit of a zelot
for his ideas and kind of a kind of a
(11:39):
manic street preacher type. And he would literally say, like,
who has time to parent kids when I have to
like spread spread my word around. And he made no
bones about it, you know, that just he wasn't going
to parent these kids.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
Yeah no, And he would come back once or twice
a year and visit them, but yeah, he was like,
I have to go out and do this. I have
a much bigger mission than raising you kids. And yeah,
that's a really tough thing to swallow, I'm sure as
you're a kid, and then even as an adult when
you're looking back. But again, astoundingly, his kids stuck with
(12:15):
him and learned to just kind of deal with the
fact that their father had abandoned them in about the
most overt way a father can abandon a child and
spent the rest of their lives with him once they
grew up and were able to basically get out of
the foster and orphanage systems.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
Yeah. Absolutely, so mentioned him being, you know, having these
big ideas. I mentioned the moral ABC and kind of
like the manic street preacher shout out to the band.
This all came from this idea of post World War two.
He had sort of a either a breakthrough or a
breakdown in his mind about that this could be it.
(12:57):
We're on the brink of destruction as a people. Mankind
needs a big shift in our perspectives, how we think
about politics, how we think about our time on earth
in the afterlife. He basically was like, the only way
forward for us, if we're going to survive as a species,
is to become the United States of the world and
(13:19):
to be all together as one people. And you know,
it wasn't the most radical idea. There have been plenty
of people that talked about stuff like this, but he's like,
we are all children of the same God, and the
only thing that can save us from that is if
we all get together and come together as one.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
Yeah, I'm glad you said that he either had a
breakthrough or breakdown because his sister Louise, who will play
a big role in a minute. She traces the origin
of his zealousness and his need to like spread this
message to the time when both of his parents were
killed murdered and his wife died like all within basically
(13:58):
a year, and that he changed after that. And depending
on who you talk to and how you look at it,
he changed either for the better and like became the
person who was supposed to be or his ideas were
just super kookie and he managed to support himself just
by the grace of making soap.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
Yeah, so I mentioned the moral ABC. This is basically
the end result of his sort of an end result,
meaning it was still a work in progress to the
day died. He was always tinkering with his moral ABC,
which is the thing printed on that soap label. All
one is the big rallying cry, which is what I
(14:39):
was kind of alluding to earlier with his thoughts. But
that is what he I mean to secondary to selling soap.
He was worried about this label and the words on it.
It's seemingly his entire life until he died.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
Yeah, he figured out that he could use the soap
as a way to get the word out there, which
is pretty genius actually, and that's where the label came from.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
Did we take a break, all right?
Speaker 1 (15:28):
Okay, Chuck. So after some period of time, he ended
up in Chicago, and like you said, he became a
manic street preacher in Chicago and he attracted an adherent
This is this is kind of like a little side story,
but it's worth telling because I think it really kind
of gets the point across about Brauner and who he
(15:48):
was and the people he hung out with at the time,
because he came out as like the reasonable one out
of this one. But one of his devotees was named
fred Walker, who he had attracted, and Fred Walker Poker
he would turn out to be a Nazi sympathizer, but
before that was clear, he was an Austrian immigrant who
had created his own universal brotherhood movement called American Industrial Democracy,
(16:12):
and he really was vibing on what Brauner was saying.
And at some point, I guess either he or they,
it's not clear, got the idea of creating a publicity
stunt to get their ideas out there to more people,
and apparently Fred Walker submitted or suggested that he be
(16:33):
crucified to get this message out as a publicity stunt,
and he was crucified.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
Yeah. This is in outside of El Station, a train
station in Chicago, March ninth, nineteen forty five. Cops were
called down there and like dude on a cross with
nails the whole nine yards. It wasn't like a show,
and he was tied up there. It was a real
crucifixion that he survived. At some point mentioned Bronner's name
(17:03):
and the cops went and talked to Bronner and said, hey,
do you have I think he mentioned the peace Plan
or something like that. Walker did to the cops and
they said, are you a Bronner And they said yeah,
and he said do you have this a peace plan?
He went, sure, I do, and even have a pamphlet.
They're like, well, why don't you come talk to us
then about what happened to your friend? Nothing ever happened.
(17:26):
I guess everyone just clammed up about how he was
actually literally crucified. But in the hospital room with like
reporters and everything in there with this guy, Bronner was
in there with his peace pamphlets like passing them out
to people.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
Yeah, but apparently people were like, this is not the
kind of thing I want to associate with crucifixion, you know,
like I now think that your ideas are related to
this man being crucified in Chicago. So it wasn't the
best publicity stunt of all time, but it does kind
of get across the kind of stuff and the kind
of people that doctor Broner was hanging out with in
(18:02):
Chicago in the mid forties, And he developed a reputation
pretty quickly because within a year he was arrested by
the Chicago police and his life completely changed. At this point,
he was known for not taking no as an answer.
