The Undisputed King of the Internet

A behind-the-scenes look at "America’s Reverend" (the most popular podcaster in the world) and how he came to amass hundreds of millions of followers with his friend and co-conspirator Dr. Henry Von Teal.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

How are influencers born, dear listeners? Do they spring forth with their rants and hot takes and conspiracy theories fully formed, like Athena from the forehead of Zeus? Or are the events that shape them more convoluted, messier, and far weirder than anything you could ever imagine? Hello friends, and welcome back to Jones and Wolf, an audio fiction podcast featuring original music. Today's story, the undisputed king of the internet, imagines the origin story of America's Reverend, the most popular podcaster in the world, and how he came to amass hundreds of millions of followers with his friend and co-conspirator, Dr. Henry von Tiel. Enjoy. When the aliens finally come to sift through our records, or a more evolved species emerges from the ashes of human civilization, and they consider the history of all that came before, one of the stories that will surely amaze them is how a nondescript 75-year-old former Catholic priest came to briefly be crowned the undisputed king of the Internet. I'm talking about the Honorable Reverend James T. Kelly, a man who had given in to a number of eccentricities after leaving the priesthood. Take, for example, his stern insistence that nothing involving the natural rhythms of the human body should ever be suppressed. This meant that he was openly flatulent, as a matter of principle, no matter the situation. It also meant that if he was talking to someone outdoors, it would not be uncommon for him to pause, turn to the side, and urinate in the middle of their conversation. These bodies are simply vessels. He would tell newcomers to the ranch, noticing the discomfort on their faces after he unzipped his pants to take a piss, or the terror that seized them when they realized he'd just released a particularly nasty fart. And when we cling to things moving through us, we risk damaging our holy design. He started the ranch soon after leaving the Catholic Church. In the beginning, it was just going to be a place where he and some of his closest friends could go worship on their own terms. Land was cheap in Joshua Tree in those days, and one of the Reverend's most ardent supporters from the old diocese, Dr. Henry von Thiel, had offered to buy 50 acres in the desert for the Reverend to pursue his ideas completely free from the oppressive influence of organized religion. Dr. Henry wasn't a medical doctor, by the way. He'd earned his doctorate in medieval studies from a small liberal arts school in the Midwest that no one, not even his closest friends, could ever remember the name of. He'd also inherited quite a bit of money from his father, a famous television detective, and had been so moved by the Reverend's homilies that he'd resolved to do whatever it took to help the man realize his full creative potential, no matter what direction he went in or what he decided to pursue. Damn it, man! Henry told him after the Reverend had refused his offer, not twice, but seven times.

SPEAKER_01 3:20

You have a real gift to hell with the deacons and the bishops who can't see beyond their narrow views of right and wrong. God doesn't speak to the neat and clean, and he doesn't do his work through politicians. It's the artists of this world who are in communion with the Spirit. Men like yourself, savants who have the ability to tap into that divine frequency, and then share it with the rest of us heathens. You've read the damn book, he said, thumping a copy of the Bible he had with him. How do you think today's church officials would treat the truth tellers in there, eh? It wouldn't be pretty. I can assure you of that. I'm begging you, James, take the property. It's one of the only ways I can put Dad's royalty checks to good use. Please, don't deny me this good deed.

