This is the memory palace. I'm Nate Demet.

Walter's Seagmeister was born in 1909 in the Bronx to Russian immigrants, who wanted their

son to grow up to be a doctor. And he did. Sort of. He grew up to be Dr. Raymond Bernard.

He was Walter's Seagmeister for many years. He was a smart kid, went to Colombia, and then moved

downtown to NYU. We got his PhD in education. So he was technically a doctor, but not at all in

the way his parents wanted, or in the way that he'd later go on to imply. He wrote his dissertation

about the educational theories of Rudolph Steiner. Steiner was the guy who created the Waldorf

schools. They're sort of Montessori, I still oversimplified, a lot of learning through play,

sort of stuff. About a thousand of them in the United States, so. And his interest in Steiner was

legit too, but soon he was off Waldorf and onto some of Steiner's other theories about Atlantis

and mind reading. And then things got a little shaky for Seagmeister. Before long, he was walking

around buttoned up 1940s Manhattan, dressed on black, with hair down to his waist. But showing his

parents' Judaism for a largely made up form of pre-Judeic Middle Eastern mysticism, concocting

idiosyncratic nutritional theories, and persisting exclusively on popcorn and kelp for long stretches

of time. He starts to sell lessethin. It's a type of fat cell taken from egg yolks. He marked

it as a kind of cure-all, good for the brain and nerves and stuff. And it's not. Don't it's not

really bad for you either. But the FDA used to be more vigilant about cracking down on people who

claim that supplements do things that they don't. And they went after him. And Waldorf Seagmeister

became Dr. Raymond Bernard. It sounded better in the advertising. And the feds didn't know where to

find the fictional Dr. Bernard. For a while. Soon, people he knew were getting calls from government

agents who figured out that Seagmeister and Bernard were the same men. Dr. Bernard went underground.

Or tried to. He lived in the woods of Florida for a while, eating his kelp and popcorn. And then

...