He was known for not knowing the meaning of the
word can't again. Lisa Broner described him. And there was
(18:27):
the International Center, a college at the University of Chicago.
They would have like seminars or presentations or lectures, and
doctor Broner is like, I've got a perfect lecture for
you guys. Let me get up there and talk and
tell everybody my all one sermon and that moral ABC
And they said, no, we don't want you to do that.
(18:47):
Thanks for offering, And the University of Chicago thought that
was that.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
Yeah. So in March of forty six, he comes back
pretty hot headed. He's yelling out his fellowsipes, he's kind
of yelling out his moral ABC and a couple of
cops come out and say, hey, your car's parked illegally
out there. Why don't you come out with us and
we'll get it moved. And I guess this was just
(19:12):
the old cop thing to not cause a big scene inside,
because they get him outside, immediately arrest him, hit.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Him with a blackjack.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
Yeah, he's in jail for about a week, and his
sister Louise eventually came from Rhode Island to sign committal
papers to have him sent to Elgin State Insane Asylum,
where he says, and you know, we don't We've talked
before about how hard it is to get any hard
facts about what happens and what happened in those places
(19:40):
back then. But Bronner himself said that he was he
had to sleep on a concrete slab that he was
chained to every night. He was forced us into solitary
confinement and electroshock therapy. We don't know which parts of that,
if all of it or none of it is true,
but that's what he said happened, and in fact, if
(20:01):
you see pictures of the older doctor Browner, he's always
got on these these dark glasses. That's because he lost
his eyesight very slowly over the years, and he credits
that or blames it rather on the shock treatments that
he got in at Elgin.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
Yeah, he would later on say he would call Elgin
a concentration camp and say that he was put to
hard labor mixing concrete. And he probably was put to
work because they did use inmates for labor back then,
but they, like he would say, like in the concentration
camps I did. Is what he was talking about was
(20:37):
the mental institution that he was committed to by his sister,
and he wasn't very happy there, as you can guess,
So he escaped. He escaped three times, and the third
time was the charm. He finally got away. It's always
the last escape attempt, you know, Well.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
Didn't he just kind of get up and leave. When
his sister visited, she.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
Was allowed to make him out to lunch. She went
to the bathroom, he stole five bucks out of her
purse and took off and made it. He made it
all the way to Vegas. He hitchhiked to Los Angeles
and apparently he had a ride all the way there
and he made the mistake of mentioning to the driver
that he had just escaped from a mental hospital, and
the drivers like, I'm gonna let you off in Las Vegas,
(21:20):
how about that? And he took that five dollars or
whatever was left of it, and I want to say
it was a roulette spin and managed to make enough
money to get him the rest of the way out
to Los Angeles and rent a room while when he got.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
There quite a story. So what we're saying is his
big successful attempt was he was taken out to lunch
and he got up and left.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
Yeah, yeah, I guess so for sure.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
Amazing.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
Yeah, I mean there was no like barbed wire or
climbing over stuff or searchlights to anything. There was probably
a hot beef.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
Right, So he ends up in Los Angeles. The company,
the real company that we know is doctor Browner's Soap
Company was founded then in nineteen forty eight. That's when
the company started. In Earnest he would go to Pershing
Square in downtown LA where people would manic street preach
(22:17):
and he would literally stand on a soapbox and preaches
moral ABC to people. I keep wanting to say ABC's
but it's ABC. Yeah, just like Scorpions, Yeah exactly. And
he would preach and then sell bottles of this liquid soap,
and people loved the soap so much they would go
back and just buy the soap. So that's where he
(22:38):
was like, no one's even listening to preach anymore. And
that's where the idea hatched, was to actually put the
message on the soap, bing bang boom. Didn't even have
to stand around in that soapbox anymore.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
Right, So again, like this, I'm trying to figure out
how to get him across. If it's not coming through,
maybe this will do it. Throughout the nineteen fifties, he
became obsessed with the idea that communists were secretly running
the United States and ruining it, and he used to
call the Los Angeles Field office of the FBI every
(23:11):
day to tell them how to root out communists or
suggest ways of finding communists and getting rid of them,
and they eventually created a file on him because he
called so much.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
That's a good way to get on the FBI's list
is to call them every day.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
Yeah, just call them directly. You want an FBI an
FBI file, just start calling him every day. And then
he also was really concerned that fluoride that was in
the water had actually been put there to poison us.