SPEAKER_00 4:20

It was during that first year in Joshua Tree that the Reverend wrote his most famous work, The Nine Principles of Spiritual Existence. Barely a hundred pages, a slim volume that detailed his understanding of what it meant to live an enlightened life in postmodern America. It was a book he'd wanted to write for a long time. The best way he thought to organize his thoughts on a subject he'd spent nearly his entire adult life pondering. And so he would work on the nine principles almost every day, writing page after page at a small desk he set up on his front porch, frowning over the words that didn't quite capture the sublime majesty that everyone possessed in their souls, pausing only to smoke a big, fat, juicy spliff while the sun set on the desert horizon each evening. The book took him a little over a year to write. During this time in the Reverend's life, he also grew out his beard, stopped wearing shoes completely, ate only fermented foods, somehow still managed to gain a pleasant amount of weight, and became almost permanently reddened from the desert sun. Once he finished the book, he used the little money he had to print a dozen copies and then mailed them to friends. He didn't think much about it after that. The book was just a way for him to release his most personal thoughts after all those tension-filled years he'd spent in the church. He was incredibly happy with his life in Joshua Tree, content to smoke the marijuana he grew on the property, ponder the relationship between God and man, take great long pisses on the desert clay while the armadillos considered him from a distance, and occasionally put his hands on the shoulders of a barista or a gas station attendant or whomever else he happened to come across who seemed to be in need of some simple human kindness. But then the strangest thing started to happen. People he'd never met, never talked to, and certainly never shared his address with started showing up at his property. Almost always they would have a copy of the nine principles that someone had photocopied and bound together with staples or glue. More often than not, they would arrive on a one-way bus ticket, or by hitchhiking. Someone once even claimed to have walked there all the way from Idaho Falls. The Reverend, after taking a moment to process the surprise of receiving not one, not two, but dozens of petitioners at his doorstep, would always react the same way. He would welcome them into his small adobe house, put on one of the big pots of pork verde stew that would later become a staple in the ranch's mess hall, start rolling a joint, and then ask them why they had found his book so meaningful. A middle-aged man from Staten Island told him that he had learned to love himself after finding a copy of the Reverend's book in a Dominican barber shop, and as a result, was finally ready to put on long, beautiful wigs and glorious sequin dresses and get up on stages in places he'd never even heard of and just dance his heart out. No matter what his elderly mother thought about it, all thanks to the nine principles. And a young mother from St. Louis was finally able to admit that her husband, a partial owner of a professional baseball team, was stifling her spirit with his nonstop insistence that she go see a psychologist. She had decided to leave him, the mansion, her young son, everything really, and come to the desert after she found a stack of photocopies in her maid's purse. That stack of pages turned out to be the nine principles. It was the first principle that grabbed her, sinking all the way to the depths of her being and making her realize that up to that point she had been sleepwalking through her life. The first and most important principle the Reverend wrote is this ignoring the quiet voice within is the surest way to make the enemy of your own soul. And no matter how much she tried to suppress it, no matter how horrible it seemed when she considered it from other people's perspectives, the young mother's quiet voice was telling her to get as far away from her family as fast as she possibly could. There were a dozen more stories like this, just as intense. And the Reverend would listen to these people and cry with them and smoke his never-ending joints, and all the while he would privately marvel at the power of the written word. But it wasn't until the man who'd purchased the property for him, Dr. Henry von Thiel, came to visit him that the Reverend opened up about what he'd been experiencing, and the idea for scaling the ranch was truly born. After purchasing the desert property in Joshua Tree and convincing the Reverend to move there, Dr. Henry, or Harry, as he liked his friends to call him, had gone through a particularly nasty blue period, which was an expression he used to describe the episodes of severe depression that he'd been suffering from periodically for the last 35 years. Since high school, in fact, when he'd been institutionalized briefly for increasingly erratic behavior, that culminated with him running out of his parents' home late one night and screaming at the top of his lungs that he'd just seen a miniature Jesus Christ sitting on his pillow. In middle age, whenever he felt one of his blue episodes coming on, Harry would normally hole up in his late father's apartment in the East Village, sit in the worn leather recliner with the blinds drawn, put a symphony on the record player, smoke dozens of the Turkish cigarettes he paid huge fees to import every year, and begin yet another silent contemplation about the end of the world. By this time in his life, perhaps due in no small part to the number of medieval texts he'd poured over as a doctoral student, Harry fashioned himself a bit of a diviner, and as he pondered the apocalypse at the depths of his sadness, he would sketch pictures in his notebooks, or write words that he felt had great psychic import. Robots! Read one full page in his journal, another depicted an interspatial group of superintelligent insects who'd banded together to wipe humanity off the face of the earth. Recently, however, his reveries had become less fantastical, less like the stuff of the science fiction novels he'd read and loved so much as a boy, and far more indicative of the experiences he had living day-to-day in New York City.

SPEAKER_01 10:56

It's the indifference that will almost certainly undo our civilization, he wrote in his notebook one evening, after a particularly harrowing experience on the subway.

SPEAKER_00 11:07

Harry had made the mistake of eating Cuban food that afternoon, and although he was no stranger to the indigestion that fried plantains often caused him, he became worried somewhere between 42nd and 125th that the burning pain in his upper abdomen was something far more serious this time. The longer it lasted, the more he became convinced that what he was actually experiencing that afternoon on the A-train was, in fact, the onset of a severe heart attack.

SPEAKER_01 11:35

I beg your pardon, he said to a well-dressed woman seated next to him, but I wonder if you might have an aspirin in your purse that you would consider lending me. I'm having a bit of an emergency. This level of understatement was classic von Thiel.

SPEAKER_00 11:54

Harry's mother, for example, had once tripped on loose gravel in the driveway of their vacation home in the Hamptons. Upon staggering into her home with her face nearly covered in blood, however, she simply told the shocked weight staff with a forced smile that she'd, quote, had done something rather embarrassing and gotten a little nick in her forehead. End quote. Perhaps it was Harry's same penchant for feign nonchalance that caused the woman who was reading a carefully folded New York Times to politely ignore him. Normally Harry would never dream of shouting at someone on the subway, but in that moment he was completely sure his heart was on the verge of collapse. Not to mention that this matronly lady next to him almost certainly had a bottle of aspirin with her that she was unwilling to share.

