00:00:00.740Hey all! Joe here, and you are listening to Under the Influence. Happy start of fall!
00:00:07.700Happy kids going back to school! It is a wonderful time of the year, and we should really all
00:00:13.020mark it with a glass of champagne and a spa day. In fact, I don't know why Hallmark doesn't
00:00:20.100make cards that say, Happy Kids Going Back to School Day. It might be because we just
00:00:26.620don't celebrate things that make moms happy nearly enough. And frankly, maybe I should
00:00:32.620just start making those. Okay, I'm going to do it. You guys know that when I think of
00:00:37.400an idea, I just can't stop. So I'm going to make us all a set of happy kids going back
00:00:43.800to school day cards. Go do something nice for yourself, moms. Today we are going to1.00
00:00:49.880dive into one of my favorite subjects, fame and infamy, and the desperation for both.
00:00:58.580We're going to talk to the author Abbott Collar, whose new nonfiction book Eden Undone
00:01:03.740comes out in a couple of weeks. Eden Undone is so intense that it reads like a novel.
00:01:11.120In fact, if I had written some of the things in this book in one of my novels, my editor would
00:01:17.000have said, hey, could you stop being so bananas, Piazza? Like, seriously. Dial it back. Tone it
00:01:23.880down, girl. Eden Undone is the true story of sex, murder, and utopia in the Galapagos Islands.0.96
00:01:33.800It is a wickedly gothic tale about a group of people who try to start a utopia in the Galapagos.
00:01:39.960but paradise quickly descends into chaos. There's a Berlin doctor and his lover,0.57
00:01:47.500a traumatized World War I veteran and his young family, and an Austrian baroness with two adoring
00:01:53.980and much younger boyfriends. The baroness is my favorite character in this. Her nickname is
00:01:59.080Crazy Panties, and she wields a riding crop and a pearl-handled revolver. Needless to say,0.98
00:02:06.660the conclusion of all of this is murderous. Two of the islanders go missing, two others are dead,
00:02:13.280and the survivors are hurling accusations of murder. I think there's so many parallels
00:02:19.380to what is happening in the world today, and also so many parallels about the people who
00:02:25.580allegedly go off the grid because they want to live a simpler life, but are desperately craving
00:02:32.720attention on social media. You all know who I'm talking about. You are here to talk about your
00:02:45.740wonderful new book, Eden Undone. And we're going to dive into this story. It is nonfiction that
00:02:52.560reads like fiction. It is a gonzo banana story. But what I want to put at the top of this episode
00:02:58.660is that this book made me think so many things about fame and infamy and how people crave both
00:03:11.320of those things, even when they claim that they don't. It also made me think a lot about the
00:03:19.300concepts that are so popular on social media of homesteading and retreating from society
00:03:27.000and how so often those end up turning into capitalist commercial enterprises.
00:03:36.440Yes, it's funny you say that because part of the reason I had a hard time getting publishers to
00:03:43.420agree to this book, and they said, well, what is the larger social significance, right? It's like
00:03:47.520that annoying question that people always ask nonfiction authors, what's the bigger story?
00:03:52.160What's the universal theme that we're going for here? Because it can't just be a great story and
00:03:56.800nonfiction has to like tell us something about our society. And I mean, part of it was, you know,
00:04:02.560this is a timeless and universal appeal. Like there is a point in time when every single person
00:04:07.060has wanted to abandon their life and they think it's going to be simpler if they could just get
00:04:10.480away from it all and build something simpler somewhere else where nobody knows who they are.