And that's a pretty interesting idea that the whole I
guess theory that fluoride is detrimental to us came from
doctor Brauner, possibly because he seems to be one of
(23:50):
those pop culture influencers that you just had no idea
that something you thought or think can be traced directly
back to him and his ideas. But there's a few
examples of that, and this could be one of them.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
Yeah, for sure. You mentioned early at the very beginning, like, oh,
I just heard about that soap in the nineteen sixties,
or maybe my parents did. That's because in the nineteen
sixties things were going bad, and then they started going
really well. He was in trouble with the irs. He
had registered the company as a nonprofit. The FEDS were like, no,
(24:27):
it's not a nonprofit. So he said, all right, I'm
going to stop selling soap all together. I'm going to
concentrate just on my preaching on the fluoride issue. And
as it seems, you know, these stories are all I
think taken a little bit with a grain of salts
as far as the timing, sure, but supposedly that's when
a couple of hippies walked up to the door with
(24:50):
a bunch of money and said, Hey, we want a
couple of fifty gallon drums of your soap. And this
idea was like, wait a minute. These hippies in San
Francisco Summer of Love one of those years, they loved
this soap, and all of a sudden they had like
a like a willing audience. Who I think the hippies
(25:13):
were perfect in that they they liked the soap, of course,
but they also liked it being all natural, and they
liked this kind of wacky guy had all this stuff
on the label. It just really fit with that whole
sixties thing, and that turned the company around.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
Yeah. I saw that I described as the world was
finally ready for doctor Browner and his ideas, because.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
It sounds about right. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
Yeah, he'd been like espousing eco consciousness and brotherly love
and a lot of the stuff the hippies were into
since the forties, probably a little earlier, but definitely since
the mid forties. And yeah, so they kind of became
followers of doctor Barner. They would hang out at his
house which was also the factory in Escondido, California, and
(25:57):
he would also he put his phone number on the
his home phone number, and he had a bunch of
different phones I guess the same phone number went to
a bunch of different lines, and would answer calls from
customers like all day and all night and just start
talking to them about the moral ABC and talking to
them about how to use his product and just basically
(26:19):
anything that was on his mind. Because he loved to talk.
I saw it didn't matter whether it was a tape recorder,
a reporter, a customer calling in, or a a child,
one of his kids. Like he just he just went
off constantly on his thoughts and his tangents and his
moral ABC and what it meant and how to live.
(26:41):
And the hippies definitely vibed on that for sure.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
Yeah, I think the word narcissist has probably been used
more than once with doctor Browner.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
It's entirely possible. But if you watch him interact with
his family, he's in his old age, he's very kind
of tender and relaxed and calm and doesn't seem like
he's manipulating them or anything like that. It's strange. I
think he has his own condition, a unique condition.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
He has Doctor Bronnerism.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
Yeah. But he was not a good business person. Like
we've mentioned quite a few times. He would not sell
his soaps because he was working on that label. He
would not deliver his soaps and orders. He owed a
lot to the I R. S In back taxes, like
millions of dollars. And even though they did pretty well
in the sixties, by the eighties he had kind of
(27:38):
run the company back into the ground there on the
brink of bankruptcy. And that's when his son, his oldest son, Jim,
turned the company around. He turns out Jim was a
great business person. He was great at making the manufacturing
process more efficient. He balanced the books. He even took
the moral ABC and was like, Hey, we've got a
(28:01):
thing here, but maybe we should craft it into a
and just something that makes a little more sense, Like
just sort of shape it and give it more of
a story so it doesn't sound like a Mannick Street
preacher just babbling things on the corner.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
Right, I say we take a break and come back
and talk about what they did with that.
Speaker 2 (28:19):
Let's do it all right. So when we left, we
(28:44):
talked about eldest son, Jim Bronner, sort of shaping and
forming the Moral ABC into what we see today on
the label. And he did that through and it got way.
They really leaned into the hippie stuff too, because a
it seems like I don't know as much about Jim,
but Ralph, his brother, was total hippie, still is. And
(29:07):
they started saying things like, all right, the Moral ABC
are now the six cosmic principles. Stuff like that.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
Yeah, because they went through, they rooted through his philosophy
which they'd been harangued by and probably knew by heart
since they were little kids. That when he came to
visit them, and they basically mined it for the best ideas,
and they boiled it down to those six cosmic principles.