SPEAKER_01 12:40

Your purse, woman! Damn it, look in your purse, he screamed.

SPEAKER_00 12:46

Thankfully, at that exact moment, the pressure lifted in Harry's chest, and he let out a tremendous belch. He felt instantly better, and although his immediate fear of a heart attack had vanished, he was left with some uncomfortable questions. Namely, would anyone on the train had behaved differently if he'd been having an actual emergency? Would any of those strangers have done anything at all to help him? A short while later, acutely aware that he'd made something of a scene, Harry tried desperately to make eye contact with a fellow passenger on that crowded subway car, seeking a moment of understanding, of commiseration, that yes, although he'd made an ass of himself, it was because he'd been convinced that he was undergoing a coronary instead of the intense bout of gastrointestinal discomfort he now understood it to be. But although he looked earnestly from New Yorker to New Yorker, hoping to connect with someone, anyone on that train, his efforts were met with only the distant, glassy-eyed stares of individuals who wanted nothing to do with him or his problems. And so Harry, utterly embarrassed by the whole thing, opened his copy of the old East Slavic tale of Igor's campaign, buried his head in it, and pretended to be translating for the rest of his subway ride home. Later, listening to Mahler's Fifth Symphony on his record player and feeling rather alone, he wrote in his notebook, I fear the problems of our society may be too great to overcome.

SPEAKER_01 14:19

And then he added, I think it's time to go visit my dear friend in the desert.

SPEAKER_00 14:27

When Harry first saw the man who had come to be known across social media as America's Reverend and also the host of the most famous podcast in the world, Father John Thomas Kelly was preaching at an obscure Catholic church near Fordham University about avoiding self-judgment as if it was a mortal sin. Wasn't it Christ, after all, who spoke to the prostitutes and the tax collectors alike and told them to rise to their feet and do away with their shame? He would say with his characteristic gentleness and kindness of heart, not because they were righteous, but because the first step towards salvation is accepting all of your warts and flaws. Hearing these words, Harry, who'd been shuttled in and out of institutions his entire life and couldn't keep track of all the maladies he'd been labeled with, vowed never to fight with himself again. In the days and weeks that followed, he grew a handlebar mustache, he started wearing a leather jacket, he poured his feelings into notebooks and occasionally read from them at open mics. He even tried to make his own kimchi once, and although it went horribly wrong and he was never quite able to get rid of the smell from the heavy drapes in his father's apartment, there was no denying that a very real transformation had taken place. But it wasn't until Harry went to visit the Reverend on the Joshua Tree property that he first glimpsed how this whole Reverend on the Ranch thing might actually scale. Sitting out there beneath the immense canopy of stars, incredibly high, listening to the Reverend describe the people who discovered the Nine Principles and had gone on pilgrimages to find him, Harry felt the same way he did when he encountered the Reverend for the first time in the Bronx. He was like a record producer who had just discovered a great band. A band he was convinced was going to fundamentally change the music scene in America. Damn it, man! Harry said once he passed the joint back to the Reverend and finished his coughing fit.

SPEAKER_01 16:32

Don't you see what's happening here? You're starting a movement. This is how the tectonic plates that underpin culture begin to shift. Imagine all the good you can do for people who've been let down by the traditional institutions in this country. People who otherwise wouldn't find a path toward their own spirituality. That's what you're doing for them, James. You're offering them an alternative path to the discovery of their own souls. And then, hitting the joint again, he added, You're going to change the world, James. We do it together. It'll be the most important thing that we ever do.

SPEAKER_00 17:17

And although the Reverend swore he would stay committed to the nine principles, no matter whether he allowed himself to be swept away in these plans or not, it wasn't until years later, when the old man was alone after interviewing the President of the United States, walking naked beneath the stars, that he allowed himself to truly hear the quiet voice within him once again. It was asking him if what he and Dr. Henry Von Thiel had done was part of the Lord's sacred plan, or rather, a scheme born on the fork and tongue of the devil, warming ever deeper into his human mind. The music was done by Joel Wolf. A couple of quick asks for you, dear listeners. If you like this story, please give it a five-star rating wherever you listen to podcasts. It would also mean the world to us if you would share your favorite Jones and Wolf story with a friend. Joel and I will be back soon with a new story or another story companion episode. In the meantime, if you want to get in touch, you can reach us at Jones and Wolf at Gmail dot com. That's J O N E S A N D W O O O L F at Gmail dot com. Until next time, friends, thanks for listening.