00:04:15.340And yet it's clear from history and from this story, I think in particular, that, you know,
00:04:21.800it's wherever you go there you are as as the adage goes and wherever you go there you are
00:04:29.260yes yes well I want everyone to keep these themes that we that we just like planted in your noggin
00:04:35.720in your head as we talk about what Edith and Dunn is about I don't want you to give spoilers
00:04:42.040necessarily but can you just give us the high level TLDR of this gonzo story yeah I'd actually
00:04:49.980love to first open with the quote, the headline in a newspaper that I read that made me decide
00:04:55.280that this story had to be written. And it kind of sets it up nicely. So it was a 1941 newspaper
00:05:01.720headline that said, quote, Was Dr. Ritter with his steel teeth poisoned in paradise? Was Baroness
00:05:09.680Eloise known as Crazy Panties, who rolled the island with a gun in love, murdered by one of0.98
00:05:15.120her love slaves after she had driven the other to his death? And why is Frau Ritter going back0.83
00:05:20.240to what she once called Hell's Volcano, the mystery of the Galapagos Island, which Germany
00:05:25.280covets to be solved at last? So I read that and I was like, I just got I got to stop you. I got
00:05:32.340to stop you for one second. I want someone to call me crazy panties. I you know, I think that1.00
00:05:39.420we can manage that. I think that we need to get that on merch immediately. And you need to start
00:05:44.800selling that you are crazy. Yeah. I want my nickname to be crazy panties. I'm just putting1.00
00:05:51.220it out there. Let's just everyone from now on. I shall I shall be known as crazy panties. So yes.
00:05:57.100So that's bananas. So all right. Keep going. Keep going. So I read this and I was like, first of all,
00:06:02.620and I did exactly what you did. I zeroed in on crazy panties. I was like, if there is going to
00:06:06.800be some woman known as crazy panties, she best live up to this. Like you must embody the nickname.1.00
00:06:12.700If you're going to get that nickname, you better earn it. And so she more than earned this nickname. And the general story was that these this doctor, this really eccentric, crazy doctor in Berlin decides to abandon civilization.
00:06:26.460he brings along with him his lover and his patient. She has multiple sclerosis. He was this really
00:06:33.460kind of doctor who believed in, you know, raw, raw food and mental health. And you can meditate
00:06:40.340your way out of your multiple sclerosis. He basically mansplained her multiple sclerosis
00:06:44.460telling her, saying, you could really just cure yourself if you put your mind to it.
00:06:48.100So they go off to this Galapagos Island. They, you know, try to live alone. She's kind of getting
00:06:53.620wary of him. They have a tentative peace. They're like fighting, then they're making up and they're
00:06:58.080fighting. And an American explorer comes and discovers them, quote unquote, tells the entire
00:07:03.900world that he discovered this modern day Adam Eve on the Galapagos Island. And another family from
00:07:09.320Germany shows up. So, of course, Dr. Ritter and his patient Dora are very annoyed by this. This0.99
00:07:16.040family shows up. The woman is pregnant. She wants Dr. Ritter's help. He's like, no, get away from me.1.00
00:07:20.600I don't want anything to do with you people.
00:07:22.700So they settle into a tentative peace.
00:07:25.260Then Crazy Panties, a.k.a. the Baroness, shows up with two lovers, a gun on her hip, and she announces she's going to turn the Galapagos Island of Floriana, where they're all living, into another Miami.0.99
00:07:37.800She's going to build this tourist hotel.0.99
00:07:39.680She's going to invite all the American wealthy tourists.1.00
00:08:41.560as you said, this uninviting locale. Yeah, I mean, so uninviting, so uninviting. So we've got
00:08:47.940the Ritters to be the first to say, I am dropping out of society. And let's give people a time
00:08:53.260period. This is in between the two world wars, right? Yeah. So it starts in 1929. And, you know,
00:08:59.640the stock market crash happens. So there's a lot of world turmoil from that, a lot of chaos.
00:09:05.520Hitler is starting to come into power, the fall of the Weimar Republic. And a lot of Europe is
00:09:10.580is sort of, you know, freaking out about the fact that there is a, you know, a change of government
00:09:16.040that's going to affect the world, really. It's the drumbeat to World War Two is starting.
00:09:21.300What we're seeing is a world in turmoil, you know, a change of political values,
00:09:28.260a really intense fear of whether or not capitalism works because the stock market crashes.
