Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hey guys, it's us, the Jonas Brothers. I'm Joe. I'm Kevin. And I'm Nick. And guess what? We created our own podcast called Hey Jonas. We invented a podcast? Well, we didn't invent it. We just contributed to it. We're the first people to do podcasts. We get to ask other people questions because we're sick and tired of being asked questions.
Well, sick and tired is a strong way to put it, but you know. Tired and sick. Tired and sick. Listen to Hey Jonas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Just listen. We don't care where you hear it. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy. Not quite.
On Humor Me with Robert Smigel and Friends, me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guests, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between songs banter.
Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter.
Listen to Humor Me with Robert Smigel and friends on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Diana Maria Riva, and on my new podcast, How Hard Can It Be?, I call on my Gen X squad from Ohio to Hollywood as we navigate midlife's most fantastic BS. Unfiltered conversations from night sweats to fupas to scheduling sex. Wait, what sex?
Is it just me, or does every woman my age want to look at Pinterest instead of having sex sometimes? Ha ha ha!
They say we can't polish a turd, but we're sure going to try. So let's get blunt with laughs, tears or tears of laughter. Listen to How Hard Can It Be with Diana Maria Riva on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Chapter 2: What was Howard Hughes' life like in Las Vegas?
So, of course, the boxes that the tissues came in would be sterile as well. So rather than walking around in bare feet or whatever, he was basically using tissue boxes as disposable sterile slippers.
Yeah, and I just want to caveat that by saying the picture looks real to me, so I hope it's not one of those things where, like, dude, you fell for the Howard Hughes picture.
That's a deep cut, though, man. If you're making deep fakes today, you're probably not... Super familiar with Howard Hughes. So to go back and make that is, I mean, hats off to that guy, really.
I mean, or it may not, maybe it's not Howard Hughes. Now I'm like doubting myself. It looked like Howard Hughes, but.
It was Wayne Newton.
All right. I feel like we should take a break and we're going to come back and talk a little bit about who was there helping Howard Hughes on the ninth floor of that hotel right after this. Hey, it's us, the Jonas Brothers, and guess what? We have some big news. What's the news, Nate? Huge news. We created our own podcast called Hey Jonas. We invented a podcast? Well, we didn't invent it.
We just contributed to it. We're the first people to do podcasts. Yeah, a pretty wide range of podcasts. We're starting a trend. But this one's extra special. So how did we actually come up with the name Hey Jonas, guys? I honestly don't remember. I think it was on a call about what we should call it, and...
Well, we were thinking of originally calling it one of the early names of our band before Jonas Brothers. This is how you guys remember it going down? Yes. I have a very different memory of this. We were talking about a thing, a bit for the podcast where people could call in and say, Hey, Jonas.
And then I wrote down on my little notepad, Hey, Jonas, and offered it up as a potential title for the podcast. Oh, wow. But thanks for remembering that, guys. Listen to Hey Jonas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Just listen. We don't care where you hear it. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy. Not quite.
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Chapter 3: How did Hughes' mental health affect his life in Vegas?
He wanted to make it not a mob town that only kind of the seedy people would go to gamble. So he's the first one to have that real vision. And in 1967, started buying up hotels and casinos.
Yeah. And again, like this was a time where the FBI essentially had like they were camped out in these hotels and casinos because they were conducting so many investigations all the time. Yeah. So this was a it was a gamble, if you'll forgive the pun, unintentional. for him to buy this stuff because he did start to buy it in the eye of like changing the entire city. And that was not a given.
We know it worked out in retrospect, but he didn't know that at the time. So it was kind of risky him doing that. Plus also he had to deal with the mob. He ended up buying six hotels from 1966 to 1968, hotel casinos, I should say. And almost all of them were from the mob, if not all of them.
Yeah, he bought the one he was in, the Desert Inn. He bought the Sands. He bought Castaways, the Silver Slipper, the Landmark and the Frontier. And not only did he have a vision for Vegas as sort of a legitimate town where people and corporations could do business and like possibly families might even come one day, but. He wanted it to be what he called an environmental city of the future.
He didn't want because, again, he was a germaphobe. So he had this vision of a smogless city with an efficient government where it was like taxpayers didn't have to get fleeced. And like he like sort of as a utopia almost.
Yeah, let's talk about that city of the future, some of the stuff he wanted to do to Vegas and Nevada to kind of create that city of the future. Remember when I said that I think that he could have had a pretty good chance of getting the Cheesecake Factory to sponsor Factory Seconds podcast with Adam and Ben? Yeah. There's also a toss up because he might have been turned down.
He had a lot of ideas that the local county and city and state legislatures were like, hey, that's a great idea. We'll get back to you on that. Some of the ideas were just terrible as well. But he was essentially trying to shape Vegas into his own image.
Yeah, for sure. He had a sort of list of things that he proposed but never really got done. And he had a ton of influence. He got this casino without having to appear before the Gaming Commission or anything like that to get licensed. That's how much pull he had. You're not supposed to be able to buy a casino that easily.
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Chapter 4: What were some of Howard Hughes' eccentric behaviors?
And, in fact, that would open the door for the Nevada Corporate Gaming Act, which made it easier for public companies to get into the business because previously they had a requirement that every stockholder had to submit background checks to be involved in Las Vegas. So that went away and really opened the door.