The first is ourselves, work hard, grow our customers, do
(29:37):
right by customers. It's a good one. Our employees treat
employees like family, and as we'll see, they definitely live
up to that one. Our suppliers be fair to suppliers,
our earth, treat the earth like home. Our community fund
and fight for what's right. And this is like their company,
their corporate ethos, and they legitimately stick to it. This
(29:59):
is in no way, shape or form a gimmick greenwashing marketing.
It's it's exactly what this family company lives by.
Speaker 2 (30:10):
Yeah, yeah, it's pretty remarkable they I mean, we'll just
list off some of the things they do as a
company and you can decide for yourself whether you feel
good about supporting them. But during Jim's tenure, he passed
away not long after his father, which you know we'll
get to, but they introduced a basically one hundred percent
coverage for health insurance, zero deductible health plan, a fifteen
(30:35):
percent profit sharing plan. Ten years after that, they said,
all right, as a company, we're going to have a
five to one compensation cap. So that means, at no
point in our company's history or future history, I guess,
will the highest played, highest paid employee be more than
five times compensated what the lowest paid employee is, which
(30:59):
is remarkable to do.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
Yeah. So that means that like the people leading the
company or making about I saw about three hundred grand
a year, and I mean they could be making so
much more than that because the company pulls in tens
of millions of dollars now, but rather than funnel it
out of the company, the kids and grandkids decided to
(31:22):
invest it back into the company by paying the workers
really well, by funding political causes, and essentially just making
their product better and better. That's I mean, you just don't.
You don't see that anymore. It was remarkable back in
the day. Now it's like mind boggling, you know.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
Oh absolutely, if you you know, get like fair trade
coffee or any kind of fair trade product, or a
cosmetic or soap or something that it says is made
with fair trade ingredients, he was way or the company
was way ahead of that. I mean, they've kind of
done that to start. Their raw materials have always come
(32:03):
from fair trade partnerships, back when people didn't even know
what that meant. They donated, and this is a few
years ago. In twenty twenty two, they donated close to
nine million bucks, which was about a third of their
net profits, to three hundred more than three hundred nonprofits.
And like you said, they you know, they're heavily involved
(32:23):
in progressive politics. They published an election guide that basically
say here's who these candidates are, here's what causes they support,
and how it aligns with the causes we support or not,
and I believe over the past two decades as a company,
they've donated more than one hundred million dollars to their
various charities and activism or activist organizations.
Speaker 1 (32:47):
Yeah. I want to say typically progressive, but I think
it's one hundred percent progressive.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
One of the things they fought for for years was
legalizing hemp. Industrial hemp the stuff you can't get high
off of, but you can use a million different ways,
and they helped get that pushed forward just from agitating.
I think it was David Brauner, the grandson. I don't
remember if he's Jim or Ralph's kid, but he's the
(33:12):
Cosmic Engagement Officer CEO. He's actually the vice president, but
he's in charge of activism, and he did a lot
of I guess publicity sends to draw attention to industrial hemp,
like he was arrested in two thousand and nine for
planting hemp seeds outside the DEA headquarters. He locked himself
in a cage with a bunch of hemp outside the
(33:34):
White House. He had to be cut out, I think
with the jaws of life. And finally, when hemp farming
was legalized in twenty eighteen. They sent out this celebratory
press release about how, like what a great day this was.
It's kind of cute to read.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
Yeah, and by the way, that's who I was thinking
of when I talked about kind of what a hippie.
He was, not Ralph, it was David the grandson.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
Oh yeah, he's super hippie. There's a GQ profile of
the company and the I guess they call it the
hero image is David Browner with his tongue stuck out
and there's a hit of blotterer on his tongue, but
it's the doctor Broner's logo on the blotterer and like
they're super into legalizing psychedelics, especially for use in mental health.
(34:20):
And that health plan that they came up with. They're
the first company to subsidize ketamine assisted therapy. Yeah, using psychedelics,
Like that's part of the health plan. You can go
get that and the company covers it with their one
hundred percent coverage health plan.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
Pretty amazing. So I mentioned that Jim Broner passed away
around the same time as his father, Emmanuel Browner, died
in ninety seven from complications from Parkinson's disease, and his son,
his eldest son that turned the company around, passed a
year later from cancer. They were making, you know, like
(35:01):
you said, it's really taking off lately. In the late nineties,
they were doing pretty well. They were making you know,
four or five million bucks a year as a company,
which is awesome, but like you said, it was sort
of hippie dippy. Health food stores is where you'd find it.