00:09:35.060Right. It's not that different from today,
00:09:38.380where we're seeing so many people retreat because the world has gone weird politically.
00:09:44.420Inflation is so high. People are scared. When people are scared,
00:09:48.640they start fantasizing about another kind of life, right?
00:09:51.660Exactly. And that's what was happening here. And, you know, it was, you know, the doctor also had
00:09:58.700the intention of sort of spreading his philosophy around the world. He fancied himself to be this,
00:10:03.520you know, philosopher on par with Nietzsche and other well-known philosophers.
00:10:08.380And, you know, so he was sort of setting himself up for this paradox. He wants to be this solitude figure living off the land and living this life of quiet retreat. And yet he wants to be a famous name throughout the world.
00:10:22.360So he already goes there with conflict internally. And that conflict is only heightened and brought out into the external when all of these other people come and start sort of, you know, courting, you know, attention and wanting the Americans to come, the rich Americans.
00:10:39.580And it does become a big tourist attraction. I mean, at some point, you know, years into this experiment, these settlers on Floriana are actually listed as one of the popular stops on world cruises.
00:18:07.360yeah a lot of which views like yeah there was vincent astor from the astor family um roosevelt
00:18:15.320kermit roosevelt from the roosevelt family um this guy alan hancock who was this um sort of
00:18:21.680if anybody knows hancock park in la or the labrea tar pits he owned that but they all came and you
00:18:27.940know oh they're you know ostensibly for the purpose of collecting animals and specimens
00:18:32.300But really, they just wanted to go down and sort of scout out these settlers and these exiles. And they were the most exotic specimen of all. And they brought back news of it. And for people who were stuck in the Great Depression, who were, you know, depressed and sort of had no means of entertainment because everything was so expensive now, this became an escape for people.
00:18:54.400They would read about them in the newspaper and just fantasize that, you know, I want to do that, too.
00:18:59.340It became kind of a universal aspiration to be able to leave your life and go down to the Galapagos and start anew.
00:19:06.980Again, like this brings us back to the idea of fame and infamy.
00:19:12.920So these guys would come and, you know, at first all of these people prided themselves, especially Frederick Ritter, prided himself on being like, I can self-sustain.
00:19:25.540Meanwhile, like he's struggling and everything, but he starts accepting gifts from the explorers and it becomes a competition.
00:19:31.240So all these people who were initially were very proud of living off the land and sort of being off the grid and being able to sustain themselves, start competing for not only for attention, but for goods.
00:19:42.340You know, they're competing for tools and gifts and clothing and foodstuffs and seeds.
00:19:49.960And it sort of adds to the feelings of animosity and, you know, the murderous feelings that start percolating among all of these settlers, because at some point, I think everybody wanted to kill everybody else.
00:20:03.060So at some point, we do get we do get there where it seems like everyone on this island wants to murder everyone else on this island.
00:20:11.400And a lot of people, there's a lot of bodies.
00:20:17.480uh and what's what's so interesting to me is like yes they're they're you know there's animosity
00:20:23.940over the goods but then there's also animosity over the attention that different people are
00:20:28.920getting i mean even though they're on this massively remote location apparently removed
00:20:36.120from the world they're all also paying attention to the column inches that the other people are
00:20:42.440getting that the attention the other people are getting and what they're writing about them
00:20:46.520Like, it is amazing how, especially for the time period, how quickly information and rumors and gossip are spreading, right?
00:20:56.120Oh, totally. I mean, it was, people were monitoring it, like, you know, every time mail came in, which wasn't that often, but when it came in, there was a lot of mail.
00:21:06.880And they would pour over the column, see who was getting in the inches and sort of, you know, decided that they were going to try to thwart other people from getting attention.
00:21:17.300Like, you know, if somebody went to say see the Baroness, she would say, oh, don't go see Ritter.0.85
00:21:22.780He's crazy. He's not worth visiting.0.97