So all this to say he had a ton of pull and could really get things done, but he has a laundry list of things he wanted to get done that they all were just sort of like, yeah, we'll look into that.
Yeah.
Yeah, there was this great list in the Las Vegas Review-Journal that some of the stuff he was pushing for, he wanted to keep dog racing illegal. I could not find what his issue with dog racing was. He wanted to repeal the sales tax, gas tax, cigarette tax. He wanted to keep Clark County School District segregated. So now you're starting to be like, oh, okay.
He wanted to prohibit the booking of talent from communist countries. It's kind of, I can see that being a 1960s sentiment, not just his. He wanted to outlaw rock festivals. He wanted to, and I could not find out why for this one either, but he wanted to require Vegas or Clark County to consult with him before they realigned any streets. I don't, I could not find out why. Do you have a guess?
Uh, no, I think he, I don't know.
What was the last one?
The last one was he wanted to be exempted himself from having ever to go to court or any board for any reason at all. Like he wanted to ensure that he could stay in that room. He also wanted to get rid of the nuclear testing site nearby. They did not do that. And he also wanted to, like I said, he had a big problem with the water. He thought the water was dirty. And once he found out
that Lake Mead fed water into a system where, you know, kind of like it's very common today where wastewater is treated and fed back into the system. He was like, no, no, no, you need to get rid of that. And they were like, yeah, we're not going to do that.
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Chapter 5: How did Howard Hughes end up buying the Desert Inn?
As far as like, you know, the postmortem on what he had going on in his life, in his autopsy, he weighed 93 pounds at the time of death and apparently had enough codeine in his system, they said, to stop five beating hearts. And even though it was kidney failure, technically, neglect is kind of what the doctors talked about. He didn't have a will.
The very famous movie I know we've talked about before on the show, Melvin and Howard, about supposedly Howard Hughes played by Jason Robards. I think Howard Hughes' middle name was Robard. Yeah. It's a really good movie, a little indie from the 1980s, I think. Maybe 70s, but I think 80s. But there were a lot of fake wills that turned up after his death.
But his $2.5 billion estate in 1976 was then sort of, I guess, sort of up for grabs.
Yeah, a lot of people came forward like, that belongs to me. No, that belongs to me.
I think 11 or 12 people ended up splitting the whole estate, but a group of them hired an attorney who hired Raymond Fowler, who at the time was the head of the American Psychological Association, to conduct a psychological autopsy, they called it, on Howard Hughes to basically determine his mental competence toward the end of his life. And this gave the world...
Again, people were just like, wait, he weighed how much? How long was his hair when he died? What was going on when he died? Like all that news started to come out. This gave the world like an actual psychological profile. You're not supposed to diagnose anybody, any patient that you've not actually interviewed or taken care of yourself.
But Fowler basically did as good a job as you possibly could in creating a psychological sketch of somebody just from the research he did.
Yeah, tons of research, like obviously interviewing staff and reading newspaper documents, court depositions, personal letters that he wrote back and forth with his mother, phone call logs, pilot logs. And, you know, where we ended up was he most certainly had OCD. I think everyone kind of agrees on that. His germophobia, they think, may have stemmed from his childhood.
Apparently his mother was a germophobe and constantly worried about little Howard getting sick from polio. And so she was checking him every day for signs of polio. And they think, yeah, it probably stemmed from that childhood with his mom.
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Chapter 6: What impact did Hughes have on the Las Vegas casino industry?
Maybe we'll do that after our Scorsese bit.
Yes, there you go. You got anything else?
I got nothing else.
Well, if you want to know more about Howard Hughes in Las Vegas, build a time machine and go pound on his door until he lets you in. But bring a bunch of Kleenex and it's time for Listener Mail.
That's right. This is a bit of a myth busted from our Aussie friends, although this Benjamin here is from Albuquerque. But we did get other emails from Aussies. So apologies for not reading one from the native land. But guys, in the kangaroo episode, Josh mentioned, and I was on board too, so you're not taking the ball for this.
Okay, good, thanks.
That the origin of the word kangaroo may have come from a misunderstanding of an aboriginal person saying, I don't know. I think the origin for this myth might be The film Arrival from 2016, in which Amy Adams, linguistics professor character, tells the kangaroo story to Forrest Whitaker in relation to the misunderstandings that may happen when communicating with the aliens.
In the next scene, Jeremy Renner tells her that he's surprised to hear the story to which he says, it's not true, but it illustrates my point. I'm not a learned linguist myself, so I can't provide any more information about it, but it's certainly an interesting idea. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that has possibly multiple times happened, possibly multiple times throughout history.
Also, I find it interesting that you mentioned the film Enemy at the end of the episode because Arrival was also directed by Denis Villeneuve. It's a phenomenal film that I highly recommend if you haven't seen it.
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Chapter 7: How did Hughes' wealth influence his lifestyle choices?
We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter.
Listen to Humor Me with Robert Smigel and friends on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Is it just me, or does every woman my age want to look at Pinterest instead of having sex sometimes? Ha ha ha! They say we can't polish a turd, but we're sure going to try. So let's get blunt with laughs, tears, or tears of laughter. Listen to How Hard Can It Be with Diana Maria Riva on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.
Guaranteed human.