It really exploded in the in the teens, in the
twenty teens, that is, and especially after twenty twenty with
(35:23):
COVID when people were washing their hands a lot. I
think they they almost reached the two hundred million dollar
level during COVID, and you know, considering where they started
and then all the ups and downs in between, that's
quite an accomplishment.
Speaker 1 (35:37):
Yeah, for sure. They also sell a bunch of other
stuff too, including chocolate toothpaste, pretty good toothpaste. But the
thing is, the irony of all this stuff is that
you can use the casteel soap for most of this,
not the chocolate, but you can brush your teeth with it,
you can wash your hair with it, you can gargle
with it. Apparently it helps clear up congestion. It does
(35:59):
all sorts of stuff, and I believe it says all
eighteen uses on the label, and you can go read
the labels and get you know, the moral ABC out
of them, and each one's a little different. It has
some other stuff that the other labels don't have, so
you have to buy them all.
Speaker 2 (36:14):
I guess, yeah, And now I mean I don't have any,
but I you know now that Emily is making our
own cast deal soap from her company. Uh you know
it's all bets are off.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
I washed my hair with it this very morning.
Speaker 2 (36:30):
No, we still actually have a big stash of Emily soap,
and she just made some for the family the other day,
so I don't think it will be switching over anytime soon.
But Doctor Browner's is good stuff.
Speaker 1 (36:41):
We can come to my house if you if you
want to use some Doctor Browner's get away.
Speaker 2 (36:45):
Oh good, I.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
Could use some of Emily soap though, just you know, hint, hint, I.
Speaker 2 (36:51):
Bet we could find a squeeze bottle or a misshapen bar. Sure.
Speaker 1 (36:57):
If you want to know more about doctor Browner? Wait,
should we should tell him? Should we tell him the
Mark Spitz thing? Oh?
Speaker 2 (37:03):
Yeah, I forgot about that. What was the deal he
was on the label?
Speaker 1 (37:06):
Yeah, he was held up along with Jesus Thomas Zazz,
the psychiatrist E. L. Zamenhoff, the guy who created Esperanto
as a great example of a Jewish person who helped
change the world, because he had set the record for
the most gold medals in a single event her sport.
(37:28):
I guess. And in two thousand and eight he finally
was like, get me off of this label and sued
Doctor Browner's, and I guess they settled for some undisclosed amount.
He's like, stop venerating me, give me some money instead.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
Yeah, and give me off of that wheaties box.
Speaker 1 (37:45):
If you want to know more about doctor Browner's, you
can go read some doctor Broner's labels and read a
bunch of good articles on them too. And in the meantime,
while you do that, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 2 (37:57):
Well, my friend, it is not, because today we send
a message out that is all a plea to define
people of Atlanta, Georgia. We have a live show and
all the other cities are doing great, and we're selling
We sold out in Indianapolis and we're selling great all
in Chicago, and Minneapolis and almost sold out in Durham. Nice,
(38:18):
but for some reason, our hometown show is lagging.
Speaker 1 (38:21):
Because these are the people who know us, like really
know us.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
Yeah, I like whatever, you're here, you live here.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
We see you at the library, like every week.
Speaker 2 (38:31):
I'll see Chuck at the car watch all the time.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
That's a fifty.
Speaker 2 (38:35):
So we're just asking for some support. This will be
the last show the tour. It's a great show. Josh
put this one together and it's just it's a really
good one and we'd love to see everyone in Symphony
Hall on what is it the seventh or eighth of September.
Speaker 1 (38:51):
The seventh, seventh, it's a Friday.
Speaker 2 (38:54):
It's a Friday night show, everybody. Those are the good ones.
Speaker 1 (38:56):
Yeah, so come see us because we want to see you.
Speaker 2 (38:59):
And it's it's a seventh, it's a Saturday.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
It's a Saturday at the seventh on the seventh.
Speaker 2 (39:04):
Yeah, we're Durham.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
On the fifth that's a Thursday.
Speaker 2 (39:08):
And then the sixth we got the night off right,
Josh's gonna wash my hair and then the seventh of
September at Atlanta Symphony Hall. Tickets are still available, just
go to our website. And go to the Symphony Hall
website and buy some tickets and come see us, because
who knows, we may never do another live show again.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
It's possible.
Speaker 2 (39:30):
Actually that's not true, but come out in net cs.
Speaker 1 (39:33):
Yeah, if you want to go to buy tickets, you
can go to link tree, slash, s ysk Live or
our website Stuff you Should Know dot com and click
on the tour button and yeah, and if you want
to get in touch with this like normal, you can
send us an email. Send it off to stuff Podcasts
at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (39:55):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. M
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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